Sgt Pepper - I remember the day | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

There are a lot of younger posters here, and I wondered if some of you might like to hear the memories of a hoary old so-and-so telling you what it was like to buy it on the day it was released.

I guess the first thing is you have to do is try to imagine what life was like before the internet. There was no way to share speculation – what you had was the music press (Melody Maker, Disc, New Musical Express, Record Mirror), and that was about all there was for raising expectations. You had perhaps heard a few tantalising details, some song titles maybe, and the odd track or two might have been previewed on the radio if you had been lucky enough to be tuned in to the right station at the right time. There was excitement, of course – there always was before a Beatles release. But apart from that, there was a big old vacuum into which Sgt Pepper was about to emerge in full plumage (sorry about mixing my metaphors).

You also have to remember that we (in the UK) had got used to 2 Beatles albums a year. But, apart from the Collection Of Beatles Oldies album and Penny Lane /SFF last Christmas, there had been nothing since Revolver a year ago, so anticipation was all the keener.

So I got off the school bus and walked up the High Street to Clarks (long since gone) and Mrs Langbourne, seeing me come in the door, held up a large brown LP-shaped paper bag. I won’t say I ran in, but it was close. I only lived 5 minutes’ walk from Clarks, and most of that was spent not looking where I was going, because I was looking at the sleeve. Straight indoors, and up to my bedroom.

OK – try to imagine no CDs, no Mp3s, not even any cassette tapes: vinyl was the currency of music. Most LPs had a glossy colour front and a non-glossy b+w reverse with the track listing, maybe some comment, maybe some photos. Every Now And Then you’d get something like Beatles For Sale where the front of the sleeve was a single layer gatefold, giving you another two surfaces for pics/text. Sgt Pepper was a double glossy gatefold, and all colour, with – wow! – the lyrics on the back. No-one had ever done this before. Looking forward to learning those!

So I go to take out the LP, and the paper inner sleeve (usually plain white paper with rounded corners for EMI for the last couple of years, square paper with a polythene liner before that) had these graduated pink swirls all over it, going from red on one side to white on the other.

Out comes the LP itself, and there are no blank bands between the tracks. What the…? How are you supposed to lift the stylus up to skip tracks? Why have they done this? The answer is because there is no real gap in between the tracks, but I have yet to find this out. The LP looks plain odd because of it, though.

So the LP goes on the turntable and I alternate between looking at the sheet of cutouts and the front and back of the gatefold – that busy, busy front cover, and the lyrics on the reverse – while the music starts.

Audience? Tuning up? And then these hard guitars, french horns (?!), sublime harmonies in this introductory song which then turns into (now I see why there are no gaps) Ringo’s song, which is great. Lucy transports me to its own dreamworld, then the chopping guitars of Getting Better bring me back. Fixing A Hole threatens to take me to dreamland again, She’s Leaving Home breaks my heart, and Mr Kite is another one which takes me to another world.

Flip the disk. George’s Indian song isn’t the most immediate piece (it took me many years to appreciate which a profound piece it is), but the laughter defuses it and then 64, the most obviously accessible song on the album delights me with its reference to the Isle of Wight, where I live now and lived then. And Lovely Rita – well, I was used to Paul’s character/story songs, but the sounds? This LP was NOT what a pop group sounded like (comb and toilet paper?). Good Morning is more conventional pop group-y (but those time signatures, that screaming guitar!), the reprise lacks the interest of the opening version but makes up for it in energy, and then…

I think I might have died for five minutes and gone to heaven. I had never heard anything like A Day In The Life and, with the exception of Bohemian Rhapsody, nothing has ever come near it since in terms of epic vision. I was stunned.

But only for as long as it takes to flip an LP and start over (it was a couple of days later before I started to let side 2 play the end groove over and over).

Sgt Pepper was an LP which delivered in every way possible. It is sad that so many of its innovations have been copied so often in the 48 years since that they have become cliches, and that it is so much of its time that it now sounds more dated than the records which bracketed it. And it is particularly sad that it is now not possible to hear it in context.

Because it was a pretty remarkable thing to own that summer.