Album Club, July 2017: The Beatles - 'Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band'
The Album Club choice for July comes courtesy of Barry, with the timely suggestion of The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. As always, please listen to the album in its entirety before you comment and/or vote.
The Beatles – ‘Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’
“It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band”
Well it wasn’t twenty years ago, but fifty years ago that the Beatles went into Abbey Road Studios to make what is now seen as a groundbreaking album. It was ambitious and challenging in scope, and revolutionary in the way the Beatles used recording techniques and the facilities of the studio almost as a fifth musician (and some say that George Martin as producer, as well as the sound engineer Geoff Emerick, could well justify that accolade). Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Beatles alter ego, a virtual persona they would adopt allowing them the freedom to create sound images that would be impossible to reproduce in any live performance by The Beatles.
Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club band is not a concept album as such, but if there is a common theme it is songs about the everyday things in life: newspapers; circuses; parking meter attendants; pot holes; growing old and retirement; friendship and camaraderie: mending a fuse, and running to catch the bus to work. Plus some more ‘quirky’ songs based on the imagery of Lewis Carroll and the nonsense verse of Edward Lear, as well as some Eastern mystical meditation and the use of Indian instruments, rhythm and scales.
In the album the Beatles are looking back to a past time of music halls and vaudeville. To a time of Edwardian military bands playing in the park and to circuses: dancing horses and trapeze artists. And to invoke these images the Beatles used instruments not normally associated with pop bands. There are cellos, flutes, harpsichord, celeste, calliopes and the use of full orchestras playing free-form glissando. This is best illustrated by both the opening track and the track ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’, where in the latter the swirling calliope sounds are given a surreal twist by having the recording tape cut up into sections of arbitrary length, re-spliced in random order and replayed, so some parts are actually running backwards.
Of the thirteen tracks on this album, I’ll pick out four, which to me exemplify why Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band is so special.
The first is, for me, one of the most moving and heartbreaking songs about the failure to talk things through and of their sad consequences – ‘She’s Leaving Home’. There are three ‘voices’ to be heard in this song: a dispassionate narrator; the voice of the heartbroken and bewildered parents, and a voice representing the girl herself who after having put up with a stifling, closeted life at home is ‘breaking free’ to an uncertain future.
Wednesday morning at five o'clock
As the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen
Clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the backdoor key
Stepping outside, she is free
She(we gave her most of our lives)
Is leaving (sacrificed most of our lives)
Home (we gave her everything money could buy)
She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years (bye bye)
Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown
Picks up the letter that's lying there
Standing alone at the top of the stairs
She breaks down and cries to her husband
"Daddy, our baby's gone.
"Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly?
How could she do this to me?"
She (we never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)
Home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years
Friday morning, at nine o'clock
She is far away
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
Meeting a man from the Motortrade
She (what did we do that was wrong)
Is Having (we didn't know it was wrong)
Fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside, that was always denied, for so many years
She's leaving home, bye, bye
(In my opinion if there is only one track that exemplifies the lyric writing skills of The Beatles, this is it. Every time I hear it tears come to my eyes.)
The second track is ‘Lucy in the Sky With Daimonds’. Avoiding any debate on the meaning of the title, this is just a very good pop tune. Invoking images from the writings of Lewis Carroll as well, perhaps of the nonesense verse of Edward Lear, this is a gimpse into a child–like word of fantasy. Listen to how John Lennon’s voice appears in different parts of the soundstage and with subtle changes in processing.
The third is ‘Within You Without You’. This was probably the first time Indian instruments and rhythms and scales were used on a pop record. Not only that, but the subject matter is essentially one of eastern mysticism on the nature of existence and of reality. Heavy stuff? – no, not really, but certainly noval and challenging at the time.
The fourth is ‘A Day in the Life’, and a veritable tour de force it is. Ostensibly a near ‘stream of consciousness’, it is a story about the everyday, the mundane: newspapers, pot-holes in the road, a car crash, running for the bus to get to work, but the whole track builds up layer by layer, image by image. Again musically it adventurous, with an orchestra playing a freeform avante garde-like aleotoric glissando, building up in volume before the final crashing and (artificially) sustained piano chord.
So there you have it - in my opinion, one of the most important and ‘watershed’ pop albums of the twentieth century’. What do you think?
(Oh, and can someone please tell me what is said on the locked lead-out groove at the end of side two. It’s been driving me mad for the last fifty years!)
Album Club, July 2017: The Beatles - 'Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band'
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