This programme contains some strong language
ENGINEER: Sgt Pepper's Lonely... Hearts Club Band. Hearts Club Band. Take one. This is take one.
ELECTRIC GUITAR
On 1st June, 1967, a record was released
that changed the rules of what a pop album could or should be.
That album was the Beatles'
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
# It was 20 years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play
# They've been going in and out of style... #
Sgt Pepper was immediately acclaimed
as a startling new advance for music.
Nothing like it had been heard or seen before.
# Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... #
It was the most expensive album cover yet produced -
an artwork in itself.
The lyrics, for the first time ever in a pop music LP,
were printed on the sleeve.
# Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends... #
Sgt Pepper chimed with the times.
It became the soundtrack to the '67 "summer of love".
The music was psychedelic and visionary.
In parts, that is.
The most extraordinary thing about the album is that
it's so firmly grounded in real life, not hippy fantasy.
# Lovely Rita, meter maid... #
Of the 13 songs on Sgt Pepper,
around half were inspired by newspaper stories,
pictures or everyday events.
# Lovely Rita, meter maid Nothing can come between us...#
Lovely Rita is addressed to a young woman
who gives Paul a parking ticket.
It's not a howl of rage, as you might expect, but a cheeky come-on.
# Heading for home, you start to roam then you're in town... #
A cornflake advert on TV inspired
John's sardonic take on married suburban life,
Good Morning Good Morning.
# I used to get mad at my school Now I can't complain
# The teachers that taught me weren't cool... #
The different songwriting personalities work hand in hand.
In Getting Better, we find Paul's message of sunny optimism...
# I've got to admit it's getting better... #
..mischievously undercut by John's "can't get no worse."
# It can't get no worse... #
# When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now... #
One of the album's was famous songs
was recorded after Paul's dad turned 64.
# Birthday greetings Bottle of wine. #
Most importantly of all,
this breadth of subject matter is mirrored and underpinned
by an extraordinary breadth of musical influences.
The album may start off with up-to-the-minute hard rock,
but then come echoes of folk, brass band and classical music,
vaudeville, and the music of other cultures.
# And the people...#
This is the real revolution of Sgt Pepper - all styles are fair game.
And this is what made it so very influential to later musicians -
its sheer musical ambition and scope.
# I read the news today Oh, boy... #
With the help of newly invented studio techniques,
the Beatles were making a kaleidoscope of sound
the likes of which had never been heard before.
# Newspaper taxis appear on the shore...#
There are innovations and revelations
on every track of the album.
In this film, I'm going to look at just some of the songs
in which I think the Beatles' brilliance at inventing
and reinventing musical form is at its most striking.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds... #
I'm going to do so with the help of never-heard-before outtakes,
by unpicking the original master tapes,
and eavesdropping on the Beatles' own studio conversations.
JOHN: This time you get it in the middle of the song.
HE CHUCKLES
I had to laugh meself, you know.
Let's start the Sgt Pepper story at the beginning -
a momentous decision taken in August 1966.
# Think I'm gonna be sad I think it's today...#
The Beatles had been touring the world for three years,
but the fun had drained away, along with the audibility of their music.
They'd had enough, so they decided to give up touring altogether.
This looked like madness.
A pop group's success depended on playing their music live
so the audience would buy the records,
which were made quickly and cheaply.
Paul, can I just have a brief word with you?
It's gone downhill, performance,
Cos we can't develop when no-one can hear us, you know what I mean?
So for us to perform, it's difficult,
it gets difficult each time. More difficult.
Do you mean they don't listen to you
and therefore you don't want to do that?
Yeah, we want to do it, but if we're not listened to,
and we can't even hear ourselves, then we can't improve in that.
We can't get any better.
So we're trying to get better with things like recording.
How are you? Can I stop you?
Work began at Abbey Road in November '66.
The Beatles would be there for an unprecedented five months.
Having given up touring,
they didn't need to make music that could be played live.
Instead, with producer George Martin, they could turn the studio
into an audio laboratory,
pushing the possibilities of recording technology to new limits.
Together, they constructed a sound layer by layer,
track by track, instrument by instrument -
a method soon to be the norm
for more or less every artist in the world.
DRUM TRACK FOR SGT PEPPER'S REPRISE
Take 13.
PAUL: Ringo, keep it a bit straighter at the end,
keep it a bit straighter. Do a couple of bits, but...
Cos, see, it's got to edit in, hasn't it, into the other one.
Are you getting bored of being in The Beatles after all this time?
