the beatles magical mystery tour album on youtube

‘Magical Mystery Tour’: Inside Beatles’ Psychedelic Album Odyssey

By Douglas Wolk

Douglas Wolk

The year leading up to the release of the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967 was turbulent but fantastically fertile for the Beatles – they were working on its songs more or less simultaneously with the ones that ended up on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. With touring no longer a question, they had the luxury of fine-tuning their songs at length in the studio; the same band that had recorded its first album in a single day was now tinkering with individual recordings for weeks on end. 

If Sgt. Pepper was a blueprint for the Beatles’ new utopianism – a culture of vivid sensory experience, for which they could be the entertainers and court jesters – the Magical Mystery Tour project was an attempt to literally take that idea into the world. Paul McCartney ‘s concept was that the Beatles would drive around the British countryside with their friends, film the result and shape that into a movie over which they would have total creative control. But like a lot of Sixties attempts to turn utopian theory into practice, the movie fell on its nose: The Beatles simply weren’t filmmakers.

“You gotta do everything with a point or an aim, but we tried this one without anything – with no point and no aim,” McCartney admitted the day after it premiered. The Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, on the other hand, did what the movie was supposed to do – despite being a grab bag of the group’s 1967 singles and songs recorded specifically for the film, it holds together surprisingly well as an addendum to Pepper , giving us an image of the psychedelic Beatles refining their enhanced perceptions into individual pop songs so potent that they changed the whole landscape of music.

The songs that would end up on Magical Mystery Tour began taking shape in late 1966, well before McCartney was struck by his cinematic vision. From November 24th, 1966, to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked extensively on a pair of new songs, intended for what would become Sgt. Pepper : John Lennon ‘s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” both reminiscences of the Liverpool of their childhood. By the end of January, though, EMI was demanding a new Beatles single – there hadn’t been one since “Yellow Submarine” the previous August, an impossibly long gap in those days. George Martin wasn’t happy about pulling “Penny Lane” and “”Strawberry Fields Forever” off the album-in-progress, but there wasn’t much else in the can. Released on February 17th, the single was a worldwide hit, and a statement of purpose for the rest of the Beatles’ recordings that year: reflective, druggy, a little nostalgic, and more inventively orchestrated and arranged than anything else around.

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Why the Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ Was Scattered, but Essential

The Beatles  were on a roll in 1967.

They not only had released what many fans consider their best-ever album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , they also were writing and recording new songs at such a pace that those fans – not to mention radio and retailers – could hardly be expected to keep up with them.

In fact, six weeks after Sgt. Pepper's came out in late May 1967, the Beatles released a new single, "All You Need Is Love," backed with "Baby, You're a Rich Man." Those two songs, along with a pair of tracks recorded at the start of the Sgt. Pepper's sessions and other more recent tracks, ended up on the U.S. edition of Magical Mystery Tour , which was released on Nov. 27, 1967.

In the U.K., the 11-song LP was pared down to a six-track double EP that came out almost two weeks later, on Dec. 8, and included only the songs recorded specifically for the Magical Mystery Tour film project the group aired on British television that Christmas. The remaining five cuts, pushed to Side Two of the U.S. release, were released as singles between February 1967 and all the way up to just a few days before the album came out.

It's a tricky release history that suits the scattershot nature of Magical Mystery Tour in general.

Following the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on May 26, 1967, the Beatles – no doubt feeling invincible after the rapturous reception to the album – wanted to make a movie about themselves that included new music. The idea was to load a whole bunch of people onto a bus (including the four Beatles, John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr ) and take them on a day-long trip. Along the way, they would stop so the group could perform, or rather lip-sync to, some of those new songs.

The movie, a 52-minute special that aired on the BBC on Dec. 26, 1967, was a notorious mess . There was no script, no director to speak of and no discernible point to the self-indulgence on display. There were new Beatles songs, however, and that was enough to salvage the project.

Still, as an album ,  Magical Mystery Tour  feels like a letdown after the recent creative landmarks Rubber Soul , Revolver and Sgt. Pepper – and the ones to come, like the White Album (their next proper LP released the following year) and Abbey Road . And that's mainly because it was never intended as an album, but an EP designed to tie in to a holiday TV special.

