![]() And that despite McCartney´s and George Martin´s ever PR for the album. ![]() The problem with McCartney´s compositions is that they cannot age, opposed to Lennon´s music that always is growing. It would have been much better as the title song. When the work with the album was almost finished, they recorded a Harrison composition It´s All Too Much, very good. Two songs are among the worst songs Beatles have ever made: The title track, and Lovely Rita. ![]() I think there are too many mediocre McCartney compositions, and too few exciting or daring Lennon compositions, even though Lennon´s compositions here are the best – most of A Day In The Life, Being For Mr. And the critics or the establishment became so enthusiastic! Or, they believed they must be enthusiastic? But the critic Richard Goldstein in New York Times was not impressed, it´s “ a soft and messy piece of work” and “there is nothing beautiful on Sgt. So it was a natural development that the establishment´s interest was very high, when the album Sgt Pepper was released 1 June 1967. But actually, they only understood the ballads in the albums. After Yesterday the establishment followed the Beatles albums with more and more interest. The establishment didn´t know that Lennon was the dominant composer 1963-1965, and judged McCartney to the “Composer in The Beatles”. They – not the youth - controled the media and got the prerogative. Now the establishment and the elder generation “discovered” The Beatles. But then came McCartney´s Yesterday 1965, a song without drums, and with strings. The establishment and the elder generation preferred pop music resembling Irwing Berlin´s songs in the 1930s. The Beatle music was too bluesy or expressive for the elder. The establishment and the elder generation didn´t discover The Beatles when they made their breakthrough in 1963.It was the youth. The reason why the album became so famous is this, as I see it. People would have to say, ‘What?’ We’d had quite a few pun titles – Rubber Soul, Revolver – so this was to get away from all that. I wanted a string of those things because I thought that would be a natty idea instead of a catchy title. ![]() The idea was just take any words that would flow. The idea was to be a little more funky, that’s what everybody was doing. That’d be crazy enough because why would a Lonely Hearts Club have a band? If it had been Sergeant Pepper’s British Legion Band, that’s more understandable. I just fantasised, well, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. All that culture of the sixties going back to those travelling medicine men, Gypsies, it echoed back to the previous century really. I just strung those together rather in the way that you might string together Dr Hook and the Medicine Show. There’s lot of those about, the equivalent of a dating agency now. Then, ‘Lonely Hearts Club’, that’s a good one. So I said, ‘Sergeant Pepper,’ just to vary it, ‘Sergeant Pepper, salt and pepper,’ an aural pun, not mishearing him but just playing with the words. Mal said, ‘What’s that mean? Oh, salt and pepper.’ We had a joke about that. Me and Mal often bantered words about which led to the rumour that he thought of the name Sergeant Pepper, but I think it would be much more likely that it was me saying, ‘Think of names.’ We were having our meal and they had those little packets marked ‘S’ and ‘P’. I thought we can run this philosophy through the whole album: with this alter-ego band, it won’t be us making all that sound, it won’t be the Beatles, it’ll be this other band, so we’ll be able to lose our identities in this. We could say, ‘How would somebody else sing this? He might approach it a bit more sarcastically, perhaps.’ So I had this idea of giving the Beatles alter egos simply to get a different approach then when John came up to the microphone or I did, it wouldn’t be John or Paul singing, it would be the members of this band. What would really be interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know. Then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. There was now more to it not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach.
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