Five incredible covers of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
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(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
By the time Beatlemania finally came to a symbolic close in August 1966, when their final live show was played at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, The Beatles already had one of music’s most radical and revolutionary cuts out in the pop ether. Their seventh LP, Revolver, was already riding high on the UK and Billboard album charts. The screaming fans still clutching their ‘She Loves You’ 7″ would have been exposed to the LP’s lysergic-soaked finale ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a surrealist blast of avant-garde psychedelia and novel recording trickery that thrust the sonic and countercultural vanguard to the centre of the mainstream.
Inspired by his recent experiences on LSD, John Lennon sought to translate the kaleidoscopic trip onto the record, asking producer George Martin to “sound like one hundred chanting Tibetan monks”. Realising the studio as a creative instrument in its own right, Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick sought to deploy Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s love of musique-concrète and electro-acoustic work to oversee some of EMI’s Studios’ most maverick sessions—from vocals captured via a Leslie speaker to the complex collage of samples sped up and aurally twisted into new and far out dimensions.
It’s interesting to picture what the average suburban kid thought of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. For some, it may have been a fascinating pull into strange, experimental terrain striking like an alien lightning bolt—for others, a bewildering indulgence of noise that is best forgotten. Allegedly, The Who and The Rolling Stones were stunned when afforded a sneak preview, while old Merseybeat pal Cilla Black just laughed. Alienating some fans while pulling in a whole new freaky crowd of dropped-out admirers, Revolver‘s parting acid ode saw The Beatles shake off the last vestiges of the Fab Four and set an inventive course for the innovative pop explorations to come.
Written primarily on one chord and adopting Indian drone harmonies doesn’t make for an easy cover option, yet ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ has inspired scores of renditions just as any other from the Lennon-McCartney songbook. Its best versions avoid trying to ‘out-trip’ the original but still harness its transportive energy in their own unique and affectionate fashion. With volumes of artists having taken a stab at the psychedelic masterpiece, we take a look at five of the most valiant renditions.
Five incredible covers of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
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