(Credits: Far Out / Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library)
Thu 12 March 2026 21:00, UK
While John Lennon was certainly not averse to experimenting with new and complex ideas during his time with The Beatles, it was in his solo career that he arguably stepped further into territories that were baffling to those around him.
With The Beatles, he was fortunate enough to have been paired with other musicians who shared the same sense of adventurousness. Finding yourself working alongside someone like George Harrison, who was also not averse to experimentation, would almost certainly have been a bonus for Lennon in terms of being able to bounce his ideas around freely, while Paul McCartney’s flourishes of whimsy were also a solid example of how the band occasionally slipped away from being a straightforward pop group.
His songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ showed a sense of daring coupled with a small amount of accessibility, which Lennon was celebrated for. However, on the other end of the spectrum, he would occasionally use his platform as one of the most beloved songwriters of his generation to produce completely off-the-wall musique concrète compositions, with ‘Revolution 9’ arguably being him at his strangest.
His solo output, especially the material he was making with his wife, Yoko Ono, had a sense of freakishness about it in places, and the experiments went even further than they had before, sometimes with entire albums being devoted to the same sound collage style displayed on ‘Revolution 9’.
However, it was a song that one might argue seems simple on the surface of things that truly left his bandmates speechless and unable to comprehend, and while it was a minor hit for Lennon, it incorporated an influence that felt far removed from everything else he’d released up until that point.
Despite having been written as far back as 1970, with him first performing the song in early shows after the breakup of The Beatles, ‘Mind Games’ wouldn’t be recorded and released as a single until 1973, with it being the lead track from the album of the same name. Most people would consider this to be one of the most accessible songs of his solo career, sitting comfortably alongside the likes of ‘Imagine’ and ‘Jealous Guy’, but his bandmates may have felt differently about it.
Much to their confusion, there was a section of the song that felt alien to the members of his band, largely because it dabbled with a style of music that was unfamiliar to them, and Lennon would later proclaim that he had a laugh trying to get his band to cooperate with him.
“That was a fun track because the voice is in stereo and the seeming orchestra on it is just me playing three notes with slide guitar,” he claimed, before adding, “And the middle eight is reggae. Trying again to explain to American musicians what reggae was in 1973 was pretty hard, but it’s basically a reggae middle eight if you listen to it.”
Reggae would of course make its way into the US mainstream not long after, with artists like Bob Marley and the Wailers first charting in the US in 1976, but it was certainly more prevalent in the UK for some time beforehand, and therefore Lennon’s attempt at subtly introducing it into the middle eight section of ‘Mind Games’ felt especially baffling for his American bandmates.