Watch the Beatles' 'Penny Lane' Video

So, while Side One of the album – which includes the title track, "The Fool on the Hill," "Flying," "Blue Jay Way," "Your Mother Should Know" and "I Am the Walrus" – flows as an occasionally spotty soundtrack, Side Two sounds like what it is: a hodgepodge of recordings the group assembled over the past year. They're all great songs, but within the LP's context, "Hello, Goodbye," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Penny Lane," "Baby, You're a Rich Man" and "All You Need Is Love" come off like one of those sketchy Beatles albums Capitol Records put together in the States from leftover U.K. singles and album tracks.

Still, Magical Mystery Tour completed fans' collections by gathering some great songs that weren't previously available on any album – especially "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," both of which were recorded for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band but released five months before the LP came out to satisfy record-company demands for new product.

And it is an essential collection of Beatles songs, even if the concept and context is occasionally flawed when measured alongside the band's other albums from the era. Not that it mattered much to fans.  Magical Mystery Tour  shot straight up the U.S. chart and stayed at No. 1 for two months. And these days it's considered a part of the Beatles' core catalog; the U.S. album has been remastered and reissued along with the group's 11 original U.K. albums.

It belongs there. Just don't expect it to fall together as seamlessly as the others.

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Magical Mystery Tour

By Scott Plagenhoef

September 9, 2009

After the death of manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles took a series of rather poor turns, the first of which was the Magical Mystery Tour film. Conceived as a low-key art project, the Beatles were oddly nonchalant about the challenges of putting together a movie. They'd assembled records, they'd worked on A Hard Day's Night and Help! -- how hard could it be? Without Epstein to advise, however, things like budgeting and time management became a challenge, and this understated experimental film turned into a sapping distraction.

Musically, however, the accompanying EP was an overwhelming success. The EP format apparently freed the band to experiment a bit, not having to fill sides of a 45 with pop songs or make the grand statements of an album. The title track is a rousing set piece, meant to introduce the travelogue concept of the film. The remaining four songs released exclusive to the EP are low-key marvels-- Paul McCartney's graceful "The Fool on the Hill" and music-hall throwback "Your Mother Should Know", George Harrison's droning "Blue Jay Way", and the percolating instrumental "Flying". Few of them are anyone's all-time favorite Beatles songs, only one had a prayer of being played on the radio, and yet this run seems to achieve a majesty in part because of that: It's a rare stretch of amazing Beatles music that can seem like a private obsession rather than a permanent part of our shared culture.

As a more laid-back release, the EP suggested the direction the band might have taken on the White Album had it remained a full band, happy to shed the outsized conceptualism and big statements and craft atmospheric, evocative pieces. In the U.S., the EP was paired with three recent double-sided singles, ballooning Magical Mystery Tour into an album-- the only instance in which a U.S. release, often mangled by Capitol, became Beatles canon. With only the EP's title track married specifically to the film's themes, the overall effect of a title track/album sleeve as shell game was in line with Sgt. Pepper ' s Lonely Hearts Club Band .

Of the three singles, the undisputed highlight is "Strawberry Fields Forever"/ "Penny Lane", John Lennon and Paul McCartney's tributes to their hometown, Liverpool. Slyly surreal, assisted by studio experimentation but not in debt to it, full of brass, harmonium, and strings, unmistakably English-- when critics call eccentric or baroque UK pop bands "Beatlesesque," this is the closest there is to a root for that adjective. There is no definitive Beatles sound, of course, but with a band that now functions as much as a common, multi-generational language as a group of musicians, it's no surprise that songs rooted in childhood-- the one experience most likely to seem shared and have common touchpoints-- are among their most universally beloved.

The rest of the singles collected here are no less familiar: Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" was initially completed up for an international TV special on BBC1-- its basic message was meant to translate to any language. Harrison's guitar solo, producer George Martin's strings, and the parade of intertextual musical references that start and close the piece elevate it above hippie hymn. Its flipside, "Baby You're a Rich Man", is less successful, a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme from the considerably stronger "And Your Bird Can Sing". It's the one lesser moment on an otherwise massively rewarding compilation.

