In 2017, when The Beatles’ eighth album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reached its 50th anniversary, prog icons including Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman and Steve Hackett told Prog about the impact the 1967 release had on them, and on the burgeoning progressive rock scene.
Everyone who was there at the time can remember exactly where they were when they first heard The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For Rick Wakeman, the epiphany came in the living room of his parents’ suburban house in Northolt Park Green, Middlesex, as he listened to his father’s radiogram.
“The BBC were doing the first playing of it, and I was eagerly awaiting this album, just as everybody was,” Wakeman recalls. “The opening blew me away. I thought, ‘This is just something else.’ And then what came on after it was just, ‘Oh wow, this is completely different.’ The next day I bought it. As did millions and millions of others.”
Pink Floyd recorded their debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in Abbey Road while The Beatles laid down Sgt Pepper in the same building. Roger Waters was listening to the BBC broadcast as he was driving to some long-forgotten destination. “I remember pulling the car over into a layby, and we sat there and listened to it,” Waters told US radio station KLCS. “Somebody played the whole thing on the radio. And I can remember sitting in this old, beat-up Zephyr 4, like that [completely agape].”
For Steve Hackett, his first encounter with the record that would come to define the era and help sow the seeds for progressive rock came slightly later. “I grew up in Pimlico, so Chelsea was on the doorstep,” says the former Genesis guitarist. “I remember going to the Chelsea antiques market.
“I went up to the second floor, into this room that had Indian hanging silks, and there was this strange music playing. It wasn’t until I got hold of the album that I realised it was Within You Without You. They had completely reinvented themselves – unrecognisably so, in fact.”
The fact that so many people have such clear memories over half a century on is testament to Sgt Pepper’s standing as one of the most significant albums ever released. As with so many other strands of music, its influence on prog is huge. As with the band who created it, the work did more than any other to open up the minds of a generation of aspiring musicians, who’d go on to lay down the foundations of progressive rock soon afterwards.
“The Beatles were the first progressive band,” states Jon Anderson, who was a year away from co-founding Yes when Sgt Pepper was released in May 1967. “There were other bands making adventurous music – The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and various others. But The Beatles were doing it first – not just with Sgt Pepper, but before too.”
This was a band trying to record music that technically shouldn’t have been possible. It was that spirit the progressive bands would pick up on
Rick Wakeman
Anderson was playing residencies in Hamburg with his band The Warriors when he first heard it. “Me and my friends played that album endlessly for about three weeks,” he says. “We’d do a show, then go back and listen to Sgt Pepper all night. We were high as kites, on so many levels, then the album came out and we got even higher. It was like someone opening a door to revolutionary music.”
The Beatles’ eighth album didn’t come entirely out of the blue. The band had long since transcended their roots as an R&B-influenced pop combo, something proven by the 1966 single Eleanor Rigby – a slice of foreboding Scouse Gothic.
“Eleanor Rigby was such a groundbreaking song,” says Hackett. “It wasn’t a traditional pop song. It was this character portrait, this short story. And you can almost smell the dust on the old instruments that were being used. It had such an adventurous spirit, and you can trace that thread into Sgt Pepper.”
That song, along with the equally revolutionary psychedelic freakout Tomorrow Never Knows, appear on 1966’s Revolver, the last album the Beatles recorded before announcing their retirement from touring in August of that year. That decision was arguably the most significant of their career, allowing them to devote their attention to the studio – something that, in the hands of producer George Martin, became the most important instrument in their arsenal.
It’s a film for the ear… The Beatles were really good at coming up with these flashpoints in people’s lives
Steve Hackett
The sobriquet of ‘The Fifth Beatle’ has frequently been hung around Martin’s neck, and rightly so. He began as their producer, arranger and mentor, but by the time of Sgt Pepper, he was their co-conspirator too. It was Martin who manipulated the tape loops on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, played the harpsichord on Fixing A Hole, pioneered the use of crossfades to remove the gaps between songs, and created the famous 40-second long final chord on A Day In The Life. Remarkably, all of this was done on four-track machines.
“When George told me the limited equipment they had, and the way he bounced one track onto another to make sure they had enough to do the next thing, I just thought, ‘How the hell did they do it?’” says Wakeman. “This was a man and a band trying very hard to record music that technically shouldn’t have been possible. It was that spirit of studio experimentation that the progressive bands would pick up on.”
The Beatles recorded Sgt Pepper with Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick over a period of five months between November 1966 and April 1967. It was a measure of how fast the creative river was flowing that the first song they tracked, John Lennon’s kaleidoscopic Strawberry Fields Forever, was hived off as a stand-alone double A-side single with Penny Lane, and it didn’t feature on the finished album. Memorably, Strawberry Fields Forever was one of the first hit singles to feature a Mellotron, which Lennon had been introduced to by The Moody Blues’ Mike Pinder.
Their songwriting was at the highest quality. If you’ve got a great song, you can do anything with it
Rick Wakeman
The seed for the (very) loose Sgt Pepper concept came from Paul McCartney, who had the idea of a set of songs recorded by a fictional band who were one part Edwardian music hall entertainers, one part LSD-fuelled visionaries. It wasn’t a concept album as such – and even if it was, it was a long way from being the first – but it popularised the idea that a set of songs could be conceptually and musically linked.
“Sgt Pepper was undoubtedly a form of concept prog,” says Wakeman. “It might not have been a full-on concept album, but there’s seriously conceptual stuff in there.”
