North Sea oil pumped ashore – Six Day War – Biafran War – Abortion legalised in UK – Pound devalued – Christian Barnard performs first heart transplant, the patient survives for 18 days – Concorde ready at last.
In January 1967 Paul McCartney demonstrated his versatility in two ways. He composed the score for a northern film drama, The Family Way, starring Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, John Mills and Wilfred Pickles. It was a good if traditional score, arranged by George Martin and incorporating a brass band.
In the same month, some electronic sounds recorded by Paul McCartney were played at the Carnival of Light at the Roundhouse in London. The results have never been released. Paul’s friend, the author Barry Miles: “The notion of random sound and different ways of organising sound, particularly the idea of using the whole orchestra as one instrument, comes from John Cage. Paul recorded a random track two years before John did ‘Revolution No.9’. It’s more or less the same kind of stuff as ‘No.9’ but it is less structured. It is a lot of banging and shouting with a heavy echo.”
February 1967, Mellow Yellow – Donovan (UK No.8, US No.2)
Paul McCartney, whisperer and reveller
February 1967, Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever (Parlophone R 5570, UK No.2, US No.1)
Hunter Davies: “My book Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was about to be filmed and I approached Paul to see if he would write some music for it. He was busy with other projects but in conversation I suggested a serious, hardback biography of the boys. There had only been two lightweight paperbacks previously. He thought it was a good idea but he told me to clear it with Brian Epstein and helped me write a letter to him. When I went to see Brian, he played me the acetate of ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The second track was a huge leap forward from anything they had done before. It convinced me that an official biography would be a worthwhile project.”
When David Jacobs played ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to his panel on Juke Box Jury, they didn’t know what to make of it and even doubted its hit potential. Jacobs himself thought the Beatles had made a mistake. It was part of a double-A side single with ‘Penny Lane’. If the other A-side had been another experimental track, say ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, how well would the single have fared?
George Martin: “‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was the beginning of the Pepper era. We recorded it with ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ at the same series of sessions just before the end of 1966 and we agreed to get back together after Christmas. We wanted ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ to be part of the album but EMI wanted a single so we didn’t include them on Pepper.”
Bill Drummond of the KLF: “John Lennon might never have been interested in Yoko Ono if he hadn’t been to art school, so being there might have been a defining influence in his life. Going to art school introduced him to a lot of things that he didn’t know existed, a world outside of Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent. It opened his eyes to surrealism. For me, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is the greatest record ever made and he wouldn’t have made it if he hadn’t gone to art school.”
The song’s inspiration was a Salvation Army home, Strawberry Field, close to where John had lived. Hughie Jones of the Spinners: “I don’t think that John Lennon was really thinking about Strawberry Field when he put those words together. He was thinking about childhood and about freedom such as going into the woods, they were woods rather than fields actually. It was a great place for a little boy and he was thinking about that rather than making meaningful remarks about Salvation Army hostels or children’s homes.”
George Melly: “Strawberry Field was a reform home for girls, but John was attracted to the title because the idea of Strawberry Fields is a very trippy idea, glowing and glimmering in the sun. The Beatles’ hallucinatory songs were unlike anything that had been done before, both as tunes and images, and I’m glad they’re there.”
Singer/ songwriter Ron Sexsmith: “As a kid, I loved’ Strawberry Fields Forever’. It was like a crazy dream. It was like no other record at the time and it still sounds like no other record I’ve ever heard. I didn’t know anything about drugs back then so I had no idea as to how they came up with a song like that. It is beautiful and a masterpiece.”
Elizabeth Thomson, co-author of The Lennon Companion: “John Lennon supposedly knew at the age of five that he was brilliant and that he had a great writing gift. That business of saying, ‘No one I think is in my tree’ in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is his way of saying that he knew he was better than everyone else.”
George Martin: “I regard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as a very great song. It was the beginning of the imaginative, some say psychedelic, way of writing. I prefer to think of it as being complete tone poem imagery and it’s more like a modern Debussy. We did two different recordings of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. They had different arrangements and were in different keys and tempi. John wasn’t satisfied with either and he asked me to take the beginning of one and add it to the end of the other. I pointed out the difficulties but he just smiled and said, ‘I’m sure you can fix it’. It was a terrible challenge but, with a bit of luck, I found that by reducing the speed of one of the recordings and increasing the other, the tempo change accounted for the intonation change of a half-tone. I put the two recordings together and what you hear today is two separate recordings edited together.”
Drummer Dave Mattacks: “The first time I heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ I thought, ‘What a great tune, that’s a great song, it’s got the best of everything’. It’s really interesting melodically and I like everything about it. It changes signatures, there are odd beats and bars here and there but you’re not aware of it at the time, it’s just a terrific tune with a great performance. Everybody plays tremendously well on it and the sound and the production are great. It’s a landmark recording.”
Jake Thackray: “The lyrical line of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is very odd and compelling and so is the chord sequence. There are some bars of 5/4 time which throw you but which work completely.”
Beth Nielsen Chapman: “The Beatles came along when I was in fifth grade. I remember being in a friend’s house in Germany and hearing ‘Penny Lane’ and I was jumping on a bed and thinking that I had to own that. That was the first time that I heard music that I wanted to go and buy.”
Ralph McTell: “There’s a very English feel to ‘Penny Lane’ and to the Sgt. Pepper album which followed. I don’t know Penny Lane in Liverpool but I know a Penny Lane in Croydon or wherever. I always imagined somewhere with a street market, lots of little shops and a community of people buzzing backwards and forwards. I thought it was very English and very optimistic.”
George Melly: “‘Penny Lane’ was a Liverpool street that had always intrigued me as a kid and I had real image in my head. The Beatles treated it as a surrealist thing with the nurse selling poppies and the like. I believe that it caused considerable embarrassment to the local fish-shop because people kept going in and ordering ’fish and finger pie’. It was typical of the Beatles to throw that in. They knew that very few would know what they were on about.” ‘Finger pie’ is teenage slang for fingering a female’s genitals.
Jake Thackray: “I like the lyrics in ‘Penny Lane’. I would love to have written those buggers myself. They’re authentic, it’s about a street that people know about, and there’s a barber’s shop and a fire brigade. It’s a very, very English, northern song. I also like the vigour of that high, dashing trumpet. It’s a stunning record.”
Klaus Voormann recommended the Swedish director, Peter Goldman, to the Beatles for the making of promotional films for the single. Tony Bramwell organised the locations and the props: “Klaus Voormann had an idea about a big harp in the open air. It was impossible to make one quickly so we found an old tree in Sevenoaks and we smashed an old piano to pieces and put wires from it to the top of the tree. We strung Christmas balls around the top and it looked surreal. We filmed it in the park for two days and then came to Penny Lane. We got a policeman dressed as a fireman and filmed the barber’s shop and the roundabout. The Beatles rode horses in the east end of London and it all cut together very nicely. It was the first time anyone had made a film without miming to the song. Because it was 32mm, we could use laboratory tricks to change the colour and light. It was ground-breaking, just like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ later on. They were the first psychedelic films.”
While filming, John bought a poster for a circus in Rochdale in 1943 which led to the song, ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite’. The lyric is little more than a celebration of the poster, but it fitted perfectly into the psychedelic times.
Documentary filmmaker John Sheppard who made The Stones in the Park: “It’s very difficult to look at the records that were No.1 during the first part of 1967 in England and sit them alongside the designation Summer of Love. There’s ‘I’m a Believer’, ‘Something Stupid’, ‘Puppet on a String’, ‘Silence is Golden’ and ‘Release Me’, which committed the cardinal sin of preventing the Beatles getting to No.1 with ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.”
Paul Gambaccini: “When I was living in America, I was constantly amazed at the records you’ve missed out on and also some of the records which were hits. Jerry Butler is the one who upsets me the most: he never had a hit in England. ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is the greatest single ever made and I wondered how on earth Engelbert Humperdinck could have kept the Beatles from No.1 but now I know what a sensation he was in England.”
Don’t expect any misgivings from Engelbert Humperdinck: “I don’t feel bad about it at all and, indeed, I feel proud that I kept the Beatles from being No.1. To be in front of them in the charts was totally amazing.”
There were some unlikely winners during the Beatle years. Engelbert for one, but the top selling record of 1965 was Ken Dodd’s ‘Tears’ and the biggest-selling album of 1967 was not Sgt. Pepper but the soundtrack for The Sound of Music.