No. I'm having a great time. Merry Christmas to you.
Long time since I've seen you. Thank you very much, Ringo.
That's all right, thank you. Are you going to work now?
Well, I'll see what they're up to.
I think it may be tea-time, with any luck. Bye.
Strict radio silence was maintained.
The public could only wait and wonder
what the world's biggest band was up to.
PAUL: Keep the bass drum loud.
Keep the bass drum loud. Ba!
DRUMS PLAY Yeah!
Oh, is that what you're doing?
Only in February '67 did The Beatles unveil
the extraordinary sound world they'd been creating.
Two of the first tracks recorded for the Sgt Pepper project
were released - Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane.
ENGINEER: Take one.
# Living is easy with eyes closed
# Misunderstanding all you see... #
But hang on, you might be thinking,
neither of these two tracks is on the album.
No, they are not, but they could have been.
EMI and Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager,
desperately wanted to release a new single.
There hadn't been one for a whole seven months.
So, in a bit of a flap, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane
were put out as a double A side.
GUITAR AND VOCAL # ..tune in but it's all right
# That is, I think it's not too bad
# Let me take you down cos I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields
# Nothing is real
# And nothing to get hung about
# Strawberry Fields forever. #
In so many ways, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever
were and are essential and integral parts of the Sgt Pepper project,
and not only musically. They also laid the groundwork
for one of the central themes of the album - childhood.
# Let me take you down cos I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields
# Nothing is real... #
Strawberry Fields Forever
was the first song recorded in the Sgt Pepper sessions.
The name comes from a Salvation Army children's home
near to where John Lennon grew up, Strawberry Field.
The strong draws on his childhood memories
of its annual garden parties,
complete with Salvation Army band,
and playing away from adult supervision
in its overgrown grounds.
These are its original iron gates.
# It doesn't matter much to me
# Let me take you down... #
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared the world
for the unique masterpiece that was Strawberry Fields Forever.
Its daring, its bizarre soundscape, its unorthodox structure,
and its stylistic originality still astonish today.
# Strawberry Fields forever... #
Right from its haunting opening notes,
a strange flute-y sound played by Paul
on a then still-novel keyboard, a Mellotron,
an early form of sampler,
we are in uncharted musical waters.
OPENING BARS OF STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOEVER
# Let me take you down cos I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields
# Nothing is real
# And nothing to get hung about... #
But while the song might have hinted at the sensation of an acid trip,
that's not what it's about. It's a song about childhood memory -
an unsettling one, at that, bristling with insecurity.
CHAOTIC PERCUSSION
JOHN: I go crazy! I go crazy!
PERCUSSION CONTINUES
Strawberry Fields Forever took 55 hours of studio time to create.
Nowadays, many of the techniques it employs are routine.
Back then, though, they had to be painstakingly developed,
often from scratch, by producer George Martin
and his Abbey Road engineers.
GEORGE MARTIN: Strawberry Fields Forever take seven,
remix from four-track.
Take six.
A remarkable example of this ingenuity came about
when John decided he wanted to combine
the dreamy opening mood of one take
with the energetic groove of another,
the two performances having been recorded ten days apart.
"So what?" I hear you say This is what.
The two takes are not only made up of different instruments
playing at different volumes, but they are in different keys,
and, most inconveniently, performed at different speeds, too.
Joined together, they should sound like this.
SLOWER, LOWER PITCHED TAKE # Let me take you down, cos...
FASTER, HIGHER PITCHED TAKE # ..I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields. #
Awkward.
Nowadays, editing these two disparate sections together
so you can't hear the join could be done on a phone app,
never mind in a studio using computerised recording systems.
In December 1966, it had never even been tried,
so George Martin and his team decided to follow a hunch.
What if they could slow down the faster take
so it matched the other one in speed and key?
It was a neat idea, but how could the machine be slowed down
by a regulated amount?
In those days, magnetic tape recorders
didn't have a variable speed function.
Until, that is, EMI engineer Ken Townsend
effectively invented just such a function
by cunningly manipulating
the electricity supply feeding the playback machine.
This is where the join between the two takes place.
# ..take you down cos I'm going to
# Strawberry Fields... #
Awesome.
# Nothing is real
# And nothing to get hung about
# Strawberry Fields forever
# Strawberry Fields forever... #
Strawberry Fields Forever set the tone for Sgt Pepper,
musically and technically,
even if it didn't make it onto the album.
It also helped inspire Paul's journey into the musical past -
The Beatles' shared past.
