Got an hour? Sit back and enjoy the show. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band may or may not still be the “greatest rock album of all time,” but—as the presenter in the documentary above remarks—it most certainly is “an extraordinary mirror of its age.” The album also marks several great leaps forward in studio recording techniques and pop songwriting, as well as production time and cost. Sgt. Pepper’s took five months to make and cost 40,000 pounds. By contrast, the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, was recorded live in a single day for a cost of about 400 pounds. For Paul McCartney, “the big difference” Sgt. Pepper’s made was that previously “people played it a bit safe in popular music.” The Beatles “suddenly realized you didn’t have to.” Over the next few months, they cobbled together their personal influences into a glorious pastiche of rock, pop, balladeering, vaudevillian show tunes, psychedelic studio experimentation, television advertising jingles, and Indian and symphonic music—creating the world’s first concept album. Nothing like it had ever been heard before, and it may not be too much of a stretch to say that nearly every pop record since owes some debt, however small, to Sgt. Pepper’s, whether by way of the songwriting, the conceptual ingenuity, or the studio experimentation. To see the influence the album had on a handful of popular English musicians forty years later, watch the BBC television special above, produced in honor of the album’s fortieth anniversary and featuring bands like Travis, the Magic Numbers, and the Kaiser Chiefs covering the album in its entirety.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 17:30:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015