Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 26 May 1967 in the United Kingdom and 2 June 1967 in the United States, it spent 27 weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart and 15 weeks at number one in the US. It was lauded by critics for its innovations in production, songwriting and graphic design, for bridging a cultural divide between popular music and high art, and for providing a musical representation of its generation and the contemporary counterculture. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour.
In August 1966, the Beatles permanently retired from touring and began a three-month holiday. During a return flight to London in November, Paul McCartney had an idea for a song involving an Edwardian military band that formed the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept. Sessions began on 24 November at EMI's Abbey Road Studios with two compositions inspired by the Beatles' youth, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", but after pressure from EMI, the songs were released as a double A-side single and not included on the album.
In February 1967, after recording the title track "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", McCartney suggested that the Beatles should release an entire album representing a performance by the fictional Sgt. Pepper band. This alter ego group would give them the freedom to experiment musically. During the recording sessions, the band furthered the technological progression they had made with their 1966 album Revolver. Knowing they would not have to perform the tracks live, they adopted an experimental approach to composition and recording on songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "A Day in the Life". Producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick helped realise the group's ideas by approaching the studio as an instrument, applying orchestral overdubs, sound effects and other methods of tape manipulation. Recording was completed on 21 April 1967. The cover, depicting the Beatles posing in front of a tableau of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by the British pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.
Sgt. Pepper is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while continuing the artistic maturation seen on the Beatles' preceding releases. An important work of British psychedelia, the album incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music. It is described as one of the first art rock LPs, aiding the development of progressive rock, and is credited with marking the beginning of the album era. In 2003, the Library of Congress placed Sgt. Pepper in the National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2003, and in a revised list published in 2012, Rolling Stone ranked the album number one in its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". As of 2011, it has sold more than 32 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time, and it remains the UK's best-selling studio album. Professor Kevin Dettmar, writing in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, described it as "the most important and influential rock-and-roll album ever recorded".
By 1966, the Beatles had grown weary of live performance. In John Lennon's opinion, they could "send out four waxworks ... and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music anymore. They're just bloody tribal rites." In June that year, two days after finishing the album Revolver, the group set off for a tour that started in West Germany. While in Hamburg they received an anonymous telegram stating: "Do not go to Tokyo. Your life is in danger." The threat was taken seriously in light of the controversy surrounding the tour among Japan's religious and conservative groups, with particular opposition to the Beatles' planned performances at the sacred Nippon Budokan arena. As an added precaution, 35,000 police were mobilised and tasked with protecting the group, who were transported from hotels to concert venues in armoured vehicles. The Beatles then performed in the Philippines, where they were threatened and manhandled by its citizens for not visiting First Lady Imelda Marcos. The group were angry with their manager, Brian Epstein, for insisting on what they regarded as an exhausting and demoralising itinerary.
The publication in the US of Lennon's remarks about the Beatles being "more popular than Jesus" then embroiled the band in controversy and protest in America's Bible Belt. A public apology eased tensions, but a US tour in August that was marked by reduced ticket sales, relative to the group's record attendances in 1965, and subpar performances proved to be their last. The author Nicholas Schaffner writes:
To the Beatles, playing such concerts had become a charade so remote from the new directions they were pursuing that not a single tune was attempted from the just-released Revolver LP, whose arrangements were for the most part impossible to reproduce with the limitations imposed by their two-guitars-bass-and-drums stage lineup.
On the Beatles' return to England, rumours began to circulate that they had decided to break up. George Harrison informed Epstein that he was leaving the band, but was persuaded to stay on the assurance that there would be no more tours. The group took a three-month break, during which they focused on individual interests. Harrison travelled to India for six weeks to study the sitar under the instruction of Ravi Shankar and develop his interest in Hindu philosophy. Having been the last of the Beatles to concede that their live performances had become futile, Paul McCartney collaborated with Beatles producer George Martin on the soundtrack for the film The Family Way and holidayed in Kenya with Mal Evans, one of the Beatles' tour managers. Lennon acted in the film How I Won the War and attended art showings, such as one at the Indica Gallery where he met his future wife Yoko Ono. Ringo Starr used the break to spend time with his wife Maureen and son Zak.
While in London without his bandmates, McCartney took the hallucinogenic drug LSD (or "acid") for the first time, having long resisted Lennon and Harrison's insistence that he join them and Starr in experiencing its perception-heightening effects. According to author Jonathan Gould, this initiation into LSD afforded McCartney the "expansive new sense of possibility" that defined the group's next project, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Gould adds that McCartney's succumbing to peer pressure allowed Lennon "to play the role of psychedelic guide" to his songwriting partner, thereby facilitating a closer collaboration between the two than had been evident since early in the Beatles' career. For his part, Lennon had turned deeply introspective during the filming of How I Won the War in southern Spain in September 1966. His anxiety over his and the Beatles' future was reflected in "Strawberry Fields Forever", a song that would provide the initial theme, regarding a Liverpool childhood, of the new album. On his return to London, Lennon embraced the city's arts culture, of which McCartney was a part, and shared his bandmate's interest in avant-garde and electronic-music composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.
In November, during his and Evans' return flight from Kenya, McCartney had an idea for a song that eventually formed the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept. His idea involved an Edwardian-era military band, for which Evans invented a name in the style of contemporary San Francisco-based groups such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In February 1967, McCartney suggested that the Beatles should record an entire album that would represent a performance by the fictional band. This alter ego group would give them the freedom to experiment musically by releasing them from their image as Beatles. Martin remembered:
Paul said, "Why don't we make the album as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant Pepper was making the record? We'll dub in effects and things." I loved the idea, and from that moment on it was as though Pepper had a life of its own.
