Part of
Recording the "Magical Mystery Tour" soundtrack
Apr 25 - May 3 and Aug 22 - Nov 17, 1967 • Songs recorded during this session appear on Magical Mystery Tour (US LP - Mono)
- Album Songs recorded during this session officially appear on the Magical Mystery Tour (US LP - Mono) LP.
- Studio:
- EMI Studios, Studio Two, Abbey Road
- Studio:
- EMI Studios, Studio One, Abbey Road
Timeline
More from year 1967
Some songs from this session appear on:
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About
On September 5 and 6, 1967, The Beatles recorded the backing track for “I Am The Walrus“. On this day, they continued the overdubbing process in two separate sessions. Paul McCartney also added backing vocals to “The Fool On The Hill” at the tail end of the second session.
The first session took place from 2:30 to 5:30 at Abbey Studio One, during which George Martin’s orchestral score was recorded by 16 session musicians. The musicians included eight violinists (Sidney Sax, Jack Rothstein, Ralph Elman, Andrew McGee, Jack Greene, Louis Stevens, John Jezzard, and Jack Richards), four cellists (Lionel Ross, Eldon Fox, Bram Martin, and Terry Weil), one clarinettist (Gordon Lewin), and three horn players (Neil Sanders, Tony Tunstall, and Morris Miller).
The orchestra was recorded and overdubbed simultaneously with a reduction mix of Take 17. It took the musicians seven attempts (numbered 18 to 24) to complete the session, with Take 20 being the best. However, the last four takes were only edit pieces and did not last the entire length of the song.
The second session took place from 7 pm to 3:30 am at Studio Two. To free up two tracks, a reduction mix of Take 20 was made and named Take 25.
During this session, George Martin conducted the Mike Sammes Singers, which consisted of eight male and eight female vocalists, including Peggie Allen, Wendy Horan, Pat Whitmore, Jill Utting, June Day, Sylvia King, Irene King, G Mallen, Fred Lucas, Mike Redway, John O’Neill, F Dachtler, Allan Grant, D Griffiths, J Smith, and J Fraser.
The singers recorded their parts onto one track of Take 25, which already contained the previously recorded orchestral score and the Beatles’ basic track. With the addition of the vocals, the song took on its characteristic and complex arrangement, with intricate layers of sound.
When John brought along ‘I Am The Walrus’, later in 1967, I said, ‘I see what you’re trying to get out: it’s very bizarre, but it’s great. Let’s organize it.’ John went along with that. I wrote out a score for cellos, wrote out all the parts for the singers, right down to the ‘ha ha has’ and the ‘hee hee hees’ which John had suggested, sung by the Mike Sammes Singers.
George Martin – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995
I think in a way, for instance something like ‘I Am The Walrus’, someone like John probably doesn’t get enough credit, because those sessions, those preparatory sessions, were very important because they set the style and often gave very accurate briefs of what we wanted. For instance, all of John’s “Everybody’s got one” and “Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, ha ha ha” [from ‘I Am The Walrus], all that stuff was from John at a session with George Martin, a preparation session. We’d be around at John’s house or George’s house, and he’d say, ‘I want to go, ‘Ha ha ha’’. So, George would write that all that in the score, and John would sort of say, ‘Well, it could go like that or like that’, but we couldn’t write so we needed George to translate our thoughts.
Paul McCartney – From interview with Clash Magazine, September 2009
The idea of using voices was a good one. We got in The Mike Sammes Singers, very commercial people and so alien to John that it wasn’t true. But in the score I simply orchestrated the laughs and noises, the whooooooah kind of thing. John was delighted with it.
George Martin – From beatlesebooks.com
John worked with George Martin on the orchestration and did some very exciting things with The Mike Sammes Singers, the likes of which they’ve never done before or since, like getting them to chant, ‘Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one…,’ which they loved. It was a session to be remembered. Most of the time they got asked to do ‘Sing Something Simple’ and all the old songs, but John got them doing all sorts of swoops and phonetic noises. It was a fascinating session. That was John’s baby, great one, a really good one.
Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997
I had this whole choir saying ‘Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one.’ But when you get thirty people, male and female, on top of thirty cellos and on top of the Beatles’ rock ‘n’ roll rhythm section, you can’t hear what they’re saying.
