THE PROBLEM WITH A ‘MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR’ – AS advertised in Liverpool, at least – was that there was zero mystery involved. You could be 99.9 per cent certain that you were going to the seaside resort of Blackpool. It would be advertised as a Mystery Tour and you weren’t supposed to know where you were going. You’d get on the bus and you’d trust the operators to take you somewhere nice and surprise you. Blackpool!

As it turns out, I don’t remember our family ever going on a Mystery Tour. It was just something you’d hear about. But I liked the idea. It seemed kind of zany and romantic at the same time. It’s like, ‘Come with me, we’ll go somewhere.’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘It’s a mystery . . .’ ‘Okay, great!’

I put in this fairground barker thing at the start to bring the listener into the song, ‘Roll up roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour / Step right this way’. I remember going along to these funfairs as a kid – many of them would be down the ‘Golden Mile’ in Blackpool, a section of road full of amusement arcades – and there would be men barking about their attraction and how you’d never seen anything like this before. You’d be intrigued by things like the bearded lady, fortune tellers and ‘The Headless Wonder’. There were also curiosities like the five-legged sheep, which, of course, you weren’t allowed to touch. The four legs were obvious, but then there was a little bit of a leg coming out of the side. It had clearly been attached by someone, a mysterious little leg that they had just stuck on. But it was a freak show. That’s what they called it and that was why you were supposed to go in – to peek at the freaks. That word ‘freak’ hasn’t aged all that well, but this was the 1950s and early 60s and it was a term widely used for anything and everything that was unusual or macabre. So, in the song, I’m recalling those childhood visits and using phrases that a fairground barker would say: ‘That’s an invitation, to make a reservation. Come on in. We’re waiting to take you away.’

But where were we going to take you? Another important element in this song’s story is the film. We had stopped touring at this point, so we no longer needed to write and record songs that had to be performed onstage. That had initially started with things like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ from Revolver, but it was much more pronounced on Sgt. Pepper. We now had the freedom to write a song like ‘A Day in the Life’ because we felt the four of us wouldn’t ever have to try and perform it for an audience. There was a kind of liberation in this, as now the only limitation was our imaginations. So we let our imaginations run wild. We returned to books we’d loved as children, things by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. We were also exploring other ways of going on Mystery trips, with things like LSD and meditation. We first met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi shortly after this song had been written, but our increasing interest in Indian thought had already started to seep into our work, especially on George’s songs ‘Love You To’ on Revolver and ‘Within You Without You’ on Sgt. Pepper. A number of yogis we were interested in made their way onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper, too.

This was also the time when books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were being read, so that idea of exploring the mind became part of everyday conversations. The psychedelia movement was taking off too, and albums like Sgt. Pepper and the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request were all part of that.

Another big thing around this time was the idea of the happening. In January 1967 we took a break from recording ‘Penny Lane’ and made an avant-garde recording called ‘Carnival of Light’, which we’ve still not released. It was only ever played at the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at the Roundhouse in London. These happenings tried to break away from ideas of what an event could be and explored things like improvisation, which had come to rock music via jazz musicians who had been doing it for decades. Bands like Pink Floyd were redefining what a live concert could be during their shows at places like the UFO Club, which we’d been to see. British theatre was being shaken up by people such as Peter Brook and Peter Hall. So all these different and new viewpoints fed into this expanding idea of what art could be and what going on a ‘trip’ could mean.

‘Magical Mystery Tour’ had been written and recorded just a few days after we finished mixing the Sgt. Pepper album, and it was intended to be the start of our next project. With no tour booked, we had worked up the concept for a new film and we wanted to do something different, make something looser and spontaneous and incorporating these new ideas. The film and soundtrack were delayed as we began to explore Transcendental Meditation and, tragically, we lost our friend, manager and mentor Brian to an accidental overdose that summer. But, feeling a little rudderless, our working-class instincts kicked in and we just got on with things, trying to manage ourselves, and completing the film in time for Christmas.

At the time everything felt like we were just taking things in our stride, step by step. But I look back now and can’t help but be amazed at the speed of it all. The year 1963 had been important for us in the UK, but we started off 1964 in the US with the album Meet The Beatles! That took off at such a pace that, by the end of the year, we’d moved on to Beatles for Sale. We’d always loved films, yet there we were just three short years after making our first film, about to direct one ourselves. A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 had helped cement the idea of ‘The Fab Four’ in the minds of the world. The Beatles cartoon series and Help! in 1965 had done more of the same. This time we wanted to try something different. We weren’t the same people we had been a few years earlier, and it felt like the world wasn’t either. George, who turned into an avid gardener, used to say The Beatles were like forced rhubarb; our growth had been accelerated. So now with no manager, no written script and no formal background in directing or producing, we delivered our new film, Magical Mystery Tour to the BBC. They broadcast it on BBC1 on 26 December, Boxing Day. It didn’t go down all that well after the first showing because it was so different to our previous films, and I think that took many people by surprise. It also didn’t help that such a vivid and colourful film was shown in black and white. But it was broadcast again shortly afterwards in colour on BBC2 and got a much better reception. That also created quite an appropriate metaphor for the times. BBC1, where the film got the bad reviews, was the older, more mainstream channel. BBC2, where the audience had embraced the film, was a much younger channel and focused on edgier programming. As our music’s horizons had started to broaden and we brought in all these new elements it felt like we went from being a BBC1 band to one more at home on BBC2.