It has often been suggested that ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ were going to be part of a larger project, an album called Liverpool, although I’m not sure where this originated as neither Lennon nor McCartney said so. Willy Russell: “The Beatles were too canny to write straightforward songs about Liverpool or the Cavern. When they do mention somewhere specific like Penny Lane, they transcend the place and it becomes much, much more than a little thoroughfare. They start with something specific and then move on to something gloriously general. Maybe they toyed with writing about the Star-Club or the Cavern but their instinct told them not to. Things like ‘All I Want for Christmas Is a Beatle’ or ‘Cavern Stomp’ are iffy novelty records. They would have kept away from that, but it may have found its expression in due course. Later, George Harrison did ‘When We Was Fab’, which was a lovely song.”
There was talk of the Beatles making a new film, Up Against It, scripted by the controversial playwright Joe Orton. Music writer Elizabeth Thomson: “If you see the film Prick Up Your Ears, you will see Brian Epstein telling Joe Orton that they can’t make Up Against It, but it wasn’t as straightforward as that. There was a lot of communication back and forth. Orton’s diaries tell how he was approached to make the film and he was taken with Brian Epstein and Paul McCartney. Up Against It is a very amusing screenplay and I am sure it would have been a very entertaining film, but there would have been an outcry if it had been made. It would have endangered their nice, safe image although in retrospect there is nothing too outrageous in it. The Beatles all got into bed at once, but so did Morecambe and Wise.”
During 1967, it was as though the Beatles were at a fancy dress party but not all their fellow musicians had a costume or wanted to be there. Jon Savage: “There was a split by the late-60s – did you become psychedelic, take acid and grow your hair or did you go into cabaret? Some of the bands had been together from the early 60s and they were exhausted. They didn’t want to risk losing their audiences and they didn’t want to make changes.”
The Liverpool bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers felt out of place. Paul Du Noyer: “Most of the Liverpool bands were comprised of earthy, working class lads and not college boys like the southern groups. The southern groups moved into psychedelia as it was more intellectual and well away from the beer and football culture of the north.”
The Hollies found themselves under criticism when they recorded ‘King Midas in Reverse’, although now it sounds as good as anything else they did. Frank Allen of the Searchers: “We were amazed when ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ came out. There’s no way we could have copied that in the Searchers. We didn’t have that kind of originality and we didn’t have the writing talent. The same applies to a lot of other bands, but that didn’t stop some of them trying to copy the Beatles. The Searchers just knew how to sing nice songs and if we’d taken more care over that, our career would have been ten times more successful.”
EMI record producer Walter Ridley: “The problem that I found insurmountable with the Swinging Blue Jeans was that they couldn’t write their own hits. In that world, if you can write your own hits, you’re there as of right. If you’ve got to take somebody else’s writing, then the very good songs may be taken before they reach you. Elvis Presley had great writers queuing up to give him songs but we didn’t have that depth of songwriting talent in this country. The Beatles had an enormous advantage. They weren’t the best musicians in the world, they weren’t the best singers in the world, they weren’t the best performers in the world, but they were the best songwriters in the world. They could write songs that were way ahead of their time, marvellous writing.”
June 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP (Parlophone PMC 7027)
Produced by George Martin, 13 tracks – 39 minutes 43 seconds
Side 1: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/ With a Little Help from My Friends/ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds/ Getting Better/ Fixing a Hole/ She’s Leaving Home/ Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite
Side 2: Within You, Without You/ When I’m Sixty-Four/ Lovely Rita/ Good Morning Good Morning/ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)/ A Day in the Life
In 1966 the Los Angeles band the Mothers of Invention, masterminded by Frank Zappa, released their double-album, the satirical and experimental Freak Out! The single, ‘It Can’t Happen Here’, was greeted with hostility on BBC-TV’s Juke Box Jury and its chairman David Jacobs said, “We certainly hope it can’t happen here.” It was clear to the Beatles, however, that Frank Zappa was an excellent musician who wrote great lyrics and had a strong sense of humour.
Barry Miles: “Just after they’d done ‘Penny Lane’, Paul McCartney told me that they were going to do their own Freak Out! It wouldn’t be anything like Freak Out! but it would have a specific viewpoint. The new album was not going to be a set of tracks slapped together. Freak Out! has the overall theme of empowerment of youth and how brown shoes don’t make it. The level of political comment in Sgt. Pepper is on about the same level as Freak Out! although done entirely differently.”
Ron Mael of Sparks: “I always loved the Beatles and the ambition of Sgt. Pepper is something that every band should aspire to. We never try to write songs like the Beatles but the size and scope of that album is something that we try to do with every album. It is an inspiration and it is encouraging you to do something really important.”
The Summer of Love was a spiritual quest for the young, a search incorporating mind-expanding drugs, highly colourful clothes and sexual freedom. The philosophy and lifestyle of Dr Timothy Leary and the availability of contraceptive pills were important contributory factors. These interests highlighted the generation gap. The media told of the happenings (and the Happenings) in New York and San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury was full of runaway teenagers and tourists but it didn’t last long as Dion sang in ‘Sanctuary’, “Well, I got to Haight, I was a little late”. However, it could be argued that the Summer of Love left a dangerous legacy in that it encouraged subsequent generations to tune in and drop out.
If the engine room for the Summer of Love was in San Francisco, numerous groups - the Doors, Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane - provided the pistons. Although peace signs were everywhere, so too was conflict. The peaceniks were rebelling against the war in Vietnam and often moving to Canada to escape the draft. American teenagers were rebelling against their parents’ values.
The record that both transcended and encapsulated the Summer of Love was English – the Beatles in their new identity as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s no magic about the Sgt. Pepper name: it was simply “salt and pepper, please” being misheard as “Sgt. Pepper, please”. The critic, Kenneth Tynan called the album “A decisive moment in the history of western civilisation.” That’s sounds pretentious and Tynan was probably using hyperbole to get noticed.
Released on 26 May 1967, the LP topped the album charts for 26 of the remaining 28 weeks of the year. Val Doonican: “I was so proud of my album Val Doonican Rocks but Gently. It was arranged by Ken Thorne, a lovely writer who had been involved with the Beatles’ movies. We picked all these lovely, sentimental, late-night songs and I don’t think I’ve enjoyed making an album as much as that one. Lovely. It went to No.1 on the album charts and it knocked Sgt. Pepper over. Astonishing really, isn’t it?”
Adrian Barber, founder member of the Big Three, who was to produce Vanilla Fudge and the Allman Brothers, recalls in his own distinctive way: “I was jealous of the Beatles’ success when it first happened and it was not until Sgt. Pepper that I appreciated them. It was so far ahead of what I was doing that it entranced me. Chris Huston of the Undertakers asked me to come over to his apartment and he took me into his bedroom, handed me a joint and left me on the bed. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought nobody else could be doing anything like that and only a few thousand people would really understand what they’d done. It was so perfect. It was right, right, right, right down to the three mice in the football helmet in the dirty brassière in the attic.” (No, I don’t understand that either, but then I’ve not been hallucinating.)
Beatles press officer Tony Barrow: “I am one of those people who, by and large, plays the earlier stuff, the middle 60s stuff up to Sgt. Pepper. It’s almost like Old and New Testament with the dividing line at Sgt. Pepper. You’ve got one set of people who concentrate on the ‘Before’ music and one set on the ‘After’. It may be personal memories in my case rather than the magnificence of the music. I associate particular Beatle tunes with things that were happening to us and I had much more contact with the Beatles between 1963 and 1966 than I did afterwards.”
Hunter Davies: “I was with Paul one morning on Primrose Hill with his sheepdog Martha – it was the first day of Spring and he remarked how the weather was getting better. He started laughing and told me about when they were touring with Jimmy Nicol depping for Ringo. After each concert, they would ask Jimmy how it was going and he would say, ‘It’s getting better.’ John took the piss out of him and it became the tour joke. As he walked, Paul worked out the first bars of ‘Getting Better’. John came round to the house later and they worked on it in Paul’s little studio. Then they went into Abbey Road the next day and finished the song.”
Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats “Tony Crane and I were at Abbey Road when they recorded ‘Getting Better’, some four or five months before it came out. Paul was playing electric piano, John and George guitars, and Ringo drums. We couldn’t actually hear what Paul was singing although we were in the studio. They did several takes and consequently we knew every note of the song but none of the lyrics apart from the bit about ‘I used to be cruel to my woman’. Before the album came out, we were singing that bit to everyone.”
George Martin: “I like to experiment with voices and you can hear it clearly on ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. If you listen to it in stereo, you’ll find that there’s only an accompaniment on one of the tracks. This boomeranged on me as some foreign copies were pressed that only had this track on the record, which meant that Paul’s voice wasn’t there. It taught me a lesson and since then, I’ve put the voice in the centre.”
The Beatles, or more specifically Paul McCartney, called the album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The songs would be performed by this imaginary band and suitable costumes were created. The LP would play like a concert with an overture and a song by Billy Shears, followed by a song by somebody else, and so on, with a reprise of the title song, leading into ‘A Day in the Life’.
