The Beatles album George Martin thought would be reflected on as their masterpiece “in years to come”
What defines what will last and what will fade? It’s almost impossible to tell. Timelessness is something that philosophers could fuss over for eternities to come. But surely, The Beatles would be somewhere near the heart of their studies. The birth of the band is now closer to Henry Ford revealing his first ‘quadricycle’ than it is to the present day. Yet, you could argue that there is still no greater cultural force even though they folded from existence as an operating entity over half a century ago.
The whys and wherefores behind that are all up for debate, but when it comes to the masterpiece that they’ll be remembered for in another few centuries to come, their producer and proud fifth member, George Martin, figured that there would only be one. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the most famous album of all,” the silver-haired sonic whizz said in 1993.
“In years to come, when people say, ‘What was the great album of the 21st century?’, they will say, ‘It is Sgt Pepper‘. It may not be true, but it certainly is the one that sticks in everybody’s mind,” Martin opined. Indeed, it not only brought about a distinct new sound, but it captured the iconography and ideals of the era. If you think of the 1960s – culture’s greatest renaissance period since, well, the renaissance period – you think of Sgt Pepper first and foremost—that’s quite a feat considering man landed on the moon, JFK lost his head, and full-blown war broke out in Indochina.
For Martin, there were myriad reasons behind this. “The cover has just almost as much to do with that as the music that the cover contained,” he said. “The cover was a brilliant exercise in graphic art. By this time, covers became works of art in themselves.” This is far from a fastidious development either. The rise of cover art represents the dawn of pop culture as we know it, whereby music was more than sound. As The Beatles proved more than anyone, it was also about the look, the lore, and everything else that ties into modern identity ideologies.
No matter how forward-thinking Sgt. Pepper came to be, it was also proudly the culmination of all that came before it. It will be remembered as the defining record of the age simply because it grasped the age like no other. Pop culture had reached a fever-pitch by 1967, and The Beatles decided to pour all of this frenzied liberation, progression and discontent with the stilted status quo into an album that paired the depths of culture’s expanding pool with the new horizons made capable by blossoming studio technology. They asked Martin, “What new sounds can you give us?” And flooded that with a farrago of old influences.
It was a kitchen-sink album: avant-garde yet commercial, revolutionary yet classical, a comic farce with deadly serious intent, a thousand instruments yet only four folks still firmly at its heart. It needed a cover to match this vast scope. And so, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, the duo tasked with bringing the visual side of the album to life, got to work. “I suggested that they had just played a concert in the park. They were posing for a photograph, and the crowd behind them was a crowd of fans who had been at the concert,” Peter Blake told Spencer Leigh.
Tasked with creating a mob of fans, The Beatles figured that there was little point choosing any old buffoon from the proletariat in this new age of celebrity. So, Blake asked the band for a list of their fantasy crowd. He made one, too. As did the art dealer Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser. “The way that worked out was fascinating. John gave me a list, and so did Paul. George suggested only Indian gurus, about six of them, and Ringo said, ‘Whatever the others say is fine by me’ and didn’t suggest anyone.”
This offers a nuanced insight into their characters, and in many ways, the constitution of the cover is reflective of the constitution of the band—the mix of personalities typifying not only what made their sound so singular but also their whole gamut so appealing. You had the antagonistic anti-heroes and figures of bold profundity reflective of Lennon’s radicalism; you had McCartney’s earnest folk heroes, stars of the people, beloved and endearing; then you had the spiritual focus and discipline of Harrison, staying in his lane and yet steadfastly present; while Ringo was happy to simply support the others and relinquish egoism, much like his steady beats.
Finally, there is the influence of others in the mix. The Beatles were always happy to accept external input, which was symbolic of the contributions made by the likes of George Martin himself. While this might be an oversimplified way of looking at The Beatles (and perpetuates tropes that didn’t necessarily always play out), there is an underlying grain of truth to it that makes the cover a fascinating artefact in a multitude of ways; somehow not merely a cornucopia of influences, but a mark of the interplay that made the Fab Four a uniquely tessellated force.
The jigsaw of the faces emblematic of all the magic that went into the make-up of the humble four-piece, now fully realised in maturity and remoulded as the make-believe Lonely Hearts Club Band, a literal facade of what The Beatles had become: the centrepiece of pop culture, standing on the shoulders of giants, adorned in the brightest regalia reserved for heroes of old, but in their own way, self-aware of the preposterousness of this position, and mockingly satirising it in a manner indicative of the inherent mirth which, ironically, made them so damn adored and culturally transcendent in the first place.
That is, in short, modern culture at its very best – a democratised culture for the people – which is why the world could do a lot worse than to remember this record as the defining force of the age at its best—right down to its imperfect patches even within its virtuous streak.
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