In the 1980s, songs were scrutinised for sharing hidden messages with impressionable youth. Bands like Judas Priest came under fire from the Christian right for apparently slipping in subliminal satanic messages urging young fans to commit suicide. Their frontman, Rob Halford, sensibly pointed out the rational argument: why the hell would we want to kill off our fanbase? If anything, the subliminal messages would urge fans to spread the word and buy more records.
Sadly, The Beatles also met the wrath of dark misconception when Charles Manson cooked up a disaster off the back of ‘Helter Skelter’. Sometimes, however, the messages are not simply in the overstimulated minds of heretics, and they hide in plain sight. If Bob Dylan brought a new sense of irony to lyric writing, a lot of other acts took his double meanings and obfuscated them in weird ways. The Beatles were huge proponents of this depth-delivering technique.
And by weird ways, I mean that often, the intent doesn’t shine through. Whether it is an irony that many of us have missed or a dark backstory twisted by an otherwise pretty melody, many of their most famous songs are hiding secrets.
Below, we’ve curated these mystic tracks and lifted the lid on what they really meant. And no, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ really isn’t about LSD remarkably, but rather a child’s painting.
The Beatles songs with hidden meanings:
‘Blackbird’
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‘Blackbird’ is a beautiful song of multitudes. It might contain touches of Johann Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, but that isn’t the only musical touchstone. While in India with the Maharishi, Paul McCartney was awoken in the dead of night by the melodic sound of a blackbird chirping away. He transposed the sound in song, and the beauteous anthem was born.
However, he also thought the floating fortitude of such a song was fitting to add fight to a worthy cause. McCartney also says he was trying to offer words to Black women struggling in America, in particular, words that “encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope”.
‘She Said, She Said’
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Peter Fonda is the hidden star behind this gem. His troubled life was interwoven with pop culture in more ways than one. Following his mother’s suicide, Peter and his sister Jane moved to an uncle’s house in Nebraska, where he almost accidentally killed himself. On his 11th birthday, he unintentionally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died.
Years later, while tripping out on LSD with The Beatles, he told John Lennon, “I know what it’s like to be dead”, a line which John Lennon later worked into the ‘She Said, She Said’. It was Lennon’s second acid trip, and the experience was one that he simply couldn’t note down in a song.
‘Got to Get You into My Life’
“We were staying in that hotel [the Delmonico in New York City],” Paul McCartney once recalled, “And we were on tour, so we were all together in the hotel suite. We were having a drink and then Bob [Dylan] arrived and disappeared into a backroom. Then Ringo went back to see him and after a couple of minutes Ringo came back into the suite looking a little dazed and confused and we said, ‘what’s up?’ and he said, ‘oh Bob’s smoking pot back there’, and we said, ‘oh, well what’s it like?’ and Ringo said, ‘the ceiling feels like it’s coming down a bit’.”
The direct effect of that evening – aside from a mild high and one hell of an anecdote – is the song ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, which Paul explains is a veiled reference to the band’s growing love of the devil’s lettuce and a burgeoning desire to smoke more of it. However, in a more nebulous sense, the reverberations of the fateful meeting with The Voice of a Generation were somewhat more impactful. And the hidden meaning also stretches to The Beatles’ feeling that they had to be more in tune with the counterculture.
‘A Day in the Life’
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Such is the way that we consume news, whereby pointless innocuities often sit inches from reverent tragedies, the song mirrors a story reel in an unfurling wayward journey through incidents and sound. Thus, the pothole problem in Lancashire is quickly followed by a man blowing his mind out in a car, which is a reference to a friend of The Beatles and Guinness heir Tara Browne, who died in a car accident in 1966. Lennon stated, “I didn’t copy the accident, Tara didn’t blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse.”
The Irish socialite was a mainstay amid the hip rock scene of the day before a folly befell him. He pushed the highwire lifestyle to dangerous limits one day and sped through South Kensington in his sports car at speeds reportedly around 100mph. Eventually, he cruised through a red light and collided with a parked lorry and died. His girlfriend, the model Suki Potier, fortunately survived, claiming that Browne swerved the car to absorb the impact of the crash to save her life.
However, it is a mark of the transcendence of the song and what it says about modern life that Paul McCartney had different ideas about the verse altogether. “The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case; certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head,” he once said. It is a mark of how prolific and variegated the band were that the meaning of this lyric has even escaped those who coined it.
‘Run for Your Life’
Inspired by the Elvis Presley song ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’ in which the hip-swinging singer calls out, “I’d rather see you dead little girl, than to be with another man,” Lennon decided he would tell his own tale of dark domestic violence. Lennon eventually ended up hating the song when the irony seemed lost, as the hidden message was somewhat subverted, and the track was hoisted by its own poppy petard.
In the years that have followed, the failed attempt at condemning the open darkness contained within has led to it being banned by radio stations for espousing a dangerous message of violence against women. In short, it’s perhaps The Beatles’ most regrettable song.
‘Helter Skelter
As previously mentioned, ‘Helter Skelter’ doesn’t have a hidden meaning, but pop culture has become postmodern at this stage, so people often find themselves digging in the wrong area. Charles Manson actually accused The White Album of being the motivating factor for his despicable cult slayings.
In particular, he blamed the song ‘Helter Skelter’ for his actions. “It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘rise.’ It says ‘kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music,” he said when he stood trial. He believed that the song about an amusement park actually detailed a forthcoming race war. As Family member Brooks Poston later said, Manson told his cult on New Year’s Eve in 1968: “Are you hep to what The Beatles are saying? Helter Skleter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.” Naturally, this has been fervently denied by the band.
