Paul – lead
vocals, bass
John – harmony vocals, rhythm guitar
George – harmony vocals, lead guitar
Ringo – harmony vocals, drums, tambourine, maracas
George Martin – organ
With the recording of Sgt Pepper drawing to a close after some 670 hours in the studio, it was Neil Aspinall who hit upon the idea of restating Paul’s original concept for the album. (When John later told Aspinall, “Nobody likes a smart-arse, Neil” as he passed him in the studio, “That was when I knew that John liked it and knew that it would happen”.) To come full circle, and to highlight the range of music that the group had presented since the opening track, they would wind up the album with the pared-down rocking essence of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, and so would introduce the final track as the show’s encore.
So, having spent the week putting the finishing touches to ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, the group recorded and mixed ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ in a single 11-hour session. The recording needed to be simple – there was no time to come up with anything fancy, no orchestral overdubs or studio trickery. Uniquely on the album, no tape reductions were needed for the track, in contrast with ‘Getting Better’ and ‘Within You Without You’, both of which required three. The final released version was the ninth and final take recorded that evening, with overdubbed vocals, organ and percussion.
The end of the album’s recording was in sight and the group were upbeat. In fact, Paul was scheduled to fly to America a couple of days later to be reunited with Jane Asher, hence the need for this Saturday recording – the only weekend session in the four months of recording Sgt Pepper. But the excitement is palpable in the finished track. Harking back to track one of album one, a clipped count-in from Paul (nicely contrasting with a sly “Bye!” from John) heralds a brisk snare march from Ringo. The sound of the band is compact and high-energy, which is testament to the work done by Geoff Emerick to tame the acoustics of the massive 57-by-94-foot Studio One. This studio may have been chosen to get the excitement and feel of a live show, though Emerick remembers it was because Studio Two, where virtually the entire album had been recorded, was unavailable. Whatever the reason, the Beatles held the session in Abbey Road’s vast recording hall, capable of housing a full orchestra and chorus together, if needs be, with an audience. Ringo was ensconced in a purpose-built isolation booth, the others clustering together to make the best use of the acoustic properties of the studio. Despite the cavernous surroundings, the musicianship on the track is very tight – as if they had been playing all night as part of a concert tour. Indeed, by this stage in the proceedings, they had been recording for some four months and knew the album’s title track backwards. So the basic track was laid down in nine takes, with, for the only time on the album, the four playing live on their usual instruments. Vocal and percussion overdubs were then added, and the track topped and tailed with crowd noises. The organ is often credited to Paul, but the version on Anthology 2, from take 5, clearly includes the organ, which must therefore have been played by George Martin as no overdubs had been recorded.
This all-but-closer on the album pulls out a songwriting trick that is very widely used to create fresh excitement in a song, but which the Beatles used remarkably rarely – so-called phrase modulation. This device, also known as the truck driver’s gear change, abruptly cranks the song up semitone or two towards the end to give the impression of something new and interesting, and then rehashes exactly the same harmonic structure. The result can be very effective, but it is usually dismissed as a cheap way of achieving an emotionally uplifting finale to the song. With varying degrees of cynicism, it is all too apparent in ‘Take My Breath Away’ by Berlin, ‘Money, Money, Money’ by Abba and ‘A Moment Like This’ by Leona Lewis, as well as a plethora of Westlife songs. Perhaps the most notorious and unforgivable transgression appears after that eternal pause towards the end of Whitney Houston’s ritual slaughter of ‘I Will Always Love You’.
Paul had used it in ‘Penny Lane’, but the intention there was to bring the chorus back up to the key of the verse to complete the cycle, rather than upping the emotional ante just for the sake of it. The idea of using modulation in ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ is similarly well-considered. The whole point of the song is that it’s the closing number to the Sgt Pepper show (notwithstanding the encore to come), and that the band – who are not the Beatles, remember – want to make their mark before the final bow. And the change itself is smooth and done with subtlety, as we are prepared for the move a couple of bars in advance. The song progresses through F–Ab–Bb–F (I–bIII–IV–I), but then prepares for the next verse with Bb–F–G–D to land on G for the modulated second verse. But we have really got there two bars earlier, where the G–D is effectively I–V, to bring us back to I–bIII–IV–I.
And the point is not only that we can ready ourselves for the album’s epilogue, also in G, but that we are now back where it all began – ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ itself kicked off the whole show in the key of G.
Oddly, George Martin’s book Summer Of Love contains a couple of inaccuracies regarding the taping of this particular track – not only does he remember recording over two days, overdubbing vocals the following day, but that the take used was not the final take 9, but take 5 (which actually appears on Anthology 2).
According to balance engineer Richard Lush, “The only real version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the mono version … There are all sorts of things on the mono, little effects here and there, which the stereo doesn’t have.” The differences between the stereo and mono albums are particularly evident on this track. Surprisingly, the first is one that is clearly inferior on the mono version – the edit from ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, which, considering it is a simple tape-splice edit, seems positively clumsy. The guitar note and chicken cluck match perfectly in stereo. There is also an additional half a bar of percussion tapping before Paul’s count-in in mono, compared with the more satisfying complete four-beat bar in stereo. (This adds a little colour to George Martin’s implied statement that he simply spliced the chicken and the guitar note together. As the mono and stereo versions differ, the sound of the guitar being tuned cannot have been part of the actual recorded track. The gap between the guitar and the count-in is longer in mono than in stereo.)
Conversely, the cross-fade to the subsequent track, contrasting the concert applause with the intimacy of the final track, is smoother in mono, the final chord of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ matching the first guitar chord of ‘A Day In The Life’. There are different off-mike vocals also – there is speech before the count-in in mono and Paul shouts incoherent encouragement to the crowd at the end of the track, where the stereo ending has John apparently asking Paul to hold his guitar for him. In addition to these differences, the crowd noise also fades in and out in different places.
The artifice of the Sgt Pepper set concludes, but a formidable epilogue awaits.