Magical Mystery Tour

Part 1 - Background and Production

The Beatles' next major movie project, the television film Magical Mystery Tour, began some two years after Help! and, unlike their previous productions, was self-produced, financed and directed. The concept of the film was initially proposed by Paul McCartney, who envisaged a semi-improvised fantasy musical in which the group's most recent batch of soundtrack recordings would be sandwiched in a loose semi-comic and surreal narrative ‘plot’. This ‘plot’, such as it was, consisted of a psychedelic day trip in which the Beatles, accompanied by a group of professional actors and performers, friends and fan club members travelled through unspecified parts of England in a multi­coloured bus, visiting such locations as an army recruitment centre, an Italian restaurant, and a Busby Berkeley-style musical set.

Although the idea was conceived by McCartney, the entire group was responsible for the ‘story’ of the film and, while much of the dialogue was improvised, the project was actually directed by all four Beatles, with Ringo Starr additionally credited as director of photography. Overseen by Apple Films' head Denis O'Dell, the film was produced for around £30,0001 (over a two-week period) and released through Apple Films, a division of the group's emerging Apple business empire.

I've already considered the economic and cultural reasons why film was (and still is) important to pop groups from a wider and more all-embracing economic perspective, but why should a group, with no previous professional experience of film-making (and with no shortage of resources for hiring professional producers and directors), decide to write, direct and produce their own film? Although McCartney has discussed and, to an extent, defended the film quite strongly over the last ten years or so, neither he, nor any of the other Beatles, has actually discussed reasons for such involvement in great depth, in the Anthology interviews, somewhat dismissively claiming that his love of home movie-making was a key factor, and that ‘it was all done on whims.’ However, it is arguable that the group's interest in film-making at this point in their career was the result of both personal and wider, cultural factors.

From a personal perspective, they were rather unhappy with their previous film, Help!, and felt that their early ‘loveable moptop’ image had been over-exploited in both their previous vehicles. Referring to Help! and A Hard Day's Night, Lennon commented, ‘We were a bit infuriated with the glibness and shiftiness of the dialogue [of A Hard Day's Night] and we were always trying to get it more realistic, but they wouldn't have it. It ended up OK, but the next one [Help!] was just bullshit because it really had nothing to do with the Beatles. They just put us here and there.’2 He also said that the group ‘felt like extras’3 in their own film. By making their own film, the group may have felt that they would be retaining total artistic control over their product.

Lennon's dismissal of their early films suggests that he and the other members of the group felt that they did not have enough personal control over their image and artistic output. Moreover, their 1967 embrace of hippy counter-culture (using and, in McCartney's case publicly endorsing LSD,4 supporting the underground press,5 and taking classes in transcendental meditation6) seems to have been a reaction against five long years of being ‘packaged’ into a highly manufactured act which, while musically liberated, was heavily contrived (the identically besuited ‘boy next door’ image), politically censored (Epstein did not allow the group to discuss Vietnam publicly7), and domestically lionized (Harold Wilson's 1965 award to the group of the MBE). For the Beatles, the exploration of alternative lifestyles may have offered the attraction of an individualism and personal freedom paradoxically necessary to regain some semblance of sanity. The 'hippy' ideal distrusted the ‘manufacturing’ of mainstream pop culture and placed individualism, however ironically, high on its agenda, and the group's involvement with the movement could well have exaggerated their distrust of such promotional methods and accentuated their interest in self-production. Indeed, for all its potential hazards, self-production and direction provided the group with a golden opportunity to break out of the straitjacket of externally imposed media presentation, a presentation which, by 1965 and the release of Help! had become basically repugnant to them.

Moreover, their supreme self-confidence in their ability to adapt to and master other media was, in 1967, at least theoretically justifiable within both their own biographical track record and, on a broader level, within the cultural and artistic climate of the period. Besides being the world's most successful contemporary songwriters and musicians, the Beatles justifiably saw themselves as cultural all-rounders, capable of mastering any medium which they felt inclined to dabble in. Quite apart from their music, each member had received considerable commercial and/or critical success for ventures undertaken outside the confines of the group itself. Lennon, for example, had published two best-selling books, while McCartney had provided the score for the Boultings' feature film The Family Way (1966). Meanwhile, Starr, keen to develop his acting career, had in August 1967 been offered a part in United Artists' new production, Candy (1968), a role which he accepted later in the year. He would later co-star with Peter Sellers in the dramatization of Terry Southern’s novel, The Magic Christian (1969), in a role which, according to director Joe McGrath, was originally envisaged for Lennon.8 Meanwhile Harrison had developed a profound interest in Indian music, and was busy mastering the sitar (an instrument which he brought into much of the Beatles' material from 1965) under the guidance of his musical guru, Ravi Shankar.

