THE BEATLES
WILL YOU JOIN US?
What do you do when you’ve just released the most significant album in rock history? For The Beatles in late 1967, the answer was simple: go back to work, but in the most playful way possible. There are recording sessions turned into parties, psychedelic and spiritual adventures (“George swore to me he could levitate”), destabilising tragedies and, eventually, a redemptive and surreal trip into the unknown – the Magical Mystery Tour. Michael Bonner procures a return ticket for the survivors: “The songs had changed, our attitudes had changed,” says Ringo Starr. “Our well-being had changed.”
“It’s a daft film… But it was made by people in a fame bubble” NEil iNNEs
THE invitations, remembers one guest, were printed in blue, red and purple psychedelic designs. In keeping with the switched-on spirit of the times, the party they described was to be fancy dress. Accordingly, the soirée at the newly opened Westbourne Suite at the Royal Lancaster Hotel was a grand affair. The 200 guests enjoyed an extravagant buffet, drinks and splendid views across London’s Hyde Park. It was December 21, 1967. The occasion was The Beatles’ fabled Christmas Party – an annual event hosted for friends, family and an ever-expanding entourage. John Lennon came as a Teddy Boy with his hair sculpted with a generous helping of Brylcream into a gravitydefying quiff. Paul McCartney, meanwhile, donned full Pearly King regalia, completed by a checkered smock tied round his neck. George Harrison dressed as an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler and Ringo Starr wore a flamboyant Regency tailcoat and top hat. Dotted elsewhere around the party, an onlooker might have spotted Shirley Temple (Lulu), a nun (Cilla Black), the Duke of Edinburgh (George Martin), several Charlie Chaplins and at least one Adolf Hitler. Vivian Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band glued joke fried eggs to a bright yellow mac – much to the delight of McCartney. The Bonzos also provided live music on the night – in keeping with the celebratory mood, Mike Love and Bruce Johnson joined in on a lengthy version of “oh Carol”, with Harrison on saxophone.
Even by their own standards, The Beatles moved at speed through 1967. “Strawberry Fields Forever”, Sgt Pepper and “All You Need Is Love” offered thrilling leaps in artistic imagination. “often even now, when I think of John, I think of us writing together,” Paul McCartney told Uncut. “’A Day In A Life’. ‘Mr Kite’. ‘Getting Better’. Those moments are the most precious for me. The great thing about me and John writing together was we competed with each other, which was healthy. ‘Fucking hell, he’s just written “Strawberry Fields”, I better write “Penny Lane”.’” But for The Beatles, the music is only one strand in a stranger, deeper narrative running the course of the year. The group’s association with Hindu mystic, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; the unexpected death of manager, Brian Epstein; the opening of the Apple Boutique; the creation of Apple Corps. Now, to close out the year, the BBC are due to unveil Magical
Mystery Tour, their first significant new work since Sgt Pepper, in a matter of days. The atmosphere in the Westbourne Suite is charged, anticipatory. “‘Legs’ Larry was going to do his tap dancing routine with his false breasts,” remembers the Bonzos’ Neil Innes. “John kept saying, ‘Come on, Larry. Show us your tits. We’ve all seen ’em.’”
But when it airs, Magical Mystery Tour proves too rich for the Boxing Day stomach. Lacking Epstein’s grounding influence, the film is an unfiltered glimpse into The Beatles’ minds in late 1967; a lysergic playground with the Fabs themselves appearing as magicians or dressed in strange animal costumes. There are midget wrestlers, a dancing walrus and a dream sequence involving lots and lots of spaghetti.
“The reviews were terrible,” says producer Denis o’Dell. “I thought, ‘What are we going to do now?’”
“It was probably the first time The Beatles had got any criticism,” says Neil Innes. “It’s a daft film; it is what it is. But it was made by people in a fame bubble, the like of which no-one had ever seen.”
The Beatles entered 1967 with confidence and freedom. Now Magical Mystery Tour caught them at a critical point in their evolution – poised between the utopian spirit of the Summer of Love and a darkness that slowly engulfed them over the next three years. “The songs had changed, our attitudes had changed and our well-being had changed,” Ringo Starr told Uncut.
