June 1967
Every day, in every way, on every album since With The Beatles in 1963, they seemed to be getting better, or at least different, moving on, or at least moving sideways, and of course sometimes deliberately backwards, but Sgt. Pepper turned out to be a multi-media, multi-level giant leap forward.
Take the album cover: endlessly voted the best cover ever, it was the first to have all the lyrics of the songs printed on the rear cover–which was a blessing. By this time, we all wanted to know the words. With most songs, most singers, you can easily mishear or misinterpret, as Dylan did, so it was handy to see every word written down, and spelled correctly.
Professor Colin Campbell, who compiled that concordance of the lyrics, had to listen to every word on every record, over and over, and write them down, exactly as he heard them, because he could not trust the several printed versions of lyrics to get all the words correct–until the Sgt. Pepper album came along and made his research much easier.
It was a gatefold album, which meant it opened like a book, rather than consisting of a single sleeve. Inside one pocket was the album, and in the other was a stiff cardboard sheet with cut-outs of Sergeant Pepper, his moustache, badges, stripes, picture and stand-up sign. The cover photograph, now such an iconic image, showed thirty-nine heroic or famous figures.
I remember being present for the photo shoot and seeing one figure they had been persuaded to abandon at the last moment: a full-size Hitler. I was surprised it got as far as the studio. Jesus was chucked out much earlier.
I like to think that including Albert Stubbins was my idea. At Paul’s one day, I heard them discussing the figures they might have and I said surely they should have one famous footballer, even though I knew that not one of them had been regular football fans as a boy, or ever played football. John thought hard and chose Albert Stubbins, who had played for Liverpool in the fifties just because he had always thought Albert Stubbins was a funny name.
As we were leaving Paul’s house, he asked me to bring any interesting looking object that could be added to the photographic set. From his mantelpiece I picked up a little silvery statue thing that looked like a sputnik–apparently some award he had been given–which I plonked down at the front in the middle of the word Beatles, which was spelled out in flowers. Study the front cover carefully and you can just see it, between the L and E. I’ve boasted about that for decades.