The packaging for Sgt. Pepper was to be unlike that for any other album. It was designed by Peter Blake with his then wife, Jann Haworth. Peter Blake: “I suggested that they had just played a concert in the park. They were posing for a photograph and the crowd behind them was a crowd of fans who had been at the concert. Having decided on this, then, by making cut-outs, the fans could be anybody, dead or alive, real or fictitious. If we wanted Hansel and Gretel, I could paint them and they could be photographed and blown up. I asked the four Beatles for a list and I did one myself. Robert Fraser did a list and I can’t remember whether Brian Epstein did one or not. The way that worked out was fascinating. John gave me a list and so did Paul. George suggested only Indian gurus, about six of them, and Ringo said, ‘Whatever the others say is fine by me’ and didn’t suggest anyone. It’s an insight into their characters. All kinds of people were suggested. Hitler was there; he is actually in the set-up, but he is covered by the Beatles themselves as we felt he was too controversial. The same applied to Jesus. There were only two of their contemporaries on the cover. Bob Dylan was suggested by John and I put on Dion because he is a great favourite of mine. Presley was left out on purpose because if you were taking the top symbols, he would obviously have to be there. I can’t remember why he was excluded. Maybe they felt he wasn’t making good records anymore. I can’t think why Chuck Berry isn’t on there. If I was doing it now, Chuck Berry would definitely be there, so maybe there was an embargo for some reason.”
Mike Evans, author of The Art of the Beatles: “The cover was created in three dimensions. That whole tableau was created and all those pictures of their heroes or whoever were life-size blow-ups of photographs, stuck onto hardboard and arranged on long wooden poles so that it looked like people actually grouped there. When the picture was taken, whoever was knocking around the studio took souvenirs as nobody thought it had any great significance.”
Peter Blake: “The original Madame Tussaud’s waxworks of the Beatles were included which were rather old-fashioned. They had little, high-button jackets whereas the Beatles by this time were psychedelic and wearing daffodils. John came to the photographic session with a white silk scarf and a daffodil in his buttonhole and wearing all sorts of badges. They had moved on and the idea was to have this other band, the Beatles, looking at Sgt. Pepper’s band. It was commenting that the record really wasn’t made by the Beatles at all. The Beatles were just a part of the audience watching Sgt. Pepper.”
The cover is extraordinary, perhaps even more so in comparison to the minimal CD packaging of today. There is so much detail in the cover that university theses have been written about it. There are the questions of selection, the various uses of colour and black-and-white, why certain portraits have been used, how the incidental material was determined, and so on. Peter Blake: “Sgt. Pepper broke so much ground, not particularly because of me. The Beatles were at their absolute peak and power and I was quite inventive. If we decided to do something, they could go to EMI and say, ‘This is what we want to do’. If EMI said, ‘No’, then they wouldn’t get the record. They were very powerful so it meant that we could break through lots of barriers. One thing was the words on the back: another was that it was going to be the first double-album. It ended up as only one record, but it was a double-sleeve. It was meant to be a double-album but the Beatles used ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ for a single, and they didn’t have enough to make two albums. I had already worked out the double pocket and that is when I created the sheet of cut-outs. My original idea was to have a little plastic bag full of presents, a sergeant’s stripes, some badges and maybe some sweets and this is when EMI put their foot down and said that this was completely impractical. That was the only thing we didn’t do so then I designed the insert.”
What was the origin of the Sgt. Pepper sleeve? For some years, I thought it was Adrian Henri’s painting The Entry of Christ into Liverpool (1964) but now I know that both are based in different ways on James Ensor’s The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1889).
Liverpool artist Adrian Henri: “The Beatles were one of the first acts to print lyrics on an album cover. They popularised the idea of printing the lyrics which in turn gave them a totally different significance. It brought the lyrics into the foreground, and the idea of getting a real artist to do the cover was extraordinary. Nobody had thought of asking a painter before, and they did it with Peter Blake and then with Richard Hamilton for The White Album.”
Peter Blake: “Someone at EMI said that we would have to get permission from all the people on the cover or their families. That in itself was very interesting because Mae West wrote back and said, ‘What would I be doing in a Lonely Hearts Club?’ The Beatles wrote her a personal letter, which they all signed, in which they said, ‘It’s not quite like that. We would love you to be there.’ Then she agreed. On the top row, I put in two of the Bowery Boys, but Leo Gorsey wanted a fee. EMI wouldn’t pay a fee so he was taken out. You’ll see that there’s a gap at the top. Brian Epstein later thought, ‘We could get rid of all these problems if we put it out in a brown paper envelope instead.’”
Scarcely a month goes by without some magazine or record cover paying homage to the Sgt. Pepper cover. Peter Blake: “There have been insulting parodies and there have been flattering parodies. To this day you’ll see cardboard cut-outs with photographs which come from the Sgt. Pepper idea. Usually I’m flattered, but the one that the Mothers of Invention did on We’re Only In It for the Money was spiteful. I have never liked Frank Zappa much.”
Barry Miles: “Frank Zappa’s sleeve wasn’t an attack on the Beatles: it was supposed to be humorous. Zappa always said that the Beatles tried to stop it but I was there when McCartney said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ McCartney did say that they needed EMI’s permission and Zappa didn’t understand that as they were the Beatles and they could do anything they wanted. The original Mothers album even had a cut-out where you could clip out a Zappa moustache.”
Peter Blake: “There’s a whole mythology around the Sgt. Pepper sleeve which is extraordinary. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all by chance. If they were marijuana plants, it was a joke on me. As it was, the figures were set up at the back, and there was a small stage for the Beatles to stand on and in front of that, at an angle, was a flowerbed. That was subcontracted to a firm, so if there were marijuana plants, and I don’t think there were, they brought them in.”
There are so many unique features about Sgt. Pepper. One was to sequence the songs without bands on the vinyl or pauses between the tracks. The Beatles played around with the running order, so why did they end up putting ‘Getting Better’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’ together when they are virtually the same tune?
All this would have counted for little if the music on Sgt. Pepper had not been outstandingly original. George Martin: “It’s very difficult for me to be impartial, but my favourite Beatles album is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club. I do think it is the best thing that they ever did. It was a producer’s dream. I was able to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do and the boys were similarly anxious to make it far out for its time. At the end I wondered if we’d gone too far, if people would think it was pretentious, but fortunately they accepted it.”
Rick Wakeman: “I liked the concept of Sgt. Pepper. The BBC did a preview, the first play of the whole album and I like millions of others sat glued to the radio. There wasn’t much of a story but it was great music and I was gobsmacked. It was pushing the bounds of technology. It really showed you what George Martin could do and in a strange way, it made him the fifth Beatle.”
Bob Brunning, a founder member of Fleetwood Mac and later a headmaster: “The Beatles were responsible for me failing my college course. The day that I had to sit my Art final coincided with the release of Sgt. Pepper. You could get Sgt. Pepper first thing in the morning and I thought it was utterly reasonable to miss my finals to buy Sgt. Pepper. I listened to it all day. I went to college the following day and my lecturers said, ‘Why didn’t you sit your finals yesterday?’ I said, ‘Sgt. Pepper was released and I couldn’t wait until two in the afternoon.’ Very unsympathetically, they failed me and I never had the chance to take it again. I don’t regret it: every second of that day was worthwhile.”
Jimmy Webb: “Sgt. Pepper was only cut on a four-track recorder and it is a testament to George Martin’s genius. The recording studio had its own capabilities and Pet Sounds was a multi-tracking tour de force. The studio became more than just an organ that soaked up and preserved a performance. George Martin and the Beatles were aware of the possibilities and so the studio came into its own. Now the studio is in control, but there was a magical time when there was a symbiosis between art and the recording studio that was very important.”
Richard Digance: “George Martin recorded Sgt. Pepper on four tracks. Having made records myself, I would have thought that some of that Sgt. Pepper stuff would have been impossible on four tracks, but George did it by putting the guitars on one track and the vocals on another and bouncing them across. That was a very sophisticated technique for the early years, and he deserves so much credit for those albums, more than your average fan would ever know.”
Alan Parsons: “I originally worked in the department responsible for exporting copies of master tapes to foreign countries and was lucky to be among the first to hear the Beatles’ new product. Listening to Pepper made me want to get into this wonderful art form for myself. They had a remarkable knack of fooling us on first hearing when it looked like they had blown it, but after two or three plays, we would be totally transfixed. I can remember thinking that ‘We Can Work It Out’ was the end of their career and then realising it was a work of genius.”
