Two markets, two releases
Whatever critics made of the film, the records sold very well. But the sales story depends on which country is being discussed, because the songs were packaged differently on each side of the Atlantic. In the United States, Capitol released a full-length LP on 27 November 1967, containing eleven tracks. In Britain, the six new songs came out on a double EP on 8 December 1967. The difference in format shaped how each release was measured by the charts of the day.
The American album
The US album combined the six songs from the film with five recent singles tracks: Hello, Goodbye, Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, Baby, You’re a Rich Man and All You Need Is Love. This produced a strong, varied record, since it included some of the most celebrated songs of the Beatles’ year. It reached number one on the Billboard album chart, and it stayed at the top for several weeks, though I would not give a specific figure without a source.
The sales reflected the Beatles’ standing in America, where their records were reliably successful, and also the appeal of having several recent hit songs on one disc. For many American listeners, this was the way the Mystery Tour music first reached them, and for a long time the American version was the one most people thought of as the album.
The British EP
In Britain, an EP was a short-playing record, usually with four tracks, and the double EP format used here was unusual. It carried six songs across two discs, with a booklet of photographs and cartoon strips in the sleeve. The package was priced as a premium item, and it was measured on the singles chart rather than the album chart. It peaked at number two.
The Christmas market in Britain was crowded that year, and the Beatles were competing with themselves: their single Hello, Goodbye was the Christmas number one. The EP was therefore held to second place by the group’s own record, which is a reminder that a number two position can be a strong result rather than a disappointment. The EP also sold well over the holiday season and continued to appear in the charts in the new year.
Why the singles mattered
The success of the project owed a lot to the singles that surrounded it. Hello, Goodbye had been released in late November, with I Am the Walrus on the B-side, which meant that one of the film’s songs was also in the shops as a single. The package of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, from early 1967, provided much of the strength of the American album. In this sense, the chart performance of the Mystery Tour records cannot be separated from the group’s general run of success in 1967, which also included the Sgt. Pepper album and All You Need Is Love.
Sales and reviews
The contrast between the film’s reception and the records’ sales is striking. On 26 December 1967, a large television audience watched the film and many reviewers disliked it. At the same time, shops were selling the soundtrack in large quantities. These two facts were not in direct conflict, since buying the record did not require approving the film, and many fans bought the songs because they were Beatles songs.
The result was that the project could be both a critical misfire and a commercial success. Observers at the time sometimes described the film as a failure, but the soundtrack’s strong performance meant that the Beatles’ business interests were not damaged. It is a useful example of how the music side of the group’s output could outlast and outperform an experiment in another medium.
A caution about the numbers
Chart positions are easier to state than sales totals. Figures for copies sold vary between sources and between formats, and rankings on charts of the 1960s were compiled differently from modern ones. For that reason, this account sticks to the positions that are widely reported, number one on the Billboard album chart and number two in the UK, and avoids precise sales claims. What can be said with confidence is that the music was a popular success, and that this success did much to rescue the project’s standing in the end.