It's 25 years now since it was issued,
and there aren't many records which really last in the memory
for a quarter of a century.
I suppose it is a museum piece.
♪ It was twenty years ago today ♪
♪ Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play... ♪
It invoked the spirit of the age,
of the Carnaby Street and Mary Quant.
It was a joyous Spurting-out of life.
♪ The act you've known for all these years ♪
♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ♪
♪ I get by with a little help from my friends... ♪
It was colourful, and it was peace, and it was love, and it was music.
♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds... ♪
The songwriting team thing will keep going on whatever happens, will it?
Yeah, we'll probably carry on writing music forever, you know?
♪ It's getting better all the time... ♪
That's probably the big difference,
is that people played it a bit safe in popular music,
but I think that's what we suddenly realised, that you didn't have to.
♪ I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in ♪
- ♪ She... ♪ - ♪ We gave her most of our lives ♪
♪ Is leaving... ♪
♪ For the benefit of Mr Kite ♪
♪ There will be a show tonight on trampoline ♪
♪ We were talking ♪
♪ About the... ♪
I remember track by track, it was exciting at that time,
nothing like it had ever been.
♪ Will you still need me, will you still feed me ♪
♪ When I'm sixty-four ♪
♪ Lovely Rita, meter maid ♪
♪ Nothing can come between us ♪
♪ When it gels dark, I tow your heart away ♪
♪ Good morning, good morning, good morning ♪
♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club... ♪
♪ Found my way downstairs and drank a cup ♪
♪ And looking up I noticed I was late ♪
♪ Found my coat and grabbed my hat ♪
♪ Made the bus in seconds flat ♪
In 1966,
the Beatles had been working most successfully for three years.
They'd conquered the world in a way nobody else had done before.
♪ Ah, ah-ah-ah ♪
♪ Ah-ah-ah... ♪
And yet, things started to fall apart.
All sorts of troubles beset them.
John Lennon had made his famous remark
about being more popular than Jesus Christ,
which, although arguably true, caused a great deal of upset in America.
They were performing incessantly.
They had heavy guards wherever they went.
And when they went to the Philippines, they barely escaped with their lives
after they'd offended President Marcos
by not turning up at one of his receptions.
And Imelda Marcos was outraged at the way the Beatles had ignored her.
So, they decided they didn't want to tour again. They were fed up.
They really wanted to lead something of a normal life.
I remember we all used to run in the back of these big vans they'd hired.
And this one was like a silver-lined van, chromium,
nothing in it, like a furniture van with nothing in it, just chrome.
And we were all piled into this after this really miserable gig.
And I said, "Right, that's it!"
No, we were absolutely fed up with touring.
And why were we fed up with touring?
Because we were turning into such bad musicians.
Because the volume of the audience
was always greater than the volume of the band.
And for me personally,
on stage there was no chance in hell I could do a fill,
because it would just disappear.
So I ended up just hanging on to the off-beats
and watching the other guys' bums
and trying to lip-read to see where we were, you know?
It sounds marvellous, being a multi-millionaire pop star,
having the whole world at your feet, girls screaming wherever you go.
In actual fact, it's hell.
And that was happening wherever we went, even in India.
You know, we went to India from the Philippines.
I planned to go there to buy a sitar, actually.
I was thinking, "At least this is going to be one place"
where we can have a bit of peace."
And when we get off the plane, there was all these Indian faces in the night,
all shouting, "Beatles! Beatles!"
Paul went to Kenya,
went on a safari trip as I remember,
and John had already been booked by Richard Lester
for a part in "How I Won The War".
So he went off to Spain to film.
And Ringo joined him there for a while, just to hang around with him.
George went to India and worked with Ravi Shankar.
There was no question of disbanding at that point.
It was just, "We gotta get off this road."
And at that time, a lot of other things were changing. Society was changing.
The psychedelic era was coming in, and we were very much part of that.
And I think we really felt that
it could be done better from a record than from anything else.
The record could go on tour, was the theory.
I think Paul made the phone call.
Paul always made the phone call. "Let's go back to the studio, lads."
It used to terrify John and I cos we'd be in the garden,
and Paul would want us to work all the time, cos he's the workaholic.
