Fact #150104

The Beatles started recording for their eighth album, although it was not yet called Sgt Pepper, in late November 1966. "By the time we came to make Sgt Pepper," McCartney has said, "we had a lot more artistic freedom, so we started to incorporate more of the crazy kind of life we were living at the time." They also started to monopolize the Abbey Road Studios, working long hours and writing much of the material in the studio.

Abbey Road staff engineer Peter Vince recalls that, "Although you knew that by being involved on a Beatles track you were making history, you actually sat around a lot of the time doing nothing, waiting for them to come up with ideas. But you had to be there because suddenly they'd get the idea and want to go straight for it. They were the innovators of working through the night and very long hours. Prior to them, everyone went home at 10pm."

Even Ringo found the long hours in Abbey Road wearisome. "It's a fine album," he quipped, "but I did learn to play chess on it, because I had so much spare time."

On 24 November 1966, Strawberry Fields Forever was the song that started off the sessions. Written by John in Almeria, Spain during the making of the film How I Won The War, the song evokes Lennon's childhood memories of Liverpool's Strawberry Fields Salvation Army Home where he played as a child.

"John was the least articulate of the three writers," remembers their producer George Martin, often described as the fifth Beatle. "I would have to dig deep into his brain to find out what he wanted me to do. In the case of Strawberry Fields, which he first played to me as a slow song on acoustic guitar, he wasn't really sure what he wanted. He had a mellotron to play with and he was a little unsure. The first time we recorded the song, it turned out much heavier than expected. So I wasn't surprised when he said he'd like me to do it again. That was the first time we ever remade a Beatles song. He said he wanted a score with cellos and trumpets. I was surprised at that, but it worked well."

Among the first outsiders to hear Strawberry Fields were The Who's Pete Townshend and Cream's Eric Clapton, at an informal gathering in Epstein's 24 Chapel Street apartment. "The conversation that night was very highly intellectual," remembers Townshend. "They played Strawberry Fields for the first time to us and I remember not quite knowing what to say, and Eric saying 'Could I hear that again, please?' really not quite knowing what had hit us."

A song McCartney had written back in the days when The Beatles played The Cavern, When I'm Sixty Four, was started on 6 December. Lyrically and musically, it was McCartney's tribute to his 64 year-old dad, Jim, who had played in dance bands during the war. "It was a pastiche," notes George Martin, "a kind of send-up of the old stuff. Paul always had that sneaking regard for the old rooty-tooty music."

Lennon later observed "I would never even dream of writing a song like that." and yet similar elements of pastiche and nostalgia soon cropped up in his song Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite.

Two days before the end of 1966, the basic track for Penny Lane was laid down by Paul in Studio Two. "Penny Lane was a bus roundabout, and there is a barber shop … and a bank on the corner. It's part fact, part nostalgia," says McCartney. "We put in a joke or two. 'Four of Fish and finger pie' - the women would never say that, except to themselves. 'Finger pie' is just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut."

As with When I'm Sixty Four, the song had been around for a while. McCartney had mentioned it in a tv special in November 1965 and, even earlier, Lennon had abandoned an attempt to include a reference to Penny Lane in his song In My Life.

Paul, having been inspired by a concert performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, was keen to include the sound of a high, baroque trumpet on Penny Lane. "We had no music prepared," remembers George Martin. "We just knew that we wanted little piping injections. As we came to each section where we wanted the sound, Paul would think up the notes he wanted, and I would write them down for David (Mason, the trumpeter)."

If The Beatles were congratulating themselves on having made a spectacularly good start on the new album, their elation was short lived. Under pressure from Capitol Recordsin America to release a single, Beatles manager Brian Epstein approached George Martin and it was agreed that Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever would be the next single.

Martin, however, remained optimistic. "When Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields were played to me, I knew we had a new wave coming through and I was urging the boys to give me more." On a more personal level, however, those two songs clearly mirrored the changing personalities and perceptions of John and Paul. Strawberry Fields was as dark, introvert and metaphysical as Penny Lane was bright, extrovert and worldly.

