Yellow Submarine
Only A Northern Song
All Together Now
Hey Bulldog
It's All Too Much
All You Need Is Love
George Martin Orchestrations

Yellow Submarine is barley a Beatles album at all - the jaunty title track can be heard on Revolver from three years earlier, there's the 1967 single "All You Need Is Love" and all of the second half is film score background music by George Martin. Which leaves just four songs, largely leftovers from the Magical Mystery Tour sessions. "All Together Now" is a playground skipping rhyme that may have taken Paul McCartney as much as two minutes to compose. "Hey Bulldog" is John Lennon apparently making things up as he goes along, with his mind on something else, while "Only A Northern Song" is George Harrison doing likewise. But George Harrison does supply this album's biggest redeeming feature, a trippy extravaganza (it's clutter is all the more evident on CD) "It's All Too Much". The latter track is beatific Beatles silliness ("Show me that I'm everywhere and get me home for tea") and the archetype of its time. It exemplifies the difference between British pop psychedelia and its American rock counterpart. Over there, lysergic visions soundtracked the screaming acid nightmare of Vietnam. In giggling little England, dressed up in the mock nostalgic uniforms of a vanished Empire, this psychedelia was only a Technicolor ticket back to Toytown.

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