PAUL, CLICKING FINGERS IN TIME: Two, one, two, three, four.
PIANO PLAYS "PENNY LANE"
John and Paul met at a church fete in 1957,
a stone's throw away from Strawberry Field,
and started writing songs together almost straightaway.
Their creative relationship was part collaboration, part rivalry,
so Paul reacted to John's masterpiece by coming up with
one of his own - Penny Lane.
# In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
# Of every head he's had the pleasure to know
# And all the people that come and go
# Stop and say hello... #
Penny Lane is a short bus ride from where Paul and John grew up.
As teenagers they used to meet at the bus shelter
in the middle of the roundabout mentioned in the song.
Penny Lane is a surreal nostalgic journey
back to the very beginnings of the Beatles story.
MUSIC: Lucille by Little Richard
# Lucille, won't you do your sister's will?
# Lucille, won't you do your sister's will? #
The Beatles grew up obsessed with 1950s rock and roll.
Paul in particular fell in love with
the flamboyant style of Little Richard.
Little Richard was responsible for one particular shift
in the rhythmic pattern that underpinned rock and roll.
The four beats in a bar - one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four -
were subdivided into threes, or triplets.
Little Richard evened out those threes into twos.
HE PLAYS TWO HITS PER BEAT
See what I did there?
Turning the shuffle, as it was known, into a double-time rhythm
gave rock and roll a fresh impetus,
and made it easier for teenagers to jive to.
MUSIC: Lucille by Little Richard
Paul made his own contribution to the subdividing of beats.
He takes Little Richard's eight even beats to a bar...
..and makes them into four even beats in the bar.
HE PLAYS "PENNY LANE" CHORDS
Which is a musical version, I suppose,
of replacing jogging with walking.
# There beneath the blue suburban skies... #
But here's the thing. The piano in Penny Lane isn't just one piano.
On the record, it's four. And we can follow the trail of them all
by unpicking the track layer by layer,
like an archaeological dig, in the original masters.
It's a fantastic demonstration of how the Beatles put together
their songs using the studio as part of the creative process.
"PENNY LANE" PIANO
With the piano engine room in place,
more surprises were to come in the song's instrumentation.
Here's one of them.
HE PLAYS "PENNY LANE"
This is a harmonium, a 19th-century foot-pumped reed organ
originally designed for smaller churches and chapels.
Paul uses it to add some deep, breathy sustained notes.
Paul and John's magpie-like search for instrumental colours
that were unusual, half-forgotten or unexpected is one of the most
distinctive features of the Sgt Pepper project.
Alongside classical, woodwind and brass,
Penny Lane also gives pride of place to a so-called piccolo trumpet,
a sound that was last fashionable in 1750.
MUSIC: Penny Lane
While the Penny Lane sessions were under way, Paul saw a performance
of JS Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto on the TV.
MUSIC: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 by JS Bach
He decided he wanted the baroque trumpet sound on it for Penny Lane.
TRUMPET SOLO SECTION OF "PENNY LANE"
When this baroque-style melody is superimposed on
the thoroughly contemporary backing of Penny Lane, it creates,
like so much on Sgt Pepper, a new hybrid sound -
not a copy, not a clone, a totally new combination.
HANDCLAPS AND BACKING VOCALS
JOHN: But that'll have the backwards trumpet on that.
PAUL: Forward trumpet. Oh, no, backwards, sorry.
TRUMPETS PLAYING BACKWARDS
HANDCLAPS AND BACKING VOCALS
Penny Lane isn't just a nostalgic postcard
of The Beatles' 1950s youth.
It reaches far further back in time, to Victorian days.
This musical time travel was to be echoed throughout Sgt Pepper.
ENGINEER: For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, this is take one.
JOHN: BEING For The Benefit.
Three, four.
TRACK PLAYS
# For the benefit of Mr Kite
# There will be a show tonight on trampoline
# The Hendersons will all be there Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair
# What a scene!
# Over men and horses Hoops and garters
# Lastly through a hogshead of real fire
# In this way Mr K will challenge the world... #
One day in January 1967, John Lennon wandered into an antique shop
in Sevenoaks, Kent and saw a poster advertising
a circus performance which took place in 1843.
He bought it, but it was also a gift.
Practically all the lyrics of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
come from this flyer.
JOHN, NASALLY: # For the benefit of Mr Kite
BASS PLAYS
Two, three, four...
GEORGE MARTIN: Don't shout it out,
though, John, just... Well, all right.
