Twiggy’s favourite album by The Beatles: “This changed the world!”
Like just about every single other person on the planet, Twiggy’s a fan of The Beatles. While that’s not exactly earth-shattering breaking news, the 1960s supermodel and the Fab Four have a special kinship from the psychedelic era in more ways than you might think. For starters, Twiggy’s favourite album by the band epitomises the kaleidoscope of colour and life that shot through the airwaves, in doing so redefining the fabric of musical existence.
Of course, we could be talking about none other than The Beatles’ iconic 1967 album Sgt Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, Twiggy told the Daily Express in 2012, was not only her favourite Beatles record but also among her favourite records of all time.
She recalled her memories of the album’s release by saying: “Oh my God, this changed the world! I can remember when it came out, everywhere you went in London, it was playing.” The reason that Sgt Pepper altered the global musical axis as much as it did was simply because it was the singular most captivating love letter to the swinging ‘60s and one that had a profound effect on Twiggy’s own life and career.
With her striking, unmistakable look, Twiggy was plucked out of obscurity and thrust into the limelight as an iconoclast of fashion at the height of this very same era. The particular moment in time was conducive to a global tirade—aside from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Twiggy became one of the most prominent female faces of the British invasion, and between them, they took the world by storm across every medium of culture.
In many ways, with the model and the Liverpudlian legends clubbed together in an exclusive group of world-changing megastars, it’s no real surprise that the influences of each other are tangible on them both. While Twiggy singled out the seminal album as the pick of her listening habits, she also leaned on them for backing later when trying to get further projects, like her burgeoning film career, off the ground. She claimed Paul McCartney was “the one I became most friends with”.
For the part of Sgt Pepper, it remains to be seen whether there will ever be another album which could even come near eclipsing the unquantifiable cultural impact that it had on the whole of society. Although overtly an outright explosion of psychedelia, this was the album which first flaunted the notion of experimentation and concept work that is defined as the precursor to the entire musical genre of prog rock. You cannot overstate Twiggy’s assertion that it truly changed the world.
With the legacies of these two sets of British invasion icons happily having skipped off into the sunset together, you’re left with the feeling that perhaps the 1960s was the decade when the world peaked. It was a delectably hedonistic cocktail of music, movies, fashion, colour, culture, art – and, of course, drugs.
The revolution had impacts that can still be palpably felt through every aspect of entertainment today. There’s no denying that the cultural cannonball of The Beatles and Twiggy was a match made in heaven.
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