Is ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ really a concept album?
These days, albums can be whatever an artist desires. That means whether they consist of greatest hits or pertain to one specific theme throughout is entirely up to them. However, this luxury has only been granted to artists for around half a century. While this might seem like a while, it’s just a blip in music. The album underwent radical changes from the 1940s to the ‘60s, with The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band representing a huge turning point in what they could be.
The term “concept album” is something we recognise today as standard, but it didn’t start gaining traction as a common term until the ‘60s. Music journalists frequently used it to describe records that grouped songs together. However, because its definition was broad and music was going through an experimental phase, it started being applied to the majority of records that were released.
In retrospect, some artists could be considered conceptual artists prior to the ‘60s. These include the likes of Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie, who didn’t have to release songs single by single but instead could focus on making LPs given they predominantly wrote for themselves. As such, the songs on their albums sound a lot more consistent as opposed to other artists making music at the time; however, they were still limited with how much of a theme they could apply to their album, given album art wasn’t a thing and all records were put in a plain sleeve with a label.
The idea of adding an overriding theme to an album came at the same time that album art was embraced as an extension of the album. You can see this in The Beatles’ discography as their record covers became increasingly surreal until they became an added layer to what was happening within the record. The best example of this added layer can be seen on Sgt Pepper.
Released in 1967, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles’ ambitious and psychedelic outing. Paul McCartney created a fictional band and wrote a song from their point of view. The Beatles also dressed as the band for the cover and posed as if they were those depicted within the record.
This is commonly mistaken to be a concept album, and rightly so, given at the time, when the term was used by writers everywhere to describe a lot of different records, Sgt Pepper was the closest example to what we would consider a concept album in the modern age. That said, it laid a foundation for the idea instead of executing it. The song ‘Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ is conceptual, but the rest presents itself as a standard Beatles album.
That doesn’t undermine what the band did with this record, though. As is the case with all of The Beatles’ work, they were groundbreaking in their pursuit of this idea and shifted the scope of music, showing people what they could do by embracing the album as an art form rather than just something to heap songs onto. By pairing the cover art with a song on the record, they showed how far the narrative aspect of a record could go and set the stage for bands like The Who, Pink Floyd and Yes.
