1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 90. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)



I mean ... there’d be riot and blood in the streets if this one didn’t make it into any “best albums” list. Does it live up to its reputation? I think so. It’s not necessarily the first “concept” album in the sense of thematically linked songs (in fact, Sinatra started the whole list off with one of those), but it is an early example of the tracks being held together by an overall soundscape. Not as much as Pink Floyd will do later on, but the overall sense is that the album is a concert by performed the Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It’s very musically varied. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds dabbles in psychedelia (but after a steady diet of Californian psychedelia actually feels quite quaint and polite). She’s Leaving Home, with its strings, feels more like a tune from a musical, and is all the better for it.  Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite is quite vaudevillian. Ringo’s best song, IMO, With A Little Help From My Friends, along with When I’m Sixty Four and Lovely Rita are probably the most like earlier Beatles, just good quality pop songs.

Harrison digs deep into his fondness for Ravi Shankar with Within You Without You, played by Harrison and some Asian musicians, and this is where Dimery has primed us to accept sitar and tabla instrumentals. And then the album closes with the epic A Day in the Life, which is apparently meant to serve to bring us the listener out of the magical world of Pepperland and back to harsh reality. And what a journey it was – definitely the first album on the list that actually does that, with the tracks really feeling like their position in the playing order has been carefully considered to build up an ongoing picture.

And talking of pictures, this is probably (I’d have to go back and check) the first really iconic album cover in the list. One that launched a thousand crazy fan theories. [Edit: After having gone back and checked, arguably that accolade goes to Andy Warhol’s banana cover for Velvet Underground & Nico earlier in the same year, or maybe The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963.]

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