Flying

"FLYING"
AUTHORSHIP Lennon (.25), McCartney (.25), Harrison (.25), and Starr (.25)
This was the first composition to be written by all members of the group and the only instrumental the Beatles recorded for Parlophone.

McCARTNEY: " 'Flying' was an instrumental that we needed for Magical Mystery Tour so in the studio one night I suggested to the guys that we made something up. I said, 'We can keep it very very simple, we can make it a twelve-bar blues. We need a little bit of a theme and a little bit of a backing.' I wrote the melody. The only thing to warrant it as a song is basically the melody, otherwise it's just a nice twelve-bar backing thing. It's played on the Mellotron, on a trombone setting. It's credited to all four, which is how you would credit a non-song." Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now

RECORDED
September 8, 1967, at Abbey Road, with overdubbing September 28

INSTRUMENTATION
McCARTNEY: guitars, chanting
LENNON: Mellotron, chanting
HARRISON: guitars, chanting
STARR: drums, maracas, chanting
The electronic sounds at the end were put together by Lennon and Starr using tape loops. The Long and Winding Road: An Intimate Guide to the Beatles

MISCELLANEOUS
This was heard in the film Magical Mystery Tour. For the instrumental "Flying", they decided that the music demanded a sequence of aerial shots: clouds and landscapes seen from the air. The film producer Denis O'Dell, who was to become the head of Apple Films, was already working for the inchoate Apple at the time. He had been part of the production team on Stanley Kubrick's 1963 Dr. Strangelove, and remembered that they had hours of aerial shots taken while flying over the Arctic to get the final scenes where B-52s cross the pole to drop their nuclear bombs on Russia. He told Paul, 'I can get you some out-takes,' and did. They edited them together and tinted them to make it look unlike Strangelove. Unfortunately the colour filters over the black and white originals turned the grey cloud shots even more grey and formless when the film was broadcast in monochrome on British television, so the "Flying" section proved very boring viewing and contributed greatly to the adverse reception that Magical Mystery Tour ultimately received. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now