Magical Mystery Tour
"Magical Mystery Tour" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles and the title track to the December 1967 television film of the same name. It was released on the band's Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack record, which was a double EP in Britain and most markets but an album in America, where Capitol Records supplemented the new songs with tracks issued on the Beatles' 1967 singles. The song was written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership.
The Beatles recorded the track in April and May 1967, soon after completing work on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and several months before committing to make the Magical Mystery Tour film. The song serves as an introduction to the audience, in the style of McCartney's opening title track to Sgt. Pepper, and includes ringmaster calls, a trumpet fanfare and traffic sounds.
Composition
"Magical Mystery Tour" is credited to Lennon–McCartney, although written primarily by Paul McCartney. McCartney said it was co-written by the pair. John Lennon said, "Paul's song. Maybe I did part of it, but it was his concept." In 1972, Lennon said, "Paul [wrote it]. I helped with some of the lyric." According to Hunter Davies' contemporary account of the recording sessions for the song, McCartney arrived with the chord structure but only the opening refrain ("Roll up / Roll up for the mystery tour"). McCartney asked Mal Evans, the Beatles' assistant and former road manager, to search local bus stations for posters with text that could be adapted for the song, in the manner of Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" When Evans was unsuccessful, a brainstorming discussion took place in the studio the following day to complete the lyrics.
The lyrics explain in a general way the premise of the film: a charabanc mystery tour of the type that was popular in Britain when the Beatles were young. McCartney said that he and Lennon expanded the tour to make it magical, which allowed it to be "a little more surreal than the real ones", and that the song was "very much in our fairground period". There are also interpretations of the lyric as an explicit reference to drugs, since the Beatles were experimenting with acid in those years. McCartney himself said about the song:
Because those were psychedelic times it had to become a magical mystery tour, a little bit more surreal than the real ones to give us a licence to do it. But it employs all the circus and fairground barkers, "Roll up! Roll up!", which was also a reference to rolling up a joint. We were always sticking those little things in that we knew our friends would get; veiled references to drugs and to trips. "Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away," so that's a kind of drug, "it's dying to take you away" so that's a Tibetan Book of the Dead reference ... Magical Mystery Tour was the equivalent of a drug trip and we made the film based on that.
Personnel
The Beatles
- Paul McCartney – lead and backing vocals, piano, bass guitar, ringmaster's voice, percussion
- John Lennon – lead and backing vocals, acoustic guitar, percussion
- George Harrison – harmony vocal, lead guitar, percussion
- Ringo Starr – drums, percussion
Additional musicians
- Mal Evans – percussion
- Neil Aspinall – percussion
- David Mason – trumpet
- Elgar Howarth – trumpet
- Roy Copestake – trumpet
- John Wilbraham – trumpet