The Beatles’ eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, had just been released in the UK. It was a roaring success and the fans were hooked; Beatlemania had ascended to cloud nine. It was considered by critics to be the Beatles’ greatest work yet, and one of the most influential albums in the history of popular music. The success of Sgt. Pepper was the result of the song writing partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Together, the pair had written the closing line of the orchestral crescendo in A Day in the Life – “I'd love to turn you on,” a powerful metaphor in an era of technological innovation and sexual awakening. The line caused a scandal in the British press, and led to the song being banned on UK radio. Paul McCartney remained the genius behind the album. At the Imperial Hotel in London, McCartney was attempting to explain to journalists how he had written Sgt. Pepper: “You feel it everywhere, in your arms, in your legs…to write an album like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, you have to feel ethereal. I’m not talking about drugs, about ecstasy or heroin. I’m talking about the world. I see peace. This album is our work of art,” the Beatles explained to the journalists.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded at a time when the band was attempting to distance itself from the pressure of ‘Beatlemania’. In August 1966 the four musicians played their last concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. During this final US tour, the gap had continued to widen between what the Beatles wanted to offer their audiences and what fans could actually hear amidst the screaming. The sound conditions were deafening, and the Beatles could not deliver on stage what they had produced in the studio. They decided to quit. “We’d just had enough,” Paul McCartney told journalists.
The group took a long break to recover. Georges Harrison travelled to India to learn the sitar and the local culture. John Lennon acted in the Richard Lester film How I Won the War, which was filmed in Germany. Aside from a brief escapade to visit Lennon in Spain, Ringo Starr stayed in London and spent most of his time with his wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney worked on the soundtrack to the film The Family Way, and holidayed incognito in France and Kenya with his fiancé Jane Asher and his friend Mal Evans. “On the plane on the way back, Evans asked me to pass him the salt and pepper, and I heard ‘Sergeant Pepper’. That misunderstanding made me laugh, and gave me the name of our next project.”
In the late autumn of 1966, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road studios. They were determined in their vision, and explained it to their producer in no uncertain terms. “It was very simple. We were tired of playing in front of an audience. But it gave us an opportunity for a new start,” explained Paul McCartney. “We couldn’t hear what we were playing on stage because of all the screaming,” he added. “So where did that leave us? We tried playing the songs from Revolver onstage but there were so may complicated overdubs that we couldn’t really do them justice. Now we could record anything we wanted and it didn’t matter. What we wanted was to set the bar higher and to make the best album we’d ever made,” he concluded.
Alan Alfredo Geday