On location during the filming of Magical Mystery Tour. RAF West Malling, Kent, 1967

Returning to the song, that phrase ‘take you away’ may remind some people of the 1966 novelty song ‘They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haa!’ by Napoleon XIV. I believe his real name was Jerry Samuels. It was quite an amazing song because it was about mental health. What’s more, we were laughing at it. Even in the 1960s, a decade beyond those post-wartime years, people laughed at stuff, even dark stuff. A lot of dark humour. A lot of sick jokes. And you were encouraged to laugh at it, as a way of defeating it. As a way of not letting it get you down. They’re ‘coming to take you away.’ I’m sure that phrase in ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ was an echo of that.

Otherwise we could have just carried on with ‘Roll up roll up.’ The ‘roll up’ is another drug allusion because we were rolling up cigarettes. There’s a lot of this sort of sixties tripiness, ‘Waiting to take you away.’ It’s like, ‘Come on,’ you know. ‘Have a puff of this little cigarette and we’ll take you away somewhere.’ All our friends and contemporaries, and most of our listeners at the time, would spot that, ‘Hey, that’s great. Let’s roll up a joint.’ We were trying to put this song into that hazy world that someone like Coleridge might have recognised. I knew from school that Coleridge was a bit of a drug addict. Laudanum, I think, which was the drug of choice for many of the Romantic poets. So, we knew there was a history of people writing about that.

‘Satisfaction guaranteed’ is like ‘roll up’; they are phrases that you’d heard a million times. It’s the kind of thing you’d see on an advert for a vacuum cleaner or something, and The Rolling Stones had used the word ‘satisfaction’ so effectively a couple of years before. Given the popularity of The Beatles, a lot of our phrases have themselves crept into everyday language, like ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ You couldn’t talk about a mystery tour really unless you added the adjective magical. That happens a lot with journalists, they will quote, ‘Well, it’s been a long, winding road to get here.’ You see things like let it be, all you need is love, we can work it out quite a bit. They’re just throwing these titles in because they work so well as a phrase. And there’s that little allusion to The Beatles’ song. I am always very pleased to see all those, because I think, ‘Oh, they’ve got that from us.’

Speaking of getting things from other people, I know there’s an idea floating around that I might have run into Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and his Merry Pranksters when I accompanied Jane Asher on a West Coast theatre tour in April 1967. I don’t know about half these things. I just read something about me hanging out with a great French poet, somebody I’d never heard of. I have no idea if I met him or not. So I might say, ‘Well, I am not even sure I met Ken Kesey.’ But then, someone shows me a photograph, ‘Here you are with him.’ ‘Oh, okay!’

So I am not sure of that connection. But we were connected inasmuch as we were all connected in this generation. This crowd of us who liked the same kind of things. It was in the water and getting around. People in America were hearing what we were doing. We were hearing what they were doing. Sometimes people would say, ‘Oh, you were the absolute leaders of the generation.’ And we’d say, ‘Well, not really.’ We were some of the leaders of our generation. But we always said we never wanted to take top billing because there were so many other people who were doing these different things in society too. Allen Ginsberg, for example. Barry Miles, who helped start the underground newspaper International Times, came round to my London home in the summer of 1967 and brought Allen with him. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were already there, and the five of us talked for hours about all sorts of things like LSD, the Beat generation, Liverpool eccentrics, mysticism, religion – one of those conversations where you solve all the world’s problems. Allen and I stayed good friends for three decades after that, right until he passed away in 1997. His thinking was very similar to ours. We had a lot in common with people like that. It was quite a thrill to know that there was this whole new youthquake breaking out across the world. There were so many new ideas being explored, it was such a fertile moment in time. It was great to be amongst the leaders of that and get to know some of them. The opportunities expanded for us and for everyone and, I know it’s become sort of a cliché for people of my generation to say this – it might be difficult for some younger readers to appreciate the impact, and they might be minded to say, ‘Okay, boomer!’ – but those years really did have a profound effect on a lot of people, and those effects are still being felt today. I don’t mean that only in the sense of the wider culture and society, I also mean it on a more human level. The music, the ideas, the love and promise of change that fomented at the time – it affected a lot of people on a deep personal level. Music changed our lives when we were growing up. Discovering this exciting new thing called rock and roll helped us realise that there was a whole world to explore outside of the Liverpool post code. I’ve since had the privilege of meeting many of those musicians, so I had the opportunity to say thank you to them for changing our lives. Now, in turn, many of the people who were moved by our music still come up to me to this day and say, ‘Thank you for changing my life.’