News The Beatles song Paul McCartney called “the wackiest” they ever made
When The Beatles decided to take a break from touring, they didn’t intend to slow down their creative momentum. By this time, they had fully matured as songwriters. While they no longer performed directly to live audiences, they were eager to explore and push the boundaries of their craft, enriching the minds of their listeners with each studio session. Reflecting on their past ventures, such as the innovative work on tracks like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Paul McCartney recognised that they had tapped into something extraordinary with ‘Helter Skelter’, surpassing any previous endeavours.
Before the band had even got to the late 1960s, they were already on the cutting edge of rock history. Outside of working with George Martin to finetune their productions, the Fab Four would throw anything into a record so long as it would improve the track, either throwing a string section into ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or letting George Harrison play a sitar that he barely knew how to play on ‘Norwegian Wood’.
After the massive success of Sgt Pepper, the band were at an impasse when their manager, Brian Epstein, passed away. While McCartney tried to lead the group through their next album, Magical Mystery Tour, their creativity wouldn’t be unlocked until they began studying transcendental meditation in India.
Coming back with more songs that they knew what to do with, the band decided their next album would be a double record of all-new material. Although the experimentation gave way to some of the most grating music they would ever create (looking at you, ‘Wild Honey Pie’), McCartney needed to push himself after hearing a quote from The Who’s Pete Townshend.
Thinking the Mod rockers had made the dirtiest record imaginable, McCartney’s competitive streak got the better of him on ‘Helter Skelter’. Considering this was the humble balladeer known for songs like ‘For No One’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Helter Skelter’ was a much-needed reminder that McCartney knew how to make blistering hard rock, including an all-star performance by Ringo Starr on drums.
Aside from all of the masterful steps into psychedelia that the group made, McCartney maintained that ‘Helter Skelter’ was one of the most off-the-wall experiments that they had ever done, saying, “[The goal was] to make the dirtiest, loudest, the most out-of-control, wackiest thing we’ve ever done.”
Although the song has been heralded as one of the progenitors to heavy metal for its time, there are still some psychedelic elements to the backing track. Aside from McCartney’s fantastic guitar part, the ending break feels more and more hypnotic as you listen, including one spot where the song fades out and fades back in again before coming to a crashing halt as Ringo Starr shouts about having blisters on his fingers.
While McCartney tends to get labelled as the straight-edge Beatle who was always looking to create the next pop hit, ‘Helter Skelter’ is the kind of hard rock freakout most would have expected from John Lennon. Macca could have written a pop hit if he wanted to, but sometimes, the need to leave your competition in the dust is a greater motivator than any chart action.
