Flying (Beatles instrumental)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Flying" holds a quiet distinction in the Beatles catalogue: recorded on the 8th of September 1967, it is the only track officially credited to all four members of the band. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr share the writing credit, listed as "Harrison/Lennon-McCartney/Starkey". That collective authorship was unprecedented for the group. But the story behind those two minutes and seventeen seconds involves a sprawling tape experiment, a jazz coda that never made the final cut, and aerial footage of Iceland viewed from a plane.

• 2. Roots in the Blues

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  "Flying" was only the second instrumental the Beatles ever wrote, arriving two years after "12-Bar Original" in 1965. Like its predecessor, it was built on the classic twelve-bar blues chord progression. The two other Beatles instrumentals, "Cayenne" and "Cry for a Shadow", were recorded earlier still, in 1960 and 1961 respectively, making "Flying" a rare revisit to a form the band had largely left behind. Its original working title was "Aerial Tour Instrumental", a name that pointed directly at the Magical Mystery Tour film it was made for.

• 3. From Nine Minutes to Two

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  The basic track was laid down on the 8th of September 1967, using Mellotron, guitar, bass, maracas, and drums. Three weeks later, on the 28th of September, Lennon and Starr returned to add tape loop overdubs. Those loops pushed the total length to 9 minutes 38 seconds. The finished release, however, runs just 2 minutes 17 seconds. The original ending had been a fast-paced New Orleans jazz-influenced coda, but that section was removed. Lennon and Starr's tape loops replaced it, and a portion of those loops was later combined with elements of the discarded jazz sequence to create "The Bus", an incidental piece used at various points in the TV movie.

• 4. Playing Without Words

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  Lennon plays the main theme on Mellotron. McCartney holds down the bass line, Harrison handles the guitars, and Starr plays maracas and drums. All four Beatles sing the melody, but without a single lyric. The track fades into an assortment of tape effects assembled by Lennon and Starr. On screen in the Magical Mystery Tour film, the music accompanies colour-altered images of Icelandic landscape shot from an aeroplane, alongside unused footage from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove.

• 5. The Bootleg Variation

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  A different version of "Flying" circulates on bootleg albums, including one titled Back-track 1. This variant contains added Hammond organ and strange whistling noises in the early passages, and it retains the jazz-influenced ending that was cut from the official release. Clocking in at around 2 minutes 8 seconds, it runs slightly shorter than the released cut despite its extra elements. Music historian Mark Lewisohn speculated that the jazz coda was "seemingly copied straight from an unidentifiable modern jazz record", but the passage was in fact performed on a Mellotron, using its Dixieland Rhythm setting, one of the full-orchestra style banks that Mellotrons offered alongside their familiar single-note instrument samples.

• 6. Critical Reception

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  Richard Goldstein, writing in The New York Times, found the track more interesting than the surrounding album material, describing it as more modest by comparison. Robert Christgau placed it "just a cut above Paul Mauriat", damning it with faint praise while stopping short of outright dismissal. Rex Reed, reviewing the album for Stereo Review in what he made clear was a highly unfavourable assessment, wrote that it "sounds like the soundtrack of an old Maria Montez jungle movie at just about the point where she feeds the chanting populace to the cobras". That three critics reached three entirely different conclusions about the same two minutes points to how genuinely unusual the track was for a major pop release in 1967.