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. 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.
And that's mainly because it was never intended as an album, but an EP designed to tie in to a holiday TV special. Pepper – and the ones to come, like the White Album (their next proper LP released the following year) and Abbey Road. Still, as an album, Magical Mystery Tour feels like a letdown after the recent creative landmarks Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. There were new Beatles songs, however, and that was enough to salvage the project. There was no script, no director to speak of and no discernible point to the self-indulgence on display. The movie, a 52-minute special that aired on the BBC on Dec. Along the way, they would stop so the group could perform, or rather lip-sync to, some of those new songs. 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.
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. It's a tricky release history that suits the scattershot nature of Magical Mystery Tour in general.įollowing the release of Sgt. release, were released as singles between February 1967 and all the way up to just a few days before the album came out. The remaining five cuts, pushed to Side Two of the U.S. 8, and included only the songs recorded specifically for the Magical Mystery Tour film project the group aired on British television that Christmas. 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. edition of Magical Mystery Tour, which was released on Nov. Pepper's sessions and other more recent tracks, ended up on the U.S. 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.