Much better from Lennon is "I Am the Walrus", crafted for the Magical Mystery Tour film and EP but also released as a double-sided single with McCartney's "Hello Goodbye". One of Lennon's signature songs, "Walrus" channels the singer's longtime fascinations with Lewis Carroll, puns and turns of phrase, and non sequiturs. "Hello Goodbye" echoes the same contradictory logic found in the verses of "All You Need Is Love", a vague sense of disorientation that still does little to balance its relentlessly upbeat tone. McCartney excelled at selling simplistic lyrics that risk seeming cloying, though, and he again does here-- plus, the kaleidoscopic, carnival-ride melody and interplay between lead and backing vocals ensure it's a much better record than it is a song.

In almost every instance on those singles, the Beatles are either whimsical or borderline simplistic, releasing songs that don't seem sophisticated or heavy or monumental (even though most of them are). In that sense, they're all like "All You Need Is Love" or childhood memories or Lewis Carroll-- easy to love, fit for all ages, rich in multi-textual details, deceptively trippy (see Paul's "Penny Lane" in particular, with images of it raining despite blue skies, or the songs here that revel in contradictions-- "Hello Goodbye"'s title, the verses in "All You Need Is Love"). More than any other place in the band's catalogue, this is where the group seems to crack open a unique world, and for many young kids then and since this was their introduction to music as imagination, or adventure. The rest of the Magical Mystery Tour LP is the opposite of the middle four tracks on the EP-- songs so universal that, like "Yellow Submarine", they are practically implanted in your brain from birth. Seemingly innocent, completely soaked through with humor and fantasy, Magical Mystery Tour slots in my mind almost closer to the original Willy Wonka or The Wizard of Oz as it does other Beatles records or even other music-- timeless entertainment crafted with a childlike curiosity and appeal but filled with wit and wonder.

On the whole, Magical Mystery Tour is quietly one of the most rewarding listens in the Beatles' career. True, it doesn't represent some sort of forward momentum or clear new idea-- largely in part because it wasn't conceived as an album. The accompanying pieces on the EP are anomalies in the Beatles oeuvre but they aren't statements per se, or indications that the group is in any sort of transition. But if there was ever a moment in the Beatles' lifetime that listeners would have been happy to have the group just settle in and release songs as soon as possible, it was just before and after the then-interminable 10-month gap between the Revolver and *Sgt. Pepper'* s . Without that context, the results could seem slight-- a sort-of canonized version of Past Masters perhaps-- but whether it's an album, a collection of separate pieces, or whatnot matters little when the music itself is so incredible.

[ Note : Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

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Magical mystery tour.

Release date: 27 November 1967

(Spoken lyric) Roll up, roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour. Step right this way!

Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour. Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour.

Roll up, and that's an invitation, Roll up for the mystery tour. Roll up, to make a reservation, Roll up for the mystery tour.

The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away, Waiting to take you away.

Roll up, we've got ev'rything you need Roll up for the mystery tour. Roll up, satisfaction guaranteed, Roll up for the mystery tour.

The Magical Mystery Tour is hoping to take you away, Hoping to take you away.

The mystery trip.

The Magical Mystery Tour. Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour.

The Magical Mystery Tour is coming to take you away, Coming to take you away.

The Magical Mystery Tour is dying to take you away, dying to take you away, take you today.

"Magical Mystery Tour" is a song by the Beatles, the opening track and theme song for the album, double EP and TV film of the same name. Unlike the theme songs for their other film projects, it was not released as a single.

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Democratic us rep. henry cuellar of texas and his wife are indicted over ties to azerbaijan, a severe thunderstorm watch in effect for 6 counties in the area, ‘rain - a tribute to the beatles’ comes to the majestic theatre for 2 shows, ‘rain’ is scheduled to play on aug. 4.

Julie Moreno , Executive Producer/Digital Content

Do you want to know a secret?