Record producer Stuart Colman: “Sgt. Pepper contains my favourite Beatle track which is ‘Fixing a Hole’. It’s beautiful, and mind images whisk across the speakers while I’m listening to it. It’s got all sorts of colouring in there and the Beatles were magical about doing things like that. I’ve never paid much attention to the so-called drug references on Sgt. Pepper. I just enjoy it as a Beatles record and I’m sure that’s how the Beatles meant it to be in the first place.”
Documentary filmmaker John Sheppard: “Since the war, LSD had been deployed in a whole range of experiments by doctors. Sometimes it was used to disorientate prisoners, sometimes it was therapeutic. There were guinea pigs around who claimed to have had a profound experience. Up until the mid-60s, the role of drugs in England was confined to a group of people inhabiting the raffish fringes of London society. 1967 changed all that, and Sgt. Pepper gave it some public attention. As the comedian Robin Williams says, ‘If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there.’”
George Harrison commented in 1968, “We can jump around and try new things which others can’t or won’t. Like drugs. People doing ordinary jobs just couldn’t give the time we did to looking into all that.” I’d never appreciated that the Beatles were doing this as a public service. Thanks, fellers.
Ray Coleman: “There was a chameleon quality to John Lennon. He was an experimenter in every way. He experimented with drugs and he wanted to push his mind, his brain and his body to the limit. When he drank, he drank too much and he did everything to excess. Even his appearance. He kept fooling us all the time, particularly when you judge the music that came out of the different parts of his life. I found him fascinating.”
Tony Thorpe of the Rubettes: “I still think that the Beatles are underrated because everybody talks about their massive fan following and their wonderful tunes but the Beatles changed everything. It was John Lennon’s avant-garde mentality that was the main push and the fact that George Martin was able to pick up on it and complement it so perfectly. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ were plucked out of thin air. There was nothing before that to give them even the slightest idea of what to do. It wasn’t jazz, it wasn’t straight music, it wasn’t rock – it was nothing else but the Beatles. It was totally unique and completely original, and they were revolutionising lyrics and chord structures and the way the studio could be used. Flipping heck, what an achievement. They turned popular music into art.”
George Martin: “The thought that ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ deliberately stood for LSD is rubbish. John Lennon wasn’t like that at all and people credit him with too much subtlety. He liked to shock people and if he’d really wanted to write about drugs, he would have done so, straight out. You’d never have been in any doubt as to what he was singing about.”
Alistair Taylor, who worked for NEMS Enterprises: “‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ doesn’t stand for LSD as I happened to be there when Julian brought that drawing back from school but if you listen to the song, he must have been out of his head when he wrote it.”
On the other hand, around the same time, Jimi Hendrix recorded a song, ‘The Stars that play with Laughing Sam’s Dice’. Did Lennon and Hendrix both decide to put LSD into song titles? It’s possible. My own theory is that the picture exists, yes, but John saw the potential of the L-S-D in its title.
Roger McGough of Scaffold: “I always thought that Procol Harum’s lyrics were daft. I wrote one like theirs that starts ‘You’re as bored as butterscotch’, and it goes on and on like that. I was at Paul McCartney’s in St John’s Wood, staying there with his brother, Mike. Mike told Paul that this was a good poem and Paul put music to it. Mike sang it on one of the albums. Lyrically, it’s crap but it sounded great when Paul sang it.”
George Melly: “There was a certain moment in the Beatles’ development when they took LSD and it utterly changed their music and their imagery. Now, you can say that LSD was a very bad thing, and certainly it was for some people. There are some who ‘blew their minds’ and became casualties, but, treated as a help towards art, in the Beatles’ case and in some other cases, it changed their visual approach to life. I only took LSD once, I didn’t like it much, but I did hallucinate. Here were four creative figures who previously had to rely on the world as seen by everybody else. Okay, a joint blurs things a bit, but it doesn’t do much. After LSD in which the wallpaper fills up with kissing mouths and sofas become hippopotamuses, a stream of consciousness was released which went into the songs. I would say that ‘A Day in the Life’ was their richest, drug-created invention. It’s partially about drugs of course, but it’s doomy, a bad trip, whereas ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is beautiful and cheerful and pretty. ‘A Day in the Life’ also emphasises the bad side of drugs, the despair and the doom that can come out of them, but it is a considerable work of art and it would not have been created without LSD. Whether art is justified by this way of living, I don’t know. I’d give it the benefit of the doubt because, without it, we wouldn’t have had their best song.”
Because drug terminology was often adapted from standard speech, it was easy enough for songwriters to protest, “Of course it’s not about drugs. We weren’t thinking of that at all.” However, Paul has said in interviews, though not at the time, that when they came up with the line, “I’d love to turn you on”, they gave each other “a little look”.
After hearing the Sgt. Pepper album, the Director of Sound Broadcasting, Frank Gillard, wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI: “I never thought the day would come when we would have to put a ban on an EMI record but sadly that is what has happened over this track. We have listened to it over and over again with great care, and we cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that the words ‘I’d love to turn you on’ followed by that mounting montage of sound, could have a rather sinister meaning.”
He continued, “The recording may have been made in innocence and good faith, but we must take account of the interpretation that young people would inevitably put upon it. ‘Turned on’ is a phrase which can be used in many different circumstances, but it is currently much in vogue in the jargon of the drug-addicts. We do not feel that we can take the responsibility of appearing to favour or encourage these unfortunate habits, and that is why we shall not be playing the recording in any of our programmes on radio or television.”
Evidently Frank Gillard was not aware that scores of EMI records had been banned over the years. John Peel soon found himself in trouble for violating the ban and playing ‘A Day in the Life’, but I suspect that he did it deliberately.
Music writer, Paul Du Noyer: “‘A Day in the Life’ is a good example of a pure John song with a pure Paul song in the middle. That is done to very good effect. They often wrote in fragments so they had bits lying around. Paul had this incomplete notion of describing his bus ride to school through Liverpool and it seemed to fit this idea of the dreamy ‘Day in the Life’.”
Beatles biographer, Mark Hertsgaard: “‘A Day in the Life’ has to be their single greatest masterpiece, showing the sensibilities of each man. John had a wonderful cosmic lyric about status, hierarchy and false gods with a warning about unhappiness if one goes chasing them. Paul’s contribution brings it down to the level of the common man and makes it more human. The orchestral crescendo has the world spinning out of control and it is a wonderful mixture.”
George Martin: “After the strings at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’, we added a special dog whistle which is an 18 kilocycle note that you won’t be able to hear. We thought it would be nice to include something especially for dogs. We also wanted some noise at the end so that people would wonder what the hell it was. It didn’t mean anything but people found that by playing the damn thing backwards, they could make out a four letter word. I was amazed when I was first told about it but Paul tried it out and, sure enough, it was there.” If you didn’t have an auto-return, the final sounds would play on and on for hours.
The range and depth of music on Sgt. Pepper was very impressive, but not all the songs were new. Paul McCartney had written his first version of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ in Liverpool and had once performed it during a power cut at the Cavern. The song answers the question, ‘Will you love me tomorrow?’ Comic actor, Bernard Cribbins: “George Martin rang me and said, ‘I’ve got a song called ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, would you like to have a go at it?’ It’s a very nice love song and if you ignore the tune, which is very good anyway, you’ll find it is one of the loveliest poems ever written. My record wasn’t very well received, but I still think we made a very good recording.”
Kenny Ball: “I know that John Lennon never liked jazz, but I loved the Beatles’ stuff. The way they worked out those harmonies was almost churchlike, wasn’t it? It was a different style of harmony as well, 13 bars in a row instead of 16, so it made you think a little bit. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ intrigued me because it reminded me of an old jazz tune called ‘Jazz Me Blues’, the first two bars are more or less the same. I always felt that McCartney had a feeling for trad jazz. ‘Honey Pie’ was very much in that vein. We had a go at ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, but we only got to No.48.”
‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is a picture of family life and so is the drama of ‘She’s Leaving Home’, a poignant ballad inspired by a story in the Daily Mirror. It was arranged by Mike Leander as George Martin was busy with Cilla Black and McCartney was impatient. It’s an intriguing song as McCartney is imaging the situation from both sides. No doubt helped by John saying, “Now this is what Mimi would think…”
A song about a female traffic warden, ‘Lovely Rita’, is pure fun, the evidence being that all four Beatles play comb and paper. Paul wrote the song after speaking to a female warden, Meta Davis, and she occasionally talks about it in the press.
Despite the many types of music, Sgt. Pepper works as a coherent whole. In order to preserve that entity, no singles were released from the album. This meant that some great songs were up for grabs, none more so than ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, a UK No.l for Joe Cocker. Joe Elliott of Def Leppard: “Joe Cocker’s vocal on ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ is mind-blowing and I prefer it to the Beatles’ version. They had so much passion in their performances and their songwriting ability was second to none. It is the ultimate blueprint. We sound nothing like the Beatles at all, but the structure of their songs is a huge influence on all our work.”