You'll hear it, though, I mean, it'll be on the bass.
Well, we'll have the massed Alberts on by then, won't we?
Two, three, four...
MUSIC PLAYS:
# For the benefit of Mr Kite
# There will be a show tonight on trampoline... #
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
is Sgt Pepper's most obvious musical tribute to a bygone era.
Ironically, though,
it's also one of its most technologically challenging.
To grasp how ingenious George Martin and his team were on this song,
we need to understand
just how limited recording resources were in 1967.
These days, thanks to digital recording,
you can create as many layers of sound on top of each other
as you like, as separate recordings all fitting together -
hundreds, if you want.
But all that George Martin and the Beatles had available to them
was a princely four separate tracks on one magnetic tape.
What they frequently did was use up
all four tracks on tape machine number one,
then make a mix of those four, and record it,
or bounce, as it's known in the trade,
onto one track of the four available on tape machine number two.
So in Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, for example,
the first four tracks were used up by 1 - Paul's bass...
BASS TRACK PLAYS
..2 - John's guide vocal...
# Hendersons will all be there Late of Pablo Fanque's fair
# What a scene! #
..3 - Ringo's drums,
and 4 - George Martin playing a harmonium.
HARMONIUM TRACK PLAYS
Except for the guide vocal, which was ditched,
these were mixed and then bounced down to one track of
the second machine, and so the process went on.
JOHN: What?
Oh, yeah, we're all on different tracks. Yeah, yeah, all the time.
Why don't they just all play at once, then, you might ask?
The reason is that the song was being created layer by layer
and some sections of it
simply couldn't be done by live performance.
For example, the bit where Henry the horse dances the waltz.
# And of course Henry the horse dances the waltz
INSTRUMENTAL SECTION
To capture this talented animal's pirouetting star turn,
what was needed was a way to suggest the atmosphere of
an old-fashioned circus purely in music.
John told George Martin he wanted to "smell the sawdust".
OLD RECORDING OF FAIRGROUND MUSIC
A fairground organ sound was decided on, but calliopes, or "call-I-opes"
as they are known, aren't played from a keyboard -
they are operated by punch cards, like a player piano.
Instead of using one of these straight,
George Martin gathered together as many taped recordings of them
as he could find, and asked his assistant, Geoff Emerick,
to chop them up into one-second fragments,
throw them in the air, and stick the pieces together again
in a kind of random musical patchwork quilt.
This is the result.
CALLIOPE COMPOSITE TRACK PLAYS
You could describe it as an early manifestation of sound sampling,
now ubiquitous, and it works brilliantly.
Henry the Horse's waltz now has a strikingly surrealistic,
archly comic tone, a wonderful kind of movie in sound,
which an existing calliope tune could never have conjured up.
END SECTION OF "MR KITE" PLAYS
PAUL: John, sing...
Sing those quicker:
# Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
# Yellow and green. # OK. Anyway...
OPENING BARS OF "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"
JOHN: # Picture yourself in a boat on a river... #
JOHN CHUCKLES PAUL: Come right in with the...
One of the most famous of all the songs on Sgt Pepper was,
like Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, also inspired by a picture.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
was a childhood drawing by John's son Julian
about a friend of his at primary school.
# With tangerine trees and marmalade skies... #
But there's another little girl wandering through
this remarkable song - Alice in Wonderland.
Published in 1865, Lewis Carroll's surreal children's classic
came back into vogue
in the hallucinogenic haze of a century later.
It was also a childhood favourite of John and Paul's.
VOCAL TRACK PLAYS: # Towering over your head
# Look for the girl. #
MUSIC STOPS
COUGHING
Concentrate, swing it.
OPENING BARS OF "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
is not, despite its initials, about LSD.
And what's most arresting about it anyway
is not its, "Hey, man, that's far out," vibe.
Like Strawberry Fields Forever, the song evokes in the music
as well as the lyrics a child's-eye view of the world.
# A girl with kaleidoscope eyes... #
It's established in the nursery-style music-box opening
with its falling chromatic scale, played by Paul.
HE PLAYS RIGHT HAND PART OF OPENING BARS
This sets the mood of the song -
dreamlike, disorientating, otherworldly.
And to keep that mood going, and constantly develop it,
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds takes us on a harmonic journey.
Sometimes a harmonic progression
just goes from one chord to another...
HE PLAYS CHORD SEQUENCE
..then returns home.
But more advanced use of harmony allows these journeys
to move to a new centre of gravity altogether.
