The Beatles song Wayne Coyne called “one of the great mysteries of recording history”
Neo-psych outfit The Flaming Lips have always thrived on their weirdness. From telling stories of love and humanity through the vessel of Yoshimi’s battle with pink robots to penning a song for The Spongebob SquarePants Movie, their indie rock sound is equal parts strange and endearing. In 2006, they even released a compilation album titled 20 Years of Weird: Flaming Lips 1986-2006.
Purveyors of the weird and the wonderful, The Flaming Lips may, at first, seem at odds with the originators of pop and universally loved The Beatles. Still, their influence can still be felt in every modern band, and The Flaming Lips are no exception, though they’ve been sure to pick out the weirdest tracks in The Beatles’ extensive catalogue.
The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne shared his love for the Liverpool lads duing an interview with The Line of Best Fit, naming ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as one of his favourite songs. He noted how many people “forget that The Beatles have hits, because you always listen to every song on every one of their records. It was almost like every record is a Greatest Hits”. Nonetheless, Coyne managed to find the weird amidst the hits.
He named ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as one of his nine chosen songs, dubbing it “such a fucking weird song”.
Coyne’s brothers first introduced him to The Beatles, alongside a myriad of strange artists. He argues that The Beatles fall under this, stating, “A lot of it isn’t even pop music, but you don’t know that when you’re ten years old or whatever, you just think, ‘Well, it’s The Beatles. It’s just that, that’s what pop music must be. If The Beatles make it, that must be the definition of pop music.’”
Coyne tried to emulate their sound, recalling, “As The Flaming Lips started to make records, we started to examine, ‘How did they make this? What’s the stuff here? How are they recording these drums? How are they recording their bass, their singing, and all that?”
The frontman was particularly intrigued and perplexed by ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a droning, experimental track which incorporated elements of psych, electronic, and even a sitar. Inspired by Lennon’s use of LSD, the track featured as the closing track on their 1966 record, Revolver. Coyne dubs the track “one of the great mysteries of recorded history”.
He particularly admired the unexpected weirdness of the track, gushing, “It’s such a fucking great-sounding piece of music, and besides, it’s The Beatles. A lot of times you think of The Beatles as being these great emotional songwriters, but this sounds great even before you know it’s The Beatles.”
Coyne says that examining the sound and realising that not all music had to be made with performance in mind was a “big breaking” for The Flaming Lips. He explained: “I think at some point we probably felt, ‘We’re just not any good, if that’s the way we have to make records. That’s just all we do.’ Then you discover these types of records, even those made by The Beatles, who could just stand there in front of microphones and be magnificent. Yet, they still do this other thing that’s just a studio-made, weird-ass creation.”
With The Flaming Lips, Coyne has forged countless “weird-ass creations” of his own, with similarly wide-ranging, experimental influences.
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