What’s the strangest instrument ever used on a Beatles track?
By 1966, The Beatles had thrown all sonic limitations out the window.
With the weight of touring expectations well and truly lifted from their shoulders, they embraced what now felt like limitless possibilities in the studios. No longer would they have to write songs that required translating to a live setting, and no longer were they beholden to the sort of public expectations touring facilitates.
Instead, they could lean into their own curiosities and allow that to inform their music. Personal relationships and travel slightly altered their creative mindset, allowing them to dig deeper into the sort of existential questioning exhibited on Help. Marijuana also offered a helping joint, opening the door to the sort of musical lucidity that would help write tracks like ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, but it was LSD that truly lit the spark of psychedelic revolution for the band, and allowed the music they created to become groundbreaking.
“LSD was the self-knowledge which pointed the way,” John Lennon once explained in an interview, “I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid. But you’ve got to be looking for it before you can possibly find it. Perhaps I was looking without realising it. Perhaps I would have found it anyway. It would have just taken longer.”
Paul McCartney, who was the most reluctant LSD user at the beginning, eventually came around and explained how “it started to find its way into everything we did, really. It coloured our perceptions. I think we started to realise there weren’t as many frontiers as we’d thought there were. And we realised we could break barriers”.
That newfound sense of freedom was put straight into practice on Revolver, their 1966 album that marked a real turning point – from then on, there was no going back. Crucially, though, it proved they could be both pioneering and downright brilliant at the same time. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was a completely fresh way of recording a song, but it didn’t come at the cost of musicianship. The songwriting remained razor-sharp, and in realising that, they knew they could take things wherever they fancied.
What strange instruments did The Beatles introduce?
On their follow-up album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they cracked the code. Drenched in the sort of colour McCartney claimed the band had embraced, the record was a textural masterclass and delivered some of their finest experimental songwriting to date.
On ‘Lovely Rita’, the band truly put that to the test by introducing the humble hair comb to studio proceedings. More than that, Lennon and George Harrison paired it with a toilet roll by humming through combs covered with toilet paper to create a buzzing, harmonised vocal effect.
Later on the album, during the seminal track ‘A Day in the Life’, a hand-cranked alarm clock was used to mark the transition from the orchestral crescendo to the vocal part. Roadie Mal Evans set the alarm to help keep the band on track during the 24-bar instrumental, but the actual sound was kept in, as it fit with the myriad of textures so brilliantly.
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