On 24th November 1966, a Thursday,
the Beatles came into Abbey Road Studies to start the new album.
And the track they started with didn't appear on the album.
It was a song called "Strawberry Fields",
and the way it was done that night, that Thursday,
was virtually complete, we actually made virtually a master.
And it was the way I heard it originally when John sang it to me,
and it was a sweet, gentle, simple song,
starting with the verse, you'll notice,
- not the chorus. - ♪ Misunderstanding all you see ♪
♪ It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out... ♪
We were still in our primitive slate in technology in those days, 1966.
We were just recording on 4-track.
- ♪ No one I think is in my tree ♪ - Bass and guitar, add to it.
- ♪ I mean, it must be high or low ♪ - Still nothing else.
Dead simple.
♪ That is you can't you know tune in, but it's all right... ♪
Now we have a slide guitar played by George added.
- Curiously enough, on the vocal track. - ♪ Let me take you down ♪
- Listen. - ♪ Cos I'm going to ♪
- ♪ Strawberry Fields ♪ - Just on the vocal track.
♪ Nothing is real ♪
♪ And nothing to get hung about ♪
♪ Strawberry Fields forever ♪
♪ Strawberry Fields forever... ♪
I think that version is very charming.
♪ Strawberry Fields forever ♪
A very simple version of a very simple song.
But in fact, it never appeared like that, and no one's ever heard that one since.
We left that waning,
and John thought about it, and Paul thought about it over the weekend,
and on Monday we tackled it again quite differently.
John decided he wanted it in a lower key.
It had an introduction for the first time
which was played on that weird instrument, the mellotron,
and became a really key feature.
And it started with the chorus rather than the verse.
"Strawberry Fields" immediately, isn't it?
♪ Let me take you down ♪
- Double-tracked voice right away. - ♪ Cos I'm going to
♪ Strawberry Fields... ♪
Again, all rhythm instruments on one track.
Voices on three and four.
♪ And nothing to get hung about... ♪
But John thought about it and said, "I think I can do it better than that."
He said, "I want to have a bit more bite in it. Brass. Strings."
So, I said, "OK, let's give it a whirl."
♪ Let me take you down cos I'm going to ♪
♪ Strawberry Fields... ♪
Double-tracked voices on three and four, but with percussion as well on three.
♪ Strawberry Fields forever... ♪
Swarmandala.
An Indian instrument that George had brought back.
Like a kind of harp. Had a marvellous effect.
♪ That is you can't you know tune in, but it's all right
- Backward cymbal on track one. - ♪ That is I think it's not too bad... ♪
Always sounds like Russian language to me.
♪ Strawberry Fields ♪
♪ Nothing is real... ♪
Brass slabs and so on with a cello.
But underlying it all, this wonderful rhythm section.
About nine or ten players there.
♪ Strawberry Fields forever ♪
Well, we finished up then with a track
which would show the way that "Pepper" was going to be.
This was our first psychedelic track.
I mean, when I started songwriting, it wasn't to write rock 'n' roll,
it was to write for Sinatra.
It was to write cabaret.
In fact, one of my first songs was "When I'm Sixty-Four", which was...
♪ Da-da-doo-da-da, Ba-Dee-oo-eh, hey! Ooh bop! ♪
You know, it's big band stuff kind of thing.
And so your aims weren't set to doing rock 'n' roll.
But when we started working together,
I think... I certainly, and I think John, too,
wanted to be a Rodgers and Hammerstein, a Lennon/McCartney.
We consciously wanted to be a team.
I mean, the funny things is, I wanted McCartney/Lennon,
but of course John was always bossier and he said,
"No, no, it sounds much better the other way, Lennon/McCartney."
So I gave in.
The next song we did, actually, was "When I'm Sixty-Four",
but that was one that harked back quite a long way.
The one immediately after that was curiously allied to "Strawberry Fields".
It was "Penny Lane".
Penny Lane was a place that John knew about,
so for me to just say, "I've got a song called "Penny Lane",
he knew flatly what I was doing.
Similarly, "Strawberry Fields".
I knew about that from when I used to go and visit him when we were kids.