ON August 29, 1966, The Beatles played their final public concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Liberated, each Beatle set off to explore new endeavours. John Lennon travelled to Europe to shoot How I Won The War with director Richard Lester; George Harrison visited India to take sitar lessons with Ravi Shankar; Ringo Starr went on holiday. And Paul McCartney – the only Beatle not married at that time – immersed himself in the burgeoning London underground scene. When The Beatles entered Studio Two at EMI Studios on Abbey Road in November, to begin the three months of sessions that included Sgt Pepper, they did so with unlimited resources.
“The initial thing was that they stopped touring,” says engineer Richard Lush, a veteran of the Revolver and Pepper sessions. “With Sgt Pepper they knew they could do what they wanted, as they wouldn’t have to perform anything live – if they wanted to use a harpsichord or do something backwards. There was a confidence and freedom about what they were doing.”
“Suddenly they were more demanding,” adds engineer Ken Scott, who’d worked with The Beatles since 1964. “John once said to George Martin, ‘I want to sound as if I’m singing on the top of the Himalayas.’ So that’s what they had to try and do.”
“Because they hadn’t been together after the tour finished in San Francisco, no-one had written any songs,” says Tony Bramwell, a childhood friend of Harrison’s then working for NEMS. “When they got together for Sgt Pepper, they were writing in the studio, which they’d never done before – they always had the songs ready to go. There were days sitting round doing absolutely nothing. The highlight of the night would be working out what was for tea. Indian? Chinese? Fish and chips? It’s 7pm. ‘We’re hungry! What takeaway shall we get?’ ‘Let’s try Tandoori chicken.’ ‘oooH!’”
“Pepper – yes, all its good points, it was great – but there was a lot of downtime,” admits Starr, who learned to play chess during the recording sessions.
As a unit, The Beatles now existed solely within the amniotic confines of EMI Studios. But The Beatles had been quarantined into bubbles of one kind or another since the first flush of Beatlemania. “It became increasingly full-on,” remembers Pattie Boyd, who began dating Harrison in 1964. “Fans seemed to know where they all lived. They’d always be there, standing outside the flat. I’d have to battle through them. A little while later, Brian thought it a good idea if Ringo, John and George moved out of London. Ringo and John went to Weybridge and George and I went to Esher.” Adds Lionel Blair, a former co-star of A Hard Day’s
Night, “I remember saying to Ringo at a party, ‘I’m going to Hong Kong to do cabaret. What’s Hong Kong like?’ He said, ‘We don’t know. We don’t go outside the room. We can’t.’ Which was very sad. They couldn’t walk round the streets or anything, sightsee.”
Although The Beatles had withdrawn from the public gaze, they expanded their horizons in other ways. McCartney became a regular face about town, visiting the Indica Bookshop and other bohemian haunts. Lennon, meanwhile, held court at his Weybridge home, Kenwood. “I went to John’s house one night,” recalls Barry Finch, then a partner in Mayfair Publicity, whose clients included Epstein’s Saville Theatre. “He had a big sweet jar. He screwed the top off and gave me a black bomber, a speed pill. We went into the garden and sat together on a stone seat. There was a plaque on the ground reading, ‘Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun’. He turned to me and said, ‘Barry, I paid 20 grand for this house and it’s always fucking raining!’ We went back inside, where we took some acid. Then we went up into his recording studio. John began playing the guitar. I could play the piano a little. ‘This is good, Barry,’ he said. ‘Now go to B!’ But I didn’t know what B was. ‘Never mind.’ So we went back downstairs and that was the end of that.”
ASNAPSHoT of life in Swinging London. As Tony Bramwell describes it, the upper echelons of London’s rock society were akin to “a cottage industry. There were only a handful of places people went. The Speakeasy, Revolution, the Cromwellian, the Scotch of St James. If you went into any of those, you’d bump into someone you knew. ‘Where are the others?’
‘The Cromwellian.’ So we’d go to the Cromwellian. You could always find everybody in a night if you looked around. It was a very small world, really.”
