Chris Flackett
“They all had their chance to say, ‘They’ve gone too far. Who do they think they are? What does it mean?’ It was like the rock-opera situation: ‘They’re not Beethoven.’ They were still looking for things that made sense, and this was pretty abstract.”
“The sequences were just suggested often by memories from our childhood, things that we remembered or we remembered seeing or doing ourselves…I suppose the whole film has a bit of a village fete atmosphere to it.”
Paul McCartney
“It’s all their childhood memories all being jumbled up and juxtaposed and coming out as a series of fairly surreal images.”
Barry Miles
1967 had started so gloriously for The Beatles. Their complete withdrawal from touring had allowed the group the time and freedom to expand their song writing and production, resulting in the release of the still-astonishing “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” double A-side single, followed later in the year by Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that many still consider to be one of the greatest albums of all time. To cap it off, the debut of ‘”All You Need Is Love” took place on the show Our World, the world’s first global TV satellite broadcast, seen simultaneously by millions all over the world at a time when this was anything but the norm. Any other group would have rested on its laurels for a while after such a volume and explosion of high-level activity, but not The Beatles. Oh, no. They still had a Magical Mystery Tour to embark on.
Time has not been entirely kind to Magical Mystery Tour, the film written, performed and directed by The Beatles themselves and aired initially on TV by the BBC on Boxing Day, December 26, 1967. It was arguably The Beatles’ first major failure, certainly in critical and commercial terms, and while the film enjoys a warmer reputation now, with a lot of Beatles fans (including myself) holding it in real affection, the English newspapers of the day pulled the film to pieces, dismissing it a vanity project (which, in a way, it was) and attacking its lack of a real narrative and its surrealist presentation as amateurish. The reaction so surprised and horrified The Beatles that Paul McCartney felt the need to appear on David Frost’s chat show the very next night to essay a defense. The Beatles obviously felt that damage control was necessary. Magical Mystery Tour had not only incensed the critics, but it had driven a wedge between the very people whose positive opinion The Beatles relied on for the position—their audience.
The Beatles had enjoyed a relationship with its audience prior to this that few other popular acts of the day could dream of: a multi-generation appeal that saw the band adored by old and young alike. Magical Mystery Tour was the line drawn in the sand, the open door into the psychedelic world being embraced by the ever-accelerating youth culture of the day, a door that not everybody would be able, or be willing, to travel through. The film was not intended as any kind of manifesto, but it gave an ultimatum it may not have intended; either you tune in to where The Beatles, and therefore youth culture, was at or else you can drop out of the audience and the party can continue without you. Those young Boxing Day viewers got it. The older members of the audience, dismayed and confused by what they had seen, rejected the film and subsequently the Beatles; they’d gone “weird,” where there was no longer fun for all the family.
But need it have been that way? In this article, I want to explore why such a knee-jerk reaction was perhaps premature and that, while there’s no doubt that The Beatles were reveling in the psychedelic culture of the time, there is enough in the Magical Mystery Tour to appeal to all ages, just as the group had always done. The approach and the look may have changed, but underneath it all the same Liverpudlian working-class warmth remained…
Fun For All The Family
Culturally and socially, the Sixties were very much a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) battleground. To quote Bob Dylan, “the times they were a-changing,” with England finally coming out of its post-war malaise to embrace a modernity that America had known much earlier. An increase in the availability of consumer goods created a sense of convenience and comparative luxury and the High Purchase (HP) scheme helped to increase the affordability of such items, as well as the spending power of working-class people. Meanwhile, American rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues music, imported into the country by American servicemen and sailors, gave the newly-formed teenage consumer section of the populace the first clues towards creating their own “teenage” culture, loud and brash and colourful, and a world away from the big bands, ballads and conservative suits and dresses of their parents’ generation.
One of the consequences of the youth/pop “Swinging London” explosion is that for perhaps the first time, there was a noticeable and antagonistic generation gap in the populace. Whereas before, children would go straight from leaving school into wearing their father’s suits and mother’s skirts and would be expected to immediately be adults, teenagers rejected this out of hand. They wanted their own fashion, their own music and their own language. They had grown up in a post-war era that still saw rationing being implemented and children running amok on the numerous bombsites that still littered cities. They believed that their parents simply accepted their lot; these teenagers questioned authority and made demands instead.
