In the period between the completion and the release of Sgt Pepper, the Beatles seemed to be temporarily, but understandably, spent. The creativity they had poured into the album and its prolonged conception and development must have left, in its wake, the different members of the group with mixed feelings. Paul, who was arguably the group’s prime mover at this stage and who had been instrumental in moulding Sgt Pepper, had been responsible for the reprise of the title song, the last number to be taped for the album. He had then flown out to America to join Jane Asher for her 21st birthday. (The two were to announce their engagement on Christmas Day.) On the trip he read about Ken Kesey and his group called the Merry Pranksters, who were driving through California in a psychedelic painted bus, spreading LSD awareness and filming as they went.
According to Mal Evans’ diary of 7 April, written while he was with Paul and Jane in the US, the next project was taking shape: “Getting quite excited about planning the television film. Idea going at the moment is to make it about some sort of Mystery Tour (Roll Up! Roll Up! Paul is getting lots of ideas and we’re jotting them down as we go.)”
The Magical Mystery Tour film finally went into production in the last three weeks of September. Things went badly from the start, when the coach turned up two hours late, having been given its psychedelic livery that morning. It was soon apparent that the late Brian Epstein’s presence and organisational skills would be sorely missed. Over the following week the bus missed routes and caused traffic jams throughout the West Country (they even got stuck on a humped back bridge on the first day), and there was squabbling over the allocation of rooms and who would double up with whom, at hotels where they were not expected. Neil Aspinall remarked, “When Brian was alive you never had to worry about any of that. You’d just ask for 15 cars and 20 hotel rooms and they’d be there.”
The idea for the film was that they would jump on a bus and, based on Paul’s rough schedule, film anything that happened. Unfortunately, nothing interesting did. The improvisation in the film reveals huge cracks from the disparate elements involved, not least the four Beatles. Even after the film was completed, it was being pulled in different directions. Tony Bramwell remembered that “Paul would come in and edit in the morning. Then John would come in in the afternoon and re-edit what Paul had edited. Then Ringo would come in …”
The Beatles may have had a shot at producing something creative and new, controversial and avant-garde, but, as George Martin would have told them, even chaos needs an element of planning. Comparing the scripted spontaneity of A Hard Day’s Night with the unscripted trawl through the Magical Mystery Tour underlines this. Although the earlier film belongs to a different age (and comparison also shows the phenomenal development the Beatles had undergone in just three years), it did capture a feeling, and stands repeated viewing.
However, when Magical Mystery Tour was screened on Boxing Day, it was badly received by the public and savaged by the critics. The Daily Express managed to create space on its front page so that its TV critic could call the film “blatant rubbish”. “Appalling” and “a colossal conceit” were other verdicts. The Beatles had taken their first sip from the not-so-magic cup of failure, and although they defended the film, they now had to accept that aspects of their success were, in part, dependent on others – on Brian Epstein, George Martin, Richard Lester.
Magical Mystery Tour demonstrates that things are not necessarily intrinsically interesting or captivating, just because you point a camera at them – even if the person pointing the camera is a Beatle. The resulting film is therefore rather contrived and very patchy. Fortunately, the good patches (largely the films of the songs) are thoroughly worthwhile. As was mentioned earlier, in the Anthology film, Paul claims that Magical Mystery Tour is interesting if only on the grounds that it contains the only filmed performance of ‘I Am The Walrus’.
In the UK, Magical Mystery Tour was issued as a double EP. This final Beatles EP also marked only the second instance of original material being released in that format, after the Long Tall Sally EP in June 1964. In America, Capitol issued the songs on one side of an LP, filling the other side with recent singles and B-sides, namely ‘Hello, Goodbye’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’. Because no stereo versions had yet been made, the Capitol album featured these last three in “mock” stereo (that is high and low frequencies in separate channels). (A stereo mix of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had been made on 29 December 1966, and this was therefore used on the LP.) This Capitol album was subsequently released by Parlophone in the UK in 1976, but used the US version of the songs, with the mock stereo versions of ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’. Happily, the CD version of Magical Mystery Tour, released in 1987, is the same as the original German version of the album, with all songs in true stereo.
The Magical Mystery Tour double EP reached number two on the singles chart, being held off the top by ‘Hello, Goodbye’. Therefore, for the three weeks following the Christmas of 1967, the Beatles were once more at numbers one and two in the chart – for the first time since ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ jostled for the top spot, also for three weeks, in those heady days of Beatlemania back in December 1963. What’s more, one song, ‘I Am The Walrus’, was – uniquely – present in the top two positions of the UK singles chart.