The most hilariously hypocritical saga in Beatles history involves Paul McCartney—yes, the guy who wrote “Yesterday” and “Let It Be”—desperately trying to get the world to hear 14 minutes of incomprehensible noise that he recorded in 1967. The same Paul McCartney who fought tooth and nail to keep John Lennon’s experimental “Revolution 9” off the White Album. 🎵
Welcome to the lore of “Carnival of Light,” the Beatles track that nobody except Paul wants you to hear, that Paul has been trying to release for nearly 30 years, and that might actually be genuinely terrible. This is a story about competitive egos, avant-garde one-upmanship, and why, sometimes, archival material should stay buried.
What Even IS “Carnival of Light”?
“Carnival of Light” is nearly 14 minutes long and was recorded on January 5, 1967, right after the Beatles finished working on “Penny Lane.” Paul McCartney had been asked to contribute something to an art event at the Roundhouse Theatre in London, and he convinced his bandmates to spend ten minutes making what he later described as something in “the Stockhausen/John Cage bracket.”
According to Mark Lewisohn, reportedly the only journalist who’s actually heard the full recording, here’s what’s on those four tracks:
Track one: distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds
Track two: distorted lead guitar
Track three: church organ, water gargling, and John and Paul “screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like ‘Are you alright?’ and ‘Barcelona!’”
Track four: indescribable sound effects with heaps of echo and manic tambourine
The piece ends with Paul asking in an echo-soaked voice, “Can we hear it back now?” 💀
No lyrics. There’s no melody. At one point Paul plays a bit of “Fixing a Hole” on piano, and at another point John shouts “Electricity!” There are Native American war cries, whistling, close-miked gasping, actual coughing, and fragments of studio conversation. Paul’s instruction to his bandmates was simple: “All I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn’t need to make any sense.”
Mission accomplished, Paul. It makes no sense whatsoever.
The Roundhouse Disaster Nobody Talks About
The beautiful irony: Paul created this piece for a specific event, and its publicity posters promised “music composed by Paul McCartney.” But none of the Beatles showed up for the big reveal. While the audience was shivering in a cold, cavernous former train depot, Paul and George were in the plush seats of the Royal Albert Hall watching the Four Tops. 🎭
The people who did hear it were, in the words of Paul’s biographer Ian Peel, “comprehensively underwhelmed.” The eyewitness verdict was unanimous and brutal:
The Organizer (David Vaughan): “I don’t think it was up to much.”
The Performer (Daevid Allen): “I dimly remember the sound collage because it was not particularly memorable.”
The BBC Radiophonic expert (Brian Hodgson): “It was all rather a mess... There seemed to be no coherence to what was on the tape.”
It takes a special kind of failure to record a 14-minute Beatles track that people actually forget while they are listening to it. 😬
The Paul vs. John Avant-Garde Championship Belt
Now we get to the heart of why this matters so much to Paul, and why he’s spent decades trying to release a track that literally everyone who’s heard it says is dreadful. It’s because of John Lennon and “Revolution 9.”
In 1968, John and Yoko Ono created “Revolution 9” for the White Album—that eight-minute sound collage of tape loops and random noise. It became the definitive proof in the public’s mind that John was the Beatles’ resident revolutionary. But here is the historical twist: Paul had recorded “Carnival,” his own experimental freakout in January 1967—a full eighteen months before John ever touched a tape loop for “Revolution 9.”
While John was still living a relatively quiet life in the suburbs, Paul was the one hanging out with the London underground scene, attending Stockhausen lectures, and pushing the boundaries of what “music” could be. John actually used to mock the avant-garde, famously calling it “French for bullshit.”
And yet, because “Revolution 9” was released to the world and “Carnival of Light” was buried in a vault, history remembers John as the “weird” Beatle. John got the avant-garde credit. John became the experimental innovator. And this drives Paul absolutely crazy. 😤
As Paul told Mark Lewisohn: “I was getting interested in avant garde things... I never got known for being that way because John later superseded me, ‘Oh, it must have been John who was the Stockhausen freak.’ In actual fact it wasn’t, it was me.”
So “Carnival of Light” isn’t just a 14-minute noise experiment. It’s Paul’s receipt. It’s his evidence that he was the avant-garde Beatle before John ever met Yoko. The problem is that the receipt shows he purchased something nobody actually wants to hear.
The Anthology Vetoes That Broke Paul’s Heart
Fast forward to 1996 and the development of the Anthology project—those three double albums of outtakes, demos, and rarities that let fans hear the Beatles’ creative process. Paul sees his chance. He wants “Carnival of Light” included on Anthology 2.
