Magical Mystery Tour - English Version

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MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

★★★★ - HET PAROOL ★★★★ - DE VOLKSKRANT

The unorthodox ‘script’ for ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Paul created it at an altitude of 30,000 feet, on his way back from the US.

Introduction

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he basic idea seemed pretty straightforward, namely that The Analogues would perform the later Beatles studio albums live from the first to the last note. In reality however, the project proved full of hurdles: Magical Mystery Tour for instance wasn’t an album at all.

Originally, Magical Mystery Tour was a double EP consisting of six songs, and formed the soundtrack for the TV movie of the same name. In the USA, the EP format wasn’t very popular, but it was also standard practice for a full album to be longer than six songs. That was the basic reasoning behind the record company’s idea to combine the EP with a number of other single releases from 1967, which resulted in the Magical Mystery Tour album, and that is what The Analogues are performing live.

It’s rather comical that Magical Mystery Tour, the sequel to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is considered the ‘first true concept album’, was in fact a mere random collection of songs.

That didn’t matter to the fans and critics though, as Magical Mystery Tour was hugely successful, 3

both in a critical and commercial sense. This incidentally only applied to the music, as the film was ubiquitously panned after its release.

The Beatles stopped playing live shows in August 1966, and therefore never performed any of the material they recorded after that date. In fact they never even thought about what it would take to do so. The Analogues of course had to do just that. They encountered a number of challenges along the way, such as locating the tubular bell (in Fis) that gets rolled onto the stage just for Penny Lane, dissecting the incredible horn and string arrangements in I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever, and Jac Bico exchanged his usual guitar for the ‘recorder’ in The Fool On The Hill.

But it was also quite a task taking on the more obscure tracks like Flying and Blue Jay Way, which really came to life in a live setting.

Magical Mystery Tour was deemed a rather

mediocre film – essentially because The Beatles improvised their way through the entire movie.

However, it’s not inconceivable that the film may have been an inspiration for Easy Rider and the entire road movie genre; this in turn would support 4

our general theory that even if The Beatles did ad lib most of the time, it nearly always came up roses.

1. Magical Mystery Tour

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t might have been a very good idea to schedule a bit of a break, but four days after the completion of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles were already heading back into the studio for the Magical Mystery Tour recording sessions. The ever-restless McCartney was very inspired by his own idea for a film – for as far as you can actually use the word idea. On his way back from the USA (where he met the Merry Pranksters, a hippy commune travelling around in a psychedelically painted tour bus) he drew a pie chart in an effort to try and explain his idea to the others. Without a script or screenplay though – in fact not so much as a storyboard; just a pie chart.

Perhaps it was somewhat illustrative of the relative vagueness of their approach to things in those days (probably due their occasional acid indulgence).

That vagueness also accompanied them into the 5

Paul McCartney found his inspiration for ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ with Furthur (the bus used by the Merry Pranksters, a hippy commune around Ken Kesey).

studio, with McCartney’s opening track consisting of all of three chords and sparse lyrics. He encouraged his fellow Beatles to chip in, but their inspiration (after the intense Sgt. Pepper delivery) seemed to have been exhausted.

Guest trumpet player Gary Howard became so frustrated with the overall lack of progress that he decided to score a horn arrangement himself. It’s those very sounds that made it onto the record, and that you’ll be able to hear from The Analogues this evening.

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2. Your Mother Should Know

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cCartney wrote this song specifically for a scene in the movie where The Beatles dance their way down a monumental staircase, dressed in white tuxedos. It’s also a good example of why we cherish our decision as The Analogues to just focus on the sounds of The Beatles and omit the visuals.

The song is an ode to the time when Paul’s father Jim had his own orchestra, Jim Mac’s Jazz Band.

When talking about the story behind this song, Paul explained how he got into a very nostalgic mood at home surrounded by lots of family members and started messing A disproportional part of the film budget went towards the extremely impressive around with a staircase used by The Beatles in ‘Your Mother Should Know’. harmonium.

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3. I Am The Walrus

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ohn Lennon was able to find inspiration anywhere, from a TV commercial for cornflakes (Good Morning, Good Morning) through an antique circus poster (Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite), to the sound of a distant police car siren. With a bit of imagination, you can hear that sound right away during the intro for this song. With its complex harmonies and innovative structure, the track isn’t exactly a run of the mill pop song, and we might even be bold enough to state that this could be Lennon’s ultimate masterpiece. He himself thought that it was the best thing he’d ever written. If you disagree with this conclusion, then feel free to make yourself known to any Analogue after the show. You’d be in good company because even George Martin dismissed it initially. After John played it for him he apparently said: “What the hell do you want me to do with this?” It was a question that he subsequently answered by creating his incredible arrangements for choir, horns and strings.