It is round these clubs that The Beatles travel on the evening of Saturday, June 24, 1967, in pursuit of friendly faces to join them for their latest wonderful venture. Sgt Pepper has only been on sale for three weeks, but already its creators have moved on. Reflecting the extraordinary position they held on the global stage, The Beatles had been approached to represent the United Kingdom on Our World – the world’s first live global television satellite link-up. now, after two days of run-throughs and rehearsals, the group is seeking like-minded friends to join them in the studio for the broadcast: “‘Party at EMI tomorrow, be there in your best frills!’” laughs Bramwell. In the end, the audience includes Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and Graham nash.
The Beatles had already partly recorded the song they would debut on Our World – a Lennon composition, “All You need Is Love”. Finding EMI Studios booked, they had decamped to Olympic Studios in Barnes in May and June to work on two new songs: “Baby You’re A Rich Man” and “All You need Is Love”. For inquiring minds such as The Beatles, working at Olympic had unexpected benefits. “There were a lot of instruments to hand from previous sessions,” says Eddie Kramer, the engineer on both sessions. ”John found a bunch of French electronic instruments on a table, including a Clavioline. It was a little keyboard, an octave and a half. It had a little strip that you put your thumb on and moved it from side to side to get vibrato. ‘What’s all this, then?’ He sussed out how it worked in about 10 minutes. ‘Oi, right. Let’s do this.’ We put a mic in front of it, and he was done in a couple of takes.” For “All You need Is Love”, Kramer recalls Lennon joining the engineer in the control room. “I’d figured out how to walk the talkback mic up to the headphones, so John sat beside me at the producer’s desk. We had a 10-inch reel of tape. We hit record and John goes, ‘Two… three… All you need is love…’ We did 10 takes in a row. We get almost to the end of a reel, which lasts about 30 minutes. They all troop back into the studio and George Martin says, ‘Wind back two from the end.’ We played it, everybody’s listening, then went, ‘That’s it. There we go.’ So
then they buggered off with the half-inch tape.
“The only other artist I worked with who had the same clarity of vision and drive to get it done in one night was Hendrix,” Kramer continues. “We could go in at eight o’clock at night and finish at one or two, three or four in the morning, and we’d have two amazing tracks fairly well overdubbed and almost ready for mixing. But The Beatles were complete. It was done, it was ready. It was a machine working at incredible speed. But it didn’t feel like it was speeding. It felt like that was the pace to go at.”
THE Beatles glided through May, June, July and August. They had an immensely successful new album and an era-defining new single performed in front of the largest television audience then recorded. Meanwhile, Brian Epstein had renegotiated their contract with EMI, winning them a lucrative nine per cent royalty deal. But Epstein’s relationship with the band had become less fluid since Candlestick Park. “1967 may have been the Summer Of Love, but for many of us it was a very strange year of absolute change,” says Andrew Oldham, then managing The Rolling Stones. “Brian did more than manage The Beatles, to him it was akin to a marriage. The Beatles had, to that extent, been unfaithful to the marriage. And the new adventures of The Beatles had to have thrown Brian for somewhat of a loop. The foundation – touring – was no more. Difficult for Brian, who lived for seeing his boys from the wings.”
On Thursday, August 24, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison attended a lecture at the Hilton Hotel, Park Lane by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. “George had become turned on to Indian music, like Ravi Shankar,” says David Crosby. “All the Indian music influenced stuff he did in The Beatles. Which led to consciousness of India, which led to meeting the Maharishi, which led to me writing that song ‘Laughing’ to George – which was saying the guy might be right, but anyone who tells you they know what’s going on, take it with a grain of salt.”
“George, who was the only one really interested in this, swore to me that he could levitate,” says Denis O’Dell. “But I didn’t once see him rise.”
The following day – Friday, August 25 – The Beatles travelled to Bangor to attend a 10-day residential seminar on the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. They were billeted in the halls of residence of a local teacher training college. On Sunday, Brian Epstein was found dead at his home at 24 Chapel Street, London. Later that afternoon, the payphone rang and rang until finally someone answered it. Even on grainy black-and-white newsreel footage, you can see the disbelief etched into their faces. Hours after the news reached The Beatles of Epstein’s death, Lennon, Harrison and Starr gave brief interviews outside the college grounds; McCartney had already returned to London. Lennon, caught in the glare of camera lights, looks shell-shocked. Asked by a reporter, “What are your plans now?”, he shrugs, “We haven’t made any.” “Where would you be today without Mr Epstein?” “I don’t know.” Lennon – so often the quick-witted, acerbic star of press conferences – was adrift, lost for words.
