Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles; It was 50 years ago today ...
In the early evening of Thursday, November 24, 1966, four young men — the oldest 26, the youngest 23 — arrived at a north London recording studio to start work on a song one of them had written in Spain weeks before.
Cars ferried three of them from Georgian and mock Tudor mansions in Surrey — London’s so-called stockbroker belt — while the fourth journeyed from just around the St John’s Wood corner.
These wartime boys of Liverpool’s working classes had come a long way. On that same day in 1962 their primitive debut single was heading towards No 17 on the British charts before its modest run lost momentum. That same night they completed a two-hour set at the Royal Lido Ballroom in Prestatyn, north Wales, earning £30, but the cook threw in a plate of jam sandwiches.
By the time John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr assembled at Abbey Road’s Studio Two at 7.30pm, they were the four most famous young men on the planet.
What the Beatles had done in that room in the intervening period changed popular music, and then popular culture, reshaping the century in ways that reverberate still. When things were tough for the band, as they ground out consecutive eight-hour gigs in Hamburg’s grubby red-light district, the quartet boosted their spirits with a set piece exchange:
Lennon: “Where are we going, fellas?”
By: Alan Howe
Source:The Australian
