Paul McCartney may be a much-loved figure in British music, but the family favourite also has a raunchy side. After all, when The Beatles were playing tiny clubs in Hamburg it was Macca who took the mic for those Little Richard numbers, shrieking to his heart’s delight.
So when the mid 60s brought a tit-for-tit war of distortion between top tier British groups, there was only ever going to be one winner. Reading an interview with The Who’s Pete Townshend about the band’s single ‘I Can See For Miles’, Paul McCartney’s eyes were drawn to a quote saying the 45 was their loudest and most extreme record yet – so he decided to top it.
Entering Abbey Road once more, he began sketching out ideas for ‘Helter Skelter’ – arguably one of the first true rock or metal records, it was born out of friendly competition.
Speaking as part of the Beatles’ Anthology series, he said: “I was in Scotland and I read in Melody Maker that Pete Townshend had said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll record you’ve ever heard…'”
“I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going; just hearing him talk about it. So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’ And I wrote ‘Helter Skelter’.”
“You can hear the voices cracking, and we played it so long and so often that by the end of it you can hear Ringo saying, ’I’ve got blisters on my fingers’. We just tried to get it louder: Can’t we make the drums sound louder?”
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A full-band production for The White Album, ‘Helter Skelter’ overdubs included “mouth sax” – in reality, John Lennon blowing a saxophone mouth piece.
Paul McCartney recalled later: “I’d read a review of a record which said, ‘and this group really got us wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one’.”
“‘Pity they’ve done it. Must be great – really screaming record.’ And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn’t rough and screaming and tape echo at all.
“So I thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll do one like that, then.’ And I had this song called ‘Helter Skelter’ which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, because I like noise.”
So, one more time…