This is called a modulation.
HE PLAYS MODULATED CHORD SEQUENCE
Modulations have been the bread and butter
of Western classical music since the 18th century,
but they weren't much of a feature of either folk music or of pop music
before the Beatles.
At the heart of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds's verse
is an instability caused by the fact that Paul's bass line
drifts away from the home key of A by introducing notes
beneath the chords that don't really belong in that key.
Without these rogue notes,
the first phrase would sound something like this.
HE PLAYS CHORDS WITH STANDARD STYLE BASS NOTES
# Picture yourself on a boat on a river
# With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Now let's hear it with Paul's destabilising bass notes.
HE PLAYS CHORDS WITH NEW BASS NOTES
# Picture yourself in a boat on a river
# With tangerine...#
The bass here isn't just adding a bit of intrigue to a phrase,
it's transforming the harmonic or chordal structure of the whole song.
# You answer quite slowly... #
What this baseline does is undermine the key of A.
It's saying, "Don't get comfortable here."
A, now flaky, starts to drift,
first to F sharp minor,
then to D minor,
then to a new harmonic home,
totally alien to the starting point of A - B flat for...
# Cellophane flowers of yellow and green. #
# Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
# Towering over your head
# Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone... #
But we don't stay with B flat for long either,
because another nifty modulation is soon upon us.
We drift away from B flat
through C, then D,
to the chorus's key of G.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds
# Lucy in the...#
In simple terms,
moving from one key to another can alter the mood of a piece,
like the difference in seeing the same view
with brown, blue or green filters.
If you keep doing it repeatedly in a song, it creates
an atmosphere of unpredictability. It is, if you like,
an aural equivalent of an ever-shifting kaleidoscope,
or a girl with kaleidoscope eyes, in fact.
# Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
# That grow so incredibly high... #
In this period of their development, Lennon and McCartney
were clearly loving their newly discovered wizardry of modulation.
In fact, of the 15 tracks on Sgt Pepper, if we include
Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane,
a staggering 12 involve modulations.
But they were always conjured up
like the best magician's trick - invisibly.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds. #
Another reason why Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
has a compelling sense of strangeness
is because we're not hearing John's voice straight.
Actually, it was recorded
with the tape running deliberately at a lower speed.
So when the tapes played back at a normal speed,
the vocal sound has a higher, brighter quality.
# With tangerine trees and marmalade skies. #
Mostly when a voice is raised in pitch artificially like this,
a process later given the name "vary speed",
its essential resonances, so-called formants,
change too, so that the vocal quality sounds thinner,
as the more mature parts of the voice get stripped out.
# With tangerine trees... #
At its most extreme, an adult voice can sound like a chipmunk.
HIGH-PITCHED: # Somebody calls you You answer quite slowly... #
But a subtle raising of the pitch makes the singer sound younger,
and so when we're hearing the solo voices on Sgt Pepper,
singing about childhood or the past,
we are literally hearing younger versions of them.
# Lucy in the sky with diamonds
# Lucy in the sky... #
In a subconscious way, we, the listeners,
are being led back in time with such studio tricks.
But going back in time didn't always mean
indulging in untroubled nostalgia.
Is the tempo all right, Paul?
Take six.
Right, here we go.
One, two, three, two, two, three.
INTRO TO "She's Leaving Home"
Think of the 1960s, and a series of now-famous images comes to mind -
Carnaby Street, Twiggy, Mary Quant,
face paint, flowers,
hippies in tie-dye, and so on.
But that was the Swinging Sixties and the Summer Of Love
for a few thousand people at most.
For everyone else, especially outside London's West End,
mid-'60s Britain wasn't that different
from the post-war greyness of the 1950s.
# Wednesday morning at five o'clock
# As the day begins
# Silently closing her bedroom door
# Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
# She goes downstairs to the kitchen
# Clutching her handkerchief... #
Just getting by could be bleak.
Throughout the late '50s and early '60s,
writers, dramatists and film-makers reflected this
by creating intense, gritty portraits
of contemporary working-class British life.
She's Leaving Home is their musical equivalent.
# We gave her most of our lives. #
Paul was inspired to write the song by a newspaper story he read
during the Sgt Pepper sessions.
A young woman, aged 17 in the article, leaves home
to seek adventure in the swinging city, and, presumably,
sexual freedom, devastating her straight-laced parents
in the process.
To portray this generational conflict, She's Leaving Home
also bucks the trend of most pop songs that preceded
by presenting more than one character's perspective.
