forget them,” comments Davies.
The song was about an idiot savant, a person everyone considers to be a fool but who is actually a misunderstood visionary. Paul was thinking of gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who were often derided and an Italian hermit he once read about who emerged from a cave in the late 1940s to discover that he’d missed the entire Second World War. An experience which is said to have contributed to Paul’s image of the fool standing on the hill is recounted by Alistair Taylor in his book Yesterday.
Taylor recalls an early morning walk on Primrose Hill with Paul and his dog Martha, where they watched the sun rise before realizing that Martha had gone missing. “We turned round to go and suddenly there he was standing behind us,” wrote Taylor. “He was a middle-aged man, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat. Nothing in that, you may think, but he’d come up behind us over the bare top of the hill in total silence.”
Both Paul and Taylor were sure that the man hadn’t been there seconds earlier because they’d been searching the area for the dog.He seemed to have appeared miraculously. The three men exchanged greetings, the man commented on the beautiful view and then walked way. When they looked around, he’d vanished. “There was no sign of the man,” said Taylor. “He’d just disappeared from the top of the hill as if he’d been carried off into the air! No one could have run to the thin cover of the nearest trees in the time we had turned away from him, and no one could have run over the crest of the hill.”
What added to the mystery was that immediately before the man’s appearance Paul and Taylor had, provoked by the beautiful view over London and the rising of the sun, been mulling over the existence of God. “Paul and I both felt the same weird sensation that something special had happened. We sat down rather shakily on the seat and Paul said, ‘What the hell do you make of that? That’s weird. He was here, wasn’t he? We did speak to him?’
“Back at Cavendish, we spent the rest of the morning talking about what we had seen and heard and felt,” continues Taylor. “It sounds just like any acid tripper’s fantasy to say they had a religious experience on Primrose Hill just before the morning rush hour, but neither of us had taken anything like that. Scotch and Coke was the only thing we’d touched all night. We both felt we’d been through some mystical religious experience, yet we didn’t care to name even to each other what or who we’d seen on that hilltop for those few brief seconds.”
In Magical Mystery Tour , the song was used over a sequence with Paul on a hilltop overlooking Nice.
FLYING
The Beatles had recorded two previous instrumentals – ‘Cry For A Shadow’ in Germany in 1961 (when backing Tony Sheridan as the Beat Brothers) and the unreleased ‘ 12-Bar Original’ in 1965. ‘Flying’ was the only instrumental to be released on a Beatles’ record.
Used as incidental music for Magical Mystery Tour , ‘Flying’ emerged out of a studio jam. Originally titled ‘Aerial Tour Instrumental’, it was registered as a group composition and featured a basic rhythm track with additional mellotron, backwards organ and vocal chanting. The cloud scenes over which ‘Flying’ was heard in the film, were originally shot by Stanley Kubrick for 2001 Space Odyssey but never used.
BLUE JAY WAY
‘Blue Jay Way’ was written by George in August 1967 during his visit to California with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. On arrival in Los Angeles on August 1, they were driven to a small rented cottage with a pool on Blue Jay Way, a street high in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. It belonged to Robert Fitzpatrick, a music business lawyer who was on vacation in Hawaii.
Derek Taylor, formerly the Beatles’ press officer and now a publicist working in Los Angeles, was due to visit them on their first night in town, but got lost in
The song was about an idiot savant, a person everyone considers to be a fool but who is actually a misunderstood visionary. Paul was thinking of gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who were often derided and an Italian hermit he once read about who emerged from a cave in the late 1940s to discover that he’d missed the entire Second World War. An experience which is said to have contributed to Paul’s image of the fool standing on the hill is recounted by Alistair Taylor in his book Yesterday.
Taylor recalls an early morning walk on Primrose Hill with Paul and his dog Martha, where they watched the sun rise before realizing that Martha had gone missing. “We turned round to go and suddenly there he was standing behind us,” wrote Taylor. “He was a middle-aged man, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat. Nothing in that, you may think, but he’d come up behind us over the bare top of the hill in total silence.”
Both Paul and Taylor were sure that the man hadn’t been there seconds earlier because they’d been searching the area for the dog.He seemed to have appeared miraculously. The three men exchanged greetings, the man commented on the beautiful view and then walked way. When they looked around, he’d vanished. “There was no sign of the man,” said Taylor. “He’d just disappeared from the top of the hill as if he’d been carried off into the air! No one could have run to the thin cover of the nearest trees in the time we had turned away from him, and no one could have run over the crest of the hill.”
What added to the mystery was that immediately before the man’s appearance Paul and Taylor had, provoked by the beautiful view over London and the rising of the sun, been mulling over the existence of God. “Paul and I both felt the same weird sensation that something special had happened. We sat down rather shakily on the seat and Paul said, ‘What the hell do you make of that? That’s weird. He was here, wasn’t he? We did speak to him?’
“Back at Cavendish, we spent the rest of the morning talking about what we had seen and heard and felt,” continues Taylor. “It sounds just like any acid tripper’s fantasy to say they had a religious experience on Primrose Hill just before the morning rush hour, but neither of us had taken anything like that. Scotch and Coke was the only thing we’d touched all night. We both felt we’d been through some mystical religious experience, yet we didn’t care to name even to each other what or who we’d seen on that hilltop for those few brief seconds.”
In Magical Mystery Tour , the song was used over a sequence with Paul on a hilltop overlooking Nice.
FLYING
The Beatles had recorded two previous instrumentals – ‘Cry For A Shadow’ in Germany in 1961 (when backing Tony Sheridan as the Beat Brothers) and the unreleased ‘ 12-Bar Original’ in 1965. ‘Flying’ was the only instrumental to be released on a Beatles’ record.
Used as incidental music for Magical Mystery Tour , ‘Flying’ emerged out of a studio jam. Originally titled ‘Aerial Tour Instrumental’, it was registered as a group composition and featured a basic rhythm track with additional mellotron, backwards organ and vocal chanting. The cloud scenes over which ‘Flying’ was heard in the film, were originally shot by Stanley Kubrick for 2001 Space Odyssey but never used.
BLUE JAY WAY
‘Blue Jay Way’ was written by George in August 1967 during his visit to California with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. On arrival in Los Angeles on August 1, they were driven to a small rented cottage with a pool on Blue Jay Way, a street high in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. It belonged to Robert Fitzpatrick, a music business lawyer who was on vacation in Hawaii.
Derek Taylor, formerly the Beatles’ press officer and now a publicist working in Los Angeles, was due to visit them on their first night in town, but got lost in
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