That crucial contrast was made even more evident in the course of just one song, A Day In The Life, which they began recording on 19 January. "I was reading the Daily Mail one day and noticed two stories," explained Lennon. "One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. On the next page was a story about 4,000 holes in the streets of Blackburn. Paul contributed the beautiful little lick 'I'd love to turn you on'."

As they worked on that little lick, McCartney looked at his partner. "We know what we're doing here, don't we?" he said. "We're actually saying for the first time ever words like 'turn you on'." The Timothy Leary inspired phrase was in wide currency in the underground culture but, as McCartney notes "No-one had said it on record yet. There was a little look of recognition between us, like, do it, do it. Get it down."

And that lick wasn't McCartney's only contribution. "I had another bit, 'Woke up, fell out of bed…' that wasn't doing anything so we thought that'd be good, we could put that in the middle. We got the concept of building in a little bit like a sort of mini-operetta." The difference between Lennon's profoundly world-weary opening and McCartney's jaunty middle section gave the song a unique split personality. Or, as Lennon summed it up "a damn good piece of work."

After working on other tracks, they returned to A Day In the Life on 10 February for a session which remains quite unique in recording history. Lennon was keen to have a huge orchestral crescendo in the song but, instead of simply having George Martin arrange it and hire an orchestra, it was decided to turn the session into a party.

In his book, Summer Of Love, George Martin has recalled how "People were running around with sparklers and blowing bubbles through little clay pipes. There was a funny rich smell in the air, which may of course just have been the joss-sticks that were burning all over the place." On another occasion however, Martin has acknowledged "I knew they were smoking. They tried to hide it from me. They'd go out into the canteen one at a time. Neil (Aspinall, roadie) and Mal (Evans, roadie) would have the joints already rolled out there."

Andrew Lloyd-Webber's lyric-writing partner Tim Rice was actually in the Abbey Road canteen that night when all four Beatles walked in for one such break. It's a measure of the band's stature that, as Rice recalls, "I was speechless. There I was in the canteen on my own with The Beatles. I tried to hide in the corner. I was so overwhelmed, while the girls behind the counter didn't seem the least bit concerned."

Tony Bramwell, who had directed most of The Beatles promotional clips, was also filming this occasion. "We had 8 or 10 Beaulieu and Arriflex cameras which we handed out to anyone who had the vaguest idea of how to operate them. So you had these daft Marianne Faithfull fans filming bubbles floating in the air, while some of the rest of us tried to film the musicians. The orchestra was dressed up for the occasion with masks and funny noses and I remember Paul conducting them wearing an apron and a big kipper tie over a pink floral shirt. Mike Nesmith of The Monkees turned up and he just sat at the edge of the studio for the whole evening, watching, in total awe of The Beatles."

Judith Simons, pop correspondent of The Daily Express arrived in the studio just as the party was ending. "I'd been out at dinner, and when I checked in with the newsroom they said I should get along to Abbey Road. All the recording was over but the mood was very merry. People were throwing streamers around, and Marianne Faithfull had a can of crazy foam that she was spraying all over everyone."

The climactic moment of A Day In The Life was added on 22 February when, watched by David Crosby of The Byrds, John, Paul, Ringo and roadie Mal Evans recorded a huge E minor chord on three pianos, whose reverberations continued for 53 seconds. After the session, Crosby was driven to McCartney's home. "Scared us to pieces because he was driving drunk," said Crosby later, "but he was very kind to us."

As George Martin remembers, however, there was still one final touch needed to complete the song. "After the strings at the end of 'A Day In The Life' we added a special dog whistle, an 18 kilocycle note that you won't be able to hear. We thought it would be nice to include something especially for dogs."

Beginning on 30 January, recording of the album was delayed for a few days to allow filming of promotional films for the imminent double A sided single, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields. The first location, for Strawberry Fields, was Knole Park in Kent and it was during a break in filming here that Lennon wandered into a Sevenoaks junk shop. While there, he purchased a Victorian circus poster detailing a benefit performance by Pablo Fanques' Circus Royal at Rochdale's Town Meadows on 14 February 1843. According to the poster, the show was 'for the benefit of Mr Kite.'