In The Analogues, Bart is the Walrus and our own Walrus plays on the Hohner Pianet, also known as 8

the poor man’s Wurlitzer. This

electric piano defines the unique sound of the song, together of course with Lennon’s distorted vocal for which they used the cheapest Many people think it was a Wurlitzer but no – it was the and crappiest Hohner Pianet. microphone they could find in all of Abbey Road Studios.

A lot has been said about the song’s lyrics. One thing we know for a fact is that the song is derived from the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter,

by Lennon’s favorite writer Lewis Carroll. Other than that, the world can be divided into those who consider the lyrics total nonsense and the result of excessive drug use, and those who see a deeper meaning. The funniest story in our opinion is that Lennon received a letter from a young fan who attended his old high school Quarry Bank. The kid explained to him that they were now analyzing Beatles lyrics in his English classes. This in itself 9

made Lennon smile because when he was there, his teachers never saw him as more than a restless little troublemaker. The story goes that I Am The Walrus was a special present for his old teachers to go figure out.

The chances of this being based in fact are slightly remote, as the BBC banned the song based on their perception of obscenity within the lyrics (probably also to Lennon’s enjoyment).

4. The Fool On The Hill

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or The Fool On The Hill, Analogues guitarist Jac Bico doesn’t play his regular instrument but … the recorder. The recorder is kind of an odd instrument in that thousands of people with a strong desire to play a ‘cool’ instrument were actively discouraged to do so by having to play the recorder instead for several years. The sound of the instrument delivers an immediate association with rainy Sunday afternoons, unrealized dreams, a distant howling dog, in other words, melancholy; which is in fact the emotion that The Fool On The Hill triggers.

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And continuing with the unusual instrument theme (in pop music that is), our Bart has to juggle two rare and massive harmonicas. The Beatles needed two people for that job (John and George), but in The Analogues, Bart handles it all by himself, playing both a bass harmonica and chord harmonica. Not the kind of mouth organ that you’d nonchalantly pull out of your pocket by the campfire. As the names suggest: one delivers the low single bass notes while the other emits full chords when played.

The Maharashi (the guru who heavily influenced The Beatles for a short spell around 1967) seems

When the Maharashi speaks, his followers listen.

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to have been the inspiration for the actual Fool in this song. The fascination with all things arising from the mystic East – preferably with long grey beards – was a real sign of the times. And it tied in perfectly with the prevailing interest in mindexpanding substances.

5. Flying

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rom 1966 onwards, The Beatles were able to use Abbey Road Studios free of charge (EMI owned both the studios and The Beatles masters), scheduling their sessions around any paying customers that were booked in. But without the pressure of a ticking clock, the studio became more and more like their second home, and they liked to simply hang out there.

Few recording engineers were willing to work with them because they didn’t exactly adopt regular office hours. In addition, both Paul and John were incredibly demanding and often had seemingly impossible requests. It would drive most people mad, but not 21 year-old Geoff Emerick. We warmly recommend his book Here, There and Everywhere for a comprehensive account of what it was like to 12

Geoff Emerick in a typical pose: “Let Ringo be Ringo”.

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be the chief engineer for The Beatles. In the book, Emerick describes how Flying was the result of a jam session in the middle of the night. In his words it was “really nothing more than a twelve-bar blues born out of one of their late-night jams”. He pulled the best parts from that recording, overdubbed a few extra takes and the result was an atmospheric piece of film music. That’s how simple it can be folks.

6. Blue Jay Way

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h, and there it is: the song that many people (not us of course) skipped when playing the record. Notably it is often George Harrison who was responsible for the odd song in the mix (think of Within You Without You on Sgt. Pepper), but these are also the very songs that fascinate enormously when performed live (for us performers in any case – hopefully also for you the listener).

Curiously, there are numerous covers of this rather intimidating song by other artists. You’d think that if anyone wanted to cover someone else’s song, 14

they’d choose more of a sing-a-long track. We researched it recently (as if we don’t have better things to do) and listened to Dan Bern, Tracey Bonham, Lord Sitar, Borbetomagus, Dog Age, Colin Newman, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and of course the Secret Machines (all this trivia can immediately be forgotten).

7. Hello, Goodbye

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he love-hate relationship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon was very well illustrated by the first single release that followed the death of manager Brian Epstein*.

Hello, Goodbye, a shamelessly simple but ever so catchy McCartneyan melody, became a worldwide mega hit of course. Interestingly, for the B-side of the single they chose Lennon’s I Am The Walrus!

As The Analogues, we have always been clear about our incredible respect for this song. You’d think it would be the last song to be relegated to the B-side of a single release, just because something had to be found for the flipside: kind of like seeing Johan Cruyff on the bench as a substitute (or Bobby Charlton for the anglophiles 15

among us). So understandably, Lennon was not amused and tended to show that by talking down the quality of Hello, Goodbye.

