Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" begins with the sound of an audience chattering and an orchestra tuning up, and within seconds the listener is somewhere else entirely. Written by Paul McCartney and officially credited to Lennon-McCartney, this 1967 song does something unusual for a rock track: it introduces a fictional band performing a fictional concert, and then steps aside for the rest of the album to follow. It appears twice on the record, opening the whole thing and then returning near the end as a faster, heavier reprise. What sparked the idea? Where did the song come from? And why does a piece of music that the Beatles never once performed live during their touring years keep turning up, decade after decade, at some of the biggest moments in popular music history?

• 2. Salt, Pepper, and a Flight Home

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  In November 1966, McCartney was on a flight back to England from a holiday in Kenya when the seed of the concept took root. Roadie Mal Evans asked McCartney what the letters "S" and "P" stood for on the pots sitting on their in-flight meal trays. McCartney told him: salt and pepper. That small exchange, somewhere over the clouds, led directly to the name Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and from that name came the entire album concept. McCartney's vision was ambitious: each Beatle would take on an alter-ego, and the resulting fictional band would perform a concert in front of an audience. John Lennon himself attributed the original idea to McCartney, even though the song carries their joint credit. The group's road manager, Neil Aspinall, pushed the concept further. He suggested that Sgt. Pepper should act as the compere of the show, and that the album should close with a reprise. According to Evans's diaries, Evans may have contributed to the song's writing as well.

• 3. Building the Track

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  Work on the recording began on the 1st of February 1967, in Abbey Road's studio 2, with George Martin producing and Geoff Emerick engineering. Three further sessions followed before the track was completed on the 6th of March 1967. The song is in G major and uses a horn quartet to fill out its instrumental sections, with four named players: Neill Sanders, James W. Buck, Tony Randell, and John Burden on French horn. The crowd noise woven into the opening was not invented for the occasion. Martin had recorded it years earlier, in the early 1960s, during a live recording of the stage show Beyond the Fringe. The orchestra tuning sounds that open the track came from the 10th of February orchestra session for a different song entirely: "A Day in the Life".

• 4. The Reprise

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  The reprise, recorded on the 1st of April 1967, is a faster and heavier restatement of the opening track, but it carries its own distinct personality. Ringo Starr opens it playing the drum part alone for four bars, at which point a brief bass glissando from McCartney signals the full band's entry. McCartney also overdubbed a Hammond organ part onto this version. Where the first version stays largely in G major, the reprise begins in F and then modulates up to G. At one minute and eighteen seconds, it is one of the shorter songs in the Beatles' catalogue, though not the shortest: that distinction belongs to "Her Majesty" at twenty-three seconds. The idea for the reprise came from Aspinall, who felt that if the album had a welcome song, it ought to have a goodbye song too. The mono and stereo mixes differ slightly; the mono version includes crowd noise and laughter in the opening bars that does not appear in the stereo mix. Between the counts of two and three in McCartney's count-in, Lennon can be heard jokingly calling out "Bye!"

• 5. Three Days After Release

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  Jimi Hendrix played the song live at the Saville Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue just three days after it was released on record in 1967. The theatre was leased by Brian Epstein, and McCartney and Harrison were in the audience. That performance has become one of the more celebrated covers in rock history, though Hendrix recorded a second version much later, at the Isle of Wight Festival, which was released posthumously on the album Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight. The song has attracted a range of other performers over the years. In 1988, hair metal band Zinatra played it on an arena tour in Europe, opening for former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. In 2009, Cheap Trick released a live album and DVD titled Sgt. Pepper Live, covering the full original album. In 2011, Robbie Williams performed a personalised version on Take That's Progress tour, substituting the band name with "Robbie Williams and the Take That Band" and inserting a reference to Take That's 1990s manager, Nigel Martin-Smith. Bryan Adams and Stereophonics recorded both versions of the song for a 2007 television film called It Was 40 Years Ago Today, using the same studio, technicians, and recording techniques as the original sessions.

• 6. Live 8 and the World Record

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  On the 2nd of July 2005, McCartney and U2 opened the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". The song was selected in part because it begins with the lyric "It was twenty years ago, today", and Live 8 took place approximately twenty years after Live Aid. A charity single released on iTunes after the performance reached number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 1 on the UK Downloads chart. The release set a world record at the time for the fastest-selling online song of all time. McCartney had been performing the song live since the 1989-90 Paul McCartney World Tour, where it appeared in its full version. On later tours he shifted to the reprise as his main performance, using it as a segue into "The End", with the resulting concert sequence typically listed as "Sgt. Pepper's/The End". On the 4th of April 2009, McCartney performed the song at a benefit concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall, segueing it into "With a Little Help from My Friends", sung by Ringo Starr.

• 7. Versions, Releases, and a Notebook

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  The song and its reprise have accumulated their own release history separate from the original album. When the Beatles' recording contract with EMI expired in 1976, EMI used the newly available rights to issue "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" paired with "With a Little Help from My Friends" as a single A-side in 1978, with "A Day in the Life" on the B-side. In the US, the single was released on the 14th of August on Capitol Records and reached number 71 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK it appeared on Parlophone in September of that year, reaching number 63 on the Music Week chart. The reprise received a new life in 2006 when it appeared on the album Love, a remix project tied to a Cirque du Soleil theatrical production. That version incorporates samples of other Beatles songs and fades out before the cross-fade into "A Day in the Life". The original recording appears on the compilations 1967-1970, released in 1973, and Yellow Submarine Songtrack, released in 1999. A run-through of the reprise from the sessions was later released on the outtakes album Anthology 2 in 1996. The notebook in which McCartney wrote the lyrics to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and other songs was put up for sale in 1998.