UK UNCUT magazine November 2017 The Beatles Paul McCartney John Lennon

UK UNCUT magazine November 2017 - Like New Condition. No CD included.

What do you do when you’ve just released the most significant album in rock history? For The Beatles in late 1967, the answer was simple: go back to work, but in the most playful way possible. In our new issue of Uncut, out on Thursday in the UK (though hopefully subscribers should have their copies sooner), we mark the 50th anniversary of recording sessions which turned into parties, psychedelic and spiritual adventures (“George swore to me he could levitate”), destabilising tragedies and, eventually, a redemptive and surreal trip into the unknown – the Magical Mystery Tour. “The songs had changed, our attitudes had changed,” says Ringo Starr. “Our well-being had changed.”

For our first Beatles cover in five years (a quarter of Uncut’s lifespan, interestingly) Michael Bonner has procured a handful of return tickets for the Magical Mystery Tour’s most doughty survivors. Good tales proliferate, as you’d hope. “I went to John’s house one night,” remembers Barry Finch, then a partner in Mayfair Publicity whose clients included Epstein’s Saville Theatre. “He had a big sweet jar. He screwed the top off and gave me a Black Bomber, a speed pill. We went into the garden and sat together on a stone seat. There was a plaque on the ground reading, ‘Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun’. He turned to me and said, ‘Barry, I paid twenty grand for this house and it’s always fucking raining!’

“We went back inside where we took some acid. Then we went up into his recording studio. John began playing the guitar. I could play the piano a little. ‘This is good, Barry,’ he said. ‘Now go to B!’ But I didn’t know what B was. ‘Never mind.’ So we went back downstairs and that was the end of that.”