YOU CAN'T DO THAT

We weren’t paid very much [£200] for Sgt Pepper, and when it took off I felt that the visual artist [Blake and his then-wife Jann Haworth co-designed the album cover] should have been rewarded like everyone was. But that’s all in the past. It’s gone. I saw Paul McCartney last night and we hugged; he’s a friend. Now when people say it’s the greatest cover of all time, I celebrate the fact.

[...]The album’s famous cover was devised by an amalgamation of talent. Art-directed by Robert Fraser, designed by Peter Blake and his then wife Jann Haworth, and photographed by Michael Cooper. The look of the album, the colourful collage of life-sized cardboard models depicting more than 70 famous people on the front of the album cover and lyrics printed on the back cover, was the first time this had been done on an English pop LP.

According to Blake, the original concept was to create a scene that showed the Sgt. Pepper band performing in a park. This gradually evolved into its final form, which as seen, shows the Beatles as the Sgt. Pepper band surrounded by a large group of their heroes rendered as lifesized cut-out figures.

Also included were wax-work figures of the Beatles as they appeared in the early '60s, borrowed from Madame Tussauds. In keeping with the park concept, the foreground of the scene is a floral display displaying the word "Beatles" spelt out in flowers. There are also several affectations from the Beatles' homes including small statues belonging to Lennon and Harrison, a small portable TV set and a trophy. A young delivery boy who provided the flowers for the photo session was allowed to contribute a guitar made of yellow hyacinths.

It has long been rumoured that some of the plants in the arrangement were cannabis plants. At the edge of the scene is a Shirley Temple doll wearing a sweater in homage to the Rolling Stones (who would return the tribute by having the Beatles hidden in the cover of their own Their Satanic Majesties Request LP later that year).

The highly collectable limited edition silkscreen print is still available and comes hand-signed and numbered by Peter Blake and features the embossed logo of the Beatles’ record label, Apple Records.

[...]
The researchers believe they found evidence of a culture-shaking moment in pop, though – it just happened 30 years later. The emergence of hip-hop, which crash-landed in the charts in 1991, reinvented the musical landscape like nothing before or since, the study claims.
[...]
Not everyone is convinced by the findings, however. Mike Brocken, a senior lecturer in music at Liverpool Hope University and director of the world’s first Beatles masters degree, said: “Popular music cannot be ‘measured’ in this way – what about reception, the political economy, subcultures? So my first instincts are to question any study that uses the dreaded data analysis.”

He added: “I don’t think that the kind of formalistic musical analysis that is suggested here helps at all. The Beatles ‘communicated’ things to people; whether it was via an A-minor chord or an A-major chord really does not make the slightest difference. Semiotic approaches yield far more than chord shapes and time signatures.”

Brocken accepts that in many ways the Beatles were not pioneers of the musical styles they played, but believes this fails to diminish the group’s standing in the pop canon. “Most decent popular music researchers would probably agree that the Beatles were not so much innovators as musical magpies – and that’s not a criticism. They, like all of us, listened to all sorts of stuff and were duly inspired,” he said.