One of the more obvious areas where the generation gap was noticeable was in the realm of pop music. As Jon Savage has stated, “It’s hard to remember now, within today’s Rock Dad cross-generational culture, just how much pop music was the province of teenagers in the mid-’60s. Many a ferocious parent-child battle was fought over Top Of The Pops and Ready Steady Go!; The Rolling Stones were beyond the pale – banned in many households – but, carefully packaged and presented by Brian Epstein, The Beatles were always acceptable to adults.”
Unlike The Rolling Stones, subject to attacks in the press such as the infamous “Would You Let Your Sister Go With A Rolling Stone” headline, older people did not instantly dismiss The Beatles as long-haired layabouts who were good for nothing other than the army. While they had their critics, The Beatles enjoyed a healthy relationship with the older generation who, if they didn’t always like the group’s songs, at least appreciated there was a sophistication to the chord structures and melodies within the songs, something they suspected to be missing in the output of other groups (unfair when you consider the harmonies and chords of The Beach Boys or the avant-garde experimentation of The Velvet Underground, to name just two).
The real difference-maker in forming the older generation’s opinion of The Beatles was their Northern English working-class wit and charm. Their natural charisma, irreverence, lack of airs and graces, cheekiness and quick-witted, no-nonsense sense of humour endeared them to a working class who had not seen themselves reflected in pop music before. Meanwhile, the middle classes warmed to their energy and homespun, down-to-earth attitudes. The Beatles did not come across as pop idols, remote and pristine, but like real people; earthy, individual, genuine, with sharp tongues and sharper ripostes. Watch any of those old ‘Beatlemania’ press conferences, where the Fab Four run rings around the media with glee, and it is obvious, music aside, why people, old and young alike, fell in love with the group. They were completely relatable while still retaining an otherness that every great pop artist requires to stand out.
In this way, The Beatles became ever bigger, charting hit song after song, album after album, even breaking into film. This neatly brings us back to Magical Mystery Tour. The Beatles had been on the silver screen before, and neither A Hard Day’s Night nor Help! had particularly upset the older element of their audience. Why had Magical Mystery Tour?
Showing Homes Movies to Antonioni
In the BBC Arena documentary Magical Mystery Tour Revisited: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Annie Nightingale states that “there are bits of it that are silly, other bits self-indulgent. But on the other hand, it’s not pretentious. I don’t think they ever were. They always managed to keep the right side of that line”. Unfortunately for The Beatles, large chunks of the older parts of their audience disagreed, disdaining what they saw as pretension, whether it was actually there or not. To them, Magical Mystery Tour did not reflect the down-to-earth, unaffected, ordinary working-class lads they knew and therefore, The Beatles had betrayed some unspoken rule in their relationship with their audience: remember where you’re from and don’t get above your station. Anything else, and you run the risk of being “weird.” To the older members of their audience, Magical Mystery Tour was the moment The Beatles forgot they were working-class Liverpudlians and became “weird.”
One person’s weird, though, is another person’s adventure. Perhaps because they have been omnipresent in culture for so long, it’s easy to forget how young The Beatles were at the time—between the ages of 24 and 27 years old. They were as much drawn to the charges in culture, the arts and society as other young people their age, and the sixties more than any decade was an era chock full of cultural innovations and experimentation. To the open-minded, the arts had become a playground, and The Beatles had begun to demonstrate the broadening of their horizons in their work.
Paul McCartney has long since made a case for himself as being the Beatle most interested and involved in the avant-garde as opposed to John Lennon, but he has also admitted this was partly due to the circumstances of his living situation at the time: “I had a period of a few years, when I was living in London and I wasn’t married like the other guys, they were living outside of London. So, I would kind of probably see more cinema, see more theatre, go to more events, just because I was there.” Still, this does not take away from McCartney’s genuine curiosity regarding the avant-garde. Barry Miles said “McCartney always had his antennae out. Those would be the avant-garde kind of things he’d do, but he would also go to the various sort of nightclubs and hear torch singers. He used those actual words, that he always had his antennae out and stuff would go in, and it might not come out for years and years”.
Paul McCartney saw the increasing inclusion of avant-garde and counter-cultural techniques in their music as a kind of good-natured public service: “We always thought, ‘ooh, the people back home would love to know this’. So we felt like we were the megaphone. If it was happening to us and we liked it, we thought ‘we should let them know’. Because they’re not down here, hanging out with the artists, but it would be good to pass on the good news”.