Back in London, the news proved equally distressing to those within The Beatles’ wider circle. “We had Jimi Hendrix playing at the Saville Theatre,” remembers Tony Bramwell. “Brian always came to both concerts every Sunday night. But he didn’t show. Jimi was halfway through his first set when I had a call saying, ‘Brian’s dead.’ Eric Burdon broke the news to Jimi when
“ON the second week, we came up with the coach every morning to the film shoot in West malling in kent. i ended up having a nice chat with John; i’d had problems with my mother, so we had some things in common. he asked me where i was staying. ‘is it nice?’ i said, ‘No. it’s the sort you don’t leave your suitcase there.’ he said, ‘Well, come back and stay with us!’
“i had my case, waiting for them at the end of that day’s filming. But i watched them drive off in John’s car. i thought he’d forgotten me – then all of a sudden, the car screeched to halt, reversed, one hand grabbed my case, another one grabbed me and shoved me in the back with paul. i was very nervous!
“i stayed on the same hotel floor as the band. When my friend Jeni came up, there was no room left, so i let her use my settee. it was a lovely room. i felt quite privileged. John said, ‘order what you want. it’ll go on the bill.’ i was 19. i had never experienced anything like that before. i’d been away for christmas before with my mum, but never anything like this.” he came offstage, while I went out into the street to tell the people queuing there that the second show was cancelled. It was Brian’s theatre, after all. Then we went to the Speakeasy. Jimi sat on a stool and played a few songs. I lived just round the corner from Brian and I drove home past his house. There were press and police and floodlights. It was miserable.”
McCartney moved decisively. He convened a meeting at his home at 7 Cavendish Avenue on September 1, four days after Epstein’s death. To bring much-needed focus, he encouraged his fellow Beatles to press on with a new project: an LP and film called Magical Mystery Tour. The idea had first been mooted as far back as the spring. It would now, The Beatles decided, become a tribute to their late manager. “I was invited to Epstein’s old office in Albermarle Street one evening not long after he died,” says Gavrik Losey, who became line producer for
Magical Mystery Tour. “It was the first time I’d met The Beatles face to face. They said, ‘Brian wanted us to make this film, so we’re going to go ahead and make it. We want to do it for Brian. Will you join us?’”
KEn Scott first worked with The Beatles in 1964, as an assistant engineer – a “button pusher” – on A Hard Day’s Night. By the time he joined them in EMI’s Studio Two for Magical Mystery Tour, Scott had seen the band morph from lovable mop tops to seasoned sonic voyagers. But it is not just the music that has changed, he explains; The Beatles had also devised a more experimental attitude to their working practices. “EMI at that time was the morning 10 to 1, afternoon 2:30 to 5:30, the evening 7 to 10,” says Scott. “But after Pepper, The Beatles could do whatever they wanted. Unlike any other band, they could work the hours they wanted to. But the established engineers at EMI didn’t like the hours. The older guys had families. They didn’t like working with the band, they found it boring – they were used to the quick three-hour sessions. So they wouldn’t work on the sessions.”
The Beatles already had two songs in hand prior to beginning the Magical Mystery Tour sessions: the title track and McCartney’s show tune, “Your Mother Should Know”. On September 5, they began recording their first song since Epstein’s death: Lennon’s “I Am The Walrus”. The music – a churning, psychedelic freak-out – was the result of an intense six-hour recording session. “John wanting strange sounds to run through certain parts of ‘I Am The Walrus’,” remembers Scott. “So myself and the maintenance engineer, Ken Townsend, came up with the idea of using a radio tuner. Ringo sat in the corner when we were mixing, turning the radio tuner through stations so you’d get all this hiss, and John would pull it up whenever he wanted it.
