But the really extraordinary thing about Martin s contribution is the sound . Martin had been inspir

So we re getting near the end of these reviews fairhaven village inn now after this there s only the White Album in the mono box set. Do people want to hear my thoughts on the Abbey Road/Let fairhaven village inn It Be reissues or is it more the mono mix differences you re interested in?
Magical Mystery Tour gets surprisingly little respect as an album among Beatles fans, which I can only assume is because of its semi-canonical status (it was only released as a double-EP set in the UK, and padded fairhaven village inn out to album length in the US with singles) fairhaven village inn either that or its association with the famously disastrous but really not all that bad film to which it was a soundtrack. Either way, it s still one of my very favourite albums up there with Help! , Rubber Soul and Revolver as the band s best work.
(Incidentally, when the Magical Mystery Tour LP was finally fairhaven village inn issued fairhaven village inn as an LP in the UK, they used Capitol s masters, which included weird reprocessed-fake-stereo versions of the mono mixes of the tracks on side 2. As until buying this box I only owned the album on vinyl, that means that I ve never heard the proper stereo version fairhaven village inn of Baby You re A Rich Man so won t be able to compare that one very well).
Magical Mystery fairhaven village inn Tour itself is an inauspicious start to the album, given that there s very little actual song there, with what little interest there is coming from the horn arrangement, and from Lennon s comedy Scouser voice. The melody what there is is mostly a reworking of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds . I don t hear any distinct differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but what details there are are much clearer.
The Fool On The Hill again has few if any noticeable differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but is one of the most rewarding songs on the album. This simple, sparse melody is the kind of thing that McCartney used to be able to write almost without trying, and which he appears to have consciously chosen to give up bothering with around 1969. It s a shame, because this plain little D major/minor tune is one of the best things he s ever written.
And the arrangement, which is stunningly clear in this new mastering (and I can t say often enough how much better these CDs sound than any previous release, and this is coming from a fan of vinyl), shows that McCartney had been paying attention to Brian Wilson fairhaven village inn almost all the distinctive instrumental touches (the flute trio, the huffing fairhaven village inn bass harmonica, the jew s harp) had been used by Wilson on Pet Sounds and/or fairhaven village inn Good Vibrations . But this isn t to say that the music here is a Beach Boys pastiche the answering phrases on the acoustic guitar in the second verse are not something Wilson would ever do, the recorder part (the single most distinctive bit of the entire record) is McCartney s original idea. And most original of all, and totally Ringo, that hand percussion. The finger cymbal on the second beat of each bar in the chorus is completely out of nowhere, and still throws me off balance a little, but in a good way.
Flying is an instrumental credited to all four Beatles. A simple 12-bar with a gorgeous mellotron part played by John, it s pretty much like all the other twelve-bar instrumentals fairhaven village inn they noodled around with but didn t release. The guitars in the mono mix sound a bit louder than in stereo.
Blue Jay Way is one of George Harrison s most musically interesting songs. It sounds more like a standard pop song than his recent Indian work, thanks partly to the full-band performance, but like those songs is based around a drone, switching fairhaven village inn between C and Cdim7, with no other chords (George, like myself, was almost obsessed with the tonal ambiguity possible with diminished fairhaven village inn 7ths you hear them, especially Ddim7, throughout his later Beatles and early solo work).
The mono mix has far fewer backing vocals than the stereo mix, and the cello appears to be much higher in the mix (there s a little run of notes just after soon will be the break of day, sitting here in Blue Jay Way that I d never noticed before, despite twenty years of listening to this album).
Your Mother fairhaven village inn Should Know is the first case I ve come across of the mono version being substantially inferior to the stereo. There s phasing slathered fairhaven village inn over the whole thing, getting more noticeable towards the end, and the whole mix is very tinny. The cymbals, in particular, sound incredibly swooshy, and the whole thing sounds like listening to a tape that s been chewed up, through a tin can. It s a shame, because the song itself, while hardly a masterpiece, is pleasant enough. But this just sounds bad .
