Posted on 10/23/2026 9:47:35 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
The Hollies' "On a Carousel" preceded the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" by approximately 21 months. However, the evidence favors independent composition rather than direct musical influence.
| Category | The Hollies | The Beatles |
|---|---|---|
| Song | On a Carousel | Helter Skelter |
| Composers | Graham Nash, Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks | Paul McCartney (credited Lennon–McCartney) |
| Recording | January 11 and 13, 1967 | Principal released recording: September 9, 1968 |
| Release | February 10, 1967 | November 22, 1968 |
| Musical character | Melodic, harmony-rich psychedelic pop | Aggressive, distorted hard rock |
Graham Nash recalled that the three songwriters developed the idea of a love affair resembling a carousel, going round and round. Their objective was a memorable pop single, with strong hooks and the Hollies' characteristic vocal harmonies.
In Britain, a helter-skelter is a tall spiral slide, commonly encountered at fairgrounds.
McCartney used the image of ascending and descending to accompany a musical experience of increasing excitement and disorder.
In a November 20, 1968 interview, McCartney explained that he had read an enthusiastic description of another group's supposedly wild, noisy recording. When he heard the record, he found it considerably more restrained than advertised and decided to make something genuinely raucous himself.
The recording usually associated with this account is the Who's I Can See for Miles (1967), not the Hollies' On a Carousel.
The Hollies employ circular motion as a metaphor for recurring emotional experiences in love. McCartney uses the excitement of a fairground slide to express musical abandon.
Both songs belong to a period when British popular musicians were experimenting with childhood imagery, amusement parks, fantasy, and psychedelic associations.
That cultural background offers a plausible explanation for their similarity without requiring direct borrowing.
A February 18, 1967 issue of Disc and Music Echo, published immediately after On a Carousel, interviewed Graham Nash about his desire to make the Hollies more adventurous.
Nash discussed the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever, expressing his desire for the Hollies to produce something similarly startling rather than continue playing safe.
This documents the Hollies' awareness of the Beatles' experiments in February 1967, but it does not establish a connection between On a Carousel and the later Helter Skelter.
"On a Carousel" (1967) preceded "Helter Skelter" (1968), but no documented compositional influence between them has been established.
The comparison nevertheless identifies a genuine shared feature: two British popular songs using fairground machinery as an organizing metaphor for emotional or physical excitement, within less than two years of one another.
The relationship is best classified as a noteworthy parallel in popular-song imagery, not an established case of musical borrowing.
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How would you expect that A.I. would NOT lie to you, since its remote ancestry derives from Newspapers, the chief assignment of which was to give people 99 truths so they would swallow JUST ONE LIE at the behest of their Oligarchic owners--their descendants now Thiel, Soros, Gates, Red Shields, Rocky Fellers, all the putrid crew of them today, who own the A.I. fraud outright, though they can make peasants like us pay for it.
Charles Manson began incorporating the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" into his apocalyptic race-war ideology approximately five weeks after the song was released, around New Year's Eve 1968.
The chronology is unusually well documented, including eyewitness testimony from Manson's followers.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| February 10, 1967 | The Hollies release On a Carousel. |
| July 18, 1968 | The Beatles record early versions of Helter Skelter. |
| September 9, 1968 | The Beatles record the version ultimately released. |
| November 22, 1968 | Helter Skelter is released on the White Album. |
| December 31, 1968 | Manson begins explaining his interpretation of the Beatles' album to followers at a desert ranch. |
| January–June 1969 | His racial-apocalypse narrative becomes progressively more elaborate. |
| August 8–10, 1969 | Members of the Manson Family commit the Tate–LaBianca murders. |
Paul Watkins, a former Manson follower, testified that Manson returned to the desert ranch around New Year's Eve 1968 and began explaining that the Beatles were prophesying a revolution.
Watkins emphasized that the complete doctrine did not emerge immediately. Manson elaborated it gradually over approximately five or six months.
By the summer of 1969, according to testimony summarized in the California appellate decision People v. Manson, Manson was advocating murders intended to provoke retaliatory racial violence.
Manson's racist and apocalyptic ideas did not necessarily originate with the Beatles' song. Former follower Catherine Share later recalled that Manson interpreted the White Album as confirmation of ideas he had already been expressing.
Consequently, the more precise historical conclusion is that Manson appropriated the song's title and imagery to reinforce and elaborate an existing ideology, rather than deriving the entire ideology from Paul McCartney's composition.
There is no established connection between the Hollies' song and Manson's ideology. Nor is there evidence that McCartney intended anything resembling Manson's interpretation.
The particularly disturbing historical fact is the speed of the transformation: a British pop song about a fairground slide became, within weeks of publication, a phrase employed by Manson in preaching racial apocalypse.
Don’t bother reading this. Go back to cable news. Drool. Snooze. Don’t bother waking up when the skyline glows alight.
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at One AM
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How in the heck would anyone even think HS was in anyway derivative of On a Carousel. The very premise makes no sense.
Might as well do the same comparison between Carousel and For the Benefit of Mr. Kite because ya know fairs and stuff.
Again, no link.
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