“George [Martin] was totally open to their ideas,” continues Scott. “Because of his past working on comedy records, he enjoyed pushing the envelope. The Beatles trusted him implicitly musically with ridiculous things like the arrangement on ‘I Am The Walrus’. I don’t know too many people that could have come up with those. We were working in number Two studio, recording the orchestra, the Mike Sammes Singers arriving to add vocals. They were pretty straight-laced. They were used to doing backing vocals for the big ballad singers. They took one look at this piece of music: ‘Oompa, loompa, stick it up your jumper, everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one.’ They had no idea what was going on.”
Although “I Am The Walrus” was Lennon’s joint, Scott is keen to underscore the involvement of all The Beatles in the work. “It was still very much a
“It was still very much a democratic process”
‘Come “John said, back
and stay
with us!’”
Sylvia Nightingale The
regional fanclub secretary
on her time with the Fabs
democratic process,” he explains, “regardless of whose song it was. They would constantly make changes in the arrangements until they’d got the basic track the way they wanted it. Then they’d start overdubbing. Quite often, they were never sure what they wanted to put on next. ‘Fool On The Hill’ started off just having recorders, then Paul wanted more woodwind added. But we didn’t have any tracks left. So we tried something they had done on ‘A Day In The Life’, to build up the orchestra, and ran two four-track machines in sync. Once the machines were running, they ran together at exactly the same speed. The problem was starting them up to get them together. It was pure luck that we managed to mix it properly.”
Magical Mystery Tour was a very open-ended trip. The title song – with its fairground call of “Roll up, roll
up” – bridged the gap between Pepper’s fantasia of music halls and big tops. “The Fool On The Hill” offers an airy, reflective piece of classic songwriting from McCartney, before the Mellotron-heavy instrumental “Flying” gives way to “Blue Jay Way”. Harrison’s sole contribution is a weird, unsettling pedal-drone that features backwards tapes and phasing. The mood shifts further with McCartney’s cheery “Your Mother Should Know”, the diametric opposite of “I Am The Walrus”; a fierce, surrealistic protest song, unlike anything else of its kind. The six tracks were eventually released in November, a month ahead of the film, bolstered by the 1967 singles. The Beatles sounded powerful, strange, and brighter than ever.
SYLVIA Nightingale received an unexpected telegram one Friday morning in September. Nightingale was one of 40 regional secretaries for The Beatles fan club. The telegram, she recalls, came from Tony Barrow, The Beatles’ press secretary: “It said that if I was interested in going to Cornwall with The Beatles on a coach to do a film, would I ring a London number. Without any hesitation, of course I did.”
As with much of the music The Beatles had released so far in 1967, the idea for the Magical Mystery Tour was rooted in nostalgia. “We all used to go on them when we were kids in Liverpool,” says Tony Bramwell. “George and I went on one to Blackpool or the Lake District. You got on the coach at Clayton Square in Liverpool with a bagful of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of lemonade. You’d drive to Blackpool, look at the lights and then it was time to get on the coach to go home. If there was any girls on board, you’d try and have a snog on the way back!”
Barry Finch, by now a member of the Anglo-Dutch art collective The Fool, remembers joining the group on a modern-day equivalent, not long before epstein died. “We went on another magical mystery tour,” he laughs. “It was like a treasure hunt. You had to find flags. I was in George’s Mini with my wife, George and Pattie. We were all on acid. We had our hair in curlers. Anyway, the mystery tour ended when we reached the house. We all arrived back to find John holding hands with Brian. John had made a point of holding Brian’s hand – a gay man, of course, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal – as if to say, ‘It’s all right.’” To McCartney, who directed the film, Magical Mystery Tour was not only a throwback to the charabanc trips of his childhood, but he also saw resonances with the exploits of Ken Kesey and his travelling companions, the Merry Pranksters, as they crossed America in an audaciously decorated International Harvester school bus during the mid-’60s. “I didn’t know how they’d make it work,” admits Denis O’Dell, who’d worked as associate producer on A Hard Day’s Night and How
I Won The War. “Without Brian, they had no infrastructure at the company, no idea about progress reports and contracts
with artists and props and God knows what. They felt freedom when Brian died. They felt they could run everything themselves. But they couldn’t. They were like little boys out of school, really.”
