SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
50 years on: The Beatles by any other name
EVEN THE MOST musically myopic can’t have failed to notice the media flurry accompanying the 50th anniversary of ‘the greatest album of all time’ (although some critics have also declared it the worst).
Having abandoned live concerts, exhausted and frustrated, The Beatles conceived Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as an alterego to extend their musical ambitions. W hereas their first album took 13 hours to record, Sgt
Pepper absorbed an intensely creative 700 hours, resulting in a 39min 52sec opus that changed the direction of popular music. It won four Grammy awards in 1968: Best Album, Best Contemporary Album, Best Engineered Album, and Best Album Cover.
The sleeve, featuring famous people, was Paul McCartney’s idea – manager Brian Epstein had suggested a plain brown paper wrapper. Overruled, he then recommend art dealer and gallery owner Robert Fraser as an adviser. Fraser liked McCartney’s idea and proposed that husband-and-wife pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth should take on the project. Blake’s pop iconography drew on fairground acts, wrestlers, music hall performers and Hollywood film stars as a source for his work and was an inspired choice.
Blake asked each Beatle to nominate a dozen significant figures for inclusion. Paul, John and George duly complied but Ringo passed. George Harrison chose mainly Indian gurus, while John, always controversial, wanted Hitler and Jesus in the line-up, though neither was included. (Peter Blake maintained later that Hitler was there but obscured behind one of the Beatles.) Blake and Haworth added some of their own subjects and Fraser chose several artists – including some whom he represented!
Of the 71 figures on the cover, most are hand-coloured photographic blow-ups, but there are also ex-Madame Tussauds wax models of the ‘old’ Beatles and of course the Pepperedup real-life ones. Curiously, three Shirley Temples appear, one knitted by Haworth in her signature ‘soft’ sculpture style and wearing a ‘Welcome The Rolling Stones’ jumper.
Significant by their absence were some of the musicians who had influenced the band: where were Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry? And no Elvis, though Dion made the cut. When asked why no Elvis, McCartney said: ‘Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention – he was more than merely a pop singer, he was Elvis the King.’ Which actually seems like the very reason to have included him.
On the album’s release, controversy swirled around the meaning of the lyrics (for the first time included in full on the album sleeve) and their references, real or imagined, to psychedelic drugs. The cover also generated its own mythology. Conspiracy theorists swore that it contained hidden cyphers proving the then-rife rumour that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike.
For his contribution, and the copyright, Peter Blake received what today seems a derisory fee of £200 – however, the average annual salary in 1967 was around £850, so perhaps not so bad then. Producing the artwork and the set build in photographer Michael Cooper’s Chelsea studio was reputed to have cost an unprecedented £3000 – equivalent to more than £50,000 today.
Blake commissioned the decorated drum at the centre of the tableau from fairground artist Joe Ephgrave. Ephgrave didn’t meet the Beatles, didn’t go to the shoot and remains a footnote in history. The original painting sold in 2008 for more than half-a-million pounds. And apostrophe vigilantes still squirm at the fact that there isn’t one in the drum’s ‘Peppers’.
Peter Blake went on to design album covers for, amongst others, The Who, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, Ian Dury and Oasis. A year after
Sgt Pepper, Richard Hamilton, another pop artist and contemporary of Blake, designed The Beatles’ next album cover and it could not have been more different – pure white minimalism with only a tiny embossed ‘Beatles’ and each sleeve printed with a unique edition number. Low numbers now fetch big money.