Bill Ryder-Jones on his favourite album by The Beatles
Over the past six decades, a disproportionate share of British popular music has emerged from the Merseyside and Lancashire regions. Naturally, London serves as Britain’s cultural hub, with population density driving its share of artistic excellence, but it appears we have The Beatles to thank for energising the music scene in the north-west. A generation or two later, the region spawned another Merseyside great, Bill Ryder-Jones.
Ryder-Jones rose to prominence in the early 2000s as a proponent of an indie-rock revival on the tapered end of the 1990s’ britpop wave. As a teenage school student, he co-founded The Coral, who rose to nationwide acclaim in 2002 after releasing their eponymous debut album. The release boasted the band’s Mercury Prize-nominated signature single ‘Dreaming of You’.
In 2008, following a successful run with The Coral, Ryder-Jones departed to pursue a solo career. As a singer-songwriter, he captures the essence of Nick Cave and the recent work of Alex Turner with a poetic and anthemic approach seasoned with orchestral atmospherics. These solo endeavours peaked in January 2024 with the release of Iechyd Da, his first album in five years, which received rave reviews from all angles.
Reviewing Iechyd Da as the ‘Record of the Month’, Far Out said: “Good things come to those who wait. It took Bill Ryder-Jones four years and a whole load of life’s ‘shit sandwiches’ to arrive at Iechyd Da, but now, like the rest of the world, he has been graciously affirmed by its roaring, gentle beauty.”
Following the success of this latest solo effort, we reached out to Ryder-Jones to discuss some of his musical influences in our ‘Doctor’s Orders’ feature. Among the albums plucked out for discussion was one of Merseyside’s own, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Now, technically, this 1967 classic was a double EP (original UK release) released as the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, but we’ll make allowances for such a brilliant selection.
“Magical Mystery Tour is a good album forgotten about because of the awful film,” Ryder-Jones said, adding, “And I’m including ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ on that as well because I think when I first got it, they were sort of tacked on at the end.”
Continuing, he notes how, in the grand scheme of The Beatles’ oeuvre, Magical Mystery Tour is oft overlooked. “I don’t feel like enough gets said about how full of information those Beatles songs are,” he said. “There’s so much going on. And it isn’t like, ‘let’s just lash a load of shit on it.’ You can tell it’s done with taste. And it’s a very hard thing to do. You can hear the difference between them and the Stones when the Stones tried to go psychedelic, and it’s like, ‘Fucking shut up, you are useless’. You know what I mean? It’s like, give up on that you’re crap. But with the Beatles, it wasn’t just, ‘OK, we’re doing psychedelia now’.”
Adding: “I mean, some of this is really quite mad, but the record has also got some absolutely beautiful songs on it. And I think productions are so, so weird, in a great way. Greatest band of all time. Amazing drummer. Certainly, my favourite drummer. It’s just such a shame that it’s called Magical Mystery Tour. Someone should have said, ‘Don’t try to be cool, Paul, that’s not your bag.’”
Listen to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ from the US Magical Mystery Tour LP below.
