To make things even more perfect, not only did they see McCartney at the traffic lights, but he also stuck his head out of the window of the car to show them that he was on FaceTime with his Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr.
Speaking to the BBC in Liverpool, Neal Morton, who drives the Magical Mystery Tour bus, described the chance meeting as “surreal”.
Morton added, “I had pulled up at the traffic lights on Hope Street when who should I see – Sir Paul with Ringo on Facetime.”
He also shared that it unsurprisingly made the day of everyone on the tour, “He waved to us and everybody took photos. The passengers could not believe it.”
Sadly, due to the moment being fleeting, they did not have a chance to engage McCartney in conversation, but just seeing him in the flesh was enough for those taking the tour.
McCartney is back in Liverpool to honour actor Stephen Graham with a special award from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), which was held on July 21st.
Imagine exploring Liverpool aboard the Magical Mystery Tour bus—today, the 20th—when, just when you least expect it, you glance at a car and see Paul McCartney inside, chatting with Ringo Starr!!!! pic.twitter.com/oykuYVeHwL
— DIÁRIO DOS BEATLES (@Diario_Beatles) July 20, 2026
The film it was shown on BBC1 on Boxing Day, which is traditionally music hall and Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck time. Now we had this very stoned show on, just when everyone’s getting over Christmas. I think a few people were surprised. The critics certainly had a field day and said, ‘Oh, disaster, disaster!’
Paul McCartney
A Beatles fan who runs a YouTube page by the name of AdamBound has announced the discovery of four and a half hours of film shot during the making of the film "Magical Mystery Tour" and not used in the final edit.
ATTENTION PLEASE - Do not download the file, JUST WATCH IT, because it is very heavy file and after a few gigabytes of download it stops and you will be asked to make a subscription to download the whole file.
The movie, which was largely unscripted, used aircraft hangars for many of the scenes, including the ballroom sequence for Your Mother Should Know, while the video for I Am The Walrus was shot at two locations on the airfield, including atop the anti-blast concrete walls.
Six weeks after Sgt. Pepper's came out in late May 1967, the Beatles released a new single, "All You Need Is Love," backed with "Baby, You're a Rich Man." Those two songs, along with a pair of tracks recorded at the start of the Sgt. Pepper's sessions and other more recent tracks, ended up on the U.S. edition of Magical Mystery Tour.
“Paul had a great piece of paper—just a blank piece of paper with a circle on it,” Ringo would later recall. “We filled it in as we went along.”
“It was basically a charabanc trip,” George Harrison said during the Beatles Anthology in 1995. “Which people used to go on from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights,” a popular electric light display presented in the autumn months. “They’d get loads of crates of beer and an accordion player and all get pissed, basically—pissed in the English sense, meaning drunk. And it was kind of like that. It was a very flimsy kind of thing.”
"And now we are going to play a track from Magical Mystery Tour which is one of my favourite albums because it was so weird I Am The Walrus, one of my favourite tracks because I did it of course but also cos it's one of those that has enough little bitties going to keep you interested even a hundred years later." (John Lennon)
The Beatles devised, wrote and directed a television film called Magical Mystery Tour which was broadcast on BBC Television at Christmas, 1967
Even before Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, had hit the shops, the idea of the programme had been born and work had commenced on the title track.
It was decided that the soundtrack for the programme would be released on two seven inch discs which would be packaged with a booklet in a gatefold sleeve. The booklet contained stills from the show along with a comic strip telling the story. A lyric sheet was also stapled into the centrespread of the booklet. The EP was a runaway success and reached no. 2 in the UK singles chart, held off the top spot by their own single... "Hello, Goodbye". (BEATLES:COM)
However, as critics have pointed out more recently, the American edition of Magical Mystery Tour is a sonically innovative and positively euphoric listening experience when heard as 11 songs by a great band. The musical patchwork of new and familiar material was empathic proof that their creative vision put them head and shoulders above their competition, even when others felt they weren’t firing on all cylinders. (Sourcce Albumism).