Joe Brown: “The worst thing I ever did was to record cover jobs because that’s when my recording career started to go down the drain. I should have stuck to country-based things like ‘A Picture of You’ and music hall songs like ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am’, because all that was peculiar to Joe Brown. I knew when I did ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ that I shouldn’t do it, but you get talked into things and it was a good record and a great song. I preferred Ringo’s version to mine because Ringo had a lovely, out-of-tune, soulful voice which was great. It sounded like he needed friends, which was what the song was all about. The Beatles were very clever like that.”
Whilst the Beatles were making Sgt. Pepper, Hunter Davies was researching his official biography of the band. “When I saw the Beatles, I would tell them what I had been doing. They were very interested when I said, ‘I’ve been to Hamburg and seen Astrid,’ but they fell silent when I said, ‘I’ve been to Liverpool to see Pete Best.’ I said, ’He’s slicing bread for £18 a week,’ and they changed the subject. A few weeks later I was in John’s house, and John brought up the topic of Pete saying, ‘We were bastards. We were scared, we were so mean, we didn’t tell him face-to-face that we didn’t want him any more. We let Brian do the dirty work and we were ashamed, so John was ashamed of himself.”
The biography, The Beatles, is important for several different reasons, not least because Hunter Davies watched John and Paul writing. “I was around Abbey Road during those 3 months when they were doing Sgt. Pepper and I would go around to Paul’s house at two in the afternoon, have a walk with him and Martha or whatever around Primrose Hill, and come back and muck around. We would have tea and then John would arrive. Then they’d go into Paul’s little eyrie at the top of the house and they would play tunes to each other and because it was the Sgt. Pepper days they’d work on something for that evening. I would see the beginning and the middle, and now and again, the whole of a song. I watched it happening and then in the evening I’d go to Abbey Road and see it being recorded. I wish I’d taken better notes and I wish I could have tape recorded my interviews. I don’t like tape recording; it doubles your effort, doubles your time so I never did it. I couldn’t really use a tape recorder in Abbey Road anyway as it would have been an interference. It might also have been an intrusion in their homes when they were talking to each other. Instead, I’d get out my little notebook and it’s the same kind of notebook that I’m using all these years later. If it was a group thing, say like the shoot for the Sgt. Pepper photograph, I would rush straight home and write down at my typewriter everything I remembered happening from that evening.”
The second side of the album opened with George Harrison’s ‘Within You, Without You’, which featured George with Indian musicians. Victor Spinetti: “I said to George Harrison, ‘I can’t get it together with Eastern music’, and he said, ‘Vic, don’t listen to it. Let it happen to you. Western music is all maths, but Eastern music is the flow and you can jump in and out whenever you want.’”
July 1967, All You Need Is Love/ Baby, You’re A Rich Man (Parlophone R 5620, UK No.1, US No.1)
‘All You Need is Love’, a Beatles’ single linked specifically to the Summer of Love, was seen by an estimated 400 million viewers when they performed it live on the TV programme, Our World on 25 June 1967, broadcast worldwide by satellite.
Andy Babiuk, author of Beatles Gear: “It was the psychedelic era. They said, ‘We’ll have a mural on the house, we’ll have the car decorated and we’ll have the guitars painted.’ George’s Stratocaster was the most distinctive of them. Paul painted his Rickenbacker bass. John commissioned The Fool to do something and Ringo put something on his drumhead. They did that for ‘All You Need Is Love’, but John didn’t use his guitar. You can see it at his feet. He was the only one performing live: the vocal was live but everyone else was playing to a track.”
Marc Bolan: “Repetition comes into my songs a lot because my lyrics are so obscure that they need to be hammered home. You need to hear them eight or nine times before they make sense. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Some artists repeat the simplest lyrics about forty times over. Look at ‘All You Need Is Love’.”
Barry Miles: “John knew that he had to keep the song really simple as most of the viewers wouldn’t have English as their first language or understand much at all. It wasn’t really thought of as a single, more for the TV show, and it was very effective, though these days it looks corny. People were walking around the studio carrying signs that said, ‘Love’ in all these different languages. It was an important message for its time.”
Victor Spinetti and, in case you’re wondering, he is talking to me: “If you love the Beatles and their music, you have a great burden to carry, but it is a joyous burden as you have to live up to that. There are no songs of hate there, no songs of revenge, no songs of kill the faggot, kill the Jew, none of that. It is an avalanche of poetry and melody. Listen, my darling, if anyone tells you to listen to a record which says ‘Kill this’ or ‘Murder that’, tell them to fuck off. They burned John’s records because they said he was more popular than Jesus, but they should have burned all the others. We should all be lovers and I said to John, ‘What’s your best lyric?’ and he said, ‘That’s easy, Vic, ‘All You Need Is Love’.”
Songwriter and arranger Les Reed: “In general, the public want the 4/4 beat and you don’t generally stick in a 5/4. Burt Bacharach, who was a trained musician, would stick one in without even thinking about it, and the Beatles did it in ‘All You Need Is Love’ because it felt right. That’s what matters. It doesn’t matter how many beats you have in a bar: if it feels right, then why not?”
John Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton: “Paul would have been very happy being a Beatle all his life, but John thought that there was more to life than that. He had a lot of time on his hands. If he could write a song in 10 minutes, what would he do for the rest of the day? He jumped from reading Treasure Island to reading Marx and Nietzsche. He was forming political opinions all the time and I remember him saying, ‘Between capitalism and communism, I think communism is the better way.’ He was certainly one for having opinions that were cast in stone and 3 weeks later, he was saying the complete opposite. I couldn’t keep up with him.”
Tony Palmer: “We always think that the music of our youth is a golden age, but there is no doubt in my mind that the short period from 1966 to 1972 was a phenomenal moment in popular music history. I made a film some years later with Aaron Copland, and he said, ‘In a 100 years’ time, if people want to know what it was like to be alive and well and living in the 1960s either in western Europe or America, they are not going to listen to my music. They are going to listen to the Beatles because that tells you what the time was like.’ The difference between then and now is this – we have Bono and Sting parading around the rain forests and saving the planet, but you don’t hear it in their music. In the 60s you absolutely heard it in the music. They used music in order to try and change the world.”
The B-side of ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘Baby, You‘re A Rich Man’, is about money not being everything. It is surrealistic and yet commercial but it is more highly rated now than it was at the time. Bill Nelson from Be Bop Deluxe: “I loved jazz guitar and I looked down a bit on the earlier Beatles stuff and then, when they did Rubber Soul and Revolver and became more experimental, they got my attention. Now I love the early stuff as well as I can see the value of it. I was a teenage jazz snob. I liked George Harrison as he was a big fan of Chet Atkins and he played a Gretsch Chet Atkins guitar which I lusted after when I had cheap guitars. The production was so inspiring. My all-time favourite is ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man’. I just love the vibe of it.”
Klaus Voormann recalled his final meeting with George Harrison: “That last day I met him, he had had a video of himself when he went to the dentist to have a tooth out and he was singing, ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?’”
August 1967, We Love You – The Rolling Stones (Decca F 12654, UK No.8)
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, backing vocals
To support the protest at the arrest of two of the Rolling Stones on drug offences, John and Paul added backing vocals to their single, ‘We Love You’. It taps into the same groove as ‘All You Need Is Love’ but is nowhere near as effective. Still, context is everything. Shortly after ‘All You Need Is Love’ was released, I saw Scaffold with their comic show about P.C. Plod. They ended the show with ‘All You Need Is Plod’.
As 1967 progressed, George Harrison appeared to be leading the
Beatles as they became involved with Indian religion and mysticism. They were intrigued by transcendental meditation (TM) as promoted by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The average pop-picker was mystified, and the Beatles were in danger of leaving their audience behind as well as Brian Epstein and George Martin.
George Melly: “I’m bored very quickly by Indian music on account of what appears to be its monotony. I know that it isn’t monotonous. I know that if I understood it, I would find it marvellous. The thing about drugs is that they make everything less boring and more significant, so that the Beatles were able to listen to Indian music for hours at a time without ever looking at their watches and it seeped into their own music. It went with the incense and the bells and the pot and the LSD and the kaftans, all the 60s images which now seem extremely tiresome and dated, but, in the case of the Beatles, their genius was strong enough to give continuous validity to their music of the period.”
Donovan: “When we were experimenting, we weren’t taking drugs to get high, but to explore inner worlds, which would lead to serious meditation. Drugs became a problem, but not for us, but because the world thought that we were promoting it. Before we discovered that meditation was the safe way, we were trying these extraordinary ways of entering the inner world. That was the great discovery in the 60s. By the way, LSD was legal until 1966. I don’t call them drugs: I call them holy plants. We didn’t write songs on drugs, but what we explored in the inner world, we brought to our work afterwards.”
