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Fri 29 August 2025 13:00, UK
After finally making the decision to quit touring in the summer of 1966, The Beatles set to work realising the studio’s full, creative potential.
Shaking off the last vestiges of Beatlemania, the band was able to wield the recording possibilities now available to them without concern for how to perform live. They’d already reached this point in spirit. Released days before their final tour across the US, Revolver was already boasting cuts far removed from their typical setlist, from ‘Eleanor Rigby’s’ funereal strings, the scorching Motown that beams all over ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, and the lysergic wanders of mortality that haunt the surrealist album closer ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
But with touring now fully severed, The Beatles’ pop hinterland was cast wide open. That November, the band entered EMI Studios to cut the immortal ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a seismic leap forward in their LSD-guided sonic experiments. Issued as a double A-side single along with ‘Penny Lane’ to appease label pressure for a release, the Fabs began the sessions for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the kaleidoscopic marvel dropped amid the ‘Summer of Love’ and heralded the ‘album era’ for good.
Still lost in their psychedelic fancies, the band rustled up another handful of songs to score the Magical Mystery Tour TV feature. Conceived and largely captained by Paul McCartney, Magical Mystery Tour depicted the far-out happenings that take place aboard the titular expedition, involving a groovy coach trip and the mystical escapades it encounters at the hands of mischievous magicians, played by The Beatles themselves.
While the feature was panned after its Boxing Day broadcast on BBC One, the songs contained on the accompanying EP soundtrack, issued as an LP Stateside with various singles tacked on its second side, boasted a collection of grade-A Beatles numbers. Sitting at Magical Mystery Tour’s centre is John Lennon’s aggressively weird ‘I Am the Walrus’, another slice of leftfield pop that demanded hefty studio time to create its artful swirl of heady compositions and hallucinatory aural collage.
Dreamed up from his childhood love of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ with lines sketched out during two acid trip sessions, Lennon sought to throw all manner of nonsensical references, schoolyard nursery rhymes, and a touch of transcendental mantra in an effort to poke fun at the intense scrutiny and faux-academic analysis of much of The Beatles’ songbook. According to Hunter Davies’ authorised biography, Lennon quipped, “Let the fuckers work that one out” while working on the humorous piece.
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First heard as the B-side to ‘Hello Goodbye’, released two weeks before the Magical Mystery Tour EP, ‘I Am the Walrus’ cacophony of strange samples and sounds gave the band’s supposed chin-stroking sleuths plenty to chew over. Aside from its colourful orchestral arrangements and Lennon’s warped vocals, ‘I Am the Walrus’ dreamlike crescendo is what elevated the track to the psychedelic heights of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’
Melding in its dazzling brew is a mosaic of recording trickery and found sounds. The bizarre chorus of shrieking commands and whooping yells is all bellowed from the 16-voice Mike Sammes Singers group, given an unusual direction from producer George Martin to bleat phrases and incantations such as “oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper” and “everybody’s got one” to create the offbeat choral finale.
Coated in early flanging delay effects and sound signal rotations is the memorably eerie capture of a mysterious, dramatic reading. Inspired by avant-garde composer John Cage’s 1956 work ‘Radio Music’, on ‘I Am the Walrus’ final sessions on September 29th, the evening of the final overdubs was interrupted by Lennon, eager to record directly from an AM radio for an extra layer of fuzzed-out odd. Tuning in to the BBC Third Programme, just days before its BBC Radio 3 rebrand, a happenstance capture of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear, specifically Act IV, Scene six, found its way into the mix.
Performed by Mark Dignam as Earl of Gloucester, Philip Guard as Edgar, and John Bryning as Oswald, ‘I Am the Walrus’ grapples in detuned, fragmented blasts of Edgar talking to his blinded Earl father and his later murder of Oswald. As the song tapers off into the psychedelic ether, the final exchange is heard in shreds of clarity in the parting ascent:
EDGAR: I know thee well, a serviceable villain,
As duteous to the vices of thy mistress,
As badness would desire.
GLOUCESTER: What, is he dead?
EDGAR: Sit you down, father; rest you.
It’s a magic flourish that adds a captivating dimension to Lennon’s joyous and bizarre collage prank. Edited and captured in the studio like an alchemist in a laboratory, ‘I Am the Walrus’ skewed grab at vocal choirs, electronic trickery, and excerpts of Shakespeare all serve its confoundingly colourful character, and no doubt kept up many an earnest Beatles nut into the early hours trying to crack its absurdist coda.
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