Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Beatles permanently stopped touring in August 1966 after exhausting performances where fans screamed louder than the music. John Lennon described these concerts as bloody tribal rites that no longer involved real music.
Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth designed the album cover featuring life-sized cardboard cutouts of famous people. McCartney provided the ink drawing upon which Blake and Haworth based the design while Robert Fraser art-directed the project.
The final cost reached approximately £25,000 which is more than 30 times the budget of their first album Please Please Me. The group spent roughly 700 hours recording the LP using four-track tape recorders and innovative splicing techniques.
None of the songs were issued as singles at the time or available on spin-off EPs during the initial release period. All You Need Is Love was released separately in July after a performance on Our World satellite broadcast reached an estimated 400 million viewers.
Radio London previewed the album May 12 while BBC Light Programme host Kenny Everett officially played it May 20 excepting A Day in the Life. American radio stations interrupted regular scheduling to play the album virtually non-stop often from start to finish.