George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono all said no. Vetoed. Rejected. Not happening. 🚫
Paul later recalled: “The guys didn’t like the idea, like ‘this is rubbish.’” George, who had his own avant-garde albums in the late ‘60s (Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound), still didn’t want “Carnival of Light” released. Paul joked that George would say “avant-garde a clue” about such things, but the reality is that George just thought it wasn’t good enough.
Even George Martin, the Beatles’ producer who was helping evaluate all the recordings for Anthology, didn’t think it should be released. After the original recording session ended in 1967, Martin had said: “This is ridiculous. We’ve got to get our teeth into something constructive.” Nearly thirty years later, his opinion hadn’t changed.
The track’s legendary streak of rejection remained unbroken with the 2025 release of Anthology 4. Despite decades of fan anticipation and Paul’s own lobbying, the expanded collection arrived without the 14-minute experiment, proving that even sixty years later, the “Beatles” brand is still being protected from its own most eccentric impulses. 😏
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Anthology Collection (2025 Edition)
Barry Miles, Paul’s friend from the ‘60s underground scene and one of the few people who’s actually heard “Carnival of Light,” was brutally honest: “It’s really dreadful...It doesn’t bear being released. It’s just masses of echo...It was the same thing that everybody was doing at home.”
Think about that. Paul’s own friend, the guy who introduced him to the avant-garde scene in the first place, thinks it shouldn’t be released.
The Magnificent Hypocrisy
Let’s pause to appreciate the beautiful contradiction at the heart of this story:
1967: Paul fights against John’s experimental nonsense on the White Album, arguing it’s too weird and self-indulgent.
1996-Present: Paul fights FOR his own experimental nonsense from 1967, arguing it deserves to be heard.
The difference, of course, is that Paul’s experimental nonsense proves he was avant-garde first. John’s experimental nonsense just proves John was weird, which everyone already knew. Paul needs “Carnival of Light” released not because it’s good, but because it’s evidence in the eternal Paul vs. John argument about who was the real artistic innovator. 📜
David Vaughan summed up the Beatles’ competitive dynamic perfectly: “The idea, of course, was that he did it before John [Lennon]. They were a pain in the arse, the pair of them...In fact they all were. They were always trying to upstage each other. I mean, who gives a f*** who was first for that one, do you know what I mean?”
Paul gives a f***, David. Paul gives a very big f***.
Paul’s Eternal Quest for Avant-Garde Credit
The saga doesn’t end with the Anthology rejections. Paul has been talking about releasing “Carnival of Light” for decades. In 2001, he said he was working on a photo collage film about the Beatles and planned to use the track in the soundtrack. That project never materialized. In 2004, he confirmed he still owned the master tapes and said “the time has come for it to get its moment. I like it because it’s the Beatles free, going off-piste.” 🎬
In 2016, he told an interviewer he was “toying with the idea” of releasing previously unissued Beatles recording takes, including “Carnival of Light.” Fans got excited. Maybe the 50th anniversary Sgt. Pepper reissue in 2017 would finally include it?
Nope. Giles Martin (George Martin’s son), who oversaw the Sgt. Pepper remix, explained: “It wasn’t really part of Pepper...It’s a very different thing.”
Which is a polite way of saying: this was created for a specific one-time event, it served its purpose, the people who heard it didn’t think much of it, and maybe it should stay in the vault. 📦
The Track That Everyone Calls “The Holy Grail” But Nobody Actually Wants
Music journalist Michael Gallucci has called “Carnival of Light” “the holy grail of lost Beatles recordings.” It’s become mythical precisely because it’s unreleased. Fans speculate about what it sounds like. They imagine it must be brilliant—why else would Paul fight so hard to release it? They convince themselves that George, Ringo, and Yoko are withholding a masterpiece. 🏆
But the evidence suggests otherwise. The track was recorded in about ten minutes as a quick favor for an art event. Paul himself describes it as “a bit indulgent.” Even Abbey Road recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that John later recycled bits and pieces from the “Carnival of Light” session for “Revolution 9,” suggesting the most valuable thing about the recording was that it provided raw material for something else.
Yet Paul keeps pushing for its release. Not because it’s good, but because it’s proof. Proof that he was experimental. Proof that he was avant-garde. Proof that he did it first, damn it, and history should remember that.
The beautiful irony is that by keeping it unreleased, “Carnival of Light” maintains its mystique. If it came out tomorrow and was as underwhelming as everyone who’s heard it suggests, Paul’s avant-garde credentials wouldn’t be enhanced—they’d be diminished. Sometimes the receipt is worth more than what you purchased, as long as nobody looks too closely at the receipt. 🧾
