Review of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Released 1967

"When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.
And the time will come when you will see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you".


I have a very strange relationship with this album. I had had a summer job working behind the bar, where for the course of the entire summer season, only three cassettes were played in constant rotation: Sade's first album, Paul McCartney's second album and Sgt. Pepper. Although all three albums have much going for them, having heard each of them an estimated 150 times in quick succession that summer, each time I hear a snatch from any of them, I have a Proustian moment where instantly the smell of an ashtray mixed with Fairy Liquid makes me want to gag: not the reaction the Fab Four intended when they composed what is frequently seen as the most influential album of the twentieth century.

On the plus side, a couple of years later, I recall a major documentary about The Beatles being screened in the JCR of our University Halls. It was twenty years since the making of their seminal album and many of rock and pop's main alumni were interviewed, along with the surviving Beatles themselves, talking about the whole summer of love experience. Incidentally, I pretty sure that this was the first time the fabled quote - " If you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there" was aired by a member of Jefferson Airplane. Anyhow, an awful lot of students gathered to watch that documentary and were enraptured by the scope of their achievement and the mystic of the time. It was clear from the diverse range of students watching the programme that The Beatles were still revered two decades on.

I don't think there is any debate at all that Sgt. Pepper qualifies as a prog album. From the iconic sleeve to the costumes of the band, from the clever segues to the massive range of musical styles, from the (I think) the very first gate fold sleeve to the introduction of instruments from the Far East, the invention and ambition is astonishing.

This may have not been the first concept album but, at the time at least, it was certainly the most slickly executed. The movement from song to song is so professional that it seems to work on a theatrical staged level. Take the segue from the opening title track to With A Little Help From My Friends; both songs work well alone, but the effort and effectiveness of how the two meet is pure prog rock. It's slickness doesn't however distract from the indescribable awfulness that is Ringo Starr's vocal on this song.

There are times though when I listen to the album where I can only view it as simple collection of catchy pop songs with little depth. This is because there are very few songs by The Beatles that are not ingrained on the psyche like no other group before or since. Take Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds; it works both as an innovative and brilliant pop song when viewed entirely separately to the album, but it does also flow impeccably with the natural character of the rest of the songs collectively. Songs such as Getting Better and Fixing A Hole are undeniably pop songs but pop songs which were deliberately framed to exist within a rock album.

Of course because they were The Beatles, they could get away with the braveness of George Harrison's Within You Without You. As bizarre as it must have been at the time of release, the boldness of this gesture directly lead to budding prog musicians realising that it was okay to experiment.

Enough words have already been written about the impact of A Day Of A Life on popular culture. The point which I always dwell on when listening to this track is to marvel at the thought process and creative collaboration which could even conceive of the song structure in the first place. The ingestion of drugs no doubt had a lot to do with it, but I feel that this is a lazy explanation. To be able to harness a vision and then execute it using technology and techniques never yet employed could have resulted in a catastrophic failure. Just being The Beatles wasn't enough to make it a success. A willingness to push boundaries in this way is pure prog.

Ultimately Sgt. Pepper is probably only my third favourite album by The Beatles. That said, I am warming to it more and more with each passing year.