Sound engineer Geoff Emerick says that John Lennon came close to risking electrocution during the recording of Beatles track 'Yellow Submarine', because he wanted to sound as though his vocals were being sung underwater, and planned to sing through a mike submerged in a bottle of water. Which definitely sounds like the suggestion of someone on a suicide mission, yes. Anyway, a handy condom saved the day. And you thought they were just an eighties trend.
Emerick says: "John wanted to be recorded underwater to simulate being in a submarine. He was like that. He didn't realise the implications of that. I thought to get a bottle of water and put a microphone in the water and get him to sing to that and then I realised there was a huge amount of electrical current going through the microphone. So to protect the mic, Mal Evans (Beatles road manager) had a condom in his bag and I put the mic in the condom and put it in the bottle. John could've blown up because there was 240 volts running through this thing. It was part of some lead vocal but they never used it. I'm sure it's somewhere."