4. Tomorrow Never Knows
(Revolver, 1966)
A revolution in perspective and palette; music as creation, not performance.
 Tom Rowlands (The Chemical Brothers): “Me and Ed [Simons] always used to play it after an acid house track by Emmanuel Top called Lobotomie. It’s 10 minutes long and people would be frazzled by the end of it… then we would go into Tomorrow Never Knows and it would be absolutely incredible. People would ask if it was something new, or a remix – it just sounded so intense and so wild.
“I've had stages of my life when I've been completely obsessed with that song. It's immediate, but at the same time it’s incomprehensible. It’s noise, but it’s music. The idea that a screech could be the hook of a song was revolutionary. When we went to Japan we used to trawl those Beatles bootleg shops looking for The Void – the mythical 20-minute version of Tomorrow Never Knows. I've got lots of versions of ‘Mark 1’ as it's called – with all the different embellishments – but I've never found The Void. But I like the fact that it is called The Void. Because listening to this is like stepping into a void of nothingness and everything at the same time.
“Obviously it was a big touchstone for what we’ve gone on to do. In my mind, the alien-ness of acid house is related to the alien-ness of Tomorrow Never Knows, and of course the techniques... Paul McCartney's laugh twisted round to become seagulls, the mad compression of the drums – it's an experiment to make things sound how they shouldn't. That’s what I try to do every day. And if you're feeling sort of stumped or lacking in creative juice, you can listen to Tomorrow Never Knows and just re-charge with the spirit of adventure. It’s that feeling of too-muchness, the ultimate.”
| 
