Magical Mystery Tour

Conceived by McCartney during a flight back from Los Angeles in April 1967, Magical Mystery Tour was a TV-film experiment that filled the immediate post-Sgt-Pepper vacuum. The premise (a coachload of British eccentrics on a magical bus tour) was deliberately Anglo-folk in flavour — a contrast to the glittering Pepper alter-ego — and was the band's first major project undertaken without Brian Epstein, who had died on 27 August 1967, eight days into the production.

Recording took place between April and November 1967, mostly at EMI but also at Olympic Studios (Barnes), where the band by now preferred working. Geoff Emerick remained engineer. The six songs (split across the UK double-EP) draw on the same studio toolkit Pepper had pioneered: tape splicing, varispeed, brass-band overdubs, mellotron — but with a more cinematic, looser feel.

I Am the Walrus is Lennon at his most committed nonsense, three songs spliced together over a Mike Sammes Singers descending chorus and a live BBC King Lear feed in the fade. The Fool on the Hill is McCartney's recorder-and-piano portrait of the wise outsider (some hear the Maharishi). Magical Mystery Tour, the title track, is a brass-band carnival barker. Your Mother Should Know is McCartney music-hall. Flying is the band's only released instrumental on a UK album. Blue Jay Way is Harrison stranded in LA fog, on a Hammond drone.

The double-EP was released in the UK on 8 December 1967 in a gatefold sleeve with a 24-page booklet of stills and cartoons. UK number two on the singles chart (kept from the top by the Beatles' own Hello, Goodbye). The TV film, screened on BBC1 on Boxing Day 1967 in black-and-white (the BBC having no colour broadcast capability until the following year) was — uniquely for the band — critically savaged.

Magical Mystery Tour is the curio of the canon: a UK double-EP that the US treated as a full LP (with the 1967 singles added to fill out side B). The film's reputation has rehabilitated significantly since the 2012 Apple restoration; the EP/LP itself contains some of the band's most-loved psychedelic material, including a song (Strawberry Fields Forever, on the US LP version) that did not even make the UK release at the time.