Mr. Bongo have reissued Junior Parker’s 1971 LP Love Ain’t Nothin’ But A Business Goin’ On. A set sampled by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, De La Soul, and DJ Shadow, it’s famous for Junior’s selection of Beatles covers – Lady Madonna, Taxman, and, especially, Tomorrow Never Knows. The original was written and recorded in 1966, for the album, Revolver, and is, quite rightly, cited as a key piece of psychedelic and electronic pop. It finds the Fab Four, and their producer George Martin, enthusiastically experimenting with the idea of “the studio as an instrument.” As a song it’s a coming together of the band’s then individual obsessions. George Harrison’s passion for Indian classical music, brought modal tambura and sitar drones. Paul McCartney’s fascination with avant garde electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the then newly opened BBC Radiophonic Workshop, introduced tape loops and post-production sound manipulation. Both the guitar and Ringo Starr’s cymbals run backwards. John Lennon’s interest in LSD led to lyrics half-inched from Timothy Leary. Words that the psychedelic guru had reinterpreted from The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. At a time when most people had no idea what LSD was, the piece undoubtedly caused countless curious fans to take a tab, “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Many journalists and authors, the most recent being Matthew Collin in his new book Dream Machines, have argued that after Tomorrow Never Knows popular music was never the same again.

Junior’s radical reinterpretation is an elegant exercise is sonic subtraction. Striping away all the studio trickery, reimagining the song as deep Southern soul, a blues ballad, accompanied only by softly brushed drums and sparse twang and tremolo. It’s the sort of tune you’d expect to hear on a Bobby Gillespie mixtape, while riding the original, 1991, Screamadelica tour bus. Segued in between stuff like Mott The Hopple’s When My Mind’s Gone and James Carr’s Dark End Of The Street. Somehow it’s just as stoned as The Beatles’ version, but more the calming deep intake of breath induced by Ecstasy’s rush, than the mad manic panic of an acid peak. The production’s acres of space also make it feel like you’ve actually fallen into “The Void”.*

*The Void was one of the working titles for Tomorrow Never Knows. Lennon rejected it, worried that it was too obviously druggy. 

It was veteran DJ Paul “Count Shizzle” Doherty who turned me on to this track. I subsequently spent a small fortune on a crackly 7”. You can purchase a pristine copy directly from Mr. Bongo.