It was the place right opposite him,
where you used to go and play in the garden.
So it was kind of a magical childhood place for him.
And we transformed it into the sort of psychedelic dream.
It's like everybody's magic place, instead of just ours.
We took them from being little localised things and made them more global.
That actually was what Paul heard me play on television.
It's the second "Brandenburg Concerto", as you know.
And he was obviously sitting at home and saw this little trumpet,
and thought, "Well, that's a new gimmick and a new sound,"
and he'd just written "Penny Lane" and had had a rather bad backing track,
so apparently that was how I came to do it.
And eventually, of course, we got to what he liked,
and this is what he wrote.
♪ Penny Lane is in my ears... ♪
The reason that "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane"
didn't appear on the album
was that Brian Epstein, their manager, was worried,
and said to me, "The boys need a lift. They need a great single."
"What have you got?"
Well, I said, "We've got two wonderful songs."
"Let's issue them both."
In those days, we didn't include single releases on albums,
as we thought that was rather conning the public.
One of the biggest errors I ever made.
♪ Please release me ♪
♪ Can't you see... ♪
A newcomer with the unlikely name of Engelbert Humperdinck
had a song called "Please Release Me",
and for the first time, a Beatles single failed to reach No.1 in the UK charts.
♪ To live a lie would be a sin ♪
We were in this big white room that was very dirty.
It hadn't been painted for years and years,
and it had all these old sound baffles hanging down
that were all dirty and broken.
Not a very nice atmosphere.
When you think of the songs that were made in that studio, No.2,
it's amazing, cos there was no atmosphere in there.
We had to make the atmosphere ourselves.
The great thing about these studies in Abbey Road
was that you were always bumping into people.
Sir Malcolm Sargent would look in at the session and wave
in his pin-striped suit and his carnation: "Hello, boys."
And George would say, "Sir Malcolm would like to say hello."
"Hello, Mal." "Hello, boys."
I remember seeing Sir Tyrone Guthrie on the steps here,
you know, the great man himself.
So, it was always very like that.
It was a joke, really. They had this toilet paper like lino
that had EMI on every piece.
The refrigerator had a padlock on it,
so if you wanted a cup of tea,
we'd have to break open the padlock on the fridge to get the milk out.
EMI being this huge monster company,
when they bought the 8-track, the first 8-track in England,
they were so cheap, they didn't buy the plug to plug it in.
It was going to be boring to just make another Beatles album.
And we'd stopped touring, we now had this huge, liberated opportunity.
We could do anything we wanted.
I went on a trip to America and came back
and had this idea on the plane.
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
It was all very "Uncle Joe's Medicine Show"
"with dancing bears and elixir of life",
you know, those kind of jokey titles.
Everything about the album will be imagined
from the perspective of these people.
So it doesn't have to be us,
it doesn't have to be the kind of song you want to write,
it could be the song they might want to write.
"Sgt. Pepper", the opening track of the album,
really a good, old-fashioned rocker,
starts off with applause or rather atmosphere noise
from a recording I made up in Cambridge with the "Beyond the Fringe"-crowd,
Dudley Moore and company,
and this super electric guitar.
And tied together beautifully by a great rock voice from Paul.
- ♪ It was 20 years ago today ♪ - Listen to this.
♪ Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play ♪
♪ They've been going in and out of style ♪
♪ But they're guaranteed to raise a smile ♪
- He got sawdust in his voice there. - ♪ So may I introduce to you ♪
♪ The act you've known for all these years... ♪
And then a bit of classical work, bringing in four French horns.
Always there's the audience punctuating the whole thing.
♪ We're Sgt. Pepper's Lonely... ♪
And then the chorus, singing the chorus.
♪ We hope you will enjoy the show ♪
♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ♪
♪ Sit back and let the evening go... ♪
And together with the audience and the horns,
it's an exciting thing saying, "Come and join our show, listen to it."
- "We're a great band." - ♪ ...Lonely Hearts Club Band ♪
♪ Picture yourself in a boat on a river ♪
♪ With tangerine trees and marmalade skies ♪
♪ Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly... ♪
I remember him going up on the roof.