While the avant-garde found its way clearly and successfully into The Beatles’ music—the electronic tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the atonal classical passages of “A Day In The Life”—it also found its way into an interest with private film making, with both Ringo Starr and McCartney purchasing Super 8 cameras and experimenting with lenses and running film backwards to produce startling images, made the more interesting, as Ringo put it, with the aid of the “medication” they were taking. Whether they were worth McCartney airing these to famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, as he supposedly did, is another matter. But from here, and in the playful, experimental atmosphere of the time, it was only one small step from making home movies to bringing experimental movies into the public’s homes.
Chance and Randomnesss and Christmas
On the surface, it is easy to understand why the older portions of The Beatles’ audience disliked Magical Mystery Tour. TV audiences of the time would expect basic narrative conventions to be present; a recognisable story told in linear fashion with a clear beginning, middle and end; recognisable characters with clear motivations; humour that follows standard formats of comedy and features discernible punchlines. In short, something that does not deviate from standard forms and does not present any kind of challenge as to its meaning or reason for existing.
Furthermore, even so early in TV history, viewers already had expectations for what a Christmas special should be. Christmas TV had to be light, frothy, cheerful and inclusive. The variety show format was king, with musical and comedy acts presented in conventional ways, epitomised by the record-setting figure of 21.1 million viewers for the Christmas Morecambe and Wise Show on Christmas Day, 1977. The average viewer wanted to be entertained, a party on the screen to mirror the party in the Christmas home. They did not want to be guinea pigs for cinematic experiments.
From the beginning, Magical Mystery Tour was not designed to be cosy, generic viewing, having been originally outlined by McCartney in a circle diagram with segments carved out like hours, with only some of those segments being filled with ideas and others to be filled out at a later date. Such haphazard planning did little to endear the film to parts of the audience who were expecting something a little more traditional.
In its way, Magical Mystery Tour follows a picaresque structure, using episodic incidents to fill out the story rather than narrative cause and effect. The basic premise is simple: The Beatles and a group of people take a coach tour to a mystery location, getting caught up in surreal incidents along the way. Where the film experiments with the idea of the picaresque is in the nature of the episodes themselves, where the action might appear inexplicable (for instance, where the tour briefly visits an army recruiting centre and the Sargent mimes how to defeat a prosthetic cow in battle), and how musical performances seem to come out of nowhere and do not aid the narrative.
The nature of some of those musical narratives (“I Am The Walrus” played out on air field with The Beatles dressed in walrus costumes, while policemen and a group of people linked together in a white gown and wearing white madmen caps join hands on a massive concrete wall; “Blue Jay Way” cutting between George playing a chalk keyboard and The Beatles larking about in Ringo’s garden beneath a kaleidoscopic effect) did not conform to standard musical performances of the day. Nothing seemed to drive the narrative other than the bus, and the bus was heading to strange, nonsensical destinations such as a dream sequence where John Lennon scooped endless spaghetti onto Aunt Jessie’s plate, or where the group were found playing a gang of camp wizards watching the bus for…no particular reason it seems, other to make sure the passengers were having a lovely time.
All of this might have been rescued in the public’s eyes if there had been a final destination reached to end the tour, or even a return home and a final comment to link the whole together in a circular narrative, much like its circular plan. Magical Mystery Tour chose, however, to make no concessions in its climax, choosing instead to have The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band soundtrack a stripper whilst wearing surrealist masks, and The Beatles performing “Your Mother Should Know” in a gentle parody of the classic MGM musical routine, complete with big staircase. Cue credits. Cue complaints.
That The Beatles were following their instincts and adventures with the then-avant-garde and letting it colour their work is clear. Where I disagree with complaints from older members of their audience at the time is that while the freewheeling, surreal, psychedelic attributes of the film were certainly different to what the audience was used to, there was still a lot within the film that completely tallied up with the people they’d been and the working-class background that formed the bedrock of their relationship with the older members of their audience. The Beatles still had that core Northern working-classness about them; it was just being expressed in a different, more colourful way. Look past the psychedelic prism and there’s a lot that the older audience would (and should) of recognised.
