The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Tune-up, audience noise. When it first played, how must it have felt? The way Paul McCartney sings the word “style”. The French Horns. How must it have felt? To hear it for the first time and not know it as a picture, a Mona Lisa, a top, best, greatest ever…even though it may well be, and I’m a ware of how fashionable it may be to say otherwise. There’s even something wonderful about the frighteningly-polite sentence structures “I don’t really want to stop the show but I thought you might like to know”…and even when it segues perfectly into “A little help from my friends”, I’m reminded of hearing John Lennon speak somewhere, saying “It’s called the world’s first concept album but it doesn’t really go anywhere…” – I don’t know what would be the world’s first concept album…being prog through and through allegedly. Maybe Sgt pepper is the concept of a concept album, which is as silly and beautiful as Adrian Mole’s novel Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland in which his writer (Jake Westmoreland) writes a novel called Sparg from the Kronk, about a caveman writing a book with no language called A book with no language.

Tangerine trees, Ethel Merman (as previously mentioned in confusing her voice with John Lennon’s when I was a child) and the animation of those paint brushes becoming dancing skirts, the way that the chorus is never quite as euphoric as you hope it will be, but a little more and more expectation arises…being used to stereo throughout on all and realising what more can be painted with just the drum or just the bass in the left or right…always listening to things on headphones gives you the grain of the music up close, and maybe there’s disappointment therein…when you see that Picasso (three mademoiselles? They’re in a crucifix formation, one has a mad dripping mouth and they’re on a balcony) and you see the lines go over, the rough edges of the painting…it was all I could do not to rush up and touch it. Another reference to artworks in this writing – is there any other way to think of Sgt Pepper?

I remember when I first heard “Getting Better” and “Fixing a Hole” as a teenager, I was desperately disappointed, having heard the recognition/love of the opening three (triptych?) which we all know/love…increasingly appreciating the repeated note at the top, the anticipated hi-hat and the harmonies in the vocals…and the tamboura (I think) that opens the third verse…reminds me so much now of that horrible ALL-IS-WELL noise that kicked off the Protect and Survive videos…and it’s a cliché to say that the mix of “It’s getting better all the time/it can’t get no worse” displays the Lennon/McCartney dialectic…but as I’m sure we all know, a dialectic ain’t a binarism and for every Revolution 9 there is a Goodnight and for every Martha my dear a Helter Skelter…but that’s for another album…(I still hate guitar solos which kind of mark time…no-one is innocent of them).

I remember some music teacher telling me that his favourite Beatle song is “She’s leaving Home”…I couldn’t believe it at the time…why choose that song, on that album…? I suspect I may need to revisit it, the arrangement is unusual (all those half-tone scales, the Lego-like building of the chords in the chorus), but the voices going over and round each other are amazing. Around the Sgt Pepper time, I’ve read that Paul McCartney composed music for that BBC drama Cathy Come Home (I think) – in this you can really see the action happening, the vignette, very English. It’s odd that this is a rarity, you’d think there could be no such thing on such a Universal-type album…but in the second half of the album are others too…it’s an odd song. Made odder by the juxtaposition to Mr Kite, which is truly incredible. I like the way John Lennon mixes between being extremely precise with the words and almost slurring them, lurching between them. On an old South Bank Show documentary about the making of…George Martin plays the underlying tracks of some of the songs to illustrate his points about Beatle-genius…and pulls out the chopped-up madness of the various steam organs, calliopes and early Hammond’s etc…having been some days in preparation…

I’m sure once upon a time in my life, when thinking about all the lovely songs in the world I’d ever love to sing live, I thought about Within You Without You as a heavy and wide abstract piece, bass flutes (I was playing bass flute at the time and loved it) with alarming reverb, and as I get older the idea of it stays but the drums change; it would make use of the ascending cello line. I analysed this piece for my A level music report and thought about the modality and the mixture between traditional Indian and Western instruments. The voices would trip over each other in the second section (“Try to realise it’s all within yourself”). Normally I despise hippies and religious types (and I do) but I think that what is spoken about within the McBuddhism I have read about so far owes as much to physics as it does to religion. Small is big, big is terribly small and edges and boundaries reduce on each examination… I’m surprised I like this as much as I do but then again I’ve always been surprised by that song.

When I’m 64 is just gorgeous and goes like toast and marmite. You cannot argue with me about the loveliness of this and I will have none of it. When I was at primary school, in true Lancashire/retarded style, every school year ended with a concert featuring all the little boys and girls amusingly dressed up in flat cap and knitted shawl as appropriate, singing Victorian Music Hall songs, and this. I realise how it worked, but then hearing the same song (or vice versa) as part of Yellow Submarine as the Beatles bravely sail through the seas of time and relativity becoming young and old, stuck in that frightening cycle of rising and falling clocks, watching numbers going past and seeing who could spot the Blue Meanie first…I can’t relate one to the other. Chris and I sang it a capella at the Folk House that glorious day.

I love Lovely Rita – it may be almost my favourite Beatles song, if such a thing is possible. It may be the brass. It may be the maracas. It may the slightly outlandish North-West accent used. It may be the coda. Or possibly the use (again) of over-politeness “May I enquire discreetly, when are you free to take some tea with me?” – It may be odd to realise it but I do find linguistic prissiness terribly amusing and attractive (witness). I’m sure that’s why I could never live abroad where they speak “Foreign” – I would miss pretentious puns. Although I will say I prefer the coda out of headphones…wonder what the word may be for it.

To repeat – what must it have been like to be within the first listening public to hear this – it’s extraordinary…it’s not just that it looks so 60s and “psychedelic” – it’s so English (and I know I keep saying that but I love it), the structures, the lyric content, all are so strange. And yet at the same time, not a big ol’ hippy freak-out.

It’s long-acknowledged that the Sgt Pepper reprise may just be the best single unit of music ever produced in the world (apart from maybe that section in Born Under Punches where David Byrne turns into a robot and back again several times).

A Day in the Life, I realise, is responsible for tying together three large parts of my adult brain. There’s a book called Revolution in the Head (Ian McDonald?) which is a huge analytical book of all Beatlemusic. In discussing A Day in the Life, it invokes The Wasteland by TS Eliot. Also, the last chord was described as being “reminiscent of an eerily settling mushroom cloud”. Hence Beatles – TS Eliot – Nuclear paranoia are all neatly tied up. This song is something like a crucifixion. I have nothing else to back that up with, but it’s so integral and painful. Proper use of an orchestra. Even when the jangly McCartney piano comes in, it’s frightening…like the guy who sings “dem bones dem bones” at the end of The Prisoner…you can’t work out what he’s doing in the middle of this…the everyman and the dreamer…Ralph and Simon…and whose reality etc…philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher…a swimmy, drunken roll-call of holes in the ground. Horrifying. The closing “I’d love to turn you on”…the whole song is like a deeply troubled and troubling person you meet at a party who rambles incoherently but something stays worrying in your ear and later the fruition of vinyl and overtones suggest something else untouchable.

Sgt Pepper is such a strange and yet obvious thing to write about…you can almost understand, how could anyone have gone on, gone further from that?