John went up on the roof and got lost and came back.
♪ Cellophane flowers... ♪
He took an aspirin. Know what I mean? And it turned out to be something else.
♪ Towering over your head... ♪
He accidentally took some LSD.
It'd certainly keep him awake for a while.
♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds... ♪
At that point, the session was in effect over.
I was rather offended when the album came out
and people said, "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds" - "LSD, you know?"
Which was nonsense.
The real story about "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was
I showed up at John's house one day,
and he said to me, "Look at this great drawing Julian's just done."
And he showed me, I remember it very well.
It was a kid's drawing, and kids always have people floating around
like Chagall does in all his things. They're always just floating.
I think it's something to do with kids not realizing
that people have to be put on the ground.
I've seen the painting that this little kid does.
I don't know if you've get kids,
but they just slap paint everywhere and say it's a painting.
And of course we put them in frames and put them on the well. And...
And it was just this crazy little kid's painting. "What is that?"
John had said, "What's it called, then?"
And Julian had said, "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds."
And John went, "Ding!"
They were able to conjure up a wonderful, evocative image
with very sparse material.
And the opening to "Lucy" is really a case in point.
And it's a most wonderful phrase.
I think, if Beethoven was around, he wouldn't have minded one of those.
And over that very, very simple and beautiful phrase,
John sang just one note.
He developed it. He had a way of finding out what he wanted to sing,
even as we were recording.
But to begin with, all he sang was,
"Picture yourself on a boat on a river..."
♪ Newspaper taxis appear on the shore... ♪
Notice the tape echo on the voice already,
even though this is a very early rehearsal take.
♪ Climb in the back with your head in the clouds... ♪
- No bass again. - No.
Because it was much better for me to work out the bass later, you knew?
And it allowed me to do...
That's me.
The good thing about doing it later was it allowed me to get melodic bass lines.
Which was always... All the bass lines were always very interesting.
On this album, I think that was one of the reasons.
♪ With plasticine porters with looking glass ties ♪
♪ Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile ♪
♪ The girls with kaleidoscope eyes... ♪
Go for it!
The climate was influenced by the psychedelic era.
I think the only difficulty about talking honestly about that period
is that new the drug scene is a much heavier thing,
and if you're now in any way seen to incite or advocate drug-taking,
you're now talking about crack, you're now talking about glue sniffing,
you're now talking about life-threatening things.
So, I don't actually like doing it, because it can easily be misconceived.
If you could get back to the period
and everyone could understand how the period was and how innocent it was,
then it is easier to talk about it.
It mightn't have affected creativity for other people.
I know it did for us, and it did for me.
I mean, the first thing that people who smoked marijuana and were into music
is that somehow it focuses your attention better on the music.
And so you can hear it clearer.
Or that's how it appeared to be.
You could see things much different,
I mean, LSD was something else. It wasn't just...
I mean, marijuana was just like having a couple of beers, really,
but LSD was more like going to the moon.
We found out very early on that,
you know, if you played stoned or derelict in any way,
it was really shitty music, you know?
So we would have the experiences and then bring that into the music later.
Famous old story of one of the cleaners at the Hammersmith Odeon saying,
"That Ray Charles must be a mean git, you know?
"I just saw two of his musicians in the toilets sharing a cigarette."
"He can't pay them anything!"
I knew that the boys smoked pot,
and they equally knew that I disapproved, and they never did it in front of me.
They would always have Mal roll them a joint
and they'd nip out to the canteen and lock it
or else to the loo and have a smoke and come back again,
beaming all over their faces.
We mainly wrote in the afternoons.
I'd either go to John's house or he'd come to mine.
So I'd drive out to Weybridge.
Now, you don't want to be stoned doing that.
So we'd go out, and we'd have an afternoon of it,
and it would be later, listening, in the evening
that the little wine might come out and this and that might come out.
But I say, you know... it's very difficult for me
because I realise now being a father of four kids
that if I make this sound as exciting as it was,
the natural corollary is for someone to say,
"Well, why don't we write like that?"
And I don't want to be seen to do that,
cos now, as I say, it's a much more dangerous ballgame.
