It Was Forty Years Ago Today

I don't remember much about 1st June 1967, we would still have been living in Essex before heading south west. I can't remember the big launch of an album that changed the way popular music was recorded and listened. I can remember Hello Goodbye that came out in November because a friend of mine insisted on singing the coda all the time, you know "Hayla, Hey, Helloa." I was seven at the time.

Sgt.Pepper certainly changed many people's listening habits, I didn't hear it until I was 11 and I remember thinking that the musical arrangements were amazing, the arrangements reminded me of the classical music I'd grown up listening to at my Grandparents.

I bought a copy, which I still have complete with all the cut-outs that were included, and took it to school for the after school music listening club. That sounds really wanky but I had two teachers: Mr Joyce who taught English and sports and Mr Smith who taught Maths who, when I was 11 and 12, would stay behind after school once a week and me and a group of friends would bring records in to play. I remember Mr Smith being particularly keen on the line from "Getting Better" that goes, "the teachers that taught me weren't cool." He thought he was you see.

It's not my favourite Beatles album, that honour (?) is shared between Rubber Soul and A Hard Days Night, neither of which I think has a duff track on it. Parts of Sgt.Pepper are too claggy, like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth, but it's the whole rather than the parts that make it so memorable. It contains the last great Lennon-McCartney composition in A Day In The Life, the fantastic Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite and two dreadful Paul McCartney syrup coated confections in She's Leaving Home and When I'm 64. That said I'm not going to fall into the trap of revisionist theory and slag it off - it was after all recorded by a band who just a little over three years earlier had recorded I Want To Hold Your Hand. The evolution from moptop to standard bearers probably began with She's A Woman (the b-side of I Feel Fine), followed by Nowhere Man, Rain, Paperback Writer and the whole of the Revolver album.

By the time the group had finished touring in late 1966, brought on by trouble in the Philipines, music was moving on, Pet Sounds had been released in the Summer of 1966, Dylan had recorded Blonde on Blonde and The Beatles were ready to take recording to the next level.

It always seems strange that it's regarded as the first concept album, a term John Lennon hated so much he deliberately scuppered the whole 'concept' approach by not writing conceptual songs, I would have thought The Who's - A Quick One, which was released in December 1966, whilst the Fabs were starting the recording of the Sgt.Pepper sessions, was the earliest true concept albums - but I'm splitting hairs here.

The sessions that spawned the album also produced Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields which EMI pressurised the group into releasing as a single before the album came out. The group had adopted a 'no singles on the album' policy in 1965 and George Martin has said the one regret he has from his Beatles days is that those two tracks were not included on the album.

The big impact of Sgt.Pepper is on the recording industry and the groups peers (if that's possible) and contemporary artists. It's often been said that the album encouraged groups to write longer songs and develop concept albums, I'd argue with the first point if only because Bob Dylan wrote, recorded and released Like A Rolling Stone in the summer of 1965. The second part is certainly true and you could say that The Beatles were directly responsible for the overblown period of popular music that lasted for ten years until being, temporarily, blown away by the second most important album of the past forty years, one that celebrates it's thirtieth anniversary this October - but that, as they say, is another post.