We took a Magical Mystery Tour during our visit to London. We found a brochure advertising a walking tour that would take visitors to many locations important to the career of the Beatles.
At ten o'clock one morning we met our guide Richard and about two dozen other Beatles aficionados just outside the studio where the first Beatles' movie Yellow Submarine was made. Richard had written a book about the Beatles and had a binder of photos he had taken of the famous quartet. He was a veritable walking encyclopedia of Beatles trivia. He told us Yellow Submarine is one of Queen Elizabeth's favorite films.
The second stop on our tour was the publishing company MPL which is owned by Paul McCartney. The M stands for his last name and the P and L for his first name and that of his late wife Linda. The music company is wildly successful. It owns the rights to hundreds of popular songs as well as the scores to musicals like Annie and Grease.
Next Richard led us to a Gentleman's Washroom sign marking the location of a public toilet. Apparently in 1966 John Lennon made a guest appearance on a British television program. In one scene John was filmed going into that particular washroom. It was on this television show John wore his signature granny glasses for the first time. Those glasses started a fashion craze which lasted for years. Richard also told us some enterprising person kept the roll of toilet paper John Lennon used in the Gentleman's Washroom that day. It went on sale on E- Bay for thousands of pounds.
Our tour continued with stops at the Apple Production Studios where the group gave their final concert on the rooftop in 1969. We saw the London Library. Here original scores of many of the Beatles songs are on display. We stopped outside the Palladium Theatre where the Beatles gave their first concert and Trident Studios where Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was filmed. Our guide Richard put to rest the rumor that the song's title stands for the drug LSD. Apparently the real story is that John Lennon's son Julian came home from kindergarten one day and showed his dad an imaginative drawing he had created and colored. When his Dad asked him what he called his picture he said, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" so John wrote a song about it.
The highlight of the tour was our visit to the Abbey Road studio where perhaps the most well known Beatles album Abbey Road was recorded. The front cover of that album shows the four singers walking across the street at a pedestrian crosswalk. The intersection is actually quite busy with traffic but I waited patiently with the camera to get a picture of my husband crossing the street at the exact spot where the Beatles had their picture taken for the Abbey Road Album cover.
Later we stopped to buy Beatles T-shirts and then said good-bye to Richard our guide. Our Magical Mystery Tour was over.
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