There was a kind of spirit of adventure that they both had.
They were going to conquer the world.
But there was that element of competition,
and the competition was the essential thing that made them work so well.
He'd write "Strawberry Fields", I'd go away and write "Penny Lane".
If I'd write "I'm Down", he'd go away and write something similar to that,
to compete with each other.
But it was very friendly competition,
because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway.
But it was a real... it was this. It really helped step...
So we were getting better and better and better all the time.
John and Paul always wrote a song for Ringo on every album.
"With a Little Help from My Friends" proved to be the song.
And Paul wrote that song and wrote it beautifully simply
with just five notes that Ringo had to carry,
all within one little phrase, which was...
All in those notes.
Terribly simple. Terribly effective.
♪ What would you think if I sang out of tune... ♪
Like his drumming, Ringo's voice is most distinctive.
And on this track, he put in a really super performance
that makes the song his very own.
♪ And I'll try not to sing out of key ♪
♪ Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends ♪
♪ Mmh, I get high with a little help from my friends... ♪
The original line was,
"What would you do if I sang out of tune,"
"would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?"
Or "Would you throw tomatoes at me?",
and I would not sing that line, "tomatoes at me", because...
I hated the line anyway,
and in those days they used to throw all sorts of stuff at us on singe,
and I didn't want this to become a habit either.
And I just hated the line, so I refused to sing that line, "tomatoes",
so they changed it to, "Would you stand up and walk out on me?"
♪ Do you need anybody ♪
♪ I need somebody to love... ♪
Besides changing that line,
it took a lot of coaxing from Paul to get me to sing that last note.
I just felt it was very high.
I always worry about the vocals, you know?
I'm insecure when I do the vocals. I still am, and I was then.
And so he would get me up, and we finally got that last note.
♪ ...from my friends ♪
The role of a producer had changed over the years.
I mean, when we started in 1962,
my job was really an organizer to get them into some kind of shape,
make sure they were tidy in the studio, musically, I mean.
Gradually that changed.
By the time "Pepper" had come along,
I suppose I was a realiser of their ideas,
so that if John wanted something really weird,
I had to try and provide it for him.
Or if Paul wanted some extraordinary orchestration,
I had to try and find out what he wanted.
What I think his great skill then was to allow us to do what we wanted.
So his role changed from really deciding what was done
to allowing us to do it.
I think the role with George became easier,
because at first he was to us... we were kind of frightened,
because we were these nervous kids,
and he was like this big schoolteacher sort of person
who we had to find and have a relationship with.
George was like the big cheese.
He would come in as the producer,
and we were all a little... not afraid, but...
We knew he was the man.
And he was very good, and he was very humorous, so...
That's how George really got into our good books,
because we were very tight,
the little four of us were really tight together.
Very seldom did we let anybody in.
We always felt George had just get off his Spitfire:
"Oh, hello, chaps. Yes, it's chock away."
We always felt he was a bit one of them.
And I think we just grew through those years together,
him as the straight man and us as the loonies.
He was always there for us to interpret our strangeness.
Da, da...
When George Harrison came to me,
I didn't know what to think.
But I found he really wanted to learn.
I never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion.
I'd heard the name of Ravi Shankar,
it must have been around 1965, maybe 1966.
The third time I heard this name, I went out and bought the record.
It was strange, because intellectually I didn't know what it was.
It didn't make any sense to me,
but somewhere inside of me, it made absolute sense.
It made more sense than anything I'd ever heard before.
♪ We were talking ♪
♪ About the love that's gone so cold... ♪
I found it very fascinating, actually, working with George on that.
Him trying to get from English musicians
what the Indians were already giving us.
It started out by George working with a dilruba player,
which is a kind of Indian violin.
And then I had to copy that with a bank of English violinists.
Here we have the dilrubas on two,
and our English instruments joining in on track three,
but George answering on sitar.
Here it is.
And pizzicato strings accompanying him.
A bit of slurpy cello.
Doing the same thing as the dilruba.
♪ We were talking... ♪
And here he is singing the same tune as the dilruba
in flatly the same way, the same kind of swoops
that the dilruba does.
You hear his voice.
