Credit: Far Out / DEVO / Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library
Thu 30 July 2026 19:30, UK
It took a sly pilfer of one of The Beatles’ biggest hits to gift Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh with a surreal path crossing of his all-time hero.
Long-time spud fans will know that the John Lennon and Paul McCartney songbook pops up from time to time in Devo’s oeuvre. Way before even their first album, Mothersbaugh slung a pastiche nod to his beloved Buggs, an old Fab Four rip-off band that grabbed their slice of Beatlemania and lyrically inspired the early Devo number ‘U Got Me Bugged’. Jump to 1984’s Shout, and ‘Please Please’ naturally riffs The Beatles’ first real hit in the title, and Mothersbaugh even wields a Fairlight synthesiser rendition of ‘Day Tripper’s guitar lick on the digital ‘The 4th Dimension’.
For all their subversion and rock and roll iconoclasm, Devo were just as indebted to Liverpool’s finest as everyone else. Why wouldn’t they be? The Beatles were the band of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ avant-garde reality rupture, the concrète trip of ‘Revolution 9’, and the ultimate surrealist prank on the more paranoid end of their fanbase with the cryptic ‘I Am the Walrus’. Much of the Fab Four canon opened the door for the likes of Devo to subsequently bulldoze in the new wave era.
The Beatles’ immortal US TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 struck Mothersbaugh as hard as anyone else from his generation, the Devo co-founder telling Stereogum in 2022 that the moment he saw the British invasion’s explosive arrival as a young teenager, his musical destiny was forged there and then, thinking to himself the moment they opened with ‘All My Loving’: “That’s what I want to do”.
It was The Beatles’ closing song that would yield Mothersbaugh and Lennon’s eventual path crossing. The raucous intro of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ would rattle around the future Devoman’s head for years, the basic chord progression informing the Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! debut’s excitable first track, ‘Uncontrollable Urge’. It turned out that such an artful borrowing from the Fab Four wasn’t lost on Lennon, who decided to catch Devo live in New York on the cusp of their punk breakthrough.
The buzz around Devo brought many an alternative A-lister to Max’s Kansas City during their three-night residency in July 1977, Brian Eno, Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, all eager to catch punk’s bold new act – Bowie later to dub Devo “the band of the future” when introducing them on their return November show. Playing the show on one of the nights for a reported $70, the lack of funds for a hotel forced Mothersbaugh and the band to hole up in their Econoline van to sleep for the night, Mothersbaugh opting for the passenger seat.
But not without a surprise encounter with a former Beatle. Stumbling out of Max’s was Lennon and Hunter, clearly boozed-up and hanging on to each other lest they fall flat on the street amid their drunken fug. Devo’s van was spotted, and a bolshy Lennon decided to stroll over and treat Mothersabugh and the band to a slurred and inebriated rendition of ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ opening lyrical refrain.
Further reading: From The Vault
“He comes over and sticks his head right in front of my face, and he stinks like beer, and he goes ‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah!’ right in my face,” Mothersbaugh recalled.
“I was like… OK, I could die now, and I’d go to heaven. Best thing that ever happened. The fact he made note that that was a reference to him.”
If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best. Lennon knew all too well the fine art of looting rock and pop’s yesteryear, cutting his teeth early on with America’s rock and roll and R&B songbook when catapulting from the Liverpool and Hamburg clubs through the early records and ultimate Beatlemania. In ‘Uncontrollable Urge’s nod to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, Lennon would have spotted not just flattery, but a reflection of himself when the Fab Four were on the edge of their youthquake explosion.
Favours would be returned. Reportedly, McCartney was such an admirer of Devo’s electronically-coated new wave jab, he’d immerse himself in the sonic possibilities of the Yamaha CS-80 synth for 1980’s McCartney II, particularly bottling the spuds’ wonky anti-rock on the eccentric ‘Temporary Secretary’, phoney Midwestern accent and all.
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