Sergeant Pepper’s a smash hit again

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 All About Rock 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 A Day in the Life.