John Lennon, 1980 – From “All We Are Saying” by David Sheff, 1981
In a 2015 interview, Ray Thomas of The Moody Blues relates how fellow bandmate Mike Pinder and himself also took part in this vocal overdub:
We were very friendly at the time with the Beatles. I mean, this is going back to the original band… we lived in one big house all together in North Hampton, and that was fantastic. We rented this house for a year and it was just a year-long party. The Beatles used to come over and there’s all these girls hanging around outside, and they used to come across our neighbor’s back gardens, climbing the fences to get in without the fans seeing them. They came over and they played us Sgt. Pepper. They really admired our band and of course we admired them, and so they came over and said, “What do you think?” – because they wanted our opinion on it. In those days, there wasn’t any backbiting with bands. There was so much creativity going on. We used to sit down and listen to somebody else and say, “Bloody hell, that’s fantastic. Why didn’t we think of that?”…stuff like that. Anyway, Mike and I went into Abbey Road after that, and we played on “I Am The Walrus” and “Fool on the Hill.” And it was my idea to put all those harmonicas on. There was George and John, me and Mike around the microphone. Paul was in the control room at the desk, and we put these harmonicas down and did some vocal backing on “Walrus.”
Ray Thomas – From Discussions Magazine Music Blog: An EXCLUSIVE interview with THE MOODY BLUES’ Ray Thomas! (archive.org), January 2015
With the recording completed, the mixing process for “I Am The Walrus” commenced on September 28, the very next day.
“The Fool On The Hill” was recorded over two days, on September 25 and 26, 1967. Towards the end of this session, Paul McCartney recorded some backing vocals that were strategically placed to double his lead vocals in certain parts of the song.
Following this, the engineering team created a mono mix (RM2) from Take 6. The final touches on the song were added on October 20, 1967, when three flute parts were included, completing the work on “The Fool On The Hill.“
Last updated on April 14, 2023
Songs recorded
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Staff
Musicians on "The Fool On The Hill"
- Paul McCartney:
- Backing vocals
Musicians on "I Am The Walrus"
- George Martin:
- Conductor
- Jack Rothstein:
- Violin
- Sidney Sax:
- Violin
- Peggie Allen:
- Backing vocals
- Wendy Horan:
- Backing vocals
- Pat Whitmore:
- Backing vocals
- Jill Utting:
- Backing vocals
- June Day:
- Backing vocals
- Sylvia King:
- Backing vocals
- Irene King:
- Backing vocals
- G Mallen:
- Backing vocals
- Fred Lucas:
- Backing vocals
- Mike Redway:
- Backing vocals
- John O'Neill:
- Backing vocals
- F Dachtler:
- Backing vocals
- Allan Grant:
- Backing vocals
- D Griffiths:
- Backing vocals
- J Smith:
- Backing vocals
- J Fraser:
- Backing vocals
- Ralph Elman:
- Violin
- Andrew McGee:
- Violin
- Jack Greene:
- Violin
- Louis Stevens:
- Violin
- John Jezzard:
- Violin
- Jack Richards:
- Violin
- Lionel Ross:
- Cello
- Eldon Fox:
- Cello
- Bram Martin:
- Cello
- Terry Weil:
- Cello
- Gordon Lewin:
- Clarinet
- Neil Sanders:
- Horn
- Tony Tunstall:
- Horn
- Morris Miller:
- Horn
- Ray Thomas:
- Backing vocals ?
- Mike Pinder:
- Backing vocals ?
- The Mike Sammes Singers:
- Backing vocals
Production staff
Going further
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions • Mark Lewisohn
The definitive guide for every Beatles recording sessions from 1962 to 1970.
We owe a lot to Mark Lewisohn for the creation of those session pages, but you really have to buy this book to get all the details - the number of takes for each song, who contributed what, a description of the context and how each session went, various photographies... And an introductory interview with Paul McCartney!
The third book of this critically - acclaimed series, nominated for the 2019 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) award for Excellence In Historical Recorded Sound, "The Beatles Recording Reference Manual: Volume 3: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band through Magical Mystery Tour (late 1966-1967)" captures the band's most innovative era in its entirety. From the first take to the final remix, discover the making of the greatest recordings of all time. Through extensive, fully-documented research, these books fill an important gap left by all other Beatles books published to date and provide a unique view into the recordings of the world's most successful pop music act.
If we like to think, in all modesty, that the Paul McCartney Project is the best online ressource for everything Paul McCartney, The Beatles Bible is for sure the definitive online site focused on the Beatles. There are obviously some overlap in terms of content between the two sites, but also some major differences in terms of approach.
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