Carnival of Light: the demented history of the ‘lost’ Beatles song you’ll never hear

On November 20 2008, Paul McCartney spoke to the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row about The Beatles’ most legendarily mysterious track. At the time, the near 14-minute experimental piece Carnival Of Light had been languishing in the vaults for more than four decades, an absence that had allowed it to assume near-mythical status in the eyes of committed Beatlemaniacs. “It does exist,” McCartney said. “The time has come for it to get its moment.”

Not only has this moment yet to arrive, but almost 15 years later the only song to emerge from storage is an AI-assisted single issued just yesterday. But as palatable as the airborne melodies and stroll-in-the-park tempo of Now And Then may be, the announcement that this will be “the last ever Beatles song” to be sprung from captivity has left hardcore constituents unfulfilled. “We’re never getting Carnival Of Light are we?” mused one correspondent on Twitter/X. “But what about Carnival Of Light?” asked a second. “I still hold hope for Carnival Of Light some day,” added a more optimistic third. 

Don’t hold your breath. It seems the most pressing reason the song has yet to meet its expectant public is because few of the people who have heard it believe it to be any good. Recalling the process of selecting material for the 155-track Anthology series in the mid-1990s, McCartney told the culture journalist John Wilson that he had suggested to his former bandmates George Harrison and Ringo Starr that, “It would be great to put [Carnival Of Light] on there because it would show we were working with really avant-garde stuff… But it was vetoed. The guys didn’t like the idea. They were like ‘this is rubbish’.”

Certainly, it sounds like it might be. The author Mark Lewisohn (widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on The Beatles and their music) describes arrangements consisting of “distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gargling was one) and, perhaps most intimidating of all, Lennon and McCartney screaming and bawling random phrases including ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘Barcelona!’.”

Elsewhere, in his book The Unknown Paul McCartney, Ian Peel somehow manages to make the song sound even less appealing. “Carnival Of Light,” he writes, “is an unpredictable sound collage explosion – bursting with random percussion and vocal effects in a melody-less powerpack of randomness.”

In other words, Love Me Do it ain’t. But by 1966 both The Beatles and British pop culture as a whole were travelling at speed away from the playful norms the Fab Four had helped to establish just three years earlier. Paul McCartney’s own entry into the new English counterculture came via his connection with (among others) the design firm BEV, founded and operated by the artists Doug Binder, Dudley Edwards and David Vaughan. For the price of £300, the latter painted a rainbow on the upright piano on which the Beatle would write Penny Lane.

It was when delivering the instrument back to Paul McCartney’s flat in London’s Cavendish Avenue that Vaughan mentioned BEV had secured the Roundhouse for two nights in the new year, on January 28 and February 4, as the site for the avant-garde Million Volt Light and Sound Rave (sometimes known as the Festival of Light). Asked if he might consider contributing a piece that could be played over the Roundhouse PA, McCartney said he’d see what he could do. (In the muddled history of Carnival Of Light, it’s worth noting that others believe the idea came from the novelist Barry Miles.)

As it so happened, the Beatle had himself been a member of the audience at the very same venue, on October 15, when Soft Machine and Pink Floyd paired-up to play London’s first large-scale psychedelic happening. He even dressed in white Arab robes, complete with headdress, so as to avoid being recognized. But while his own band would in time dabble in experimental music – the eight-minute and 15-second Revolution 9 being the most strident example – in the autumn of 1966 not everyone in The Beatles was wholly thrilled with the idea of dissonant formlessness. “Avant-garde is French for bulls--t,” John Lennon liked to say. “Haven’t garde a clue,” was George Harrison’s take on the matter.

But as well as casting himself as the renaissance man-about-town, Paul McCartney was also rather taken with the idea of Lennon as the suburban rube. As he would tell Mark Lewisohn, in the book The Beatles Recording Sessions, “The way I see it, I lived a very urbane life in London… so I had the metropolis at my fingertips with all this incredible stuff going on. The Sixties. John used to come in from Weybridge in his coloured outfits and we’d meet up, and I’d tell him what I’d been doing. ‘Last night I saw a Bernardo Bertolucci film, and I went down to that [basement theatre] Open Space, they’re doing a new play there, or I had dinner with Mick Jagger last night.’ And it was, ‘My God! I’m jealous, man!’

“Because I was doing a lot of avant-garde stuff,” he added. “Or it turned out later to be avant-garde. I thought it was just ‘being different’.” Somewhat uncharitably, it has been suggested that a key reason Carnival Of Light remains in the archives is because other members of The Beatles estate (along with Paul McCartney, drummer Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, widow of George) dislike the idea of it being used to promote notions of individual supremacy. As John Wilson told the Guardian in 2008, the song’s release would “help reaffirm McCartney’s claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles”.

On the morning of January 5 1967, at Abbey Road Studios, he was certainly not shy about taking charge of the situation. “We would just go in every day and record,” he told Front Row. “I said to the guys, this is a bit indulgent but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? I’ve been asked to do this thing. All I want you to do is just wander round all of the [equipment] and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn’t need to make any sense. Hit a drum, wander to the piano, hit a few notes… and then we put a bit of echo on it. It’s very free.” With his tongue perhaps not quite positioned in the centre of his mouth, he would later describe Carnival Of Light as “the best thing since sliced bread”.

Others disagreed. As Paul McCartney called a halt to the recording after 13 minutes and 48 seconds, in the control booth Beatles producer George Martin turned to engineer Geoff Emerick and said, “This is ridiculous. We’ve got to get our teeth into something a little more productive.” They did. The next song up was Penny Lane.

In what might have been a sign that even its organisers were not wholly impressed by The Beatles’ effort, Carnival Of Light was aired only at the first Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. Unwilling to mark the occasion with a personal appearance, not even Paul McCartney was on hand to hear his weird creation played for an audience that had no idea it was the work of the world’s most famous group. Instead, he and George Harrison went to the Royal Albert Hall to watch the Four Tops.