What are The Beatles actually spelling in semaphore on the cover for ‘Help!’

By the mid-1960s, The Beatles were making classics faster than most fans could internalise them. They had already won the hearts of everyone in America from the minute they debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show, but seeing A Hard Day’s Night in the theatre only stoked the flames of Beatlemania, which had already turned into a raging fire. So if one film worked well, why not try to do the entire thing over again?

After all, Brian Epstein had signed the group to a four-movie deal, so it was only natural to get another film going that had the same kind of zany humour as their breakout third outing did. Although the band had already been exhausted by the time they began work on Beatles for Sale, they were energised enough to come up with something a lot more mature when working on the album Help!

There had been moments of experimentation here and there on their last outing, but this was the first sign the band were going to head in different directions. ‘Ticket to Ride’ is by no means a heavy tune, but the drum sound was certainly unique for the time, and tunes like ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ proved that John Lennon was getting a bit more obsessed with Bob Dylan’s brand of songwriting.

But a fifth member of the band joined during this period, and its name was Jah. The Fab Four weren’t exactly choir boys behind the scenes, and to get through the film, most of their time was spent getting stoned whenever they weren’t on set. While that didn’t exactly affect the movie, it meant that they started to care less about the manufactured side of their music.

So what do The Beatles spell on the Help album cover?
Because when looking at the poster for Help!, it’s far more confusing than it lets on. The whole process of the band waving their arms was about spelling something out in semaphore, but instead of logically spelling out ‘HELP’, they managed to spell out ‘NUVJ’. While they did try spelling out the title of the album, photographer Robert Freeman eventually shut everything down, thinking that it looked more aesthetically pleasing by going with the gibberish word.

Even though it does look like a more balanced picture, it also stands as one of the least eye-catching of their album covers. Since the whole thing is done against a plain white background, it does at least make the band stand out a bit more, but when you realise that they are spelling out a nonsense word, it loses some of its lustrs since nothing is going on aside from their typical goofiness.

Then again, that might have been out of necessity at that point. The Beatles had been on a tight schedule ever since they became global stars, and even if the whole thing was photographed by accident, there was no need for them to go back and reshoot something when they already had something decent to work with.

If anything, the fact that they all have their arms outstretched at least implies that they are asking for help from inside the album cover, but it could also have been them slowly growing bored of the endless poses that had to be placed in. They were begging to break free of this caricature version of themselves, and when the striking image of Rubber Soul appeared on their next album sleeve, it was clear they had stretched themselves out a lot more than usual.