The Big Read: It was 50 years ago this week...

24 May 2017 - 09:52 By Mick Brown
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GROOVY TIMES: 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' redefined pop music.
GROOVY TIMES: 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' redefined pop music.
Image: CHRIS YOUNG/AFP

As a teenager, each morning Paul McCartney would run from his family home to catch the green Corporation 86 bus for the half-hour trip to Liverpool Institute, where he and George Harrison went to school.

It was a ritual McCartney recorded in the song A Day in the Life - the climactic track on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album widely acknowledged as the most significant and influential in the history of popular music.

This week it is 50 years since the release of that extraordinary vinyl LP record.

"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 bus, McCartney gazed out at nondescript streets. At the shelter in the middle of a roundabout, at the bottom of Penny Lane, the bus passed a scene that, today, is little changed from that described by McCartney in another song: "A barber showing photographs" (still a hairdressers) and the bank on the corner ("the banker never wears a mac/In the pouring rain, very strange.").

Sgt Pepper was the Beatles' eighth album, and was a watershed; a flowering of artistic freedom and imagination.

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

In the four years since the release of their first single, Love Me Do, they had become the most famous entertainers in the world. Exhausted by the demands of being adorable "moptops", 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 had been discarded. They'd grown moustaches, discovered drugs, Eastern mysticism and the avant-garde, and become avatars of the cultural revolution unfolding around them. The new look captured the mood of the era: hallucinogenic, nostalgic, suffused with optimism.

McCartney suggested the group assume an alter ego to symbolise a break from the past.

Conventional opinion holds that Sgt Pepper was not the Beatles' most musically accomplished album - that was Revolver, released a year earlier. But it was the most momentous; an album that redefined the parameters of pop music and its possibilities.

Strawberry Fields Forever - Lennon's essay in psychedelic alienation inspired by the Salvation Army children's home - and Penny Lane were the first songs recorded by the group that November and were intended for Sgt Pepper until record company EMI demanded they be released as a double-A-side single instead.

The group's legacy to tourism in Liverpool - 45 years after they broke up - is £82-million a year and 2335 jobs. There are exhibitions, historic places, Fab Four gift shops and a bus ride, the Magical Mystery Tour.

"My name is Paul," announces the tour guide. "You don't have to take a stage name for this job. My name really is Paul. And this is your driver, Ringo."

The bus passes through the village of Woolton and past St Peter's church, where, on July 6, 1957, at a garden fete, Lennon performed with his skiffle group the Quarrymen and met McCartney for the first time.

"I was a fat schoolboy," wrote McCartney, "and, as he leaned an arm on my shoulder, I realised he was drunk ... in spite of his sideboards, we became teenage pals."

A very English occasion. Along with the Quarrymen, the fete had fancy-dress, a police dog display, the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry and the crowning of the Rose Queen.

Liverpudlian writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce says it was a harbinger of Sgt Pepper. "The whole of suburban life is there for the fete; and the album is like that. You've got songs for old people, songs for hippies and songs it will take 20 years for people to appreciate."

The Beatles completed Sgt Pepper on April 1 1967 - four months' work for something that has endured for 50 years. They left Abbey Road studio at dawn and drove to the Chelsea flat of friend "Mama" Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, where they threw open the windows and played the record at full blast.

"Windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering," publicist Derek Taylor remembered. "It was obvious who it was on the record. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up."

On The Magical Mystery Tour, people are smiling, too. A young American woman says it's the best time she's had travelling around Europe. For her, the Beatles weren't even a shadow of a memory. What does she see in their music? She gives the question some thought. "It just makes me happy."

- ©The Daily Telegraph

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