Sgt Pepper at 50

Discussion in 'Music, TV, Movies & other Media' started by Space_Time, May 21, 2017.

  1. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    How does it sound this many years later? What's your favorite song off of it? Will they still be playing it 50 years from now?

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-50-years/



    The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 50 years on

    19 May 1967: The Beatles celebrate the completion of their new album, 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

    19 May 1967: The Beatles celebrate the completion of their new album, 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' CREDIT: GETTY

    Mick Brown

    20 MAY 2017 • 8:00AM

    It’s the album that redefined popular music, marked the Beatles’ evolution from moptops to true artists, and was owned by one in five British households. But more than that, it is an album firmly rooted in a city: Liverpool. And so it is only fitting that to mark its 50th anniversary Liverpool is paying tribute with a major series of events


    As a young teenager, each morning Paul McCartney would walk – or more often run – along Forthlin Road, from the neat terraced council house in suburban Allerton where he lived with his family, to catch the green Corporation 86 bus for the half-hour journey to the Liverpool Institute on Mount Street, where both he and George Harrison went to school.


    It was a ritual that McCartney would later record in the song A Day in the Life – the final, climactic track on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that is widely acknowledged as the most significant and influential in the history of British popular music.


    The iconic record sleeve

    The iconic record sleeve CREDIT: APPLE CORPS./PETER BLAKE

    ‘Woke up, fell out of bed/Dragged a comb across my head/ Found my way downstairs and drank a cup/And looking up, I noticed I was late/ Found my coat and grabbed my hat/Made the bus in seconds flat/Found my way upstairs and had a smoke/Somebody spoke and I went into a dream…’


    From the top deck, cigarette between his fingers (like many teenage Liverpudlian schoolboys of the day, and like his own father Jim, McCartney was a hardened smoker of Woodbines), he would have gazed out of the window at the nondescript aspect of Mather Avenue and Allerton Road, passing the junction of Queens Drive, where the Epstein family, proprietors of a Liverpool furniture store, lived at number 197.


    Their son Brian – a few years older than Paul McCartney – having confided his homosexuality to a psychiatrist, had moved to London to study at Rada with dreams of becoming an actor. It would be another four or five years before McCartney’s and Brian Epstein’s paths would cross.



    At the roundabout at the bottom of Penny Lane the bus would have passed a scene that, today, remains remarkably unchanged from the fond remembrance described by McCartney in his song of that name – ‘a barber showing photographs’ (now a hairdressers, Tony Slavin) and the bank on the corner (‘the banker never wears a mac/In the pouring rain, very strange…’).


    The ‘shelter in the middle of the roundabout’ now bears the sign Sgt Peppers Bistro – although it has been closed for the past 10 years.


    Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album, is 50 years old this year, an anniversary that is being marked in Liverpool by a series of 13 major art events, bringing together musicians, poets, artists and circus performers, inspired by its 13 tracks. Sgt Pepper was the Beatles’ eighth album, and marked a watershed in the group’s career, an unbridled flowering of artistic freedom and imagination.


    Ringo, John, George

    and Paul recording the album at Abbey Road studios, 1967

    Ringo, John, George and Paul recording the album at Abbey Road studios, 1967 CREDIT: APPLE CORPS LTD.

    The group that convened at Abbey Road studios in November 1966 to begin work on the album were still remarkably young (John Lennon and Ringo Starr were 26, Paul McCartney 24, George Harrison just 23), but had already lived several lifetimes.


    In the four years since the release of their first single, Love Me Do, under the guidance of Brian Epstein – the would-be actor who was now their manager – they had become the most famous entertainers in the world.


    Now, exhausted by the demands of being adorable ‘moptops’, and constant touring, unable to hear themselves play above the screams of the audience, the studio had become their stage.


    The matching suits and clean-cut appearance insisted upon by Epstein had been discarded. They had grown moustaches, discovered drugs, Eastern mysticism and the avant-garde, and become avatars of the cultural revolution unfolding around them.


