Simply put, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – released 50 years ago today in the UK – is the most inventive, innovative pop album ever recorded. That it came from the biggest band in the world at the time (at any time) makes it even more of an amazing, unprecedented feat.
The Beatles were the perfect stenographers, tapping into the times, while simultaneously shifting them into what they wished the world to be. Sgt. Pepper is part Lewis Carroll, part kitchen-sink drama, and part Indian trek – a dazzling, colourful carnival ride, with artwork, sounds and lyrics that announce that this is 1967: the summer of love, the era when television and fashion alike suddenly burst into colour, a lilac- and weed-scented time that, as Paul McCartney noted in his autobiography, still seems like it was the future, many years from now. The Victorian-era touches added a certain quaint other-worldliness, while the reprise has a beat so forward-thinking, it sounds like it hasn’t come out yet.
The trippiest song on the album is the lysergic dream that is ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’: its title influenced by a drawing John Lennon’s son Julian did of his friend Lucy O’Donnell, in the sky, surrounded by diamond-like stars. It was meaningless, and perfect.
The lyrics dripped with surreal imagery, and the knock-knock of Ringo Starr’s snare hits burst through the doors of perception into a sunny, hooky chorus that no radio programmer could resist, despite persistent rumours that the title was a coded reference to LSD – something which Lennon and McCartney both denied (considering their forthrightness regarding drugs, I tend to believe their protests of innocence).
Whether or not they intentionally put the initials in the title, the rest of the song is one big acid trip, all tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
The first iteration of the song, since unearthed, is an amazing insight into how collaborative the process between Lennon and McCartney was. The aforementioned chorus is missing; Paul is on a Lowrey organ, sliding between various presets; and the snippets of chat suggest that The Rutles’ parody of the band wasn’t too far from how they bantered, even when away from the prying eyes of the press.
The song was built over four days, but the bones are already here in the very first take. So incredibly high.