You hear the dilruba.
♪ And lose their soul... ♪
"Within You, Without You" was just my way
of trying to make a Western pop song
using some of those instruments and some of those sounds.
We all knew George liked Indian music,
and there was a kind of toleration, if you like.
But it was a welcome one, because we actually liked the sounds.
The joss sticks even were OK.
They covered the smell of pot.
♪ Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
♪ Then we wouldn't have to wait so long... ♪
To me, the single biggest influence on "Sgt. Pepper"
was the Beach Boys' record "Pet Sounds".
And I think Brian Wilson was a great genius.
♪ You know it's gonna make it that much better ♪
♪ When we can say goodnight and slay together... ♪
I think of "Pet Sounds" in my head, and I think of "Sgt. Pepper's",
and I think, "Gosh! That's not..."
Those two albums aren't very alike at all,
only in that they're very creative.
They must've picked up on the creativity of "Pet Sounds", not the sound.
It's actually very clever on any level.
If you approach it from a writer's point of view, it's very cleverly written.
The harmonic structures are very, very clever.
If you approach it from an arranger's point of view,
the kind of instruments he's got on there, an oscillator, a harpsichord...
It's got some crazy stuff on there.
Well, I remember... I combined an organ with the guitar.
And phew! What a sound, It really worked great.
We get them so that they were absolutely enhancing each other.
It was like a miracle, a miraculous process.
♪ Keep in mind love is here... ♪
Because of the work they'd done,
it didn't seem too much of a stretch for us to get further out than they'd get.
We always loved the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang.
When we were kids, it was a TV thing,
a little bloke came on and they all pushed him out of the way.
But it was those giant big bass...
And John used to play harmonica, so we always liked that.
But when I heard them on "Pet Sounds"...
There's a lot of harmonica, bass harmonica, he uses that...
The instruments he uses and the way he places them against each other,
it's very cleverly done, it's a really clever album.
So we were inspired by it and nicked a few ideas.
♪ The celebrated Mr K. ♪
♪ Performs his feat on Saturday at Bishopsgate... ♪
I remember we walked into an antique shop in Sevenoaks in Kent,
and we were looking at what they had there,
and John pulled out this thing that he found,
which said, "The Benefit of Mr Kite".
And it was virtually all the lyrics to that song.
When I saw it,
it was hanging up in the hall in his house in Surrey,
and it had everything that the song has on it.
It had the Henderson Twins and Pablo Fanque's Fair,
all those words were written on the poster.
And it obviously inspired him to write a song about a fairground or a circus.
That's how you do it.
You get ideas, you hear people say stuff, or...
you hear a phrase that sounds good and you write it down or remember it.
So I think he was just advanced for those days
in his awareness of putting... everything could be put into a song.
He wanted to create a sound picture
of what the song was all about.
And he actually said to me, "I want to smell the sawdust."
But to get the smell of the sawdust,
we, John and I, both sat on different organs,
Wurlitzers and Lowreys and Hammonds,
and with double-speed techniques created a kind of whirly atmosphere.
And the backing... I had visions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
who had a little pipey organ in their hut.
John thought slightly differently. He thought of "Magic Roundabout".
But it was a tooty kind of sound that we were able to create,
and together with that, we had this weird and wonderful tape
consisting of all little sections of real steam organs,
cut up, joined together in a very haphazard manner, some back to front.
To give us no tune at all,
but just a noise that would convey what we wanted.
And this is what it is.
♪ The band begins at ten to six ♪
♪ When Mr K. performs his tricks without a sound... ♪
Double-tracked vocal form John.
♪ And Mr H. will demonstrate ♪
♪ Ten summersets he'll undertake ♪
- Ringo on his cymbals. - ♪ On solid ground ♪
♪ ...days in preparation, a splendid time is guaranteed for all ♪
- And now, here, in come the whirly bits. - ♪ And tonight Mr Kite is topping the bill ♪
This is the track with all the little sounds on it,
the melange of tapes.
And along with that is the little tooty backing on this track, track four.
And that's it. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
I mean, when I first met them, they really couldn't write a decent song.
"Love Me Do" was the best they could give me.
