Backwards Messages in Songs – 80s/90s Playground Myth or Real Thing?

[TubThumper]

Does anyone else remember all the talk about backwards messages in songs back in the 80s/90s?

I’m sure this was one of those things that spread around school playgrounds and older siblings’ record collections. You’d hear that if you played certain tracks backwards, there were hidden messages buried in them.

Bands like The Beatles were always at the centre of it—especially the whole “Paul is dead” thing—and I definitely remember people mentioning Revolution 9 as one to try.

Then there was Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, which seemed to come up all the time whenever this topic was mentioned. I don’t think anyone I knew had actually done it properly—but everyone knew someone who had

And of course, this was all in the days of:

• Trying to spin a vinyl backwards without scratching it
• Holding down rewind on a cassette and guessing where to stop
• Or just listening really hard and convincing yourself you could hear something!

I’ve also read that some bands like Electric Light Orchestra and Pink Floyd actually did mess around with reverse audio on purpose—but probably more as a joke than anything sinister.

So I’m curious:

• Did anyone here ever actually try playing a song backwards back then?
• Were there any specific tracks you remember being talked about?
• Or was it all just one big case of us hearing what we thought we should hear?

Feels like one of those classic pre-internet mysteries that everyone half-believed at the time.

Would be great to hear what others remember! Also, any funny ones that aren’t supposed to actually say anything — so it comes out gibberish?

[TubThumper]

I’ll start with Another One Bites The Dust by Queen. If you play that line backwards it sounds like “It’s fun to smoke marijuana”

[Richard1978]

I remember Judas Priest were taken to court in the USA over supposedly including backwards messages in their songs that made some of their fans try to kill themselves!

[TubThumper]

I remember recording a TV programme back in the early 2000’s called “When Rock Ruled the World” (or something along those lines). It was one of the shows with a mix celebrity interviewees reminiscing about Rock music being the dominate music genre. I remember the segment about Judas Priest. It was centred around the song “Better by You, Better Than Me”. Two kids in America killed themselves. The family took the band to court stating that the said song contained subliminal backwards messages saying “do it” and “try suicide”.

The case got thrown out. The judge ruled there was no evidence the music caused the suicides, and that the supposed messages were more like random sounds your brain interprets as words (kind of like hearing voices in noise).

[zabadak]

The intro to the ELO tune Fire On High (an album track but also the B-side to their hit Livin' Thing) had some backwards masking (the actual term for it) at the beginning. The track is an instrumental except that there is a spoken intro which, when played backwards, was "The music is reversible but time is not. Turn Back! Turn Back! Turn Back!"

[TubThumper]

The intro to the ELO tune Fire On High (an album track but also the B-side to their hit Livin' Thing) had some backwards masking (the actual term for it) at the beginning. The track is an instrumental except that there is a spoken intro which, when played backwards, was "The music is reversible but time is not. Turn Back! Turn Back! Turn Back!"

That’s a brilliant example—and exactly the sort of thing I remember people talking about!

Fire On High by Electric Light Orchestra is probably one of the few cases where it was actually done on purpose rather than people just imagining things.

I love the message too—“The music is reversible but time is not…”—it’s almost like they were having a bit of a tongue-in-cheek dig at all the paranoia around backmasking at the time.

Backmasking (or Backwards Masking was the term used when the backwards messages were intentional. The Judas Priest example wasn’t intentional, so this is why I referred to them simply as “backwards messages”.

It’s funny because by the late 80s/early 90s, even if you hadn’t heard the track yourself, you’d definitely heard about things like this through word of mouth. There was always that one kid who claimed their older brother had tried it and “proved it worked”

I think ELO doing it deliberately kind of sums the whole thing up—some bands were clearly just having a laugh, while everyone else was busy analysing everything like it was some hidden code.

Did anyone actually manage to hear this one properly back in the day on cassette or vinyl? Or was it another one of those “you had to take someone’s word for it” moments?