THE SECRETS OF SGT PEPPER
50 years ago the greatest pop album ever was released. But only now do we know the full intriguing stories (including Mail headlines) behind its
FIFTY years ago, John Lennon sat down at the piano in the sun-room at Kenwood, his mock Tudor Surrey mansion. He propped a copy of the Daily Mail dated January 17, 1967, on the stand and, inspired by two news stories, began writing A Day In The Life, acclaimed by Rolling Stone magazine as the Beatles’ best ever song.
It became the last track on one of the greatest albums of all time — Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Sgt Pepper was ground-breaking in its musical daring, innovation and surrealism, all of which can be attributed in part to the quantities of drugs being taken by The Beatles at the time.
Its gate-fold cover — by Peter Blake — is a pop-art classic. But it was the music that made it: With A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, She’s Leaving Home, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite . . .
Its release on June 1, 1967, was a cultural event on both sides of the Atlantic. And the 50th anniversary is being marked around the globe — including a reissue of the album with remixed recordings from the Pepper sessions.
Yesterday in the middle of Dublin the iconic Beatles flowerbed from the album cover was recreated in Wolfe Tone Square.
SGT Pepper took 350 ‘Beatle hours’ to make. It was McCartney who was determined that their eighth studio album would push boundaries. But he had to push his fellow band members, too. Lennon (and Harrison to a lesser extent) was heavily into LSD. He rarely woke before 11am, so they recorded between 7.30pm and 2.30am, from November 1966 until April 1967.
Two of the first three songs they recorded — Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane — never made the album because manager Brian Epstein wanted to keep the No 1 singles coming. (The third song was When I’m 64.) To his regret, their producer George Martin suggested putting out Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane as the first (and only) Beatles double A-side single because they were ‘the best [tracks] they’ve ever made’.
But it stalled at No 2 in the charts in January 1967, behind Englebert Humperdinck’s Release Me.
By then, Lennon and McCartney had embarked on A Day In The Life, the last — and greatest — collaboration between them.
‘It was a good piece of work between Paul and me,’ Lennon said in 1968. ‘It just sort of happened beautifully.” And the rest is history. So here are ten fascinating facts about a modern classic . . .
1. THE COUNT IN
ON MOST Beatle compositions, McCartney counted the band in. But it was Lennon on A Day In The Life, and he substituted nonsense words in place of the usual 1-2-3-4. You can hear him saying: ‘Sugarplum fairy, sugarplum fairy.’
2. FIRST TWO VERSES
IN THAT copy of the Daily Mail was a report of a custody hearing for the two young children of Tara Browne, a 21-year-old Guinness heir who died in a car crash in London the month before.
Lennon knew Browne but didn’t much like him. McCartney was much closer — his first LSD was with him. He recalled he’d grown a moustache in 1966 to cover up an injury after falling off a moped with Browne. The other Beatles followed suit, and all four sport them on the Sgt Pepper cover.
The first verse of the album’s iconic track would come easily as Lennon’s scrawled draft shows:
I read the news today, oh boy/ About a lucky man who made the grade / And though the news was rather sad / Well I just had to laugh / I saw the photograph. The second verse was trickier:
He blew his mind out in car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed . . .
Lennon admitted taking poetic licence with Browne’s death. McCartney had a different take in his biography, Many Years From Now (written with Barry Miles): ‘I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights, and didn’t notice the lights had changed.
‘The “blew his mind” was purely a drugs reference . .. [But], if John said he was thinking of Tara, then he was.’
3. THE THIRD VERSE
THIS begins with an oblique reference to a movie, rather than the Vietnam War as some claimed:
‘I read the news today, oh boy / The English Army had just won the war / A crowd of people turned away / But I just had to look / Having read the book.’
In 1966, Richard Lester, who had directed two Beatles’ movies, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, persuaded Lennon to co-star with Michael Crawford in How I Won The War, based on a book by humourist Patrick Ryan. This was the first time the chronically shortsighted Lennon was seen with his ‘NHS-style’ round glasses (And yes, he had read the book.)
4. THE BBC BAN
LENNON had the outline of A Day In The Life when he arrived at McCartney’s home in St John’s Wood, London, on January 17. The last line to be added — ‘I’d
love to turn you on’ — was, said Lennon a ‘beautiful little lick’ created by McCartney.
It was also one of the two lines which contributed to it becoming the first Beatles song banned by the BBC — because of a perceived reference to illegal drugs.
5. THE ‘ORCHESTRAL ORGASM’
THE Beatles played their new song for George Martin at Abbey Road Studios on the evening of January 19, 1967. They presented him with a problem: how to negotiate, musically, the dramatic switch from the first three mournful verses penned by Lennon, to McCartney’s cheerful counterpoint of the fourth verse: ‘Woke up, fell out of bed . . . ’
It was McCartney’s idea to have 40 classical musicians provide 24 bars of what Martin described as an ‘orchestral orgasm’, with each starting softly on the lowest note on their instrument, building to a discordant crescendo.
6. THE ALARM CLOCK
LENNON had brought an alarm clock to Abbey Road to tease Starr who kept falling asleep. The Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans — charged with timing the ‘orchestral orgasm’ — set the clock to go off at the end of the 24-bar count. It can be heard on the album.
7. McCARTNEY’S ‘57’
McCARTNEY would contribute just 57 ‘biographical’ words to A Day In The Life Of:
Woke up, fell out of bed / Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup / And looking up / I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat / Made the bus in seconds flat...
Up until that point, McCartney might have been describing the teenage rush to school, but the final two lines made it clear this was ‘a drug song’:
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
The reference to ‘a dream’ is what alarmed the BBC and it was banned from the airwaves.
8. AAAAH-A-AAAAH
LENNON never sang better than he did on A Day In The Life, and his voice is most evident on this nonsensical link, which brings the song back to its main theme.
9. THE LAST VERSE
IN THAT same edition of the Daily Mail was a ‘News In Brief’ item: ‘There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.’
Few songwriters could work that into a lyric, let alone make one of the most celebrated verses in music history, but Lennon did.
I read the news today, oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire / And though the holes were very small / They had to count them all / Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
‘There was still one word missing when we came to record,’ Lennon recalled. ‘For some reason I couldn’t think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall? It was Terry [Doran, later to become head of Apple Music] who said “fill” the Albert Hall.’
10. ETERNAL CHORD
THE Beatles were masters of the iconic chord: think of the opening on A Hard Day’s Night. Yet none matches the final E-chord of Sgt Pepper which lasts 42 seconds.
After nine attempts Martin was satisfied. He claimed that, as the chord faded ‘you could hear the air-conditioning’ in the studio.
OTHE Anniversary Edition is out now and there is also a special six-disc boxed set with previously unheard recordings.