Conventional wisdom holds the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to be the first concept album of the rock era. It is the story of a fictional band putting on a special show to relate their story to an adoring crowd, with flashbacks to characters and incidents that have marked their progress over the past twenty years, kicking off with reminiscences from band member Billy Shears. The album ends at the same show, with the band thanking their fans for their support, and bidding them a fond farewell …
Except, of course, it’s nothing of the sort.
Paul: “We never had a theme on a Beatles album, even Sgt Pepper. We kinda knew we were reflecting the times, but if you had asked me then, I would’ve said the songs just sort of fell out.”
John: “All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt Pepper and his band; but it works because we said it works.”
Which is not to say that the original intention wasn’t to tie the LP together with an overarching concept. In the wake of Revolver, the question of how to approach their first album since giving up live performances loomed large. As George Martin later observed, by 1966, the Beatles were a like juggernaut that was increasingly out of control. “It wasn’t so much that somebody was pressing the accelerator too hard; it was that nobody had their foot on the brake.”
On 6 November 1966, Paul left London for France to take a short break, driving his Aston Martin down to Bordeaux, where Mal Evans joined him. He had intended then to meet up with John on the set of How I Won The War in Spain, but filming had finished by the time Paul was ready to drive down to Almería, and John was already back in London (and had incidentally notched up his first encounter with Yoko Ono). So instead Paul and Mal flew to Nairobi, met up with Jane Asher and spent a few days on safari in the Ambosali Park. They flew back to London on 19 November. It was on this flight that Sgt Pepper was conceived.
“We were fed up with being the Beatles,” Paul remembers. “We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach.” And so he hit upon the idea of having another band sing the songs – of recording a new album and sending that out on tour. On the long flight from Kenya, this idea took shape, even to the point of concocting a name for the ersatz band. The ‘S’ and ‘P’ packets of salt and pepper given with the inflight meal apparently evolved into ‘Sergeant Pepper’. The name of the band was an inspired addition, in keeping with the vogue for band names that had developed from the straightforward Cliff Richard and the Shadows or Brian Poole and the Tremeloes to the likes of the more convoluted Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and Big Brother and the Holding Company. (Latterly, Paul often cited Dr Hook and the Medicine Show as an example of this trend for choosing ostentatious names, but the inspiration in this case was apparently the other way round, as Dr Hook themselves formed in 1968.)
The “concept” might be said to have held for a couple of months at most. Before the recording of the album’s title track, three tracks had been recorded – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and ‘Penny Lane’ – all of which could have potentially chimed with the idea of presenting the story of Sgt Pepper’s band. But, with ‘A Day In The Life’, ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ and ‘Fixing A Hole’ following within a couple of weeks, it’s clear that the new album would follow a different course.
In all, the Beatles’ eighth album was recorded in a total of 40 sessions (plus one final date to record the sound for the run-out groove) over a period of four months. In addition, during the period of recording the album’s thirteen tracks, the group recorded ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Only A Northern Song’ and a “tape of electronic noises” intended for a couple of Carnival Of Light shows. Paul had been asked to produce a contribution to the so-called Million Volt Light and Sound Rave that was to be held at the Roundhouse in London on 28 January and 4 February 1967. The group taped a random series of noises lasting almost 14 minutes, including distorted and slowed-down drums and organ, guitar, and screaming voices, all liberally laden with reverb and echo. The tape was played at the event without the audience being aware that they were experiencing the latest Lennon-McCartney composition. Paul had hoped to release at least a section of the recording on Anthology 2, but the idea was vetoed by George. And by the time Mark Lewisohn described the track to George Martin in 1987 and asked if he remembered the session, the producer had clearly erased it from his memory, replying “No, and it sounds like I don’t want to either!”
Extending the group’s creative thrust that had escalated with the release of Revolver, Sgt Pepper offered a musical palette that was quite breathtaking in its scope. The influences were varied and often startling – Paul’s vaudeville roots combined with Hendrix and the avant garde; a marriage of India and Stockhausen; love, allegory and the circus. And it’s no surprise that the LP contained shortest (‘Reprise’) and the longest (a dead heat between ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘A Day In The Life’) of the Beatles’ songs to date.
Added impetus came from across the ocean. On hearing the US version of Rubber Soul, Brian Wilson had resolved to produce an album with a coherence and musical invention to surpass anything that had gone before. The result, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, is an astonishing piece of work, regularly voted one of the best album ever produced. Paul was in awe of Wilson’s achievement, especially in terms of its musical arrangements and sonic inventiveness. With George Martin on his side, he resolved to top Pet Sounds. As George Martin himself later put it, “Without Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper wouldn’t have happened. Revolver was the beginning of the whole thing, but Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds. It was a spur.”