The group cast professionals, including Ivor Cutler as the conductor Buster Bloodvessel, Derek Royle as tour guide Jolly Jimmy Johnson and Fabs film regular Victor Spinetti as an army recruiting officer. The bus – a Bedford VAL coach – was otherwise filled with friends, family and other guests, including fan club secretary Sylvia Nightingale.
“We were due to depart from Allsop Place, near Baker Street, on September 11,” she recalls. “It was a Monday morning. Paul was there and some other passengers. The coach hadn’t arrived. As we were still waiting, Paul said, ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ The others got on at Virginia Water. The mood was relaxed. As soon as John got on, ‘’ello, ’ello, ’ello! How are you all doing?’ By the end, there was a lot of banter between us. I remember once Paul took his kaftan off and said, ‘Hold this for me.’ I looked at him and said, ‘You haven’t got many hairs on your chest.’ He said, ‘You’re supposed to be a fan!’ I said, ‘I am. But you still haven’t got many hairs on your chest.’ It was all very relaxed.”
The coach set off towards the West Country, with a press pack of 12 cars in pursuit. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch remembers catching up with them in Newquay. “We got to the Atlantic Hotel, where they were staying, and we spotted George and John directing comic episodes round the swimming pool. There was a lady pianist, a music-hall comedian wearing a false moustache and a whole troupe of girls in swimming costumes. John was shouting directions. The girls had to jump into the pool – it was freezing because it was September. There was a huge crowd gathered around the hotel, all waving and screaming, calling for The Beatles. Ringo was pulling faces at the cameramen and the crowd.”
The Beatles based themselves at the hotel for a week, venturing out during the day to film. One evening, they hooked up with Spencer Davis in the Tywarnhayle pub, in Perranporth. “He was down there with his family,” says Nightingale. “He’d said to Paul and Ringo to come down, and they asked me and my friend Jeni, who was another area secretary, if we wanted to join them. The pub was full of locals. We all had a singsong, with Paul at the piano. People expected Paul to be chucking out Beatles songs, but he played things like ‘Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’. I remember saying to him, ‘I play the piano a bit.’ He said, ‘Come on, then.’ I thought, ‘How the hell can you follow a Beatle on the piano?’ So I said no. We didn’t get back to the hotel ’til 3am. It was a good party!” THe Beatles had long been admirers of The Bonzo Dog DooDah Band – “They used to come and see us in the days when they wore false beards,” remembers Neil Innes. “Viv [ Stanshall] used to hang out a lot with Paul at the Speakeasy. Paul used to talk like Viv, as a kind of country gent.” It is no surprise, then, that McCartney invited the Bonzos to appear in Magical
Mystery Tour, performing onstage at the Raymond Revue Bar – accompanied by a stripper, Jan Carson. “Paul chose ‘Death Cab For Cutie’,” says Innes. “We just mimed to it. I remember Vivian being slightly irked by Paul, because he suggested he wore a chiffon scarf. ‘Be a bit more trendy, like.’ George, John and Ringo were sitting in the front row making faces all the time. Ringo and John had little three-turret Bolex cameras, 16mm. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ John said, ‘We’re doing the Weybridge version.’ The dirty little beasts were filming the stripper themselves!”
The Beatles, cast and crew decamped to RAF West Malling, Kent for a second week of filming.
“A lot of it was ad-hoc,” admits Nightingale. “‘Let’s have a go at this.’ But that was the ’60s, wasn’t it?”
“I remember Paul and John, came to me one night saying, ‘We’ve decided we want a dozen midget wrestlers for tomorrow morning,’” says Gavrik Losey. “This is in West Malling at 11 o’clock at night. I said, ‘I’ll do my best.’ ‘Oh just call so-and-so at NeMS.’ I rang this poor girl up, ‘Here’s the problem. Tomorrow morning can you get hold of 12 small people, get them in wrestler suits and in a car and down here as soon as you can!’ They were on set by half-ten in the morning.”
“The Beatles had that massive Rolls-Royce and they used to sit in that near where we were filming and entertain themselves,” says Michael Seresin, who was cameraman on the West Malling shoot. “There’d be a knock on the door and out they’d come all dressed in their finery. For the ‘I Am The Walrus’ sequence… Oh, boy! I remember the camera crew shaking their heads when the band started dressing up in those animal costumes. But you have to realise that surrealism was not a big part of British filmmaking culture then.”
