Reverse Speech: Voices from the Unconscious

Ever since the late 60s when the Beatles first experimented with a recording technique known as backward masking, people have had a fascination with recordings played backwards. In the late 70s and early 80s religious fundamentalists preached from the pulpits that occultic forces were hiding sinister backwards messages in rock and roll records. In the early 90s their cries reached the US courts when the rock group Judas Priest was sued by distraught parents whose teenage sons had suicided whilst listening to their album, Stained Class. They claimed the album contained subliminal backward messages that encouraged suicidal behaviour. Judas Priest prevailed in the case with the court ruling they had not intentionally placed these messages on the album but the Judge also concluded that the backward messages did exist.

The psychologist John Beloff, who has died aged 86, was best known for initiating and nurturing the academic study of parapsychology in Britain. Born and educated in London, he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled near Hampstead Heath. He was the fourth of five children, one of whom was his older brother Max (later Lord) Beloff, the founding vice chancellor of Buckingham University.
In 1937, John began training at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, but he found it profoundly unsatisfying. While serving in the army during the second world war, he was impressed by JB Rhine's book, Extrasensory Perception, which described painstaking efforts to obtain experimental evidence for psychic functioning