Yet they blossomed as songwriters in a way that is breath-taking.
It had an amazing effect on the way people saw records.
I mean, people suddenly thought, "Oh, you can do that?"
Well, they've done it, so of course you can do it.
So I suppose it made...
it opened a door and showed everybody that there was another room
and that you could play around in that other room,
and actually it could still be called a commercial record.
♪ Good morning, good morning ♪
♪ The best to you each morning ♪
♪ Sunshine, breakfast, Kellogg's Cornflakes, crisp and full of sun... ♪
Ah, "Good Morning".
"Good Morning" of course was inspired by a commercial.
You know, a breakfast commercial.
And I suppose that triggered something in John that made him write the song,
and again he drew his inspiration
from very mundane, ordinary things like "Time for tea" and "Meet the Wife...
"Meet the Wife" was a television serial.
It kind of indicates the suburbanality of his songs
and the very Englishness of the whole thing.
"Good Morning" was typical of him
that it was of odd meters, but sounded perfectly natural.
I mean, he would have a 3/4 bar, 4/4 bar,
5/4 bar even, without knowing it.
One-two-three, one-two,
one-two-three-four, one-two, one-two-three-four.
It was to be a very hard-driving, punchy thing.
The tune itself is quite simple.
But it was full of accents all over the place.
♪ Go to a show you hope she goes... ♪
John wanted to finish this song with a collection of animal noises,
starting off with a cock, identifying with a Kellogg's commercial...
...and then each animal was capable
of either devouring or frightening the one before it.
And we had a whole string of them here.
It took a long time,
and it took longer for me, because I would do the basic track.
We would do the basic backing track. We'd do the drums.
And then it would be days or weeks,
even months sometimes, to come back to the track
and put on overdubs like the hi-hat
or, listening again, there's lots of conga drums.
I'm not a percussionist.
That's another field of drums.
I'm on playing the congas, and there's lots of maracas,
and all that stuff sort of came on at the end.
So there was lots of huge gaps.
The biggest memory I have of "Sgt. Pepper" is, I learned to play chess on it.
We were changing our method of working at that time,
and instead of now looking for catchy singles, catchy singles, catchy singles,
it was more like writing a novel, "Sgt. Pepper", I think for me, definitely.
It was much more a kind of an overall concept, "Wow...!"
And you can see that in the packaging.
♪ And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right ♪
♪ Where I belong I'm right ♪
♪ Where I belong ♪
♪ Silly people run around, they worry me ♪
♪ And never ask me why they don't get past my door... ♪
Cover art in the mid-Sixties
hadn't really been exploited up to "Pepper",
and when the boys decided what they wanted,
they wanted really to put all of their heroes on the album
in some form or another.
And by recruiting Peter Blake, who was an avant-garde artist again,
to assemble their ideas and realise them,
in the same way I was realizing the music,
they did, I think, a pretty smart thing.
I think what happened straightaway was that it was very mysterious.
It was like a game.
There were quizzes to see if you could spot who everyone was,
and of course nobody could.
And I think a kind of cult built up around it,
and then the myths and stories that built up around it,
it became an interesting talking point, I think.
I think we just thought we'll do the best we can
in this very far-out new way that we had of thinking.
Get it to be something...
I still think that is the best philosophy, to really try and please yourself.
Probably the most momentous song on the album, "A Day in the Life",
began in a very simple way.
And we've got the rehearsal fake, take one,
the very first time we heard it,
with John giving a few instructions to people, as usual,
just before he starts it.
"Have the mike on the piano quite low."
"Keep it like maracas, you know."
John was singing while he was playing his acoustic guitar.
Paul was on piano. George was playing maracas, I think.
And certainly Ringo was on bongos.
John counts in by saying, "Sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy."
"Sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy."
♪ I read the news today, oh boy ♪
♪ About a lucky man who made the grade... ♪
Even in this early take, he has a voice...
- ♪ And though the news was rather sad ♪ - ...which sends shivers down the spine.
♪ Well, I just had to laugh ♪
♪ I saw the photograph ♪
♪ He blew his mind out in a car ♪
♪ He didn't notice that the lights had changed... ♪
Well, I think he's vastly underrated, Ringo.
