“Strange”: The Paul McCartney Masterpiece That Ringo Starr Called Too Weird—How One Beatle’s Misjudgment Nearly Buried a Hidden Gem, Only for It to Rise as a Cult Classic, Proving That Even Legends Can Miss the Magic Hiding in the Melodies of Their Most Unusual Collaborations
It was 1974, and the remnants of Beatlemania still clung to the edges of pop culture like the last embers of a fire that had once consumed the world. Paul McCartney, deep into his experimental Wings period, found himself restless. The hits were flowing, but something was missing. That itch for the offbeat, the avant-garde chaos that had first driven “Tomorrow Never Knows” or “Revolution 9,” gnawed at him. So, one rainy Tuesday in a London studio, he sat down at a battered Mellotron, strummed a ukulele, layered tape loops of reversed laughter, and recorded something entirely unlike anything he—or anyone else—had made before.
He called it “Strange.”
Clocking in at a slippery 4 minutes and 23 seconds, “Strange” defied genre. It opened with a waltz rhythm led by a toy piano, then spiraled into an unsettling yet captivating blend of psychedelic jazz, Moog burps, and eerie spoken-word passages. The lyrics were McCartney at his most abstract: “The walrus wore a wedding ring / beneath the sea of tangerine.” It was Lewis Carroll meets Stockhausen on Abbey Road.
McCartney was elated. He knew it wasn’t a single—but it was something. He reached out to his former bandmate, Ringo Starr, for a drum overdub and possibly a second opinion.
Ringo showed up, tambourine in hand, curious and good-natured as ever. But as the tape played, his brow furrowed.
“Too weird, Paul,” he finally said, half-laughing. “It’s like a bad dream in a haunted circus.”
Disheartened but undeterred, McCartney shelved the track. It was never released on Venus and Mars or any official album. It languished in the vaults, unloved and unheard—until a bootleg surfaced in 1997.
That’s when the cult following began.
Passed around like a whispered secret on internet forums, “Strange” became a hidden holy grail for die-hard McCartney fans and sonic adventurers. Reddit threads decoded its layered sounds. College radio stations slipped it into midnight sets. Brian Eno allegedly once called it “accidental genius.” Thom Yorke cited it in a rare interview as “proof that even Paul had demons.”
In 2012, McCartney finally acknowledged the track in a Mojo interview. “I just wanted to try something wild—no rules. Ringo thought I’d gone mad. Maybe I had.”
He re-released it officially in 2015 on the McCartney Vaults: Experimental Years box set. Critics, who once might have mocked it, now called it “decades ahead of its time” and “a window into the Beatles’ alternate dimension.”
Today, “Strange” is considered a cult classic—an example of how brilliance sometimes hides beneath layers of noise, waiting for the world to catch up. And Ringo? He’s since changed his mind.
“Maybe it was too weird for 1974,” he said in a 2020 interview. “But now? Now it’s just the right kind of weird.”
Even legends, it seems, can miss the magic hiding in the melodies.
