How a Victorian circus in Rochdale resulted in the birth of psychedelic music
In the intrepid air that coloured the 1960s’ counterculture, even a Victorian circus show from the small town of Rochdale could lend a hand in shaping psychedelia’s colourful plume.
Eyes were wide open across both sides of the Atlantic and around the Summer of Love. Whether the far-out US West Coast or Swinging London, a creative hunger for new ideas and sounds fuelled by copious LSD sought to let loose the rock and pop conventions in tandem with the liberatory surge of sexual politics and anti-establishment vigour.
While taking a fiercer belligerence over in the States, from The Doors’ dark cosmic theatre to The 13th Floor Elevators’ hypnotic garage attack, the UK’s answer to the 1960s’ brave new world often remained planted in a more quainter plane of Anglo-eccentricity.
Be it Small Faces’ surrealist charm on Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, Pink Floyd’s tales of the suburban strange under Syd Barrett’s early captaincy, or the dreamy baroque swirling around The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, the offbeat quirks that lie in Britain’s day-to-day were enough to inform the era’s lysergic conjurings. The Beatles were no different. ‘Peppered’ throughout their singles and LPs across their 1966-1967 output can be found surrealistic gems like ‘Fixing a Hole’ or ‘I Am the Walrus’ that dwelt in an acid-soaked realm of the old music hall or English literary canon.
It’s often said that John Lennon was the more radical Beatle, which does his principal co-writer a disservice. While indeed boasting maverick cuts like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Revolution 9’, Paul McCartney was just as keenly interested in the world of avant-garde electronic music and had, in fact, introduced the band to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s musique concrète collages. Yet, Lennon’s half of The Beatles’ songbook would best realise the potential of tape loops and studio trickery, no less than one of the most shimmeringly transportive numbers on their Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band opus.
A chance encounter with a vintage poster sparked Lennon’s inventive intrigue. While filming the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ promo in nearby Knole Park in January 1967, a perusal across a Sevenoaks antiques shop in Kent yielded the discovery of a 19th-century advertisement spreading the word of one Pablo Fanque’s circus show taking place in Bishopsgate, promising a rollicking Saturday evening of live music, trampoline stunts, somersaults through fire, and a waltz dancing horse.
It’s widely believed that the mentioned “Mr Kite” was the famous wire-walker and clown William Kite, and “Mr J Henderson”, fellow travelling performer John Henderson, who found carnival fame with his wife Agnes across Europe in the 1840s and 1850s.
Other than changing the waltzing horse’s name from Zanthus to Henry, Lennon lifted every detail from the poster for ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’s enchanting lyrical vignette. Gifted further whimsical life with its novel soundscapes of warped fairground collages and vaudeville arrangements, Lennon’s circus psychedelia sits with perfectly playful entice as it closes the album’s second side, unveiling the doorway to George Harrison’s meditative raga ‘Within You Without You’ and forming one of the many colourful patchworks that serve Sgt Pepper’s kaleidoscopic traversal.
Not only was ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ a marvel in its own terms, but its trippy chicanery reaches across the years to 1843 and scoops up the weirdness on display even amid the buttoned-up conservativism of Victorian society. Lennon struck another perfect gem of Anglo-psychedelia, gleaning potent surrealism from the unassuming corners of humdrum Britain in the best tradition of England’s latent eccentricity.
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