The Beatles song that got John Lennon labelled “the laziest person in England”
The Beatles didn’t exactly have a lot of time to just sit around during their mid-1960s heyday. Recording sessions, tours, promotional appearances, interviews, and movie shoots all took their toll, to the point that each member would only briefly be able to relax before the machine was fired up once again. There was no escape from Beatlemania, at least not yet.
All four members had their own ways of dealing with the manic schedules and non-stop commitments. For John Lennon, that often meant sleeping the days away. Paul McCartney recalled having to wait for Lennon to wake up on numerous occasions to partake in songwriting sessions – during one waiting session, he even composed ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’ sitting outside Lennon’s house.
“He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England,” was how journalist Maureen Cleave summarised Lennon’s napping habits. “‘Physically lazy,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more’.”
Lennon decided to turn his sleeping tendencies into a cheeky song for The Beatles’ next studio album, Revolver. After having brought in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as the first song to take on during the album’s sessions, Lennon experienced a bought of writer’s block that allowed George Harrison to contribute three songs to Revolver. Sick of his own laziness, Lennon took inspiration from his own hazy habits.
During the recording of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, the tape playback was accidentally threaded in backwards, causing the recorded parts to be played in reverse. The band became fascinated with the sound, leading Harrison to compose a backwards solo for the song.
“It played backwards, and, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Those effects! Nobody knew how those sounded then,” McCartney explained in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now. “We said, ‘My God, that is fantastic! Can we do that for real?’… So that was what we did and that was where we discovered backwards guitar. It was a beautiful solo actually. It sounds like something you couldn’t play.”
Check out ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ down below.
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