One eleven year old fan, Chris Lyne, travelled three miles from his home with his friend Mole, after hearing rumours that The Beatles were in Knole Park. He remembers the scene vividly. "Bright lights shone in the trees, a small crowd huddled in the cold, all eyes on a car parked at a slight distance. After a while, a door swung open and out leaped an Old English Sheepdog, followed by an outrageously attired fellow who looked a bit like Paul McCartney." Making friends with the dog, Martha, led Chris and Mole into direct contact with Paul, who organised the other three into giving autographs. "Within minutes, the unreleased Strawberry Fields Forever was blaring into the night, and there under the winter sky stood the four strangely garbed figures from the planet Fab, a scene to appear a fortnight or so later on Top Of The Pops."

Back in Abbey Road on 1 February, work started on the song that was to become the album's title, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. "It was an idea I had when I was flying from LA to somewhere," says McCartney. I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group."

As George Martin remembers it, "Paul came in with this song, Sgt Pepper, and he was kind of identifying it with The Beatles themselves. We recorded the song, and then the idea came to make it into the concept for the whole album."

That idea came, apparently, not from any of The Beatles but from roadie Neil Aspinall who suggested, "Why don't we have Sgt Pepper as the compere? He comes on at the beginning of the show and introduces the band." Aspinall's suggestion perfectly fitted McCartney's vision, because the roadie was attributing to Pepper the role that McCartney usually played in The Beatles. "At the end of every show," points out Aspinall, "Paul always used to say 'Well, it's time to go. We gotta go to bed, and this is our last number." So Aspinall went on to suggest that Pepper should return at the end of the album to do exactly that.

Out of that germ of an idea grew not only the entire Pepper concept, but an ambitious plan to take the album on the road as a kind of rock opera, featuring other bands and stage sets. As McCartney envisioned it, the show would be a way around the band's disenchantment with live gigs.

"Right at the start of Sgt Pepper," points out George Martin, "you hear the sound of a crowd in an auditorium. That had nothing to do with The Beatles. I'd taped those sounds in Cambridge when I recorded the satirical show Beyond the Fringe, and I just mixed it in with The Beatles playing to make it sound like a live show."

John's next significant contribution to the album came on 8 February when he started recording rhythm tracks for Good Morning, Good Morning, a song he later almost disowned as "a throwaway, a piece of garbage." The title had come to him at home in Weybridge, while watching a Kellogg's Corn Flakes ad which used Good Morning as its slogan.

Because Cilla Black was already booked into Abbey Road on 9 February, the Pepper sessions moved briefly to Regent Sound in Tottenham Court Road, described by George Martin as "a pretty awful little studio, very cramped and boxy". Work began on McCartney's song Fixing a Hole, a title frequently mis-interpreted as referring to heroin use. McCartney has acknowledged that in the Pepper era, he had sampled marijuana, LSD and cocaine but heroin was not a drug he experimented with, and the song had come to him, somewhat less controversially, after fixing a hole in the roof of his Scottish farmhouse.

Despite stringent security, there were occasions when complete outsiders managed to infiltrate the Pepper sessions. On the night they recorded Fixing A Hole, says McCartney, "A guy turned up at my house who announced himself as Jesus. So I took him to the session. You know, couldn't harm, I thought. Introduced Jesus to the guys. Quite reasonable about it, but that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus."

John's song, For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, with lyrics lifted almost word for word from the poster he had bought in Sevenoaks, was begun on 17 February. Lennon and George Martin worked together to create the fairground ambience Lennon desired for the song, but it was a laborious process. Engineer Geoff Emerick remembers how the track was completed, over a month later. "We had one track left to do the overdubbed fairground noises. George Martin was playing harmonium, someone was playing glockenspiel, another piano, someone was spinning tape fast then slowing it down, all in one fell swoop, live. George ended up spreadeagled on the floor, he'd been pumping the harmonium for ages,"

Work started on Lovely Rita, the song inspired by Paul's encounter with a female parking meter attendant, on 23 February. The fastest-rising psychedelic band in the land, Pink Floyd were in Abbey Road at the same time, recording their debut album. McCartney had kept an eye on their progress and, on hearing that they were next door, he suggested dropping in to say hello, along with Ringo and George. The Floyd's co-manager Andrew King remembers the visit. "The Beatles came through to have a look at us. McCartney, dressed in a loud, yellow-checked overcoat, was very friendly and encouraging but we also went through and saw them mixing Lovely Rita. We didn't stay long though, because the atmosphere was … well, it was a very bad vibe in there."