I Am The Walrus is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever recorded, based (as so much of Lennon fairhaven village inn s best work) on the most banal of sources. I ve spent three days trying to write this piece, and this and Strawberry Fields have caused me the most difficulty fairhaven village inn how do you talk sensibly about great art like this? Were I a more honest writer, this entire article would have been replaced with me talking about a bus journey I took into work about two years ago, listening to the Beatles through headphones and reading Promethea , and breaking down in tears because the human race is capable of this kind of utter, life-affirming beauty and greatness, and still spends the vast majority of its time doing such awful, dull, and downright evil things instead .
Which is, actually, I think one of the things this song s famously oblique lyric is about. The lyric was inspired by a letter from a kid at Lennon s old school, who told him that the teachers who ten years earlier had been saying fairhaven village inn Lennon had no potential were now teaching Beatles lyrics in class. So he took an old Scouse playground rhyme (the version in Pete Shotton s book is very slightly different, but the way we used to sing it in school was Yellow belly custard, green snot pie/All mixed up with a dead dog s eye/Slap it on a sandwich, nice and thick/And drink it down with a cup of cold sick ) and proceeded to write the biggest load of nonsense he could think of.
But it s nonetheless resonant nonsense the rage at the teachers who he believed to have oppressed him mixes in with the police (the melody of the song is taken from a police siren) to become hatred fairhaven village inn of authority and repression in general, especially the repression of artists the policemen are sitting pretty while you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe and of sexuality. It manages fairhaven village inn simultaneously to be utter nonsense and perfectly expressive, fairhaven village inn the surrealist rage of the id against the ego.
And the music complements it perfectly, and this is as much down to George Martin as to Lennon. Lennon s chord sequence is, of course, extraordinary, being as it is based on a circular pattern of all the major chords that start on the white notes, but Martin s arrangement adds to that, sticking a perpetually fairhaven village inn ascending string line over the perpetually descending fairhaven village inn bass part (most noticeable in the fade) to create the musical equivalent of an Escher picture (I m sure I ve nicked that line from somewhere, but it s true nonetheless).
But the really fairhaven village inn extraordinary thing about Martin fairhaven village inn s contribution is the sound . Martin had been inspired by Bernard Herrman in his arrangement for Eleanor Rigby , and that s an influence that s definitely in evidence here (and on Strawberry Fields , very much this song s twin, and about which I ll have less to say partly because I m saying some of it here), but the difference is in how the parts are recorded. The cello parts on this, especially, are recorded with the mic up against fairhaven village inn the strings, producing a sound that you could never hear in a normal orchestral or chamber performance it s simply not possible to get your ears that close to that many instruments simultaneously and giving the instrument a different timbre from anything I ve heard in music before the Beatles (and one that had a few imitators, notably ELO listen especially to Roy Wood s cello playing on 10538 Overture ). The orchestrations on the Beatles records at this point were genuinely sounds that had never been heard before . And they were being created by a man in his forties, an ex RAF officer who always wore a jacket and tie to work.
And those cello parts are far more audible in the mono mix up front and centre, loud and grungy and with a huge, magnificent sound. You can hear the bow scraping across the strings. I ve actually had to interrupt myself from typing this several times to play air cello, and I m only very slightly fairhaven village inn ashamed of the fact.
Everyone is on form here (though George fairhaven village inn stays in the background) Paul s bass is rock-solid and makes up a vital part of that Escher staircase at the end (when the chords become almost redundant, and the harmonic movement comes from the interaction between strings and bass), Ringo s playing like a man possessed, even the Mike Sammes Singers (of all people) are sounding suitably strange.
And then you have possibly the most perfect serendipity in the whole history of recorded music, when the radio that was being randomly fed in to the mix said are you, sir? straight after Lennon s I am the eggman . (Incidentally, the radio at the end means that up until the release of Love in 2006, the last minute of this song had never been released in true stereo, a fake-stereo bit of the mono mix being edited on).
Hello Goodbye was the A-side while I Am The Walrus was the B-side. Has ever a track been so completely outclassed by its flip side? Hello Goodbye is a mindless little nothing, written as essentially fairhaven village inn a game to show Alastair Taylor, Brian Epstein s assistant, how easy songwriting was. The mono and stereo mixes are essentially identical.
Strawberry Fields Forever this is frankly unfair. The last couple of albums each had *one* monumental track about which I could easily write a book. This one has two and they re similar enough that a lot of what I would say about this one (the string sounds, Martin s arrangements) has already been said about Walrus . I can t possibly write *another* thousand words on *this* song.
What I can say is that more than W