Keith Dewhurst began his write-up in The Guardian by expressing his amazement “on finding myself alone in praising… Magical Mystery Tour” and wasn’t stretching matters in describing it as a “deliberate parody of mass communication”. Citing complaints from viewers that purportedly ran into their thousands, it was dismissed as baffling and tasteless in equal measure. It was met with almost entirely damning reviews from a British press surprised and a little delighted with the chance to take the Beatles down a notch. The made-for-television film set an unexpected precedent when the BBC first aired it in black and white on Boxing Day, 26th December 1967 – it delivered the band’s first critical flop. And though their respective reputations have long since parted company, it’s still difficult to discuss one without the other. The Beatles’ ninth studio album is inseparable from their third film – the former served the latter, after all – yet throughout the decades following their release, the record seems somehow to have freed itself from its parent project. Amid all that came what was fated to be remembered for decades as an almost wilful attempt to slip from the top, or at least not to bother about being there anymore – 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour. Creative splintering fed the crepuscular mood of the White Album before the bitter divorce of Let It Be – now fully re-appraised in the full-color, full-feeling Get Back project – and the concerted rally of Abbey Road, a lush and fittingly fulsome farewell. The audacious Revolver was followed by pop’s first fully realized concept album in Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the intervening years, they began, along with Brian Wilson, to unlock the potential of the recording studio. Unless you were fortunate enough to be walking along Savile Row at 12:30 on 30 January 1969, that is, when you could have craned your neck roof-wards for half an hour or so and heard a bit of history on your lunch break. His point was taken, and San Francisco’s Candlestick Park was the last the world saw of “the four tiny figures, jerking and gesticulating inaudible”, as Larkin had it. Spooked by naive security measures and the potential danger to the band and fans alike, not to mention disillusioned by the experience of playing music none of them had a hope of hearing above the screaming that was losing its novelty Harrison was not to be persuaded. Like them or not – there are many who don’t, and many who pretend they don’t – they remain, in the poet’s words, “unreachable, frozen, fabulous”.īy the mid-1960s, the Beatles had long since fulfilled the teenage John Lennon’s cocksure promise to become the “topper-most of the popper-most!” In 1966 a frazzled, almost prematurely aged George Harrison had to be persuaded to stay the course on the flight home from the US after another arduous and febrile tour. Some 40 years after decades of revision and a succession of legacy projects, the Beatles’ cultural standing is set in amber. Larkin was looking back over a single fractious decade, one which culminated tragically in murder, but he was on the money. To Larkin’s mind, they were isolated from their peers, stranded for all eternity at the summit, there to operate in “the rarified atmosphere of hagiolatry” that their talents and the rush of “some unsuspected socio-emotional pressure” had transported them to. Not a confession but rather his take on the Beatles. Writing for The Observer newspaper in 1983, the British poet Philip Larkin declared that “when you get to the top, there is nowhere go but down”.
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