Although the Beatles felt the need to prove themselves capable of functioning without the guidance of manager Brian Epstein, the truth is that, for the first time in their career, they were really directionless.

It is impossible to imagine that a project as flimsy and unscripted as ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ would have even been considered under Brian’s watch, but with him gone, the Beatles reacted with an odd mixture of fear and freedom; fear in the sense that there was nobody ‘watching the shop’, and freedom for pretty much the same reason. It was if mom and dad had gone on vacation and left the boys alone to fend for themselves.

As a film, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ was a directionless, albeit harmless, bit of nonsense. It was easy to dismiss the artistic merits of the movie, but the music was as transcendent as ever. In America, most of us never saw the film anyway. We only had the 12” LP with a full-color booklet full of odd photographs of scenes extracted from the movie. In a sense, this only added to the band’s mid-60’s psychedelic mystique, with the album providing a soundtrack to our imaginations. In this sense, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ ultimately achieved the exact goal that the Beatles intended.

Featured songs include;

1) Magical Mystery Tour

2) The Fool on the Hill

3) Flying

4) Blue Jay Way

5) Your Mother Should Know

6) I Am the Walrus

7) Hello Goodbye