Record Achievement – An Irishman’s Diary on ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’
Along with the centenaries of two Russian revolutions, next year will also mark the 50th anniversary of a rather more benign event that, even so, marked the overthrow of an old order. It was the release of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had been in planning since before Christmas 1966 and burst onto the streets in June 1967.
Was that another “Ten Days that Shook the World”? Well, I can’t comment, because I was barely out of a pram at the time. But I’ll take the word of Rolling Stone critic and professor Langdon Winner, who later wrote: “The closest Western Civilisation has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt Pepper album was released”.
There has, it is true, been some revisionism about the album (and about the Congress of Vienna) in the years since. It seems to have fallen slightly out of fashion, even among the group’s aficionados. To rephrase Hermann Goering, when the subject of the Beatles’ revolutionary effect on culture arises, many fans reach for their Revolver (1966) as the more important record.
Revolutionary For some John Lennon snobs, Sgt. Pepper is over-flavoured with Paul McCartney, who in their eyes is guilty of writing too many saccharine pop songs and also, perhaps, of living too long. But on that last subject, McCartney contributed arguably the most revolutionary material on the 1967 album – far more visionary than A Day in the Life or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
By: Frank McNally
Source: The Irish Times
