The unexpected connection between William S Burroughs and The Beatles
Sure, you’ve seen William S Burroughs’ face peering out from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, sandwiched somewhere between Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley. But it turns out the old man of the cut-up method wasn’t just a symbolic figure in the Beatles’ universe—he was physically there. In the room. Right in the thick of it, while Paul McCartney was hammering out the now-immortal ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
I was flipping through Victor Bockris’ book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker, and nearly dropped the thing when I hit this passage: “Ian met Paul McCartney and Paul put up the money for this flat which was at 34 Montagu Square… I saw Paul several times. The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his ‘Eleanor Rigby’.”
Burroughs added: “Ian recorded his rehearsals. I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see that he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and very prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, hardworking.”
So what the hell was William Burroughs doing loitering around Paul McCartney’s songwriting sessions?
That story runs through Barry Miles. If you’ve read anything about the British underground scene of the 1960s, Miles’ name pops up like clockwork. He ran Indica Books, the famed London bookstore/gallery funded quietly by McCartney, and helped launch International Times, the UK’s answer to The Village Voice, only laced with acid tabs.
Through Miles, McCartney met Ian Sommerville—Burroughs’ on-again-off-again lover and resident tech wizard. Sommerville was a kind of proto-sound engineer who made audio experiments out of chaos and wires, and with Paul’s money, he and Burroughs moved into a flat at 34 Montagu Square. Conveniently, that same flat would later become home to John and Yoko during their Two Virgins phase. (The photo of them naked on the album cover? Taken there.)
McCartney, always fascinated by tape loops and musique concrète, would pop over to Montagu Square, fiddle with reel-to-reel machines, and work out his arrangements. One of those just happened to be ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The scene wasn’t some cocaine-fuelled rock star bacchanal either; it was more like a quiet salon of tweedy, semi-baked madmen exchanging thoughts about the future of sound.
Everyone thinks John Lennon was the experimental one. He got the Yoko cred, sure, and the acid mystic glow-up, but it was Paul—cardiganed and clean-shaven—who was neck-deep in avant-garde tape splicing, name-dropping Karlheinz Stockhausen, and writing to John Cage. He had his own home studio years before that was normal, and when he wasn’t recording bass lines, he was hanging out with Burroughs and company, plotting sound collages and thinking about what music could be—not just what it already was.
Meanwhile, Lennon was still calling people “freaks”, puffing hash with Brian Epstein, and occasionally wandering in late to the revolution. Paul was engineering it from behind the scenes.
So yeah, the next time you play ‘Eleanor Rigby‘ on your record player or hear it echoing through a supermarket, don’t just picture the lonely woman picking up rice in the church. Picture William S Burroughs, hovering in the corner with a cigarette, taking it all in—scanning McCartney like he was a new strain of language virus. He wasn’t just observing a pop song being born; he was fucking witnessing a tectonic shift in how art and music would soon collide.
Probably high. Maybe bemused. Definitely listening.