“Rain - A Tribute to the Beatles ” will stop in San Antonio this summer.

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OK, it’s not exactly a secret. The Majestic Theatre is inviting Beatles fans to come together for a live performance featuring songs from the Fab Four.

“Rain” will have two performances on Sunday, Aug. 4, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.

The concert is described as “an electrifying journey through the iconic eras of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour in addition to songs from the early years all the way to Abbey Road.”

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. on Friday online or at the Majestic Theatre Box Office at 224 East Houston Street.

Copyright 2024 by KSAT - All rights reserved.

About the Author

Julie moreno.

Julie Moreno has worked in local television news for more than 25 years. She came to KSAT as a news producer in 2000. After producing thousands of newscasts, she transitioned to the digital team in 2015. She writes on a wide variety of topics from breaking news to trending stories and manages KSAT’s daily digital content strategy.

Taylor Swift's new album The Tortured Poets Department smashes chart records in the US, UK and Australia

Taylor Swift has tied with Madonna as the female artist with the most number ones in the UK in official albums chart history.

Her new album The Tortured Poets Department has also outsold the rest of the top ten combined, while beating The Beatles' record of fastest artist to rack up 12 UK number one albums.

"No other artist has notched up 12 number one albums in such a short space of time," the official charts company said.

"Taylor Swift has done it in 11 years and six months. This surpasses The Beatles, who managed the feat in 14 years and one month."

The first single from the album Fortnight featuring Post Malone topped the UK singles chart.

Not long after the album was released, Spotify and Amazon Music said it was their most streamed album in a day.

Spotify later said it was their most-streamed album in a single week, surpassing 1billion streams.

Swift takes out the entire top 10 on the singles chart in Australia

Swift has also shattered ARIA records.

She now holds the record for the most number one albums in ARIA history for a female artist.

In Australia, Swift moves ahead of Madonna to claim third place on the list of acts with the most chart-topping albums in the country.

Jimmy Barnes leads with 15 as a solo act (he had another five with Cold Chisel), followed by the Beatles with 14.

The Tortured Poets Department is Swift's 13th number one ARIA album.

Fortnight has also climbed the charts in Australia and is Swift's 12th number one ARIA single.

Swift is the first artist to hold the entire top 10 on the singles chart, with Hozier at number 11 with Too Sweet.

ARIA Top 10 singles

• 1. Fortnight, Taylor Swift Feat. Post Malone
• 2. Down Bad, Taylor Swift
• 3. The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift
• 4. So Long, London, Taylor Swift
• 5. I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, Taylor Swift
• 6. My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, Taylor Swift
• 7. But Daddy I Love Him, Taylor Swift
• 8. Florida!!!, Taylor Swift Feat. Florence + The Machine
• 9. Who's Afraid Of The Little Old Me?, Taylor Swift
• 10. Guilty as Sin?, Taylor Swift

She has also set the record for the most singles in the top 50, charting a total of 29 tracks on the current chart.

Swift is still the only artist in ARIA history to replace themselves at number one on the album chart, having done so three times – two of those times with debuting albums.

In 2023, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) replaced Midnights; March 2024 saw Lover replace Midnights; and last week The Tortured Poets Department replaced Lover.

It's the most-sold album on vinyl and most-streamed album in week one in ARIA history.

An historic debut on the Billboard charts

Swift has also made an historic debut at number one on the Billboard 200 chart.

It's her 14th chart-topping album on the Billboard charts.

Swift ties with Jay-Z for the most number ones among soloists in the almost-70-year history of the chart.

Only the Beatles have more number ones, with 19.

With 1.914 million sold, Billboard reports that The Tortured Poets Department is the top-selling album of 2024 to date, with Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter coming in at number two, with 228,000 copies sold.

Billboard published a list of the acts with at least 10 number ones on the Billboard 200, since the list began publishing on a regular, weekly basis in March 1956.

They are as follows:

19. The Beatles

14. Taylor Swift

11. Bruce Springsteen

11.  Barbra Streisand

11. Ye (formerly Kanye West)

10.  Eminem

10. Elvis Presley

Reuters/ABC

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