We all know the first-ever song aired at MTV’s launch on August 1st, 1981, was aptly The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, but the claim for the first-ever music video is up for debate. Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is often awarded that distinction, and for good reason: its iconic 1975 visuals established more than any single before it the mandatory requirement for a ‘promo’ to be played on Top of the Pops if the band didn’t feel like miming or wishing to avoid Pan’s People jiving in their absence.
However, the road to MTV’s ’80s pop-cultural explosion was slow and steady. The ‘golden age’ of the big MGM musicals was taking the theatrical splendour of Broadway hits such as King and I or Oklahoma! and immortalising such song standards on the silver screen, and in rock ‘n’ roll’s seismic aftermath, cinema was hammered with a litany of ‘vehicle movies’ featuring Elvis Presley.
As the ’50s closed and the counterculture grew with apace, the rise of the concert film as a respected form of quasi-documentary captured numerous performances that would be issued and circulated as inadvertent promos in the future, from The Rolling Stones’ jamboree Rock and Roll Circus to DA Pennebaker’s capture of Ziggy Stardust’s ‘final’ performance in Hammersmith.
One band who had long been playing with the medium of film was The Beatles. Inspired by the Hollywood pictures of their youth, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, under the comedic direction of Richard Lester, shaped the popular impression of ‘Beatlemania’ and delivered numerous filmed song segments from their respective soundtracks. Even outside of big features, The Beatles were already producing individual promotional clips with luminaries like Michael-Lyndsey Hogg for ‘Paperback Writer’, and the surrealist japes captured on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ truly pushed the concept of the promo in artistic directions.
Creatively restless and buoyant after the phenomenal success of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney conceived their next project as a twofer television special and accompanying soundtrack EP. Inspired by the coach journeys from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights plus a little of Ken Kesey’s infamously hedonistic road trips, Magical Mystery Tour follows the fanciful exploits of The Beatles and various travellers aboard the titular expedition as their afternoon outing encounters strange happenings at the hands of mischievous magicians (played by The Beatles themselves).
The film was largely panned upon its release, criticised for its incoherent plot, evident lack of a script, and clumsy editing. The BBC didn’t help things either, deciding to show the Boxing Day premiere on BBC One despite the channel yet to broadcast in colour, resulting in the psychedelic hues and screen filters during ‘Flying’ lost to an inexplicably black and white montage of various fields.
Despite the amateurish nature of Magical Mystery Tour, it documents a moment in popular music where artistic liberation and healthy naivety had endeared themselves among the budding filmmakers of the era, Martin Scorsese remarking in 2012’s The Magical Mystery Tour Revisited, “For me, the freedom of the picture was very important.”
Delivering several famous clips for songs from the film, including ‘Blue Jay Way, ‘I Am the Walrus’, and ‘The Fool on the Hill’, Magical Mystery Tour‘s place as a pioneering milestone in the music video’s evolution is indisputable. While born from the experimental counterculture of the time with little regard for commercial viability, its intrepid little pieces like Magical Mystery Tour sowed the seeds for corporate behemoths like MTV to turn the music industry upside-down in the revolutionary way it did.