“It’s a film for the ear,” says Hackett. “There are all these little character portraits; vignettes. The Beatles were really good at coming up with these flashpoints in people’s lives. Like She’s Leaving Home – the moment where she’s just about to go. Or Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!, where it wanders into the fairground at the end. That’s so vivid.”
But strip away the quasi-conceptual element and Martin’s groundbreaking production, and Sgt Pepper still works on the most elemental level. Like the prog bands they inspired, The Beatles realised that all the highfalutin’ artistry was nothing without a great song at the heart of it.
“Musically, their songwriting was at the highest quality,” says Wakeman. “If you’ve got a great song, you can do anything with it. That showed with A Little Help From My Friends. Joe Cocker turned this pretty little pop tune into a classic rock song.”
We got pretty stoned listening to it without drugs. It was just a constant flow of emotion
Jon Anderson
Even the album’s most overtly progressive moment, the climactic A Day In The Life, is effectively two relatively conventional songs spliced together. Anderson has covered it live, unaccompanied apart from a ukelele. “It’s a beautiful song,” he says. “Very progressive, but also very simple.”
When Sgt Pepper was released, the revolution was already underway. In America, the psychedelic underground was emerging, arms outstretched, into the sunlight. In Britain, the youthquakes of the mid-60s had helped set London swinging. Sgt Pepper was simultaneously the bridge between these two worlds and their soundtrack.
“You have to remember that this was more than just music,” says Hackett. “We got stoned to it, made love to it, all of those things. It’s part of your DNA if you were that age at the time. It’s more than just a record. It defines the times.”
Part of the album’s attraction for some was its countercultural connections, especially its associations with drug culture, most notably on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Lennon and McCartney both denied the song was a not-so-sly nod to LSD, while the latter insisted that album wasn’t written under the influence of any kind of drug.
But for many of the people listening, the end result had much the same effect. “Sgt Pepper was very cosmic,” says Anderson. “We got pretty stoned listening to it without drugs. It was just a constant flow of emotion.”
There’s an aspect of The Beatles that’s a vaudeville band. There’s as much George Formby in there as there was Chuck Berry
Steve Hackett
Pepper had a more earthly impact too. The 45rpm single had long been the pop industry’s format of choice – and major cash cow – but its importance was being eroded. Inspired in part by folk-era Bob Dylan, The Beatles had shown with Revolver that the long-playing album could be more than just a collection of hits, cracking open the door for Zappa, The Beach Boys and countless others.
Such was the cultural weight of the one-time Fab Four that Pepper enshrined the notion of the album as a self-contained piece of art, one of the pillars of progressive rock. “Sgt Pepper established the fact that albums were the new big thing,” Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason said.
“We have a huge debt of gratitude to The Beatles because it transformed the relationship with the record company, who stopped trying to make us make singles and more or less said, ‘Get on with it.’ And it gave us far more studio time and far more opportunity to work on different ideas and so on.”
The Beatles had already broadened the parameters of pop on Rubber Soul and follow-up Revolver; but Pepper offered a full-spectrum musical experience. All life was here, from undiluted psychedelia (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds) and proto-hard rock (the all-too-brief reprise of the title track) to the heartfelt quasi-Eastern spiritualism of George Harrison’s Within You Without You – a song that Hackett marks as “a significant turning point in what would become known as world music.”
But at heart, Sgt Pepper was part of the grand British music hall tradition that would extend to some of prog’s more theatrical exponents, not least Genesis. “There’s an aspect of The Beatles that’s a vaudeville band,” says Hackett. “There’s as much George Formby in there as there was Chuck Berry.
What I learned was that it was okay for us to express ourselves… we could be free artists and there was value in that freedom
Roger Waters
“But that was their strength – they were able to draw from British music hall tradition, R&B and even Indian music. They adopted a pan-genre approach that made it possible for so many other British bands to go, ‘Right then, if they’ve done that, we can include a bit of jazz or a bit of classical...’”
Pepper’s impact on prog’s founding fathers was instantaneous. In the wake of hearing it, Anderson remembers urging The Warriors to rehearse more, “because we had all this new and wonderful music to be made. They told me to piss off, so I left and eventually met Chris Squire and formed Yes.”
For others, the possibility was more existential. “What I learned was that it was okay for us to express ourselves,” said Waters. “That we could be free artists and there was value in that freedom.”
For others still, it was musical: Robert Fripp, who had listened to the BBC broadcast, recalled King Crimson covering Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds during the band’s early rehearsals. As The Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward says: “Whatever The Beatles did, people followed.”
The debate about whether Pepper is even a prog album – let alone the first – still rages over 50 years after its release. But whatever question you raise, Pepper has an answer. Take the most common claim levelled at it: that it lacks the moments of individual virtuosity that would come to define prog. True, but what it does have is a collective virtuosity on almost every level – musical, conceptual, cultural, spiritual.
It moved things forward a couple of years in an instant
Rick Wakeman
Zappa, The Beach Boys and the rest each possessed several of those characteristics, but Pepper was the only one that truly brought them all together. And that, more than anything, marks it as the true starting point for the prog adventure.
“It moved things forward a couple of years in an instant,” says Wakeman. “It took us that much closer to what would become progressive rock.”
“Pepper is the template for all things weird and wonderful,” Hackett argues. “The Beatles decided they were going to change everything. And thank God they did.”
