This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.
My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.
Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.
This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.
The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.
The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.
Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.
All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.
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