McCartney told The Observer: “We even put one of those spoof backwards recordings on the end of the single for a laugh, to give all those Beatles nuts something to do.”Īccusations of demonic backmasking began in the early 1980s, perhaps inspired by a scene from the 1973 film The Exorcist, in which a tape of garbled speech by the possessed victim was found to be English when played in reverse.
BACKWARDS D FREE
The group created a backmasked message for the 1995 recording of John Lennon’s 1977 demo Free as a Bird: released as a studio version 15 years after his death, it featured a clip of Lennon saying “turned out nice again” at the end of the song. Miss him.” The band’s press office rebutted the rumour on 21 October, calling it “a load of old rubbish”, and an interview with McCartney in LIFE magazine’s November edition – featuring the headline ‘Paul is still with us’ – helped to kill it off.
Other theories suggested that, when played backwards, ‘mumbling’ by John Lennon between the songs I’m So Tired and Blackbird sounds like “Paul is a dead man. In October 1969, a caller to a Detroit radio station argued that the phrase “turn me on, dead man” could be heard when the White Album’s Revolution 9 was played backwards. In 1969, rumours began spreading among American college students that Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and had been replaced by a lookalike they claimed that clues about his ‘death’ could be found in the group’s lyrics and album artwork. So we tagged it on the end.”Īfter popularising backmasking, The Beatles became embroiled in one of pop’s stranger urban legends. So I got home about five in the morning, stoned out of my head, I staggered up to my tape recorder and I put it on, but it came out backwards, and I was in a trance in the earphones, what is it – what is it? It's too much, you know, and I really wanted the whole song backwards almost, and that was it. “We'd done the main thing at EMI and the habit was then to take the songs home and see what you thought a little extra gimmick or what the guitar piece would be. “On the end of Rain you hear me singing it backwards,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. Influenced by the techniques of musique concrète, they featured a backmasked line in Rain, a single released in 1966.įeaturing in the fade-out, the reversed vocal is the first line of the song. The Beatles first stumbled across what is called ‘backmasking’ – recording a message backwards onto a track – when they were making their Rubber Soul album in 1965.
Death metal bands don’t hold the monopoly on hidden messages: one pop group has been at the centre of rumours for nearly five decades.
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