Barry Miles: “I never liked the Mahirishi although I never met him. Allen Ginsburg said he had been criticised in India for charging for his teachings and for his connections with right-wing politicians. The main criticism was that he had commercialised the business. I spoke to Lennon about this and he said, ‘What’s wrong with being commercial? We’re the most commercial band on earth.’ There’s no arguing with that. I said, ‘But he takes a tithe off people’s earnings’, and he said, ‘No bastard’s going to get a golden castle out of me.’”
Quite improbably, Bangor in North Wales became the most fashionable place in the world as the Beatles and their entourage headed there – by train! – to study with Maharishi. Marianne Faithfull: “It was strange to go Bangor and I can’t really figure out why I was there. I wanted to go and I felt that it was some sort of spiritual quest. I’m very glad I went but it was incredibly sad because Brian Epstein died and so it was very intense. I didn’t have a great connection with the Maharishi although I think he was a very good man and did good work. Mediation is not really for me although I have used it occasionally.”
Donovan: “I was in America and I saw on the news that the Beatles had gone to meet an Indian teacher called Maharishi in Bangor, and that intrigued me. Some friends in California told me that he was giving a lecture in a school hall so I went there. There was something good about him, and I got initiated in the lower flats of Beverly Hills, on the flatlands there, and I found that meditation was incredible. It is amazing to go within yourself and drop down your heart rate and your physical functions to a very calm level: you gain a lot of power from that. I have thanked Maharishi for that ever since. Maharishi said, ‘Come to India,’ and I said, ‘I’d love to.’ The aide said, ‘There is someone else to see you,’ and he said, ‘Who is it?’ The aide said, ‘The Grateful Dead.’ He laughed and said, ‘They should not call themselves The Grateful Dead. They should call themselves The Grateful Living.’ I liked this man: he was a joker, he was funny.”
Brian Epstein was found dead in his bed over the bank holiday weekend in August 1967 and no-one can say with certainty why he died. At the time, the Beatles were seeking inner peace in Bangor with the Maharishi. The Beatles were encouraged by the Maharishi to have nice thoughts about Brian, and John’s comments to the press seemed out of place, rather like Paul’s “It’s a drag” after John’s assassination in 1980.
Clive Epstein: “Brian was not distressed but he was sorry that the touring days were over. He felt that he couldn’t make the same contributions to the Beatles’ everyday life as he had done. Obviously there were going to be new singles and new albums but that didn’t absorb as much of Brian’s time as touring. Also, many of NEMS Enterprises’ other bands were not featuring as frequently in the charts. He was a little uncertain about his own career so that is why he devoted more time to the Saville Theatre and the possibility of producing films.”
Billy J. Kramer: “Brian Epstein saw my future in films. He wanted me to go to RADA for a year. I thought it was funny because he used to say, ‘Billy, you’ll never get anywhere if you speak as badly as that’ and I would reply, ‘Brian, if people won’t accept me for what I am, that’s it.’ He was annoyed when I put on weight but when I lost it, he came to see me at the Shakespeare in Liverpool and he said, ‘It’s water under the bridge now. I can see you’re working hard and I’m going to put you back on top again.’ On the Saturday he left me a letter at the stage door which said, ‘I’m not coming tonight because my father died recently and I don’t like leaving my mother, but I shall not forget what I said to you.’ I finished at the Shakespeare and went to Stockton-on-Tees. I got shaved and had a bath and got ready for the show when I saw on TV that Brian had died. It was a very sad loss to the business because he was a very thoughtful man. We had our differences but he always remembered my birthday and sent Christmas cards to my parents. After my mother died, he went round and took my father out and made sure he was all right. I’m very grateful for that.”
Brian O’Hara from the Fourmost: “Brian Epstein was a shy, sensitive man and we liked him very much. The Beatles took the mickey out of him all the time and they knew he was the sort of man who could be hurt by one word. We didn’t see him very much in the months before he died because he became more and more involved with making Cilla Black a TV star. He wanted us to record ‘Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear’ and we turned it down because it was unlike anything that had ever appeared in the charts.”
Tony Barrow: “Brian Epstein’s death was a tremendous shock to me and yet, at the same time, it wasn’t. If someone had said to me, ‘How long do you think Brian Epstein is going to last?’, I would have said, ‘Well, honestly, I think he will be dead within the next 5 years at the rate he’s working.’ Some people say that he took his own life, but I have never subscribed to that theory. They say that he was depressed because the Beatles had stopped touring and he had less to occupy his mind. On the contrary, I would say that he regarded it as a new challenge, to pursue new directions with them as a non-touring act and I can’t imagine him wanting to do away with himself. Like anybody else in the business, he lived on his nerves and he had a lot of things going for him: several of his artists were highly successful, his personal life was okay, and I don’t think he was depressed. On the contrary, he was very positive about things and looking forward to a good future with his artists.”
Yankel Feather: “Brian would come into the club and have a double brandy and then he would have another double brandy and then he would take sleeping pills. People who take sleeping pills are going to make mistakes, I’ve done it myself. You think, ‘Have I taken that one?’, and you take another. I am sure it was an accident.”
Alistair Taylor: “Brian was not depressed. The last time I spoke to him, he was full of plans for a tour by the Four Tops and I was not concerned about his welfare. I was called to his house when his secretary thought something was up and I saw him lying in the bedroom. He used to take pills and I believe his overdose was a terrible accident. I will never accept that he committed suicide. The inquest came up with ‘accidental death’ and that’ll do for me. If he had planned to commit suicide, why was he planning for the Four Tops’ tour, why was he working through correspondence in his bedroom, and, most importantly, how could he do that to his mother? Brian was too considerate for that.”
Johnny Rogan: “There are so many functions that a manager has to perform and it comes down to personality in the end. Many of the desired qualities for a manager are mutually exclusive. There is no blueprint. Some managers are indulgent and treat their artists like children. Others have them running around, and both are good managers. A good manager will be getting success for the artist and doing it in whatever styles that suits their personalities the best. You can be a sugar daddy manager but if you are naturally aggressive like Don Arden, you are an autocrat and you can still make lots of money. Expansionism was the name of the game for both Larry Parnes and Brian Epstein. Brian has been criticised for one thing, and one thing only - people say he should have made more money for the Beatles. Integrity was his watchword. He didn’t bother with tax avoidance schemes, which was a good thing.”
Music writer Paul Trynka: “How can anyone criticise Brian Epstein? Look at his rivals. Mike Jeffrey managed the Animals, and their money disappeared in the Cayman Islands. Andrew Loog Oldham signed a deal with Allen Klein that even now he does not fully understand and the Rolling Stones’ money disappeared. Look at Colonel Parker and what happened to Elvis’ money, so yes, Brian Epstein was not aware of the kind of money that could be made from merchandising but nobody was, and he still got a slice of the action. There are managers who came later and cut better deals than Epstein but Epstein was the first rock band manager and he was vital to the band. It is easy with the hindsight to criticise him but he did a great job and it wouldn’t have worked without him.”
Tony Barrow: “I would question the comments about the Beatles being lost without Brian as prior to his death, they had decided to form Apple and to manage themselves. Brian would be pushed into the background, remaining as a friend. It is wrong to say that they had lost him at a critical time.”
John Lennon’s close friend Pete Shotton holds a similar view: “I was involved with Apple in 1967 and 1968. The Beatles had finished touring by then and I was friendly with all four of them. They were looking to start Apple. They had a lot of money that they either had to pay in tax or put in a new venture. They thought Apple would be fun, fun, fun. They were splitting away from Brian Epstein at the time. This is an important point that has been missed over the years – they were setting up Apple and not involving Brian Epstein. He was losing his babies, they were not touring, and they didn’t need him in the recording studio. He was surplus to requirements. Brian was a bit of a suit although they loved him and Apple was going to be a hippie heaven.”
September 1967, Smiley Smile – The Beach Boys (Brother ST 9001) Paul McCartney, munching on vegetables in ‘Vegetables’.
Well, it could be anyone. Possibly the most ridiculous guest appearance ever on record.
Scott Bennett from Brian Wilson’s band: “The Beatles are my bread and butter, the template from which all else stems. They were only a few American groups that penetrated at the time. Pet Sounds topped the album charts in Britain but it was a weak seller in America. Smart people were telling Brian Wilson that he was brilliant but even his record label and the rest of his band didn’t dig him. The Beatles were kicking his ass all over the charts and he must have felt like throwing in the towel, but he made Smile, which was a really challenging record. His version of psychedelia was the Ringling Brothers meets Aaron Copland. It was like he and Van Dyke Parks were living in the 1860s not the 1960s.”