Ian MacDonald writes that when reviewing their rivals' recent work in late 1966, the Beatles identified the most significant LP as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which Brian Wilson, the band's leader, had created in response to the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. McCartney said he was highly impressed with the songs' "harmonic structures" and the choice of instruments used in Wilson's musical arrangements, and that these elements encouraged him to think the Beatles could "get further out" than the Beach Boys had. He added: "we were inspired by it and nicked a few ideas." According to author Kenneth Womack, the Beach Boys' subsequent release, the "Good Vibrations" single, was viewed by the Beatles and Martin as "a direct challenge" to their supremacy. McCartney identified Pet Sounds as his main musical inspiration for Sgt. Pepper, although he said it lacked the avant-garde quality he was seeking. He envisioned the Beatles' alter egos being able to "do a bit of B.B. King, a bit of Stockhausen, a bit of Albert Ayler, a bit of Ravi Shankar, a bit of Pet Sounds, a bit of the Doors". In a 1967 interview, Harrison said that the Beatles' ongoing success had encouraged them to continue developing musically and that, given their standing, "We can do things that please us without conforming to the standard pop idea. We are not only involved in pop music, but all music."
Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention has also been cited as having influenced Sgt. Pepper. According to the author Philip Norman, during the Sgt. Pepper recording sessions McCartney repeatedly stated: "This is our Freak Out!" The music journalist Chet Flippo states that McCartney was inspired to record a concept album after hearing Freak Out!
Sgt. Pepper appeared on the Billboard albums chart in the US for 175 non-consecutive weeks through 1987. The album sustained its immense popularity into the 21st century while breaking numerous sales records. With certified sales of 5.1 million copies, it is the third-best-selling album in UK chart history and the best-selling studio album there. It is one of the most commercially successful albums in the US, where the RIAA certified sales of 11 million copies in 1997. By 2000, Sgt. Pepper was among the top 20 best-selling albums of all time worldwide. As of 2011, it had sold more than 32 million copies worldwide, making it one of the highest-selling albums of all time.
Sgt. Pepper has topped many "best album" lists. It was voted in first place in Paul Gambaccini's 1978 book Critics' Choice: Top 200 Albums, based on submissions from around 50 British and American critics and broadcasters including Christgau, Marcus, Dave Marsh and Ed Ward, and again in the 1987 edition. In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), it appears in "A Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings. In 1994, it was ranked first in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. He described it as "the album that revolutionized, changed and re-invented the boundaries of modern popular music". Among its appearances in other critics' polls, the album topped the BBC's "Music of the Millennium" albums list in 1998 and was ranked third in Q's 2004 list "The Music That Changed the World". In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, honouring the work as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In 2003, Rolling Stone placed Sgt. Pepper at number one in the magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", ranking the same upon a revised list in 2012, describing it as "the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists". The editors also said it was "the most important rock and roll album ever made", a point to which June Skinner Sawyers adds, in her 2006 collection of essays Read the Beatles: "[Sgt. Pepper] has been called the most famous album in the history of popular music. It is certainly among the most written about. It is still being written about." In 2006 it was chosen by Time as one of the 100 best albums of all time. Writing that same year, Dettmar described Sgt. Pepper as "quite simply, the most important and influential rock-and-roll album ever recorded". It is featured in Chris Smith's 2009 book 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music, where Smith highlights the album among the most "obvious" choices for inclusion due to its continued commercial success, the wealth of imitative works it inspired, and its ongoing recognition as "a defining moment in the history of music".
The album inspired the 1974 off-Broadway musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, directed by Tom O'Horgan, and the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, produced by Robert Stigwood. In 1977, the LP won Best British Album at the inaugural Brit Awards. It has been the subject of many tribute albums, including a multi-artist CD available with the March 2007 issue of Mojo and a 2009 live album, Sgt. Pepper Live, by the American band Cheap Trick. Other tribute recordings include Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father, a multi-artist charity compilation released by the NME in 1988, and Big Daddy's 1992 Sgt. Pepper's album, a release that Moore recognised as "the most audacious" of all the interpretations of the Beatles' LP up to 1997. Mark Morris choreographed Pepperland to the Beatles' "Penny Lane" and four of the songs from Sgt. Pepper, arranged by Ethan Iverson, plus six original compositions by Iverson. This work received its world premiere in Liverpool on 25 May 2017, as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the album's release.
Track listing
Original release
All songs written by Lennon–McCartney, except "Within You Without You" by George Harrison. Track lengths and lead vocals per Mark Lewisohn and Ian MacDonald.
Side one
- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" McCartney 2:00
- "With a Little Help from My Friends" Starr 2:42
- "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Lennon 3:28
- "Getting Better" McCartney with Lennon 2:48
- "Fixing a Hole" McCartney 2:36
- "She's Leaving Home" McCartney with Lennon 3:35
- "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" Lennon 2:37
Side two
- "Within You Without You" Harrison 5:05
- "When I'm Sixty-Four" McCartney 2:37
- "Lovely Rita" McCartney 2:42
- "Good Morning Good Morning" Lennon 2:42
- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" Lennon, McCartney and Harrison 1:18
- "A Day in the Life" Lennon with McCartney 5:38
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