There's the neutral observer, whose voice begins the story,
narrating in the third person.
# She goes downstairs to the kitchen
# Clutching her handkerchief. #
And towards the end of the song, we get a hint, too,
of the protagonist's point of view.
# Fun is the one thing that money can't buy... #
But, most unusually, in the chorus the story also includes
the point of view of the runaway's distressed parents.
# She breaks down and cries to her husband
# "Daddy, our baby's gone." #
To further dramatise the parent-daughter deadlock,
the different viewpoints are sung simultaneously,
a technique called polyphony, meaning many voices.
And the interplay of these melodies is known as counterpoint.
# She... # We never thought of ourselves
# Is leaving
# Never a thought for ourselves
# Home
# We struggled hard all our lives to get by
# She's leaving home... #
Not only is this musically satisfying,
it's also generous, and it's emotionally and politically mature.
Sympathy is shown for the parents as well as the alienated young woman.
Polyphony and counterpoint are musical tools that have been around
for hundreds of years in classical music.
But there's an even older alchemy at work in She's Leaving Home.
If you've ever wondered why the song sounds so melancholy,
it's not just because of the subject matter
or its delicate harp and strings accompaniment.
It's also because Paul's melody is modal.
Now, long before Western music had major and minor keys,
it had an ancient system of note families called modes.
Here's one...
Here's another...
And here's another...
African-American Blues and most of the world's traditional music
is modal. Here's an example -
an old English folk song called The True Lover's Farewell.
# Oh, fare you well, I must be gone
# And leave you for a while
# But wherever I go, I will return
# If I go 10,000 mile, my dear
# If I go 10,000 mile. #
There's a sense of sadness in its rise and fall, isn't there?
Conjuring up the idea of an earlier, earthier form of song.
The verse melody of She's Leaving Home belongs to one of these modes -
the Aeolian folk mode.
# Friday morning at nine o'clock, she is far away. #
Now, Paul didn't sit down and think, "I'll write a modal tune today."
It was instinctive.
Modes are embedded in the Anglo-Celtic folk songs
he heard growing up.
Like the childhood images evoked in Strawberry Fields Forever,
Penny Lane or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,
the intuitive use of a folk mode in She's Leaving Home
reaches back in time.
In this case, making the listener feel a sense of loss.
# Fun is the one thing that money can't buy
# Something inside that was always denied for so many years
# Bye-bye
# She's leaving home
# Bye-bye. #
Take nine. Still rolling.
My fucking arm's dropping off, I tell you.
Playing Sgt Pepper for the first time, the vinyl version,
and dropping the stylus onto the beginning of side two, you could
have been forgiven for thinking you'd put on the wrong record.
So far, we've been on a turn-of-the-century bandstand,
in an Alice In Wonderland phantasmagoria,
a slice-of-life northern drama,
and a Victorian circus.
Now we're transported to another continent.
Take one.
The Lonely Hearts Club Band's Edwardian bandstand
has turned into an ashram.
And instead of a brass band, we're hearing the sitar, the dilruba,
the tambura, the swarmandal and the tabla.
Within You Without You is the most unexpected and, as it turns out,
most visionary of all the many surprises on the album.
It's no great exaggeration to say that the song
is a turning point in 20th century popular music.
It helped set in motion what we'd now call world music.
# We were talking
# About the space between us all
# And the people. #
What's radical is not just that it uses Indian instruments.
Sitars had been played in pop records before,
by the Rolling Stones, for example, and indeed The Beatles themselves.
But in those cases, the Indian instruments were there
merely to provide an exotic sound,
a kind of aural flavouring, like musical joss sticks.
No, George Harrison, in this piece,
is co-opting the fundamental principles
of Indian music, and that is an undertaking of
a quite different order altogether.
# Da, da, da, da
# Da, da, da. #
You see, because...
Because this mar is right into the beat.
If it goes...
# Long as I need, I need, I need
# Long as I need, I need. #
George first heard a classical Indian recording in 1965.
It was a life-changing moment.
A year later, he sought lessons with the man he'd heard playing -
the great virtuoso of Indian classical music, Ravi Shankar.
# Da, da, da, da, da, da, da
# Da, da, da, da, da, da
# Da, da, da, da. #
Hinduism, with its emphasis on the snares and illusions
of the material world, had become an important part of a new kind of
spirituality that many in the West were seeking.
For some, it proved a passing fad.
For George, it became a lifelong and sincere commitment.
And he studied not only Indian music,
but Hindu religious philosophy.
