Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Album, the Beatles, and the World in 1967 - Hardcover

Brian Southall is the former Head of Press at EMI and has written about music for over 50 years. Previous publications include Northern Songs - the story of the Beatles' music publishing empire, Beatles Memorabilia: The Julian Lennon Collection, Jimi Hendrix: Made In England, The Rise and Fall of EMI Records, and Sex Pistols: 90 Days at EMI.

“It was 20 years ago today” – or so said Sgt. Pepper. In fact, it is 50 years ago since the Beatles released the album that went on to change the world of music forever. This is a celebration of 1967...
 
            Think back half a century if you can – you may not be old enough – and try to remember what was going on in your life. Throughout writing this book, I have had the pleasure of sharing memories with a host of people, including musicians, producers, composers, broadcasters, photographers, designers and fans who turned their minds back five decades to tell me what they remembered from the year when we experienced the “summer of love”.
            I was approaching 20 years of age when Sgt. Pepper came out in June 1967 and was employed at a local newspaper as a junior reporter. I’d dipped a toe in the world of pop music writing a column the paper had started in an attempt to receive free records.
            When that worked, we branched out and began reviewing concerts and interviewing musical stars. My contribution to the column included giving Bob Dylan a thumbs-up for his 1965 show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, interviewing the Rolling Stones (with a very truculent Brian Jones) backstage at Southend Odeon and being told exclusively by Pete Townshend that the Who were so bored they were thinking of breaking up.
            The column eventually folded, but nothing could dim my new-found love of popular music in all of its glorious forms. That, of course, included the Beatles, whose escapades I’d followed since 1962 and, as they went on to dominate the world, they shone through as unique talents who would never split up.
            That was not to be the case, of course, but in the mid-sixties we didn’t worry about musical differences or band bust-ups. The Beatles ruled the roost, even as their music developed to become more experimental and unshackled from any constraints and they evolved to produce a masterpiece suited to a time when psychedelia, love and peace were forever in the air.
            Memories, at times, are hard to recall. Nostalgia is hard to pin down. My wife and I have totally different memories as to where we were when – together then as a couple – we first heard the mighty sounds of Sgt. Pepper.
            In my mind, we were all sitting around the record player in a school friend’s lounge – he had a big house with several large rooms. However, Pat, my wife, recalls that we were actually in the house of that same schoolmate’s girlfriend. The fact that we heard the same album on the same day, but in houses 12 miles apart, is not important. What is relevant is that we both remember, clear as day, when we first heard the album’s stunning tracks, ‘Sgt. Pepper...’, ‘Within You Without You’, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and ‘A Day In The Life’. I can’t think of another album that I can pin down in the same way.
            If you want any other reminders of what was happening in 1967, I can tell you that the cost of an average house in Britain was £3,840, petrol was 5s.2d a gallon and a new Mark II Ford Cortina would set you back £749. And, for those readers of a younger disposition, performers who were born 50 years ago this year include Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Vanilla Ice and the late Kurt Cobain.
            Matching tie-pins and cuff-links were all the rage for the smarter man back then, while girls took to wearing mini-skirts – in “shock orange” or “switched-on pink” – with a metal chain belt. You could watch The Prisoner, The Forsyte Saga, Doctor Who (Patrick Troughton, at the time) Z Cars and The Saint on television and the list of the year’s greatest albums came from the Velvet Underground & Nico, the Doors, Love, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix and Cream.
            The world’s five biggest chart hits were calculated to be ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ (Procol Harum), ‘I’m A Believer’ (the Monkees), ‘All You Need Is Love’ (the Beatles), ‘Light My Fire’ (the Doors) and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (the Beatles), which Sir Tim Rice describes as “a brilliant list – all five are just fantastic”. And so they were. And always will be.
            For those of us who were there in 1967 – and no doubt for some who caught up with things a bit later – 1967 was a memorable year in history, and not just for the music. There were tragedies, scientific breakthroughs, wars and new laws, protests and major achievements in the arts, sport and politics.
            You don’t have to take my word for it as to how special things were back then. Even some of the Beatles were impressed...