Why was the Beatles song Helter Skelter linked with the Charles Manson murders?

QUESTION: Why was the Beatles song Helter Skelter linked with the Charles Manson murders?

Two of the many themes which inspired the macabre vision of cult leader Charles Manson were music and religion.

While in prison, Manson learned to play the guitar, and on his release became an aspiring musician and songwriter. He began to write songs to express his ethos to his growing Family of followers. One of these songs, the sinister Cease To Exist, was re-worked by the Beach Boys into their album track Never Learn Not To Love.

His delusions of becoming a star on a par with the Beatles never materialised, and instead he began to claim that the Beatles were directly addressing him through their music. He also encouraged his followers to view him as a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

These two strands were combined with deadly effect when Manson heard the Beatles' White Album. Manson ignored the fact, or didn't realise, that a 'helter skelter' was a fairground ride, and focused on its more general meaning of chaos and confusion.

He told his followers that the song Helter Skelter foretold an apocalyptic war between black and white people, during which Manson and his followers would hide in a bottomless pit in Death Valley and then emerge to rule the world.

This, he said, would fulfil the prophesies of the ninth chapter of Revelations (a neat match for the title of the Beatles' sound collage Revolution 9). In this chapter, locusts would come out of the abyss. He quoted many other songs from the White Album, such as Blackbird and Piggies, in support of his predictions.

In 1980, John Lennon denied Manson's ludicrous claim that the Beatles' lyrics were messages to him, saying: 'It has nothing to do with me. Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the 'Paul is dead' thing' (the urban myth that, in 1966, McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike).

In a dreadful denouement, in August 1969, Hollywood actress Sharon Tate and six others were murdered by members of the Manson Family.

As Beatles expert Ian MacDonald observed, the group had for a long time 'set up chains of suggestive self-reference in their lyrics for the explicitly avowed fun of confusing people', but in the end the Manson Family crossed the divide between textual analysis and mass murder.

Bob Bell, Croydon, Surrey.

QUESTION: What was the last UK town to be completely built to an architectural plan?

Out of the rubble of the Blitz, the government instituted the New Towns Act of 1946, a bold solution to the postwar housing crisis. This saw major expansions to a host of towns such as Stevenage, Basildon, Corby, Redditch, Bracknell, Glenrothes and East Kilbride.

Though Central Lancashire (1970), Northampton (1968) and Newtown in Mid Wales (1967) were the last towns to gain New Town status, the first of these was never realised and the other two were extensions of existing towns.

Milton Keynes (1967), on the other hand, was designed to a plan produced by consultants Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker & Bor, to a brief written by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. 

It featured American-style grid roads, though connected with roundabouts, and 40 per cent green space. The town did incorporate a number of historic settlements, including the existing towns of Bletchley, Fenny Stratford, Wolverton and Stony Stratford.

Graeme Davies, Dunstable, Bedfordshire.

QUESTION: Where does the expression 'sock it to me' come from?

The word sock, meaning to 'strike someone', appears first in 17th-century Britain as 'give someone sock'.

The expression became popular in the U.S. and we get an early figurative use of the phrase in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (1889). Here the Yankee is describing an argument over comparative prices of goods and services: 'Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four mills, we pay only four cents.' I prepared now to sock it to him. I said: 'Look here, dear friend, what's become of your high wages you were bragging so about a few minutes ago?'

The specific phrase was used in the Aretha Franklin recording of Respect (1967) where the backing chorus repeats the phrase 'Sock it to me' in the background, i.e. 'hit me with it'. It was made famous by the English actress Judy Carne, who adopted it as her catchphrase on the popular U.S. show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. She became known as the Sock-It-To-Me girl.

James Knight, Wolverhampton, West Midlands.

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Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY or email [email protected]