Remarkably, it was this that George was attempting to evoke
in a pop album.
Within You Without You is a heartfelt reflection on the
state of being in the modern world.
# When you've seen beyond yourself
# Then you may find peace of mind
# Is waiting there
# And the time will come when you see we're all one
# And life flows on within you and without you. #
To see just how radical Within You Without You was,
let's look at the basic building blocks of Indian music
and how they differ significantly from the Western approach.
Take rhythm, for example.
In Indian music, rhythmic patterns and the way they evolve
play a far more important role
than how a piece of music is constructed
than they do in Western music.
In Western music, it's quite normal for the rhythm to loop around
and around, unchanging throughout a piece.
Indian music, on the other hand,
hates staying the same for any length of time.
Every Indian piece is built around one or more taal.
A taal is a pre-selected rhythmic pattern that recurs
every so often throughout the piece, a groove, you might call it.
Taal are made up of a sequence of beats - strong and weak.
They're then strung together in long, additive lines,
potentially requiring huge reserves of random access memory from
the players, since none of these long strings of numbers
are written down.
What's more, most of these rhythmic sequences
change speed, or laya, during the course of the piece.
The simple teen taal, for example - the closest relative of the
Western four beats to the bar standard -
is made up of four sets of four beats.
A variant of the teen taal begins Within You Without You.
MUSIC: Within You Without You by The Beatles
# We were talking... #
The taal soon becomes mischievously irregular.
George breaks up the four plus four plus four plus four pattern
by adding two groups of five, before turning back for the second verse.
The second verse ends with a group of five,
then a group of five and a half.
Both these verses upset the listener's expectation
of where the strong beats are meant to fall.
These kinds of divisions, by the way, are unheard of in Indian music
and Western pop music.
They are entirely of George's own making.
# We were talking... #
Another crucial factor in the song which clearly shows it was
designed all along to be a musical adventure in two worlds,
East and West, is the shape of the vocal line.
George's use of melody in Within You Without You,
whilst choosing his notes from a modified Indian scale,
is, in truth, closer to a Western model of making a tune,
because there is relatively little ornamentation in it.
This is what the song might have sounded like as interpreted
by a classical Indian singer.
# We were talking
# Talking
# We were talking
# About the space between us all
# And the people... #
It's recognisably the same song,
but quite different from what's on the record.
And no wonder. Because he wasn't trained to sing in this
highly ornamented style, and guessing perhaps that the
Western audience wasn't quite ready to hear it yet,
George shaped instead a more straightforward tune,
only loosely based on an Indian scale.
Hidden in the Abbey Road Masters is a fascinating insight into how
he coaches his Indian musicians to combine their native techniques
with his half-Eastern, half-Western melody.
GEORGE SINGS WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGE
INDIAN MUSICIAN: I think I prolong too much over here. Isn't it?
GEORGE: OK, shall we try from the beginning?
Just take it, Geoff, just in case.
Within You Without You is a hybrid in its melody
and its architecture, an amalgam of two cultures.
But practically everything on Sgt Pepper
is a hybrid of some kind.
Not least the final extraordinary track, A Day In The Life.
In The Life Of, take one.
Have the mic on the piano, quite low.
Just keep it like maracas, you know.
You know those old pianos.
# Sugar Plum Fairy, Sugar Plum Fairy. #
A Day In The Life's status as the emotional and artistic climax
of Sgt Pepper almost single-handedly answers the question -
why is this record considered by musicians to be such a landmark?
It was written before most of the other material on the album,
and yet it manages to prefigure some many of the project's
overall themes.
JOHN: # Well, I just had to laugh. #
It encompasses the everyday realism of ordinary life,
deadpan commentary intertwined with psychedelia,
experimentation with recording technology,
use of classical orchestration,
modulations in key and tempo,
use of sound effects,
avant-garde techniques,
and third and first-person narrative juxtaposed.
A Day In The Life is Sgt Pepper in miniature, and then some.
# I read the news today, oh boy. #
The song was suggested by a newspaper article
about the death in a car crash of a young aristocrat, a friend of
the Beatles.
# And though the news was rather sad. #
And a story about a scandalous 4,000 potholes identified
in Blackburn, Lancashire.
Perhaps only the Beatles could have turned these fragments
of reportage into a modern classic.
# I saw the photograph
# He blew his mind out in a car. #
The song begins deceptively simply,
but listen to Ringo's anything but simple syncopated interjections,
played on tom-toms.
