Sgt Pepper at 50: Alive and kicking!

Not too long ago, at a detention facility of the militant Islamic State group in Syria, there was a quartet of particularly vicious enforcers who stood out not only because of their exceptional penchant for torture and beheadings, but also because all four of them spoke with British accents.

Their victims dubbed them The Beatles, after a band whose iconic status as a universal cultural phenomenon remains intact more than 45 years after it disintegrated. That status was more or less set in stone after an extraordinary album that was released 50 years ago tomorrow.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was greeted in The Times by the theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan as “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation”. Not everyone was impressed, though. The New York Times’ critic Richard Goldstein called it “busy, hip and cluttered”, decrying “a surprising shoddiness in composition” and declaring the album “fraudulent”. It subsequently turned out that Goldstein’s stereo was malfunctioning when he initially put the vinyl disc through its paces.

Stereo recordings were anyhow something of a novelty back then. After completing the mono mix, The Beatles left the stereo version to their producer, George Martin, and the engineers.

Arguably, Martin deserves the accolade of being the Fifth Beatle . Not only did he, as the head of a relatively inconsequential and esoteric EMI label called Parlophone, in 1962 spot in The Beatles a potential that various other labels had missed, he also kept a stern eye on production values.

It could be said that Martin’s instrumentality in honing the sound of The Beatles reached its apogee with Sgt Pepper. The Beatles had by then decided to stop touring, so whatever they did in the studio no longer required to be reproduced live on stage. This gave them the freedom to take their audio experiments to a new level. Among the earliest songs to be completed in the sessions were Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, groundbreaking reflections by John Lennon and Paul McCartney respectively on their Liverpool childhoods.

Neither track made it on to the album, much to Martin’s subsequent regret because EMI was insisting on new material. Even though The Beatles had released their groundbreaking album Revolver earlier in 1966, before wrapping up their live commitments, back then bands were expected to come up with a steady stream of material lest they fell off the pop radar. Hence Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields were issued as a double-A-sided single. It became the first Beatles single since 1962 not to make it to number one on the British charts, because each side was tallied separately.

The lads carried on with their album, which was supposedly based on a conceit McCartney had come up with: namely that The Beatles would take on a different persona, as reflected in the album’s title. Although the songs segue into one another, the concept did not really work out. Beyond the first two tracks, the rest are unrelated. Many of them nonetheless qualify as stupendous additions to the band’s oeuvre, from With a Little Help from My Friends and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to Within You Without You and the utterly unprecedented A Day in the Life, which wraps up the album.

Many of the remaining tracks — including She’s Leaving Home and Good Morning, Good Morning — are standouts too, and the 50th anniversary of the album brings a stereo remix masterminded by Martin’s son Giles.

It can hardly be expected, though, to replicate the effect the album originally had back in the day, on account of not just its content but also its innovative gatefold sleeve and the first instance of printed lyrics. About two months before its release, The Beatles took the acetate to their friend Mama Cass Elliot’s Chelsea apartment in the early hours of an April morning and blasted it out from the windows. Other windows in the neighbourhood flew open. People peered out with smiles on their faces and stuck up their thumbs. The Beatles had, once again, passed the audition.

By arrangement with Dawn