Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I'm not really your typical Beatles fan - my parents weren't big music listeners, and I don't know I could have told you anything about them. I didn't live under a rock of course, I knew some of their hits, and what haircuts they had. There is a kind of information osmosis that has to take place to survive in the school yard, or be cast out. I also remember little about one of my favourite primary school teachers, but I do remember us singing 'Yesterday' a lot in her class (on reflection, that's quite a morose song to have all the kids sing. I hope she is and was okay!)

Fast forward 10+ years, and the ski shop I worked at decided, no, we weren't allowed to play our own music anymore. Who knows what the straw was that broke the camel's back, safe to say that particular camel was probably weighed down with a lot of inappropriate music straws. They bought us a library of albums we could play on the store iTunes. Though they took suggestions, it was really just a list of music that Domenica liked. I had nothing against Domenica, but wow, did none of that music have staying power. So I spent a season listening to the one album that did have staying power, a Beatles mega-compilation. Not only was it catchy and didn't explode my earholes after a day of repeat listening, I knew most of these songs, and simply never knew that The Beatles was the artist. I didn't jump to the front of the "huge Beatles fan" queue. I don't think they need any more fans, and there's other artists that speak more specifically in my direction. BUT there is a trend I've noticed among my wider circle, potentially my age group, to exclaim "The Beatles are overrated!". Which I firmly believe is edgy bullshit.

I don't know if they've really put out bad music, but I do have to say that they went off the rails slightly in the last half of their career, when they tried to open their third eyes and bring their music into the next level of consciousness... aka they faffed about a bunch more. Or I need to develop a third ear. But it seems clear to me that even then they were making very listenable music. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a whole starts to lean into the baroque, but there's still bangers throughout. A Little Help From My Friends is an incredible tune, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was engrained into the age so hard that my father in-law still brings up "do you know what they mean by that wink wink" every time the song plays, and She's Leaving Home is a melancholy change of pace that my melancholy self can get into.

This is a rambling talk mainly about my history with the Beatles, because I can, but also because I think my history with the band is relevant to my feelings about this album. I have to admit that I could do without some of the lesser-known songs, and go back to my hits super-compilation instead. All those filler songs add a psychedelic colour to the album, and The Beatles' need to break down musical walls was understandable. Overrated? No. Do I feel an urgent need to hit skip on Within You Without You within seconds? Yes. I think this is one of those cases where I get entangled in the weight of a historical album - or rather, group - and what it's given us, and whether I'm actually going to sit there and listen to the whole thing on repeat. Let's give it a 3.5, rounded up to 4 out of respect for the bangers.

Reviewed for ‘The Musicbrainz Album Club’ #3, album picked by UltimateRiff

It took 129 days to record, between autumn 1966 and spring 1967, and it changed the world. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band may have all but disappeared under an avalanche of hyperbole, but if there's one reason why this album stands the test of time it's because its sum is greater than its whole. After five listens most people will know it as a suite, where Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds always follows With a Little Help from My Friends. And it will always be thus.

The reason it took 129 days to piece together isn't due to the band's indulgences - on the contrary, The Beatles were extremely disciplined during their studio sessions. It's simply because guiding an album this complex to fruition in those days took a long time. These guys weren't just recording songs; they were inventing the stuff with which to make this record as they went along.

But with George Martin and his backroom boys on hand, the Faberge psychedelic egg that was finally laid on the eve of the Summer of Love came so fully-realised that it changed the way we listened to recorded sound forever. Sgt Pepper's… is at once warm and familiar, yet wild and strange; cosy and English with a very empirical eye on the exotica of the East (note George Harrison's underrated Within You Without You). Shot through with Peter Blake-assisted Edwardiana, it was also as fashionable as it could possibly be.

It was also a release key in the canon of concept albums, coming with its own alter-ego mythology and very much addressing the pressing concerns of their generation, ie: how to achieve higher states of consciousness in 60s suburbia. It is riddled with The Beatles' trademark love/hate affair with the Establishment as their own lives were suddenly shoved unceremoniously up against those of the chattering classes, encapsulated by She's Leaving Home's blow at straight parenthood, Lovely Rita's suggestion of sexual deviancy, and A Day in the Life's oblique references to minds being blown on buses in rush hour traffic.

Yet it's all a far cry from the militancy of their American peers. Paul McCartney's When I'm 64 is pure nostalgia for his parents' golden age, one which was taken from them. It's less a kicking out of the jams, more a spreading them on scones at teatime.

Yet what was revolutionary was the sonic carpet that enveloped the ears and sent the listener spinning into other realms. There was the nursery rhyme surrealism of Lucy in the Sky…, the crazed calliopes of Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite! and, of course, the lysergic collage of A Day in the Life, promising the meaning of life in its endless final chord. And it still rings on today.