Friday 8th August

At the time it seemed incredible.  Revolver was moving into weirder and weirder territory but none of us was prepared for Sergeant Pepper.  I had heard nothing like it before; the freedom, the variety, the sheer madness of it all was incredible.  I loved the record, maybe too much.  Then on Boxing Day 1967 on BBC2 came the third Beatles film – Magical Mystery Tour.  It was self produced and on one level very amateurish – Brian Epstein had just died and maybe they needed a guiding hand.  There wasn’t much of a story, but a few good songs.  Then came another film in 1968 – Yellow submarine, and the Beatles weren’t really even in it.  Though portrayed as cartoon Beatles it was still a marvelous escapade, full of Blue Meanies and the most brilliant of effects, sometimes the colours just vibrated off the screen.  The Beatles wrote a few songs for the film which have lasted quite well, though at the time they were even stranger than Pepper.

These three albums seemed to suggest that anything at all was possible.  They actually drew back from the edge of madness with the White Album, although this did contain Revolution Number 9, which may rate as their strangest song of all time.  They returned to complete sanity with Abbey Road and Let it Be, but they were hardly a group at all by then, each coming into the studio with demos which sometimes other Beatles joined in on.

Strangely those middle albums, Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour have aged far quicker than the earlier records or than the last three.  They sound almost as some sort of a joke or a silly period now.  Only Yellow Submarine, with it’s weird songs perfectly counter-pointed by George Martins instrumental side seems to stand out as really good.

Throughout 1969 they were breaking up, and by 1970 with the end of the decade it was also the end of the Beatles….but not the end of their records.