We can understand that it annoyed him when McCartney judged his own lyrics as “being about the dualism present throughout the universe, whereby as always I tend to emphasize the positive side of things”. In Lennon’s opinion it was a randomly organized overview of simple opposites.

Oh well. We’ll just keep it to a very smart interplay of words, which, in all its simplicity, works magically on the tune for which it was written. And yes – singing along is allowed. * Brian Epstein should have his own book instead of this meagre footnote. Luckily others have done it properly: In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story is a great example. It can never been proven but there is a real chance that no one would have ever heard of The Beatles if not for Brian Epstein. He was able to sign The Beatles to Parlophone, the label run by George Martin. And without George Martin, The Beatles would have been an entirely different band. In August 1967, Brian Epstein passed away at the age of 32. It is noteworthy that although The 16

Beatles had a few more years of incredible creative production in them, they also started to drift apart soon after his death. Without his leadership, all kinds of creative, commercial and personal friction was allowed to develop ‌ and escalate, with the end of The Beatles as the inevitable result in 1970.

Brian Epstein, the man with (among many other things) the unpleasant task of removing Pete Best from the band.

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8. Strawberry Fields Forever

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trawberry Fields Forever, When I’m SixtyFour and Penny Lane were the first songs

The Beatles recorded for what eventually would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. However, Capitol Records, the Beatles’ record label, insisted that they release an immediate single. They settled on launching a unique double A-side single: Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane.

UK chart regulation at the time did not allow for a single to also feature on an album in the same year.

This has eventually led to a favourite game among Beatles fans: if these two songs had ended up on Sgt. Pepper as originally intended, what would have been their spot in the track order, and which songs were likely to have been dropped? After all, the same regulations also stated that an album could be no longer than 45 minutes. Please let us have your opinion – the winner will receive the DVD Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LIVE by The Analogues.

The recording of Strawberry Fields took all of 55 hours of studio time, an absurd amount of time by 18

today’s standards. Lennon didn’t quite know what he wanted: he initially introduced it to the band and George Martin as a mellow guitar ballad. Because of a complete lack of urgency (the studio was their home), a tendency for experimentation, and some instances of controlled accidents, it evolved to become the baroque masterpiece we know today.

It’s worthwhile listening to the stripped down version of the song on Ringo filming a very big camera with a very small one.

Anthology 2,

without George Martin’s elaborate horn and string arrangements.

In the end, Lennon liked both versions and proposed to patch the two of them together. An impossible task, because the two versions were different both in tempo and key. The conversation would have gone something like: John: “Why don’t you patch the two recordings together?”

Geoff Emerick and George Martin: “Sorry that’s 19

impossible to do.”

John: “I’m sure you can do it. See you!”

Well, it did turn out to be possible, and with that a huge challenge was created for The Analogues. In the end they slowed down the one recording and sped up the other to make it all pan out. But in the process, they became completely confused about what key it was being played in – not to mention the drum sound that varies from one part of the song to the next due to the Varispeed technique.

Finally of course we cannot let the mellotron go unmentioned when talking about this song.

A sampler before its time, the mellotron is a keyboard with a loop of magnetic tape with a recorded sound under every individual key. The iconic flutes at the beginning of Strawberry Fields emanated from a mellotron. After an endless and global search, we finally found one, which in itself is a miracle as there were only 35 ever made. Our mellotron was meticulously renovated for The Analogues by the son of its original maker.

And one more thing: he doesn’t sing I Buried Paul but Cranberry Sauce!

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9. Penny Lane

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uch like Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever, McCartney’s Penny Lane is an impression of Liverpool in their youth.

Without this song no one would have ever heard of Penny Lane, but to this day, that entire area of Liverpool is a tourist attraction, with street signs being stolen by overenthusiastic fans almost daily, and Analogues drummer Fred’s dog goes by the name Penny Lane. McCartney made a really big effort on this one, as he had just heard Lennon’s rather impressive Strawberry Fields Forever, so he was extra motivated to write something special.

Many of the most effective collaborations like the one between Lennon and McCartney have a lot to do with simple one-upmanship.

The story behind the trumpet solo is yet another example of how The Beatles were very open to external influences. One week before the recording session, Paul viewed a TV broadcast of Bach’s second Brandenburger Concerto. He sang his idea for the solo, which was inspired by Bach, to George Martin, who noted it down as he heard it.

He then called David Mason, the actual trumpet 21

David Mason spent a lifetime playing in leading orchestras around the world, which no one remembers, but popped into the studio to play ‘Penny Lane’ one afternoon and became immortal.

player in the TV concert, and asked him to come into the studio. Mason came in for a session and played McCartney’s solo. We called in Jean Pierre Grannetia for our version, and his solo always makes for one of the most beautiful moments of the evening.