“For the ‘Walrus’ sequence, The Beatles were standing on top of the blast walls,” continues Losey. “Huge pieces of concrete. Getting them up there was a performance. They were 20 metres up in the air, and 6ft wide. They climbed up ladders, in their costumes! It was nerve-wracking. There were no nets or anything.”
“We built a huge set in an aircraft hanger for the big song-and-dance number, ‘Your Mother Should Know’,” says Seresin. “At the very end of the day, one of the generators broke down, the lights went out and we had to wait two or three hours for some replacement. While we were waiting, the dancers – there were 50 or 60 – started getting very antsy and wanted to leave. The Beatles were sitting in a pilot’s office, having a smoke and a cuppa. Somebody said, ‘What happened?’ ‘The generator’s gone down.’ John said, ‘We better get out there and talk to them. Sign a few autographs, I guess.’ So they rallied round, went out talked to the girls.”
But behind the film’s playful, lysergic exterior lurked a satirical edge. victor Spinetti’s army recruiting sergeant – his voice speeded up so it becomes incomprehensible – represents the band’s contempt for old-fashioned authority figures. even a scene as apparently whimsical as ‘Aunt Jessie’s Dream’, where Lennon’s obsequious waiter feeds Ringo’s aunt shovelfuls of spaghetti, was a statement on the postwar austerity years. “In the early ’60s, the food in London was disgusting,” explains Losey. “We had Wimpy Bars and Lyons Tea Rooms. When the Spaghetti House opened as the first chain of pseudo-Italian food, it was amazing. But they pre-cooked the spaghetti and re-heated it when you wanted it. So it was overcooked and revolting. That goes into the spaghetti-eating scene, because everyone would have been aware of it.”
Returning to London, The Beatles switched between recording, filming and editing. By day, the band could be found at Norman’s Film Productions, on Old Compton Street, trying to figure out what to do with “miles and miles of film”, according to O’Dell. “16mm. Half of it with no identification on it, no clapper boards.” each Beatle had their own ideas of what should make the cut. “You’d go to Norman’s and Paul would be there editing,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “We’d go to lunch and John would turn up and re-edit what Paul had done.”
When no suitable footage was available to accompany “Flying”, the enterprising O’Dell procured some from an unusual source. “I remembered the thousands of feet Kubrick shot on Strangelove,” he says. “I knew Stanley quite well. I went and sorted some out which looked interesting. But it was in black and white; Magical Mystery Tour was in colour. So I tinted it. Kubrick went potty. He asked where I got it. I said, ‘It’s all in the library, Stanley.’ He said, ‘Oh, well. Fine, Denis. When are we going to have lunch?’”
“John would turn up and re-edit what Paul had done…” TONy BRaMwEll
WHILe The Beatles busied themselves with
Magical Mystery Tour, there were other matters to attend to. even in the distant days of Please Please Me, The Beatles had taken steps to handle their legal and business affairs, forming The Beatles Ltd in June 1963. Towards the end of his life, Brian epstein had considered a number of ways that The Beatles’ finances might be better protected from the punitive demands of the Inland Revenue. In April 1967, The Beatles & Co replaced The Beatles Ltd.
“The Beatles were paying 19/11 in the pound tax at one stage,” says Tony Bramwell. “They weren’t getting their fare share of what they were earning. So the accountants, Bryce Hamner, Isherwood & Company, worked out how to cut down on tax liabilities.”
Three months later, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison travelled to Greece, where they sailed round the Sporades, looking for investment opportunities. “That was a tax idea, as well,” says Bramwell. “‘Let’s buy a Greek island and have a school on it.’ The Chancellor Of The exchequer gave them permission to do that. It fell apart, though.”
