If I listen to “Hello Goodbye” now it seems to me filler in the wallbuilding sense but also provokes a desire to read its banged-home either/or scenario in a Kierkegaardian way. “Hello, Goodbye” is again a necessarily piece of tracklisting, separating out two of Lennon’s weightiest and most wonderful tracks. Something of a leap, I concede although one that opened the song for me in a new way as a critique of tabloid modes of representation necessarily about the Beatles themselves insofar as they were so often the subject of tabloid reportage, but mixed in with tabloid crude moralising (you’ve been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down), boisterous mob-oriented hooting and tossed-salad of popular topics: nuns, policemen, foreigners. The most recent time I listened to it I wondered idly if the ‘eggmen’, rather than being directly connected with actual eggs, were indirectly connected with metonymic eggs: that, not to beat around the bush, eggs being what people eat for breakfast, the ‘eggmen’ were the topics covered in the newspapers people read whilst they had their breakfast. And when I was younger I wondered if there wasn’t a spooly nightmare of eating and being eaten buried in the lyrics (the eggs, those huge tusked walruses). I get the Alice in Wonderland vibe, the bouncy free-associative surrealism angle. “I Am the Walrus” is still sublime, and partly so because it still presents a glittering cliff face of possibility. But what struck me as an especially nice touch on this relisten (something that hadn’t struck me before) was the way this perky hymn to the maternal has its melody picked up not with la-la-la, but paternally with McCartney singing ‘da-da-da-da…’ When I was younger I delighted in the staircase up-and-down giant steps of the melody line. On the contrary, it is the needful downer before the chirpy McCartneyisms of. This is not to say, of course, that the song doesn’t work, in context, here. Like those people who think the ‘God is nowhere/God is now here’ rebus an articulation of profundity.
The tune is dour, the vocals weary, the shifts in tempo jolting and mechanical, and (above all) the cod-profundity of folding a Buddhist noble truth (‘don’t belong’) into a banal request to friends not to be late to the party you are throwing (‘don’t be long’) - it’s wincing. … which makes the perversely studied drabness of Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way” all the more striking.
“Flying” Though it is by-the-numbers, there’s something about this instrumental that just gels. Or perhaps just the melancholia, something my own upbringing has imprinted upon the topography. I say this less from any deictic or specific lyrical cues in the track (the lyrics are rather too self-consciously vague and symbolic) as, I don’t know: the vibe the counterpointed melody line. “The Fool on the Hill” has always struck me as, somehow, an ineluctibly suburban song. Yet it is saved, and more than saved, by its brass, its harmonies and above all by Ringo’s storming drumming. This is a repetitive cul-de-sac of a song, really. McCartney’s songwriting in the “Magical Mystery Tour” title track is, it now strikes me (which didn’t it strike me before?) surprisingly clanking and melodically dull. But less it isn’t.Ī relistening is an interesting exercise. First pressing has a blue lyric sheet in the centre of booklet, Second pressing has a yellow sheet.One of those rather neglected Beatles albums: from their golden period, yet perhaps (by association with the dreadful film) seen as a lesser work.
#The beatles magical mystery tour movie
This release came in a gatefold sleeve which also contains a 19 pages long children's book based on the tv movie Magical Mystery Tour.In 1967, Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double EP in UK by Parlophone. 10.4 Users who have this in their collection.9.4 Users who have this in their collection.8.4 Users who have this in their collection.7.4 Users who have this in their collection.6.4 Users who have this in their collection.5.4 Users who have this in their collection.4.4 Users who have this in their collection.3.4 Users who have this in their collection.2.4 Users who have this in their collection.1.4 Users who have this in their collection.
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