When The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, it didn’t really sound like any music they’d made up to that point, or like anything that anybody had ever made until then.
It wasn’t even just the sounds that the band were making, but also in the way they were making those sounds, as well.
Paul McCartney noted about the way the band had begun working since they’d been off the road, stating “We knew we wanted to stretch our recordings. We knew that we now had more time, because we’d given up touring. We wanted to see what we could do, see how far we could stretch pop music. Realise our visions of how far out a record could be.”
And they couldn’t have stretched their sound too much further away from their ‘Please Please Me’ origins; in fact, in the space of four short years, and despite the fact they hadn’t changed their line-up since their professional debut, The Beatles had become an entirely new band, working in an entirely new world, and, it has to be said, an entirely new world of their own making.
Of course, the new album was met by almost universal acclaim from fans and the press alike, and most of their British invasion cohorts were queuing up to heap their praises on The Fab Four.
“It’s sort of confusion to me,” Eric Burdon said, “Every time I hear The Beatles, they get better and better” (obviously, he should have said it’s getting better all the time), while Chris Denning said that “what amazes me is that The Beatles can always come up with such tuneful melodies”.
Two other contemporaries tempered their praises, though, with Pete Townshend saying that “it’s obviously going to disappoint a lot of people, but to me it’s pretty fantastic”, while Ray Davies similarly praised the album with the caveat that “I’m sure The Beatles don’t care if the songs don’t appeal to their fans, but will say ‘we did it for ourselves’”.
In fact, speaking about the record ahead of the expanded and remastered deluxe box set release in 2024, that’s almost exactly what McCartney said about the making of the album.
“We were always being told ‘you’re gonna lose all your fans with this one’. And we’d say, ‘Well, we’ll lose some, but we’ll gain some’. We’ve gotta advance”. Adding that the mantra of the band was “we can’t just stop to please this current batch of fans. If we liked it and thought it was cool, we would go for it.”