On a more conventionally musical level, the group were also achieving levels of commercial and critical success that, even in the early days of ‘Beatlemania’, they could not possibly have envisaged. Their most recent album release, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released in Britain on 1 June 1967), as well as being instantly heralded in all sectors of the media as a major artistic breakthrough in pop music's brief history, was also one of their biggest commercial successes to date.9 With such multimedia success, it is hardly surprising that the group felt that a move into film-making would pose no serious problem. As McCartney somewhat naively stated before the completion of the show, ‘Film-making isn’t as difficult as many people imagine. It's a matter of common sense more than anything.’10

On a broader level, the Beatles’ film-making venture could also have been influenced by the current climate of cross-fertilization and synergy which was taking place in pop art culture on a vast scale during the mid to late sixties, particularly in the avant-garde or ‘intellectual’ circles in which the Beatles, and particularly McCartney, mixed whilst living in St. John's Wood during this period. More than any previous period in British culture, the arts, and specifically the musical and visual arts, had become a fluid melting pot of inter-relationships, with each discipline influencing and affecting the others. While groups such as The Who absorbed the auto-destructive manifestos of Dadaism,11 artists like Peter Blake borrowed from the imagery of youth culture, imbuing his work with iconography derived from fashion magazines and rock and roll memorabilia. And although the pop movement had no strict manifesto, its underlying ideology of instantaneous gratification, hedonism, the  banality of ‘straight,’ post-industrial existence, youth culture and populism meant that artists such as Blake, Alan Aldridge and Richard Hamilton could comfortably cross over into other areas of design. Aldridge became art editor for Penguin Books in 1966, while Blake and Hamilton were involved in designing album covers for the Beatles in 1967 and 1968.12 Other fine artists became even more experimental in the expansion of their media, and ‘painters’ such as Warhol (who visited McCartney circa 196613) also worked in lithography, photography and film direction. While it is difficult to speculate upon the degree to which the contemporary cultural climate influenced the Beatles' move into film­making, it is clearly likely that the cross-fertilization in visual pop influenced their artistic sensibility.

Indeed, in many ways it is tempting to see their previous album release, Sergeant Pepper, as the epitome of such inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization, the ‘product’ itself comprising elements of music (‘concept’ songs by the Beatles), Blake's cover (which in its grandiose affluence, stylish montage and revolutionary ‘gatefold’ format self-consciously-presented itself as ‘art’), and literature (the printed lyrics of the songs, a first for a pop album, radically insisting that song lyrics should be considered as poetry). Sergeant Pepper’s release and enormous popularity crystallized the gradual shift in mainstream perceptions of pop music as a low’ art, and ultimately elevated its cultural status to an intellectual level previously occupied by ‘high’ art such as theatre, literature and the fine arts. And if pop was now ‘art’, paradoxically art was now ‘pop’. For the first time in pop music’s brief history, it was embraced by intellectual and middle-class culture, and the avant-garde, a term paradoxically described by Lennon as being ‘French for bullshit’,14 had become inextricably and harmoniously linked with popular teenage culture.

This cross-fertilization and popularization of the avant-garde or ‘intellectual’ arts (also mirrored by the heightened critical status of other media such as cinema and photography) was embraced by audiences and media alike, bridging cultural and generational differences and creating an overall pop culture which was both populist and avant-garde, elitist and classless, intellectual and anti-intellectual. Within a few short years, approaches and attitudes to culture had changed beyond all recognition. In his analysis of sixties culture, Christopher Booker discusses this aesthetic shift:

[In 1956] there would have seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the concerns of, say, the teenagers jiving to Tommy Steele in the basement of the Two Fs coffee bar and those of the audiences for Ionesco at the Royal Court Theatre. Now, in 1964, the coalescence of one form of fantasy with another to make up a sort of overall ‘pop culture’, was taking place so fast that, within a year or two, no-one would be surprised to see the pages of the ‘quality' press regularly taken up with the rapturous reviews of the latest pop records, or prominent pop singers being starred in plays or films by directors of impeccable ‘intellectual’ credentials, such as Peter Hall or Jean Luc Godard - any more than they would be surprised to see Paul McCartney advertised as spending his leisure hours with the latest electronic fragment from the pen of Stockhausen.15

When in 1966 Time magazine boasted that London was fast becoming the most exciting city of the decade,16 the exaggeration, for all its sensationalism and pretension, did not, at least on a pop cultural level, seem too jarring. The fusion of media, the synergy of styles and the spirit of youthful collaboration between artists from a vast array of disciplines and cultures meant that, at least for a brief period, the once risible idea of a ‘swinging’ London actually became a reality, and British pop culture, via the synergized commercial success of its musicians, designers, artists and photographers, became a highly exportable inter­national phenomenon.

It is also possible that the group's decision to move into self-production and direction was partly based on a desire to counter media speculation that, with Epstein's death (on 27 August 1967), the Beatles, a product of his management, were also now finished or greatly weakened. Though absurd in hindsight, as Tony Barrow concedes, ‘Epstein’s death made the next thing the Beatles did absolutely crucial. The showbusiness world was watching to see how the group would handle itself without the personal management of their long-term mate and mentor, Brian Epstein.’17 The Beatles’ decision to become so heavily involved in a project which was (for them) experimental may have been partly influenced by a desire to prove any doubters wrong in grand style, showing them that not only could they still produce successful music, they could also still turn their hand to any medium they chose. Although McCartney's initial ideas for the film's concept (which dated back to April 1967) had been discussed with and approved by Epstein before his death, it is not known whether the manager had approved of the idea of the Beatles as film directors. However, the fact that they decided to progress with the project so swiftly after his death gives rise to speculation that the group wished to allay any doubts about their abilities as soon as possible.

