Sgt Pepper taught the band to play…
50 years ago today, it was unlike anything we had ever heard – and we’re still loving it
IT CAME out of nowhere: distorted guitars, orchestras, farmyard sounds and electronic energy. The only element that we recognised was the unmistakeable Beatles vocals. We had never heard anything like it.
From the rousing opener with its driving beat to the tears and tragedy of She’s leaving Home, we were enthralled and we played the album over and over again. Fifty years later we are still playing it.
On June 1, 1967, an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, changed popular music forever. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s album shattered the pop world by introducing a masterpiece of collaborative genius, so original that it raised the expectations of music followers worldwide and revolutionised the recorded music business. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the greatest album of all time.
The release of the album came just in time.
The Beatles had been struggling. On March 4, 1966, an article appeared in the London Evening Standard that was going to cause problems for them. Journalist Maureen Cleave was interviewing John Lennon, who notoriously said: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n roll or Christianity.
“Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
The publication of the article marked the end of “Beatlemania”, that intense fan frenzy and hysteria that followed the Beatles. Not only that, adoration turned to hatred and Beatles records, magazines and other memorabilia were publicly burned. What a change from the popularity of the past with chart-topping albums as well as movies like A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965) along with the US tours and television broadcasts.
In South Africa, the reaction of the government was to ban the broadcasting of Beatles music. If we wanted to listen to Beatles music in South Africa, we had to buy it.
Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager, knew that they needed something new.
Towards the end of 1966, Paul Mccartney was on Safari in Kenya with his actress girlfriend, Jane Asher. Perhaps it was simply the magic of Africa or, more specifically, the natural beauty and splendour of Treetops Hotel in the Aberdare National Park in Kenya that provided the stimulus Mccartney needed. On the plane home from Nairobi to London, he came up with the biggest idea ever in popular music – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It turned out to be a masterpiece.
In his biography of Mccartney, Barry Miles quotes him as The Fab Four, from left Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Paul Mccartney and George Harrison, rewrote music history with the release of their landmark, eighth studio album in the British summer of 1967. It was the best-selling album of the ’60s saying: “We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that f ***** g four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy s**t, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more; plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers.”
Mccartney went on to explain the thinking behind Sgt. Pepper’s: “Then, suddenly, on the plane I got this idea. I thought, ‘let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know’.
“It would be much more free. What would really be interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band.”
With the meal on the plane came little packets marked ‘S’ and ‘P’ – salt and pepper which became Sergeant Pepper. Mccartney went on: “I just fantasised, well, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. That’d be crazy enough because why would a Lonely Hearts Club have a band?”
Back in London, knowing they would not have to perform the tracks live, the Beatles were happy to experiment with the approach to composition and recording on songs such as With a Little Help from my Friends, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life. Producer George Martin left his mark on the album, which included a generous application of sound-shaping signal processing and the use of a 40-piece orchestra performing aleatoric crescendos.
Beatle lead guitarist, George Harrison, wrote Within You, Without You and provided the lead vocals. Drummer Ringo Starr, unusually, was the lead vocalist for With a Little Help from my Friends.
Nothing was the same. Everything was different.
Sgt. Pepper’s spent 27 weeks at the top of the albums’ chart in the UK and 15 weeks at number one in the US. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year – the first rock album to receive this honour.
Not all critics were generous in their reviews
One of the best-known American critics at the time, Richard Goldstein, wrote a scathing review in The New York Times that created by studio album was the Beatles’ eighth Grammy Award The artwork for in 1967 won the Peter Blake, who it. Many have Jann Haworth and their work on Graphic Arts for persona for Best Album Cover, the line-up of famous its meaning, and on the cover, speculated about Jesus Christ John Lennon wanted Lennon’s Jesus changed several times. after it was too soon canned because but didn’t but the idea was meant to feature, and Gandhi were psychiatrist remarks.adolf Hitler Marilyn Monroe, included sex kitten Dietrich, join the line-up that Marlene pipe, David Livingstone, of hairdressers’ Carl Jung, a hookah Joyce, a number Bob Dylan, James and a 9-inch Lawrence of Arabia, gnome, HG Wells Brando, a garden what it means. wax dummies, Marlon tried to figure out Many have since Sony television set. gives a clue. The hookah possibly described Sgt. Pepper’s as “spoiled” and “reeking” of “special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent”. The New York Times was subsequently deluged with letters, all
disagreeing and many abusive. Goldstein subsequently tried to explain himself but he wasted his time. The backlash was probably the largest response to a music review in history.
The Beatles became widely regarded as the foremost and most influential act of the rock era. They went on to produce many highly acclaimed albums like the White Album and Abbey Road. But nothing lasts forever and the band broke up in 1970.
Rolling Stone magazine reckoned that “the Beatles in their death throes were one of the most mysterious and complicated end-of-romance tales of the 20th century, as well as the most dispiriting. The Beatles hadn’t just made music – they had made their times, as surely as any political force, and more beneficently than most”.
We still remember the day the Beatles broke up and we remember the day John Lennon died, shot by the murderer Mark Chapman. Just as the songs played by the piper in Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn will be “forever new”, so John Lennon will be forever young, his youthful image and energy frozen in time. Had he lived, he would be 77 now – how terribly strange to imagine.
Like all good Beatles fans we faithfully replaced our records with CDS and still play tracks from the various albums.
What never ceases to amaze us is all the memories that this evokes, memories that come tumbling back from long-forgotten years, memories that mean the Beatles are as alive today as they were when Sgt. Pepper’s “came out of nowhere”.
The Greenhams are local historians based in Durban.