


The Beatles began recording music for the soundtrack in late April, but the film idea then lay dormant. The film was to be unscripted: various "ordinary" people were to travel on a coach and have unspecified "magical" adventures. Titled Magical Mystery Tour, it would combine Kesey's idea of a psychedelic bus ride with McCartney's memories of Liverpudlians holidaying on coach tours. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967, Paul McCartney wanted to create a film that captured a psychedelic theme similar to that represented by author and LSD proponent Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters on the US West Coast. With the international standardisation of the Beatles' catalogue in 1987, Magical Mystery Tour became the only Capitol-generated LP to supersede the band's intended format and form part of their core catalogue.īackground The Beatles at an early 1967 photoshootĪfter the Beatles completed Sgt. The album topped Billboard 's Top LPs listings for eight weeks and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1969. In the UK, it topped the EPs chart compiled by Record Retailer and peaked at number 2 on the magazine's singles chart (later the UK Singles Chart) behind "Hello, Goodbye". Further to the Beatles' desire to experiment with record formats and packaging, the EP and LP included a 24-page booklet containing song lyrics, colour photos from film production, and colour story illustrations by cartoonist Bob Gibson.ĭespite widespread media criticism of the Magical Mystery Tour film, the soundtrack was a critical and commercial success. The sessions also produced " Hello, Goodbye", issued as a single accompanying the soundtrack record, and items of incidental music for the film, including " Flying". McCartney contributed three of the soundtrack songs, including the widely covered " The Fool on the Hill", while John Lennon and George Harrison contributed " I Am the Walrus" and " Blue Jay Way", respectively. The sessions have been characterised by some biographers as aimless and unfocused, with the band members overly indulging in sound experimentation and exerting greater control over production. Recording then took place alongside filming and editing, and as the Beatles furthered their public association with Transcendental Meditation under teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

The project was initiated by Paul McCartney in April 1967, but after the band recorded the song " Magical Mystery Tour", it lay dormant until the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in late August. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the psychedelic sound they had pursued since Revolver (1966). When recording their new songs, the Beatles continued the studio experimentation that had typified Sgt. In 1976, Parlophone released the eleven-track LP in the UK. The EP was issued in the UK on 8 December 1967 on the Parlophone label, while the Capitol Records LP release in the US and Canada occurred on 27 November and features an additional five songs that were originally released as singles that year.

It includes the soundtrack to the 1967 television film of the same name. Magical Mystery Tour is a record by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a double EP in the United Kingdom and an LP in the United States.