The drum fills on "A Day in the Life" are in fact very, very complex things.
You could take a great drummer from today
and say, "I want it like that," and they really wouldn't know what to do.
♪ They'd seen his face before ♪
♪ Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords... ♪
I could only play the drums the best I could, you know?
You know, I've said it before that I was very lucky
that I was surrounded by three frustrated drummers.
All three of them can play drums, but only one sort of style.
There was one great moment with John who played a record to me
and wanted me to... "Well, play it like that, Ringo."
I said, "But, John, there's two guys." He says, "Don't let that bother you."
The first part of the song "A Day in the Life" was John's,
but it was incomplete.
He went to Paul and said, "Have you got anything to pad it out in the middle?"
Paul had another song which he was working on,
which really had no connection with "A Day in the Life", but it was good.
♪ Woke up, fell out of bed ♪
♪ Dragged a comb across my head ♪
♪ Found my way downstairs and drank a cup ♪
♪ And looking up, I noticed I was late... ♪
So John said, "Well, let's shove it in the middle"
"and see if we can't connect them up in some way."
We connected them with a series of empty bars
on either side of Paul's section before we came back into John's reprise,
and we knew we had to fill those bars with something sensational.
And we didn't know what it was going to be yet.
In order to keep the 24 bars
so that everybody knew when to come back in again,
dear old Mal Evans stood by the piano counting the bars.
"Seven, eight, nine, ten..."
And just to add further weight to it,
he set off an alarm clock at the end of it to trigger everybody back into it.
Seventeen, eighteen,
"nineteen, twenty!"
They told me they wanted an orchestral climax to fill these empty bars,
a giant orgasm of sound
rising from nothing at all to the most incredible noise.
And this is what we came up with.
And with that, we joined up the two parts of the song.
♪ Woke up, fell out of bed ♪
♪ Dragged a comb across my head... ♪
I think there's lots of better songs out on different records.
It's just... it was the time, the attitude,
it was the concept, the world was trying to change.
It didn't quite make it, but it made a small move.
It was in the air...
For me, the psychedelic years were the most exciting.
It's like a period. If you listen to music from the '20 or the '30s,
it has a sort of sound to it, and I think that's important.
If you want to listen to something like a Hoagy Carmichael tune,
well, it's partly the song that you like, and it's partly the way he did it,
and it's also partly the way it was recorded,
how the microphones sounded in those days,
how the tube amplifiers in the boards...
You know, it's all that kind of atmosphere,
and it becomes a little period piece.
The concept of the thing,
I mean, before concept albums became a dirty word,
you'd put it on and sit down and say,
"For the next 50 minutes, I'm gonna be going there."
So, it was very new from that point of view.
♪ And though the holes were rather small... ♪
Well, you know, the whole flower power thing fell apart in the end.
I mean, there's still some great, old hippies out there,
travelling in their vans, but...
It wasn't the movement that I felt it could have been.
I must confess that when we were going through "Pepper",
people were saying, "How's it coming along?" I'd say "Fine."
And I must confess, as we were getting longer and longer into the album
and more and more avant-garde,
I was wondering whether we were being a little bit over the top
and a little bit... maybe pretentious.
Just a slight niggle of worry. I thought, "Is the public ready for this yet?"
The musical papers which I used to read
were starting to slag us off, because we hadn't done anything,
because it took five months to record.
And I remember with great glee seeing in one of the papers,
"Oh, the Beatles have dried up. There's nothing coming from them."
"They've been in the studio. They can't think what they're doing."
And I was sitting rubbing my hands, saying, "You just wait."
♪ Friday morning, at nine o'clock ♪
♪ She is far away ♪
♪ Waiting to keep the appointment she made ♪
♪ Meeting a man from the Motortrade ♪
♪ She...♪
♪ What did we do that was wrong ♪
♪ ...is leaving ♪
♪ We didn't know it was wrong ♪
♪...fun ♪
♪ Fun is the one thing that money can't buy ♪
♪ Something inside that was always denied ♪
♪ For so many years ♪
♪ She's leaving home ♪
♪ Bye, bye...♪