# A crowd of people stood and stared
# They'd seen his face before
# Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords. #
In playing like this, Ringo isn't fulfilling the traditional role
of rock or pop drummer as of 1967.
The tom-tom fills he introduces are actually a lot more like
the way percussion works in classical music.
He's not laying down the pulse, he's punctuating it.
# But I just had to... #
This already gives us a sense of disorientation,
of ground shifting under our feet.
# I'd love to turn you on. #
A Day In The Life started out not as one song, but two.
Two very different songs.
PAUL: # Woke up, fell out of bed
# Dragged a comb across my head. #
John came into the studio with the verse, Paul added a middle section
from a completely different song fragment of his own.
# I noticed I was late
# Found my coat and grabbed my hat
# Made the bus in seconds flat
# Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
# And somebody spoke and I went into a dream. #
HE PLAYS PIANO SOLO IN A DAY IN THE LIFE
John's matter-of-fact verse, with its laconic descending harmonies,
is set off to superb effect by Paul's urgent piano and bass driven
middle section.
But what was needed now was some way of segueing between the two
different elements.
And what they came up with was truly remarkable
and unprecedented in pop music.
Both Paul and John were extremely musically curious.
Paul, in particular, was fascinated with the experimental techniques
being forged by avant-garde composers,
like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
One of the most radical of them was given the grand, if contradictory,
sounding name of aleatoric composition,
meaning creating music by chance.
Alea is the Latin word for dice.
The two orchestra glissando effects heard in the song
are created by an aleatoric method.
Paul and George Martin do it with a 40-piece orchestra,
telling the musicians to play the lowest note their instrument
is capable of, and then play whatever notes they like,
however they like, as long as they gradually raise their pitch,
and as long as they end up on one of the three notes
of an E major chord,
ideally at the very top of their instrument's range.
Nothing on Sgt Pepper, as we've seen, is quite what it seems,
which is true of its massive last chord.
If you play this E major chord on a piano...
HE PLAYS LOUD CHORD
Using its sustain pedal, its natural audibility lasts about
40 seconds, depending on what room you're in.
But all the time, it's dying away.
The final chord of A Day In The Life lasts 43 seconds,
and it is weirdly, unexpectedly alive for much of that time,
not dying away with anything like the speed of the natural version.
It carries on resonating.
Have you got your loud pedal down, Mark?
Which one's that? The right-hand one, far right.
Go on.
That's it. OK.
If you keep that on for the start, keep it on.
Take one.
So how was this achieved?
First of all, listening carefully to the original tracks,
it's not just one keyboard playing the chord, but nine,
seven acoustic pianos, each with a subtly different tone
played by eight people - Paul and Ringo doubled up on one of them -
an electric organ and a harmonium.
One, two, three...
THEY PLAY FINAL CHORD OF A DAY IN THE LIFE
Take two.
The decaying tails of all seven pianos were recorded separately.
The mixing desk's faders could then operate like a volume pedal
on the dying chords, subtly raising them as they faded away.
Hence the extraordinary effect of the overall chord somehow
remaining alive.
FINAL CHORD OF A DAY IN THE LIFE
That elongated chord, like so much else on Sgt Pepper,
takes something we think is familiar and reinvents it,
as The Beatles reinvented their image and their sound,
in every groove of the LP.
But this wasn't innovation for the sake of it.
The whole project, beginning as it did with the blue suburban skies
of John and Paul's childhoods in Liverpool,
was the most human of endeavours.
# Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
LAUGHTER
# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
# We hope you will enjoy the show
# Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
# Sit back and let the evening go. #
The musical world was never the same again after Sgt Pepper.
That's not to say the Beatles and many other brilliant musicians
didn't go on to make yet more wonderful and abundant new music.
But the rules of the game had changed forever,
and very, very few works of art in history have that effect.
Our musical age, where genres mix and converge and interweave freely,
really begins with this album.
Being for the benefit for us all, you could say.
# I feel it, I feel it, I feel it
# Oh, baby, now I feel it, I feel it, I feel it
# Feeling free now
# Gotta be free now
# Gotta be free now. #
I think it'll probably be another day singing it.
I just heard it then, I was like, "Yeah!"
This is take eight and it's the choir for the end.
Choir?
Eight, OK.
Eight beats, then.
Just like, count eight.
As soon as you say...
THEY ALL HUM TOGETHER
Come on, we'll all... OK.
Follow my lead. What's the note?
THEY ALL HUM TOGETHER
One, two, three, four.
THEY ALL HUM TOGETHER