It was felt that the album’s cover should match the ambition of its content. A design by the Dutch partnership The Fool was rejected, and gallery owner Robert Fraser was approached to commission a new sleeve. Fraser suggested the pop artist Peter Blake, who worked with his wife Jann Howarth, a respected artist in her own right. Blake’s idea was to produce a collage featuring the band as if they had just ended a concert in a bandstand, being applauded by a magical, fantasy crowd. The Beatles were each asked to provide a list of who they’d like in the audience, with Fraser, Blake and Howarth also giving suggestions. John and Paul submitted long lists, John’s naturally including controversial suggestions such as Hitler, Jesus Christ and Gandhi, while George suggested a handful of Indian gurus. Ringo was happy to go along with whatever the other three decided.
And so it was that an array of life-size cardboard cut-outs was assembled, hand-coloured by Haworth if necessary, including mystic Aleister Crowley, Mae West, Bob Dylan, Karl Marx, Laurel and Hardy and Oscar Wilde. Shirley Temple crops up no less than three times, including as a cloth doll wearing a jumper proclaiming “Welcome The Rolling Stones”. Actor Leo Gorcey, the star of dozens of Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys films in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, was airbrushed out when his agent reportedly asked for a fee of $400, although fellow Dead End Kid Huntz Hall remains in place, next to the newly created space on the back row. Gandhi was also airbrushed out at the request of an apprehensive EMI chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood. Hitler is apparently in the crowd after all, judging by photos taken during the session, but is safely hidden behind Johnny Weismuller.
The waxworks were Peter Blake’s idea. Sonny Liston, Diana Dors and the head of Lawrence of Arabia came from Madame Tussaud’s. Neatly, the Beatles themselves look on: “I thought I couldn’t have the Beatles in the frame as well until I realised, Of course! This isn’t the Beatles, this is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band! So it made absolute sense that the Beatles could be fans of Sgt Pepper.”
The painted drum skin was the work of fairground artist Joe Ephgrave, and the photographer was Fraser’s business partner, Michael Cooper. Along with the Edwardian cut-out figures included inside the gatefold sleeve, Fraser had wanted a small packet containing badges and pencils and suchlike, an idea vetoed by EMI’s marketing department. The album cover was one of the first – if not the first – to feature printed lyrics. Because Paul is facing away from the camera on the back cover, it has been suggested that he couldn’t make one of the photo sessions (possibly because he was dead?) and so Mal Evans stood in for him, presumably having donned a Beatle wig. The rumour persists in spite of the CD liner notes including a version of the back cover photograph showing Paul in profile. And as for The Fool, they did make their mark on the album package by providing the design for the red inner sleeve.
The sleeve has been imitated and parodied a number of times over the years, most notably on Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money, released in March 1968. (The album’s inner and outer sleeve images were swapped for the original release, apparently at the insistence of the record label.)
The entire package – the sleeve and its contents, the Beatles and the message – was seemingly irresistible to the record-buying public. By 10 June, it had reached the top of the LP charts, from where it didn’t budge until mid-November. It remained in the top 20 until May 1968, and regularly re-entered the chart through to 1976, having notched up 148 weeks on the charts.
And the legacy lives on. In 1987, the newly released CD peaked at number three, climbing back up to number six in 1992 on the occasion of the LP’s 25th anniversary. The 2009 issue of the entire remastered Beatles back catalogue saw it re-enter the chart at number five. Compilation albums aside, Sgt Pepper remains the UK’s best-selling album of all time.
It is easy to sit here, with the benefit of hindsight, and see Sgt Pepper’s place in the sweep of Beatles recordings as a new chapter marking a brilliant second half in the group’s existence. Musically a logical, though stunning, progression from Revolver, and culturally a landmark recording in popular music. But it is worth remembering that at the time, things were in flux. Since the beginning, the group had released two albums every year, and always one of them at the end of the year. In the spring of 1967, things seemed to have become worryingly slow. No album had appeared in time for Christmas, and for the first time, only two Beatles singles had been released the previous year. For the first time in three years, the Beatles hadn’t provided the coveted Christmas number one single. It’s true, a single had been released in February of 1967, but that was the first single in four years that hadn’t made it to number one. Without the privilege of knowing about the goings on inside Abbey Road’s Studio Two, you could be forgiven for thinking that, having poured everything they had into Revolver, the Beatles were spent. Paul was relishing the moment. “I remember with great glee seeing in one of the papers, ‘The Beatles have dried up, there’s nothing coming from them, they’ve been in the studio, they can’t think what they’re doing …’. And I was sitting rubbing my hands, saying ‘You just wait …’.”