Your Mother Should Know
What strikes me now watching Magical Mystery Tour is how, for all the hipness of its colours, music and psychedelia, the basic premise was very traditional and Northern English working class. McCartney had initially been influenced by author Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, who were travelling around America in a psychedelically painted bus while indulging in Acid Tests (essentially LSD parties featuring light and sound to help expand consciousness). At the time, this would have been seen as extraordinarily hip and certainly caught the attention of McCartney’s antennae.
Yet, when it came to implementing their own English take on The Pranksters’ trip, any links to drugs became implied through the humour and the irregular form of the film as opposed to being overtly spoken about. This would not be a film of The Beatles giving out their own literal Acid Tests. This may be partly because the group were aware what damage such a plot might do to their brand and reputation (especially after McCartney’s LSD confession earlier in the year), but also that, while they could sympathise with The Merry Pranksters, the closest thing they could relate it back to in sleepy, repressed England was their experience of the charabanc coach trips from their earlier youth.
George Harrison recalled a charabanc trip as something “which people used to go on from Liverpool to see the Blackpool lights—they’d get loads of crates of beer and all get pissed (in the English sense)”. There would be singing on the coach, no doubt aided by the alcohol, and after some time spent at their location—a walk on the promenade at the seaside, a few go’s on the rides at the funfair—it would be back on the coach, taking in the Blackpool Illuminations or other such sights on their way out, drinking more beer and singing (or possibly passing out in a drunk sleep). Roll up, it’s fun for all the family! You couldn’t imagine the London hip cognoscenti and counter-cultural icons of the day getting on the coach. It would have been too old-fashioned, conservative, unhip. Jeff Nuttall in a “kiss me quick” hat with a portion of fish and chips having a paddle in the dirty Blackpool sea? No chance. This was The Beatles connecting something fundamental about their past to their present. You can take the boys out of Liverpool, but you can’t take Liverpool out of the boys.
Yes, the surreal humour on the bus and the bizarre locations visited will be unlike any trip to Blackpool ever experienced, but the audience watching the film on Boxing Day 1967 must have recognised itself there on some level. Both the film and the tour start on a typical working class street of terraced houses and local shops recognisable to most people watching at home as being similar to their own neighbourhood. And anyone who’s been on a British coach tour would have gnashed their teeth in irritated recognition at the courier Jolly Jimmy Johnson, standing at the front of the bus with his fuzzy-sounding microphone, trying to ingratiate himself with his captive passengers with embarrassingly over-the-top joviality.
And while such psychedelic masterpieces as “I Am The Walrus” may have turned off older viewers, fans who’d rather whistle gentle ditties like “And I Love Her,” The Beatles, more than anyone, knew how music is the great leveller, bringing together people of all different ages and backgrounds. That, alongside their innate charm, was a central part of their success. It’s reflected in Magical Mystery Tour by the varied mix of passengers on the coach; young hippie girls, cackling old men smoking self-rolled cigarettes, a businessman, The Beatles themselves, working class women like Aunt Jessie, a movie starlet and a little girl who John and George seem to take a shine to. And what, amongst other things, does this disparate clan do on the coach? They drink beer, of course, and sing.
Not just any songs either, but the kind of old-fashioned ditties that people like Aunt Jessie, The Beatles’ parents and even The Beatles themselves would have sung around the pub piano in a big drunken singalong. Songs such as “No Business Like Show Business,” “Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts,” “The Happy Wanderer,” “The Can Can,” and “When The Red Red Robin comes Bob Bob Bobbing Along” may or may not have been known to the young audience watching the film, they certainly wouldn’t have been hip, but the older audience would have known those songs inside out and could possibly have enjoyed a singalong with the TV if they’d been inclined to recognise a part of their own culture in front of them rather than worrying about the ‘weirdness’ of the film.
A little bit more awkwardly, a section of the audience would have twitched at the strip tease sequence near the film’s climax. While I’m sure there was a lot of tut-tutting and covering children’s eyes, I’m also confident there would have been a percentage of older men watching who would have been to such a club (the venue in question looks like a typical, down at heel night club/working men’s club of the time). They would have been familiar with a dancer performing a striptease to the accompaniment of a band (possibly while waiting for the comic to come on, unless the strip tease was the main event).