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10. Baby You’re A Rich Man

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ight from the start of Baby You’re A Rich Man, the audience can witness the true struggle between Bart van Poppel and his clavioline, a monophone* early version of the synthesizer (but more than anything a very clumsy keyboard that is all too often uncooperative – hopefully tonight we’ll be lucky). Finding one of these unusual instruments was also easier said than done.

And all because The Beatles had to switch to Olympic Sound Studios for their recording session one day, due to Abbey Road being already booked. There, they stumbled upon the clavioline. The legend goes that rather than playing the instrument with his fingers, Lennon The clavioline. Often kaput. rolled an orange across 23

the keyboard. Bart tried it, but opted for the traditional manner (as it seemed unwise to attack the fragile instrument with fruit). * A monophone instrument can only deliver sound by one key at a time so it cannot play chords.

OK – well not everything was better in the old days.

11. All You Need Is Love

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rian Epstein was beside himself after arranging for The Beatles to represent England for Our World, the first global live satellite TV show, only to find out to his disappointment that The Beatles weren’t all that excited and didn’t take it terribly seriously.

They were way too busy with the completion of Sgt. Pepper; close to the date Lennon ended up writing All You Need Is Love for this very purpose.

The show would be hosted at Abbey Road Studio One with drums and background vocals prerecorded on tape, and the band playing and singing live, as well as the orchestra.

At that moment (almost all) The Analogues were 24

The Beatles during a press conference ahead of the ‘Our World’ programme.

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in their pyjamas, with parental permission (for this one time only) to stay up in front of the black and white TV waiting for the big event: rather a contrast with The Beatles, who were actually rather nervous for this complex operation. The recording that found its way into the shops three days later was the actual recording of that evening.

Only two things were adjusted: Ringo’s drum fill at the beginning was overdubbed, and John rerecorded two of his vocal lines.

Seeing as the song went from the drawing board to an actual record in stores worldwide in less than three weeks, this also didn’t require a huge challenge for The Analogues to bring to life. In fact, the key requirements were (a) an antique harpsichord, (b) the complete orchestra and (c) a willing audience to join in with the chorus.

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John Lennon cooperated reluctantly with the film, a brainchild of Paul McCartney.

The rest of the band weren’t immediately enamoured with it either.

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Your tour guide.

Paul McCartney.

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Sometimes it’s a pity that The Analogues decided never to dress like The Beatles early on.

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The Analogues

Director

Bart van Poppel - bass, keys, vocals Jan van der Meij - guitars, vocals Fred Gehring - drums, vocals Diederik Nomden - keys, guitars, vocals Jac Bico - guitars, vocals

Ruut Weissman

Set & light design Jantje Geldof

Visuals

Orchestra

Marcel de VrĂŠ Ruben Langedijk & RenĂŠ te Riele (Vision Impossible)

Marieke de Bruijn - violin Jacob Plooij - violin, dilruba Camilla van der Kooij - viola Jos Teeken - cello Marijn van Prooijen - double bass Allard Robert - French horn, trumpet Jean Pierre Grannetia - trumpet Michel Lamers - saxophone, clarinet Christof May - saxophone, clarinet

Stage manager Eelco Ladan

Sound technicians Remko Luijten Ger Arts

Light technicians Tijs Winters Wouter Janmaat

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Instrument & amp technicians

Publicity Monique Ophorst (Multimo Media) Hajo de Boer

Sidney Katz Martijn Klippel Niels de Maa

Production Louis-Fritz Maurer

Technical advisor Hennie Schwithal

Agency

Set building De man met de hamer

George Visser Productions B.V. + 31 (0)70 3465657 www.gvproductions.nl

Styling

Thanks to

Carine Beelen

Peak Audio (Amsterdam) Ampco Flashlight Rental B.V. Creative Technology Holland B.V. Tenfeet Group B.V. Pieter Smit People’s Place Peas Catering

Drivers Eric Apeldoorn Iwan Verploegen Richard Hoppe

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Credits Text: Hajo de Boer Copy editor: Annemiek van Grondel Translation: Renee Gehring Translation proofreader: Sam Ford Graphic design: Robert Muda van Hamel Photo editing: Hajo de Boer & Robert Muda van Hamel Photography: Pag. 6 - Jeremy Hogan / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 7 - fartoonsblog.blogspot.nl Pag. 9 - Michel Mees Pag. 12 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 13 - Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 17 - Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 19 - Tracksimages.com / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 24 - Michel Mees Pag. 26 - Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 27 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 28 - Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 29 - United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Pag. 30/31 - Barwerd van der Plas Print: Drukkerij Nautilus

First print - May 2017 Š 2017 Over Easy B.V. 34

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