The Beatles' mystery tour embarked on the first leg of the two-week shoot on 11 September 1967, heading for various locations in Hampshire, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. Along with the cast members, the coach contained a skeleton crew of film technicians and of course the Beatles themselves, who remained on board throughout the first week of the ‘tour5. After the first week of ‘tour’ shooting, filming continued at Paul Raymond's Revuebar in Soho and then switched to a disused hangar at West Mailing Air Station which, in the absence of available studio space, served as a makeshift replacement for the sequences which required conventional sets. Here a number of notable sequences were shot, including the famous ‘Walrus’ sequence and the memorable sergeant-major scene featuring the Beatles’ closest actor friend, Victor Spinetti, who was unable to take a bigger role in the film due to other acting commitments. As he remembers, ‘I’d have loved to have gone on the whole trip, but I couldn't, and that was that. So John said, "Well, look, why don't you do that thing you do in Oh I What a Lovely War", the drill sergeant sketch which I did in that show, so I just reinvented it for the film.’18

Despite the alluring premise of keeping the project relatively small-scale, the smooth running of the shooting was hampered from the start by a number of technical and logistical problems. Convoys of news-hungry journalists pursued the coach relentlessly, and at one point it became stuck under a narrow bridge on a B road towards Dartmoor, resulting in huge tailbacks and flaring tempers. ‘Fifth Beatle’ Neil Aspinall encountered difficulties organizing the en-route accommodation, and there were also problems with the technicians union. Later, at West Mailing, hearts dropped when, at around four o'clock on the last day of principal photography (24 September), the generators failed just as the cameras were to start rolling on the film's most complex and elaborate set piece, McCartney’s ‘Your Mother Should Know’, causing delays while help was summoned by Denis O’Dell’s assistant, Gavrik Losey. In the interim, Losey was mobbed when attempting to distribute signed photos to the 200 extras outside. Wherever they went, the Beatles were followed by hysterical fans. As Losey remembers, ‘We were staying in a little hotel outside West Mailing and the crowd that came pushed in the front window of the hotel... That level of adoration is just amazing to be around.’19

With principal shooting completed, the Beatles returned to London to begin working (under the supervision of Roy Benson) on the film's editing and to complete work on the soundtrack songs which they had begun before the start of shooting. Again there were problems. The editing took eleven weeks to complete (partly because the group could never agree on the cutting and partly because not all of the sequences were shot using clapperboards20), and there were problems over how to present the songs which comprised the film's soundtrack. Although the previous Beatles film soundtracks had been issued on LPs with a second side of non-film songs, their stock of unreleased recordings had effectively run dry. Without the time to work on new material to make up a release of LP duration, they were left with the awkward problem of finding a solution for marketing the six recordings, which failed to fit into any recognized format.

After some discussion it was decided that the format of the record was to be a ‘first’ for the record industry, a double EP package encased in a twenty-four-page glossy booklet which contained the lyrics of the songs, stills from the film and a psychedelic cartoon strip (complete with captions) of the film’s ‘story’. The booklet was produced in association with the Beatles’ official fan club, and carried an advertisement for both the club and its official monthly magazine, the Beatles Monthly Book, which had been running since 1963. While the accompanying booklet was in itself advertising for other Beatles-related merchandise for the unconverted who were not fan-club members, it also served another, more subtle ‘reassuring’ function for the 58,000 subscribers. With a booklet containing illustrations executed in a recognizably similar style to the black-and-white illustrations used to adorn the pages of the official fan club magazine, those who subscribed could feel reassured that their chosen publication was officially endorsed by the Beatles. The degree to which the format of the EP package was shaped solely by necessity is unknown. While it certainly solved the song quota problem, one suspects that it was also partly born of the Beatles' pioneering desire to experiment with conventional formats and packaging. Interestingly, although Magical Mystery Tour was never broadcast in America, the songs from the film did appear in LP format (also titled Magical Mystery Tour), augmented by five other recordings from the year which had already been issued as singles. This policy was not followed in Britain because it was considered exploitative to issue an album that was comprised of too many singles, and of the twenty-two singles released in Britain between 1962 and 1970 only about half contained music (from A or B side) pilfered from albums.

The EP was also artistically unprecedented for the group in that it was their first and only record to contain an instrumental number, ‘Flying’, which also became the only song to be co-written by all four members of the group. The other songs to be issued on the discs were ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Blue Jay Way’, ‘I Am the Walrus’, ‘Your Mother Should Know’ and ‘The Fool on the Hill’. The record was eventually released on 8 December 1967 at a price of 19s 6d. 21

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008