Sergeant Pepper’s a smash hit again
Remastered Beatles classic headed back to top of US Billboard charts
Fifty years after it was released, an album that critics and fans alike regard as one of The Beatles’ finest is heading back to No 1 in the US Billboard charts, albeit a remastered version with extra tracks and interviews.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in Britain on May 26, 1967, and seven days later in the United States. It was the Liverpool group’s eighth studio album and it spent 27 weeks at No 1 in the UK and 15 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts.
Only a handful of albums down the decades have sold more copies.
William Goodman, writing this month in Billboard magazine, described the album as a “musically groundbreaking, hyper-influential career-high watermark from the Best Band of All Time”.
“Sergeant Pepper’s is indeed that album,” he added, saying that the collection of 13 songs on the original double-vinyl album became a crossroads marker for the band, which had begun to grow tired of constant touring and television appearances after its breakthrough single Love Me Do hit the UK charts in 1962.
John Lennon, probably the most subversive member of the group, and certainly the most outspoken, summed up The Beatles’ attitude toward stage performances at the time by saying: “They could send out four waxworks ... and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music any more. They are just (expletive) tribal rites.”
Paul McCartney, Lennon’s songwriting partner, later said: “We were fed up with being The Beatles. We really hated that (expletive) four little moptop approach. We were men, and thought of ourselves as artists, rather than performers .”
That dissatisfaction produced an album that took from November 1966 to April 1967 to record at Abbey Road studios.
It was heavy on technical processing effects and the use of a 40-piece orchestra.
To this day, most music critics and fans regard it as the first concept album, with the songs loosely gathered around a theme, rather than just a collection of unrelated songs.
The other thing that set the album apart was artist Peter Blake’s groundbreaking cover art, signed copies of which now fetch as much as $11,600 at auction.
Big in China
In China, Zhang Youdai, who hosts a daily program called AllAboutRock on China Radio International, said: “We started to get access to rock music in the 1980s and the songs of The Beatles were our prior choices.” Incidentally, Zhang was born in the year the album was released.
Chinese fans’ interest in The Beatles was helped by Cui Jian, one of the country’s leading rock stars.
His band, Qi He Ban, was formed in 1984 and was one of the first rock bands in China. Its early recordings featured re-recordings of Beatles songs in Chinese.
Data from Xiami, Alibaba’s fast-developing music app, showed Sergeant Pepper’s was accessed more than 1.3 million times, with fans giving it a rating of 9.7 out of 10.
According to Zhang, who plans a special program to celebrate the release of Sergeant Pepper, the most popular songs from the album in China were Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life.