Going on a Magical Mystery Tour. Or not.

You have just recorded one of the most groundbreaking and influential albums the world has ever heard. It has literally changed the perceptions of the Pop music world elevating your band and the scope of what Pop music is to a level that can be considered high art. Nothing in modern music will be the same again, no other band can touch your reach and skill, although many will try to over the years, you have raised the bar beyond anything set before. What on earth do you do to follow it up. How about hiring a coach filling it full of strangers and few friends and then filming whatever happens? You do record six new songs for the film so that will work out alright then, won’t it?

This is the scenario that the Beatles found themselves in after the release of their pivotal and seminal Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band album. They had tragically lost their influential friend and longtime manager Brian Epstein plus they were worried about what was now expected of them. So the Magical Mystery tour idea seemed to be a great idea and would give them focus. A quick call to a Coach Hire Gloucester based firm like https://www.johndixtravel.co.uk/ would have made life a lot easier on the production team.

The film itself was meant to be a surrealist adventure, The band were experimenting a lot with the psychotropic drug LSD. This perception changing psychedelic must have affected their judgement of what would make a good film. The premise that they would just “film what happens” was soon abandoned as nothing did. Therefore, the boys and their friends embark on “a trip”, another way of saying taking a fair bit of LSD and drive the bus into the English countryside. This allows for several scenes based on John, Paul George and Ringo’s fevered imaginations. They go to a castle, a military base and have a rally with some British iconic cars such as a Bentley and the Mini Cooper (which Paul had helped to popularise) before all going home. The film has been labelled as one of the first real “music videos” with the aim of just getting the band “out there” in a different way.

Six original songs were recorded for the film and three are considered some of their finest, these being “Nowhere Man”, “Fool on the Hill” and the extremely weird and nonsensical “I am the Walrus”.

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