October 1967, Catcall – Chris Barber Band
Paul McCartney, organ, catcalls, producer
Jazz band leader Chris Barber: “I said to Paul, ‘You’ve got these tunes. Have you got one that you haven’t used or do you write instrumentals?’ He had ‘Catcall’ and our record was like one of their in-jokes, like the end of ‘All You Need Is Love’, because he said, ‘The idea is that the band is playing this tune and about three-quarters of the way through, someone on the talkback says, ‘No, it’s rotten. Play it some other way.’ We do that and then an audience starts cheering and it fades out, so what the record-buyers have bought is a rejected take. His whole idea was a gag based around this nice little tune. Brian Auger played the right-hand side of the organ, and Paul played the left and gave a loud yell. You can hear Paul’s voice when the band starts playing at the right tempo and everyone cheers. Vic Briggs, who was a guitarist with the Animals, is on it while Viv Prince, the drummer with the Pretty Things, drops a cymbal and makes general noises and yells.”
November 1967, Hello Goodbye/ I Am the Walrus (Parlophone R 5655, UK No.1, US No.1)
Alistair Taylor: “Paul sat me at his old, hand-carved harmonium. He told me to hit any note on the keyboard and he’d do the same. Whenever he said a word, I was to say the opposite, and from all this he would compose a melody. The words were things like ‘black, white’ and ‘hello, goodbye’. I can’t remember what Paul’s tune was but a short while later he arrived at the office with a demo of the latest single: ‘Hello Goodbye’.”
The arrangement of ‘Hello Goodbye’ with its feeling of a carnival ride is better than the song. It is a song of contradictions, which you also get in ‘All You Need Is Love’. The record has a great fadeout, anticipating ‘Hey Jude’.
Rick Wakeman: “‘I Am the Walrus’ is absolutely stunning and illustrates the remarkable empathy between George Martin and the Beatles. He was another ace in the pack and an important catalyst. The Beatles had no formal musical training, but they knew what they wanted and they were able to convey those ideas to someone who could translate them: George Martin. I experienced the same thing with Jon Anderson in Yes. He has had no formal training but he knows what he wants to do.”
Pete Shotton: “John was on the piano and writing ‘I Am the Walrus’ and he said to me, ‘What was that silly song we used to sing about yellow matter custard?’ I said it was a horrible poem:
‘Yellow matter custard, green slop pie,
All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye,
Slap it on a butty ten foot thick,
And then wash it down with a cup of cold sick.’
He wrote it down and said to me, ‘Let the fuckers work that one out.’”
Documentary film-maker Tony Palmer: “I did once have a long conversation with John about ‘I Am the Walrus’. He admitted that he hadn’t a clue as to what it was about but the words and the melody flowed and he felt it was right at the time. That is a sufficient explanation.”
Pete Shotton: “John used to receive sacks of mail but he wouldn’t read it. He would have a lucky dip from time-to-time and he picked one out from a kid at Quarry Bank. He wrote to say that the English teacher was playing their records and asking the kids to analyse them. We cracked up laughing. We rebelled at school and got suspended for a while and now they were proud of him.”
Rick Wakeman: “I don’t think that there is a musician around who doesn’t appreciate Lennon and McCartney if they are really being honest as they changed the face of music. You can’t help but like them for so many reasons. My favourite period is around Sgt. Pepper and my favourite track of all time is ‘I Am the Walrus’. That is a work of art. Technically, it was remarkable, especially when you consider the limited technology that was available”
Eric Burdon from the Animals: “There was a wild party one night and John Lennon said to me, ‘Go for it, Eggman’, so I don’t know if that is a reference to me or not. I do remember taking that single to San Francisco and going to the house where the Grateful Dead lived and putting in on their superb hi-fi system which had been built by some top engineers. I played it over and over and our minds were blown. The Grateful Dead were the cutting edge of San Francisco’s radicalism and here they were listening to a Beatles cut and saying, ‘This is so psychedelic, where did that come from?”
And why was Eric Burdon called the Eggman? “Use your imagination.”
This is one of the few times when John Lennon’s surrealism is put into the Beatles’ songs. Possibly the Eggman is not Eric Burdon, but one of Lewis Carroll’s characters, Humpty Dumpty. In Lewis Carroll, the Walrus mystifies his charges with word games, hence John Lennon admitting to be the Walrus. Lennon did say that it could have been “I am the pudding basin”, but it couldn’t: he knew what he was doing.
Paul Du Noyer: “John liked to stay close to his roots which were in basic 50s rock’n’roll and above all, very powerful and very simple music. The only time he strayed from that was during the psychedelic era, around the time of ‘I Am the Walrus’, when everything became multi-layered and more complex. It became more abstract but that was a phase as he returned to very basic rock’n’roll. John felt that as long as he didn’t stray too far from that music that he loved he wouldn’t go far wrong.”
‘I Am the Walrus’ includes a reference to letting your knickers down. Tom Sloan, the Head of BBC Light Entertainment, wrote to his managers: “In the Beatles film so far uncompleted, they sing a number called ‘I Am the Walrus’. A disc has now been issued. The lyrics contain a very offensive passage and after talking to Anna Instone, we have both agreed not to play it on radio or television. Although not officially banned, it will not be heard on Top of the Pops or Juke Box Jury. I should be grateful if you would ensure that any other possible outlets are similarly blocked off.”
December 1967, Magical Mystery Tour EP (Parlophone MMT 1, UK No.2 on singles chart)
Magical Mystery Tour/ Your Mother Should Know/ I Am the Walrus / The Fool on the Hill/ Flying/ Blue Jay Way
Paul McCartney biographer, Chris Salewicz: “Paul’s father was a disciplinarian who believed in the work ethic in that traditional, particularly northern, way, and he passed that down to Paul. What do you do when something goes wrong? You work, you find something else to do. That’s what Paul does: he just gets on with it. When Brian Epstein died, he set up Magical Mystery Tour and when the Beatles split up, he formed another group.”
If Brian Epstein had still been alive, he might have persuaded them against Magical Mystery Tour. Film producer Denis O’Dell: “The idea was that each of the Beatles would write and direct their own section on something they had loved for years, and then they would join it. I would write segues to cover the whole thing and it would last 90 minutes. I had been there two weeks and Paul suddenly said that he wanted to shoot it. We did it then as an ad lib thing which was a shame as the idea was great. It would have been fun and a new way of working and good for them at the time.”
Tony Barrow: “There was an entourage following the coach. Half of Fleet Street took to their cars and drove down to the west country. Driving in the west country is now relatively easy, but then there were B-roads rather than motorways. At one point, we started a huge traffic jam because the coach could not turn; the lock wasn’t sufficient for it to go over this tiny bridge. We were stuck, not able to go forwards or backwards, because of traffic on either side.”
Chris Salewicz: “It was very much Paul’s project and it was inspired by a visit he’d made to San Francisco the previous April when he’d seen Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, as celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s book. You know, you’re either on the bus or you’re not. He’d been very inspired by that quasi-comic adventure.”
Tony Barrow: “Ivor Cutler was on the Magical Mystery Tour. I had discovered him before a lot of Englishmen because I had known him in my pre-Beatle, Decca days. I’d been involved in writing sleeve notes for his records and classics like ‘Gruts for Tea’ were well-known to me. I was delighted when I heard that he was going to be involved in Magical Mystery Tour because I thought the amalgamation of his humour with John Lennon’s would be quite something. As it was, an awful lot of stuff took place behind the scenes after the cameras had stopped rolling for the day. It was a great pity because they were hilarious together.”
Ivor Cutler played Buster Bloodvessel in Magical Mystery Tour: “The Beatles asked me to come on their Magical Mystery Tour and as I thought it would be worth doing, I did it. They said that they knew my work and I understand, from what I have read in newspapers, that I was an influence on John Lennon. George Melly included me in an article in The Times on John Lennon’s influences. It was sociologically very interesting to see how the Beatles related with the rest of the people on the coach. I was fascinated. They did it very, very well and I was impressed with their ability to be themselves. The critical response to Magical Mystery Tour didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. It’s not the way I would have made a film, but I’m not into making cheap jibes or anything like that.”
Victor Spinetti: “Magical Mystery Tour was berated by the press, ‘How dare these long haired louts think they can direct their own movie?’, but that movie was years ahead of Monty Python. If they had gone to Cambridge, everybody would have said, ‘Brilliant.’ Because they were the Beatles, they were ready to be knocked. There is some wonderful stuff in that film and the songs are great. They were all directors. John sent me a note: ‘Can you do that thing you did in Oh! What a Lovely War. P.S. Have you got any uppers?’ They wanted me to be the courier but I couldn’t as I was in a show in London.”
