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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 already well-established by the mid-1960s, and 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”. A tall claim, perhaps, but such hyperbole wasn’t uncommon by then. Not everyone was impressed, though. The New York Times’ 22-year-old 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. Most people relied on mono equipment, and 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 effectively being the Fifth Beatle more than any other contender. 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 in rejecting the band, he also kept a stern eye on production values. The group’s initial recordings may have required little more than deciding where the microphones were placed, but as greater sophistication crept into their repertoire, it was Martin who arranged the soundscapes.
This extraordinary album was released 50 years ago.
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 Sgt Pepper sessions were ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, aurally 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. Notoriously, this exceptional record became the first Beatles single since 1962 not to make it to number one on the British charts, apparently 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’ (which had a tremendous impact when Joe Cocker performed it at the Woodstock Festival a couple of years later) and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ to ‘Within You Without You’, which George Harrison based on a Ravi Shankar composition, and the utterly unprecedented ‘A Day in the Life’, which wraps up the album.
Many of the remaining tracks — including ‘She’s Leaving Home, Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, and ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ — are standouts too, and the 50th anniversary of the album brings, apart from month-long celebrations in Liverpool, a stereo remix masterminded by George Martin’s son Giles Martin that ears better than mine have designated as revelatory.
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.
Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2017