There was also the question of romance. It’s not uncommon for people to look for and sometimes find romance at the seaside, whether that be a quick pick-up or something more lasting. Magical Mystery Tour taps neatly into this sentiment via a romantic scene involving Aunt Jessie and Mr Bloodvessel on the beach. It’s a tender moment, full of longing on both character’s parts and playfulness, and while you might expect such a scene to be treated ironically or comically, it’s actually treated seriously, even though it’s a fantasy sequence. The Beatles were not cynical enough (not even John) to sneer at love. Two ordinary people trying to win each over and win each other’s hearts at the beach? Who in the audience hadn’t been there, at least once?
A Spaniard In The Works
There is one other area an older audience should have recognised something relatable, although this is a little more complex: the film’s sense of humour.
The film was criticised by older members of the audience for having a surreal, nonsensical sense of humour. This was seen as relating to the other psychedelic elements of the film as a sign that The Beatles had gone ‘weird’. But this neglects the influence of one of the most popular radio comedy shows of the 1950s, something the audience would certainly have been aware of: The Goon Show.
The Goon Show was a radio show that ran from 1951 to 1960 and starred (mainly) Spike Milligan, Harry Seacombe and Peter Sellers. There has never been another radio show like it since. Surrealism does not begin to cover it. It was a constantly moving, energetic, collision of extraordinary word play, bizarre scenarios, abstract humour and strange sound affects that constantly attacked the establishment (ironic, considering King Charles was a major fan). Sample plots include sailing Dartmouth Prison to the south of France for a holiday, a dustbin to keep Britain’s rubbish atom-free, and a phantom head shaver. Characters would dip in and out randomly, and half the time Spike Milligan would be cracking up at his own jokes. Britain had never heard such chaos before and, whilst divisive, the show was popular enough to run for 10 series and 238 episodes, attracting a listening audience of two million, a substantial figure for such a surrealistic show.
The Beatles were all fans of The Goon Show, and it was a formative influence on their sense of humour. As John Lennon once said, “like all my generation, I was really drawn to The Goons. In many ways, they influenced The Beatles as much as rock ‘n’ roll. They were to my generation what we were to the next…hipper than the hippest and madder than “Mad”, a conspiracy against reality. A coup d’etat of the mind!” Whilst Lennon’s words focus on the impact on his generation, the listening figures suggest there was a broader listening appeal and, as such, the wider audience watching Magical Mystery Tour, regardless of whether they found such humour funny, should have least been able to recognise where such humour as that found in the film had originated.
“Already there was abstract qualities in their humour and their writing”, said Line Producer Gavrik Losey, “and their approach to all sorts of stuff. And I think the film’s a natural progression or came out of that culture.” The most obvious example of this was John Lennon’s two excellent books of nonsense literature, In His Own Write and A Spaniard In The Works, published in 1964 and 1965 respectively and chock full of surreal ideas and inventive wordplay that could have come straight out of The Goon Show itself, topped off with a dose of Lennon’s cynicism and love of grotesquery. Any Beatles fans, old or young, who had read the books should not have been surprised by the surreal humour of Magical Mystery Tour. Perhaps it was easier to ignore the books than it was the TV.
Son of Goons and Musical Halls
The visit to the army recruiting office in the film is typical of the Goon influence. Apart from the fact that a normal charabanc trip would go nowhere near an army office, this particular recruitment centre appears to be smack bang in the middle of an otherwise deserted field. Victor Spinetti plays an officer who talks at 100 miles per hour in an exaggerated version of an officer’s gruff authoritative voice, ranting without actually saying a single discernible word. Ringo asks the officer a single question—“why?”—but it serves to only baffle the officer as well as the audience. A shout of “Get your bloody hair cut!” triggers a jump cut to the field, officer’s desk and all, where Spinetti, in brilliantly physical fashion, demonstrates to his audience how to fight a prosthetic model of a cow, even miming the cow spearing him painfully in the posterior. End scene.
It’s a brilliant moment, in that the heightened atmosphere and the ridiculous behaviour of the officer form to create an amusing absurdist tableau. The scene does not progress the narrative or seem to have a purpose, other than to amuse and surprise by its existence. However, it’s quite clear that there was more to the scene, being an obvious anti-authority slight against the army and ridiculing its behaviours and culture. That it takes an absurdist approach does not make sentiment any less potent.