Sam Spoons from the Bonzo Dog Band: “As Magical Mystery Tour is one of the least interesting things that the Beatles ever did, it’s a pity to be associated with something that was a flop. It was not put together well but it wasn’t much of an idea in the first place. The concept of filming a tour has been done a lot better since. I ended up being cut out of it as they didn’t use the sequence I was in. I was sitting around at Christmas with a lot of my family and friends and I found it deeply embarrassing as (a) they didn’t enjoy the show anyway and (b) they never saw me on the screen. You can forget it as far as I’m concerned.”
Magical Mystery Tour was shown on BBC-TV over Christmas 1967 and was poorly received. Amateurish, poorly scripted, embarrassing, pointless – these were the favourable comments. Only The Guardian liked it. Critics were looking for a plot when there wasn’t one. It was the first time that the Beatles had been widely criticised. However, the years have been kind to Magical, Mystery Tour and it has improved with the years.
Denis O’Dell: “Paul was the one who did the work on the film as the others dropped by the wayside and I put an editor on it who understood music, Roy Benson. I was talking with an American company to take it first, but Paul wanted to repay the BBC for their loyalty to the Beatles, but they didn’t repay him by broadcasting it in black and white. I was 100 per cent against this, but it didn’t matter much. I sold it around the colleges and universities in America and it made money, but it should have had a better life.”
Noted rock writer and Paul McCartney biographer, Chris Salewicz: “I was very lucky in being able to see Magical Mystery Tour when it was shown on Boxing Day and again when it was repeated on New Year’s Day in colour. Very few people had colour TV then, but I had a friend who worked for the BBC with a colour set, and it was a revelation. But, even when I saw it on Boxing Day, I liked it very much. We perceived things in black-and-white in those days and it fitted in completely. It went out at the wrong time as people wanted to relax after Christmas. However, it fitted in totally with the genre of the times, Play for Today, with that core of faintly wacky, bit pretentious, rather surrealistic, unstructured plays. I don’t see what the problem is with Magical Mystery Tour. I think it’s a good film and the review in The Guardian was highly favourable.”
Tony Barrow: “I was sorry that when Magical Mystery Tour was on TV, it was slammed and slated by critics from every quarter. They were expecting a massive epic, which is the one thing it was never meant to be. Magical Mystery Tour was ahead of its time. It was a late 60s progression from the Goon Show, but people weren’t ready for it, least of all the television critics. Although the music for Magical Mystery Tour did not contain the finest music that Lennon and McCartney ever wrote or that the Beatles ever played, it had some fabulous stuff in it. The title song wasn’t too bad at all and you’ve got the marvellous extremes of ‘Fool on the Hill’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’. I was in the back of the coach, so it’s like a home movie for me. If it had been directed more professionally and with more thought, it could have been a Not the Nine O’Clock News or Monty Python or whatever.”
Viv Stanshall, the lead singer of the Bonzo Dog Band: “We were involved in a scene with a load of strippers, so it was great, come on! I wanted to do some Chandleresque nonsense. At the time I was not particularly well read and I wish I had read Dashiell Hammett. I thought Magical Mystery Tour was a very good effort. It wasn’t lit very well and had technical faults but it had ‘I Am the Walrus’ and some wonderful songs. They had a go with Magical Mystery Tour and that’s all one can do.”
Neil Innes from the Bonzos: “The launch party for Magical Mystery Tour was in fancy dress and Viv had a yellow plastic mac that he covered with plastic fried eggs to go as the Eggman, and Paul was very jealous. The Beach Boys were there and we all got up for a 20 minute version of ‘Oh Carol’ with George on bongos. Viv was moaning to John and Paul about how our producer would only give us 3 hours at a time in the studio, which led to Paul producing ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ for us.”
Few, though, criticised the music for Magical Mystery Tour. The six-track, double EP included ‘Fool on the Hill’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’. The EP set was listed on the singles chart and only kept from No.1 by the Beatles ‘Hello Goodbye’. As the B-side of ‘Hello Goodbye’ was ‘I Am the Walrus’, the Beatles effectively had the same record at No.1 and No.2!
The packaging for the EP set was exceptional, but it was used differently in the US as additional, previously released tracks were added to make a new album. Tony Barrow: “Magical Mystery Tour was a pair of EP records in a sleeve which contained a cartoon story book based upon the show. It was something that I edited and worked on in collaboration with Paul. I remember him saying Rupert Bear style, which is the way we did it – that is, not balloons, but words under the pictures. While the film was being edited in one little room in Soho, Paul and I were in another room getting that book together and he spent more time on it than I ever imagined. It pleased me greatly because I thought that he would lose all interest after they’d finished filming because there were so many disasters on that. The whole production was an ad-lib affair and I thought they might all clear off to India and I would be left to put the book together and somebody else the film, but Paul saw it through to its conclusion.”
Mark Lewisohn: “The song ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ itself has some nice sound effects. There is the sound of a car which goes from the left speaker to the right speaker, which was taped by one of the engineers from Abbey Road leaning over a bridge on the M1. All that ‘Roll up, roll up’ was speeded up from the tempo at which it was recorded.”
George Melly: “‘Your Mother Should Know’ has the feel of the Grafton Rooms, which is a Liverpool dance-hall from my youth. It’s brilliantly captured that feeling of dressing-up and ballroom dancing to Mrs Wilf Hamer. Those songs will last as long as people have a means of playing them.”
Out of keeping with the rest of Magical Mystery Tour, ‘The Fool on the Hill’ is another classy ballad from Paul McCartney, usually taken as a romantic song but it’s not necessarily so. Like ‘Yesterday’, you are not sure what is going on. Who is the “man with a thousand voices”?
The instrumental, ‘Flying’, credited to all four Beatles is a strong piece of film music including Duane Eddy-styled guitar, John on the Mellotron and some chanting by the band. George Harrison offered the swirling sounds of the mystical ‘Blue Jay Way’, which is about waiting for Derek Taylor to arrive at his rented house in Los Angeles one foggy night. The overall sound with the phased vocals is not far from the Incredible String Band.
Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band: “It’s sometimes said that we influenced the Beatles, but I’ve met Paul McCartney and he never said, ‘You influenced us’, so I don’t think we did. I loved anything that George Harrison did. It’s very clever to write song that are commercially acceptable and yet have spiritual messages. I’ve tried to do that but he was a master at it.”
December 1967, The Beatles Fifth Christmas Record Flexidisc (Fan Club) Another new seasonal song, ‘Christmas Time Is Here Again’, recurs throughout the fan club single, later recorded in 1999 as a 4-minute song by Ringo Starr. Other song snatches are ‘Get One of Those for Your Trousers’ (a parody of the Wonderloaf ad) and ‘Plenty of Jam Jars’. There is a Goons-styled sketch where they arrive at Broadcasting House, and John plays a Scottish poet on ‘When Christmas Time Is O’er’. Victor Spinetti, Mal Evans and George Martin are also featured on this faux broadcast and it illustrates that the Beatles would have made a better job of the satire on The Who Sell-Out (1968) than the Who did.
On the whole, we can see that Paul McCartney was buoyant and full of confidence during 1967 while John was depressed. John was capable of truly eccentric behaviour, undoubtedly fuelled by drugs, but not a million miles from his true personality. What if this story had been made public at the time? Pete Shotton: “We spent the whole night together and we had the house to ourselves as Cyn was in Italy with her mother and we had been hanging round the house. We used to take substances in the attic where his tapes and his toys were and he was circling his arms in front of me and he said, ‘Something is happening. I am Jesus Christ, I am back again.’ I said, ‘Couldn’t you be happy just being John Lennon?’ He said, ‘You must get the inner circle together tomorrow to make the announcement.’ We fell asleep on the floor after discussing it. He believed it all right and I have my doubts if he ever stopped believing it. We fell asleep and the housekeeper came round at 8 a.m. and we made phone calls, and everyone converged at the Apple office. John sat behind the desk, the focal point of the office, and he said, ‘I am Jesus Christ, I am back again.’ They went, ‘Oh yeah’, and were blasé about it. I said, ‘What shall we do now?’, and someone suggested the pub. It was busy in the pub and John sat on a bench next to some feller. This bloke said, ‘You’re John Lennon and it’s nice to meet you.’ John said, ‘Well, actually, I am Jesus Christ.’ This feller said, without being phased at all, ‘Well, I liked your last record anyway.’ We had a beer and went back to the office and the next night he met Yoko and there was a very quick turnaround. He stayed with her that night and Jesus Christ got forgotten then.”
Whatever we may think of the Beatles’ eccentricities, 1967 is generally regarded as their creative peak. ‘Penny Lane’/ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is a contender for the greatest single ever made, while the wildly inventive Sgt. Pepper has been voted the best rock album on many polls. Even by today’s rock critics.