Listen to This

Lost Beatle Song Surfaces

Shows McCartney more avant garde than Lennon

The conventional view of the division of labor in the Beatles is that Paul McCartney provided the melodic songs (“Yesterday”) and John Lennon the more adventurous (“Strawberry Fields Forever.”) Not always, it seems. The Observer reports that McCartney is planning to release “Carnival of Light,” a lost Beatles track he wrote 40 years ago inspired by the music of avant garde composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It sounds as if the song went missing for a good reason. It features random drumming, a distorted guitar, a church organ, the sound of gargling, and Lennon and McCartney screaming ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘Barcelona!’” The experimental piece was commissioned for “a happening” at the Roundhouse in London. “It will help reaffirm McCartney's claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles,” said John Wilson, the BBC reporter who first reported the story. Yeah, yeah.