Now, however, they were involved in two films simultaneously. Film productions had been a secondary aspect of the Beatles’ career ever since their 1964 feature film debut, A Hard Day’s Night. Concurrent with the start of Magical Mystery Tour, they’d agreed to provide music for Yellow Submarine, an animated film based on their 1966 song of the same name from Revolver. Indeed, the entire last half of 1967 was a strange time for the Beatles. “We were doing a crazy, roly-poly Sixties film.” “We knew we weren’t doing a regular film,” McCartney says. They were the finest videos, and it was a lot of fun.” John would always want a midget or two around, and we had to get an aircraft hangar to put the set in. “We rented a bus and off we went,” Starr says. They simply signed up some character actors-including Jessie Robins as Ringo Starr’s bellicose, fat aunt, and eccentric Scottish poet and musician Ivor Cutler as the skeletal Buster Bloodvessel-hired out a coach, and hit the English countryside, filming a series of bizarre and droll sketches designed to support the title’s dual notions of magic and mystery. The Beatles didn’t hire big-name screenwriters or a visionary director, or pour loads of money into the production. No one in the group took the concept very seriously. It was a very flimsy kind of thing.”Īs John Lennon saw it, “It’s about a group of common, or ‘garden,’ people on a coach tour around everywhere, really, and things happen to them.” “They’d get loads of crates of beer and an accordion player and all get pissed, basically-pissed in the English sense, meaning drunk. “It was basically a sharabang trip,” George Harrison said, “which people used to go on from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights,” a popular electric light display presented in the autumn months. As a story device, the bus tour was certain to appeal to British viewers. In fact, it would be little more than a container for six new Beatles songs: the title track, “Your Mother Should Know,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “Blue Jay Way,” “I Am the Walrus” and “Flying.” Accordingly, the film’s plot was slight and functional: a bus carrying the band and a group of tourists through provincial England comes under the power of a cadre of magicians (also played by the Beatles), after which strange things start to happen. **Free entry excluded on annual International Beatleweek Festival dates (23 – 29 August 2023).The Beatles had quit touring the previous August, and a film, he reasoned, would be a good way to keep them in the public eye. Magical Mystery Tour customers can enjoy free entry** into The Cavern Club on the day of their tour. The Magical Mystery Tour is the only Beatles tour that finishes at Mathew Street, home of The Cavern and steeped in Beatles heritage. Many more Beatles locations will be pointed out as you travel around the city centre and suburbs.
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