That the absurdist ploy perhaps caused the older generation to view the scene as ambiguous—suspecting a joke was being played on them and the army without being able to clearly state why—seems to ignore the fact that The Goon Show had also displayed anti-authority traits in its shows, Spike Milligan using his war-time experiences to poke fun at the idea of officers and the army as institutes to be respected. The older Magical Mystery Tour audience may not have appreciated the anti-authority humour but they should have recognised it as the “Son of Goon,” as it were.
John Lennon takes it further, as he often did, later performing in a sequence inspired by a very strange dream he had, dramatized on film as a very sinister yet hilarious scene and perhaps one of the best moments in the film. A weaselly-looking Lennon acts as a waiter in a large restaurant, a scarily exaggerated smile plastered on his face as he piles endless spaghetti onto a panicking Aunt Jessie’s plate, which she struggles to empty. Meanwhile, the guests at the restaurant all seem to be eating in their underwear…
Curiously, this scene forms a link to the future as well as a nod to an influence from the past. Clearly influenced by The Goons, the scene would seemingly be remade and remodelled in the form of Mr Creosote in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life. Python, of course, were influenced by both Spike Milligan and The Goons, as well as The Beatles. There’s a clear lineage here, and it seems surprising that the audience at the time couldn’t at least make the link between the humour of The Goons and that of the Beatles.
Yet, it wasn’t only surrealist humour that featured in the film. Typical working-class comedy of the time, outside of radio and TV sitcoms, would involve stand-up comics, double acts and sketch performers, often being performed in variety shows derived from the English Music Hall tradition, with comedians, singers and dancers offering audiences—what else—a variety of performances on a single bill. This kind of comedy would sometimes be referred to as ‘end of the pier’ comedy, as the bigger stars would play summer shows for the season at theatres on seaside piers. Sounds suitable for a charabanc trip!
Comedy favoured by variety would often play on stereotypes and find double acts, such as Hinge and Bracket and Cullen and Carthy, arguing back and forth humorously. These acts may be obscure to time now, but Laurel and Hardy is a good example of such an act on a global level. The Magical Mystery Tour had their own “music hall” pairing of Aunt Jessie and her “nephew” Ringo. Throughout the film and in the finest English music hall tradition, Ringo and Jessie use humour to bicker constantly and continuously try to get one over the other person. Some of the funniest moments in the film come out of their exchanges, such as the following:
Jessie: Anyway, I’ll tell you something, you ain’t coming away with me anymore.
Ringo: Who bought the tickets for this trip? I did!
Jessie: Yeah, with my money. I gave you the money.
Ringo: I’m taking you out. You’re not taking me anywhere.
Jessie: I gave you the money, darling. Remember that.
Ringo: And you’ve done nothing but eye all the fellas on the coach since we got here.
Jessie: Shut your cakehole!
The fast-paced flow of the argument, with lines (apparently improvised) flung out like artillery shells, the pointed rejoinders and the eventual explosion into the nonsense crudity (“shut your cakehole!”) nicely mirrors the classic music hall and variety double-act arguments that would have been familiar to many of the older members of the audience watching the film. That the Ringo-Jessie relationship is the throughline of the film, if there is one, was quite a shrewd move, giving something for the older members of the audience to connect with amongst all the psychedelic surreality on display. Perhaps if a story had been built around the pair, with a logical conclusion to boot, the older audience wouldn’t have been as put out as they were. But then, the film wouldn’t have been the Magical Mystery Tour we know and love…
And In The End…
“It seems to me now that Magical Mystery Tour is an attempt to fuse those elements of quintessential Englishness that made The Beatles feel like the people they were, with the advanced psychedelic elements that they had introduced into the culture. It’s a graft.”
Paul Gambaccini
It seems a shame that an older, more conservative part of the audience couldn’t enjoy Magical Mystery Tour. For all the experimentation and new creative avenues The Beatles were exploring, they were still from the same background and culture that the majority of their audience came from, something the Fab Four were never ashamed of. Indeed, it was a major part of who they were, and while they despised petty-minded English repression, they were always proud of the warm humour and feeling of their Northern working-class background. Magical Mystery Tour is a celebration of the imagination and the ability to do anything (whether you actually can or not). It is also a little love letter in its way to The Beatles’ childhood, in as much the same way as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” are.
You just have to look through the colours and see what lies beneath them.
