The Beatles - SGT Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - 1967

Credit: Far Out / Apple Corps

The controversial figures removed from the first draft of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album cover

Tue 24 October 2023 23:00, UK

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the biggest-selling album of the 1960s. This meant that the cover was the most universally owned piece of art at that time, too. This scenario proves to be the perfect paradigm of the influence that The Beatles had on culture. Not only is it frankly bizarre by modern standards that something so avant-garde and progressive was a hit with the populous, but the cover itself curates the best of culture to that point in one place and typifies how The Beatles stood on the shoulders of giants in order to see the future.

This sense of gathering the best of the past and launching it into the future culminated in Sgt. Pepper. And so, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, the duo tasked with bringing the visual side of the album to life, got to work on a cover to match the music’s intent. “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. So, Blake asked the band for a list of their fantasy crowd. He made one, too, along with 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.”

It’s a notion that reflects the members’ idiosyncratic personalities, right down to the fact that they were happy to accept help from the experts to boot. While musically, the band were all radicals in their own right, when it came to the cover suggestions, the cliche of Lennon being the rabble-rouser in the pack certainly came to the fore. Lennon was attracted to the far out figures of this world, and those sitting on the cutting room floor of this classic cover certainly stand as testimony to that.

Below, you can find a full list of the figures removed from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The figures cut from the cover of The Beatles’ album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:

Leo Gorcey: An American actor known for portraying the leader of the beloved gang of hooligans known as The Dead End Kids. The late 1940s star was cut from the cover after a fee of $400 was requested for the use of his likeness.

Adolf Hitler: Larry Bell was the unfortunate fellow set to have the leader of the Nazi party for company if Lennon had his way with the cover. However, he was deemed “too controversial” and comically replaced by Olympic swimmer and Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller. But if Blake is to be believed, this decision was made late in the day, so, in truth, Hitler was actually merely obscured out of shot by the band rather than removed entirely from the line-up. So, you might not see him on the cover, but he was present.

Mahatma Gandhi: Originally, the Indian spiritualist and independence movement leader was included alongside Lewis Carroll, but according to McCartney, he was nixed because “the head of EMI, Sir Joe Lockwood, said that in India they wouldn’t allow the record to be printed”.

Jesus Christ: Another of Lennon’s requests. However, the Christian god was never even considered, thanks to the fact that the band were still positively reeling from his “more popular than Jesus” remark, and it was fear that this gesture would further antagonise religious extremists.