    It captured the mood of the era: hallucinogenic, nostalgic, suffused with optimism

    It was Paul McCartney who suggested the group assume an alter-ego, which would symbolise the break from their past and allow them to express their new-found artistic freedom –inspired by the fancifully named groups that were popping up in San Francisco (Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish) and the new Carnaby Street fashion for military uniforms, frogged jackets and bandsman’s suits.


    Conventional critical opinion now holds that Sgt Pepper was not the Beatles’ most musically accomplished album – that was Revolver, released a year earlier. But it was by any measure the most momentous; an album that redefined the parameters of pop music and its possibilities.


    It captured the mood of the era: hallucinogenic, nostalgic, suffused with optimism, its songs a kaleidoscope of the group’s enthusiams and influences – Victorian music hall, Lewis Carroll, parochial English life.


    On Penny Lane, the ‘barber showing

    photographs’ is now Tony Slavin

    On Penny Lane, the ‘barber showing photographs’ is now Tony Slavin CREDIT: CRAIG EASTON

    It was also the closest thing the Beatles would ever record to a ‘Liverpool album’, or should have been. Lennon and McCartney had long entertained the idea of writing an album about their Liverpool childhood.


    Strawberry Fields Forever – Lennon’s essay in psychedelic alienation inspired by the Salvation Army children’s home, near his Auntie Mimi’s house in Woolton, where he would play – and Penny Lane were among the first songs recorded by the group when they assembled at Abbey Road that November, and were intended to be included on Sgt Pepper until the record company EMI demanded they be released as a double-A-side single instead.


    The Beatles’ producer George Martin would later say that agreeing to drop the songs from the album was the biggest mistake of his career.


    Madryn Street, Dingle, where Ringo Starr

    was born, is now boarded up

    Madryn Street, Dingle, where Ringo Starr was born, is now boarded up CREDIT: CRAIG EASTON

    Sgt Pepper at 50: Heading for Home has been co-curated by Sean Doran, the former artistic director of English National Opera now considered the pre-eminent festival director in Europe.


    Doran was seven when Sgt Pepper was released. His background is in classical music, and while he’d heard a song or two he confesses to have been largely oblivious to the album until being approached to direct Sgt Pepper at 50. ‘And then you listen and listen – I must have listened 50 times over a long period – and you think, my goodness, this is very high art.’


    Listening to the orchestra tuning up for the prelude to the title track, he says he is sure he can detect the low drone of the double bass playing the opening notes of Wagner’s Ring cycle: ‘It’s a lovely little touch, which makes you think maybe the musician was playing at Covent Garden in the Ring at that time.’ Sgt Pepper breeds that sort of obsessive analysis.


    Mendips, 215 Menlove Avenue, the childhood

    home of John Lennon

    Mendips, 215 Menlove Avenue, the childhood home of John Lennon CREDIT: CRAIG EASTON

    His intention with the festival, he says, was to ‘place the album on Liverpool’ – an exercise in psychogeography, planning the events on what he describes as ‘concentric circles of creation’, like the tracks on a vinyl album, moving out from the city centre to Aintree, Woolton, Toxteth and beyond.


    What the festival most definitely is not is a literal interpretation of the album. ‘We didn’t want to get bogged down in the past, or feel that we had to set up a mirror to John and Paul’s thoughts. We wanted this to be a leaping-off point for contemporary artists, for them to take a hook off a song and take it somewhere else.’


    The programme is hugely ambitious. For the album’s title track, the American choreographer Mark Morris will be premiering a new work, Pepperland, at Liverpool’s Royal Court.


    The French fireworks artist Christophe Berthonneau and Groupe F, who provided displays for the French Millennium celebrations and the Rio Olympics last year, will be celebrating Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds in a monumental display, Suspended Time, at the city’s Camp Hill; while Mr Kite’s MUSICIRCUS! will feature hundreds of Liverpool musicians, dancers and circus performers in a day-long production at Aintree racecourse.



    Once a band, the Beatles have long since evolved into a brand. A report published in 2015 by Liverpool City Council calculated the group’s legacy in tourism and revenue to the city – 45 years after they broke up – at almost £82 million per annum, and 2,335 jobs.
     
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