But, with epstein’s death, The Beatles envisaged running their own affairs via an umbrella company whose reach and vision extended beyond just music. The first flowering of this bold new venture was the Apple Boutique that opened at 94 Baker Street on December 7, the day before the “Magical Mystery Tour” eP was released. The store was stocked with exotic garments and accessories designed by The Fool, the Anglo-Dutch art collective who, over the summer, had become The Beatles’ personal couturiers. “John came to see me at my house on Montague Square,” says Barry Finch, by now a member of The Fool. “He wanted us to make the costumes for Magical Mystery
Tour. ‘Could you come up with something?’ The costumes represented a psychedelic dream that John wanted to turn into a reality. The Apple Boutique happened at the same time… it’s all connected.”
Meanwhile, plans for a business empire began to take shape. “Apple was the holding corporation for the whole lot of them,” acknowledges Bramwell. “Apple electronics, Apple Music, Apple Films, Apple Marketing, Apple Hairdressing, Apple Tailoring. Apple was registered and copyrighted for everything apart from agriculture. How could you trademark Apple apples?”
Denis O’Dell was invited to become one of the directors of the company – unveiled in January 1968 as Apple Corps. “It was impossible to run,” he says. “I wanted to do another film with them. To get their attention, I bought in Jean-Luc Godard. We produced a script. I got outside finance. Paul came round to tea one Sunday. He said, ‘Denis, we’re not going to do the film.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ‘George doesn’t want to.’ They had an agreement that if one didn’t want to do something, they’d drop the project. I said, ‘What shall we do with this script?’ Paul said, ‘Give it to me. I’ll drop it in the Thames on the way back.’” E veN 50 years on, those involved in making
Magical Mystery Tour remain proud of their achievements. “The film is an interesting document of the time,” says Gavrik Losey. “It captures their attitude towards things going on in the culture, The Beatles’ attitude towards class.”
“I thought it had shades of Buñuel,” says Neil Innes. “It was an art-school film. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. The more weird, the better!”
“When we first saw it on a big screen, loud, in Technicolor, it was a good hour’s entertainment,” says Tony Bramwell. “But the BBC showed it in black and white, which didn’t do it any favours.”
Magical Mystery Tour was broadcast on Boxing Day at 8:35pm to an audience of 15 million. Placed in the schedules between This Is Petula Clark! and a Norman Wisdom film, The Square Peg, The Beatles essentially gatecrashed the sedentary Christmas schedule. Here was the counterculture resplendent in its psychedelic finery, strangely pushed and pulled between the familiar – coach holidays, pub singalong’s, music-hall ditties – and something more disconcerting. Many who watched the film were simply left bewildered. “Just because The Beatles were out there, pushing the envelope, it didn’t mean that the public was moving at the same rate or in the same direction,” says Neil Innes. “I think it was a bit much for the general public to take. Maybe people thought they were going to get another A Hard Day’s Night.”
The fallout from the transmission was such that McCartney took it upon himself to defend the film the following night, on The Frost Programme. “Why were people so puzzled by it?” McCartney was asked. “I think they thought it was ‘bitty’, which it was a bit,” he replied. “But it was supposed to be like that. I think a lot of people were looking for a plot, and there wasn’t one.”
The interview was a far cry from one McCartney gave to Granada at the start of the year, for a documentary on the emerging counterculture, called It’s So Far Out It’s Straight Down. In between footage of Pink Floyd at UFO, the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall and a ‘Pot Is Fun’ happening in Piccadilly Circus, McCartney spoke enthusiastically about the future that lay just around the corner. “A lot of people have twigged they’ve shut themselves in a bit,” he said. “They’ve got all these rules for everything. Rules of how to live, how to paint, how to make music. And it’s just not true any more. They don’t work, all those rules.”
The optimism with which The Fabs entered 1967 had dissipated by the year’s end. After the kaleidoscopic splendour of the Summer Of Love, you can see a deepening of the shadows in Magical Mystery Tour as the September light draws towards winter. 1968 was the year of The Beatles; but also a year of strain and division, the closure of Apple Boutique and a growing realisation that Apple’s altruism was unsustainable. Ken Scott continued to work with The Beatles and solo members into the ’70s. Looking back on the band’s epochal 1967, though, he recalls a band moving at full tilt, in command of their craft. “They were unstoppable,” he says. “I learned that you had to make things as different as you could every time. It was all on the fly. We had to come up with things as we went along. It was so exciting, so charged with electricity. It was brilliant.”