Tiny but interesting: The Beatles’ 1995 song “Free as a Bird” was based on a home demo that John Lennon had recorded in 1977, three years before his murder. After the surviving Beatles had added their own parts, they appended a music-hall-style ukulele to the end, followed by a spoken snippet by Lennon, “Turned out nice again,” a reference to entertainer George Formby.

In Beatles style they reversed this snippet, expecting it to sound like cryptic nonsense. Instead, the result (arguably) sounds like “Made by John Lennon.”

Paul McCartney said, “None of us had heard it when we compiled it, but when I spoke to the others and said, ‘You’ll never guess,’ they said, ‘We know, we’ve heard it too.’ And I swear to God he definitely says it. We could not in a million years have known what that phrase would be backwards.”

(From Peter Ames Carlin’s Paul McCartney: A Life, 2009.)