Pink Floyd's other co-manager, Peter Jenner has noted, "I'm sure The Beatles were copying what we were doing, just as we were copying what we were hearing down the corridor."

Another controversial Lennon track, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds was completed in just two days, 2 and 3 March. As with Fixing A Hole, any drug references were purely fortuitous. "The thought that Lucy In the Sky deliberately stood for LSD is rubbish," insists George Martin. "John Lennon wasn't like that at all, and people credit him with too much subtlety. He liked to shock people and, if he'd really wanted to write about drugs, he would have done so, straight out."

"I swear to God," said John himself, "I had no idea. My son Julian came in one day with a picture he'd painted about a school friend named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars and called it Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."

Julian did indeed have a great school friend called Lucy O'Donnell, and Cynthia Lennon has a clear memory of Julian showing John his picture of Lucy flying in the sky, surrounded by stars.

The diversity of sources for Beatle lyrics is underlined by anarchic humourist Spike Milligan of radio favourites The Goons, who attended some of the Pepper sessions. "John told me that some of his lyrics had been inspired by Goon Show dialogue. We used to talk about 'plasticine ties' and it crept into Lucy as the 'Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties'."

By March 9 the band had moved onto another McCartney composition, It's Getting Better, whose germination went all the way back to The Beatles Australian tour in 1964. Because Ringo had been ill, his place was taken on that tour by drummer Jimmy Nicol. At the end of every show, McCartney would ask Nicol how things were going, to which Nicol would laconically respond "It's getting better all the time."

Billy Kinsley of The Merseybeats watched them record It's Getting Better. "Paul was playing electric piano, John and George guitars and Ringo drums. Because they were all wearing headphones, we couldn't actually hear what Paul was singing. They did several takes, and consequently we knew every note of the song but none of the lyrics apart from the bit about 'I used to be cruel to my woman.' Before the album came out, we were singing that bit to everyone."

During the recording of It's Getting Better, Lennon accidentally took some LSD and had to be helped out into the open air of the Abbey Road rooftop by George Martin to calm down. "I thought I was taking some uppers," Lennon later explained, "I suddenly got scared on the mike. I thought I felt ill, and I thought I was going to crack. I said I must get some air. George Martin was looking at me funny and then it dawned on me I must have taken acid. I said, 'Well, I can't go on. You'll have to do it and I'll just stay and watch.' They had all been very kind and they carried on making the record."

According to McCartney, Harrison rarely showed up at Abbey Road during the recording of Sgt Pepper, but he was certainly there on 15 March for recording of his only song on the album, Within You Without You. Harrison says the song had come together because Klaus Voorman, the artist/musician who drew the Revolver cover, "had a harmonium in his house which I hadn't played before. I was doodling on it, playing to amuse myself, when Within You started to come. The tune came first, then I got the first sentence. It came out of what we had been doing that night."

Peter Blake, the celebrated fine artist who was commissioned to do a cover for Sgt Pepper, was in the studio that March evening and recalls "There was a carpet laid out, there was an Indian musician, and the whole atmosphere was different to other times." In fact, there were several Indian musicians, which created problems for George Martin who had to make his Western-trained string players forget their conditioning, and learn to bend strings and slur from one note to the next.

A moment of rare conflict erupted on 17 March. The song in question was She's Leaving Home, a McCartney tune inspired by a newspaper item from the Daily Mirror about a teenage girl running away from a middle-class environment. Keen to get the song recorded, McCartney rang George Martin and asked if he could come to his house at Cavendish Avenue, a short walk from Abbey Road, and work on an arrangement. Martin was, however, in the middle of a session with Cilla Black and had no choice but to ask Paul if he could wait one more day.

McCartney evidently couldn't because, without further reference to Martin, he contacted Decca staff producer Mike Leander who, for a fee of £18, arranged the track for harp and strings. "The next day Paul presented me with it," remembers Martin, "and said 'I've got a score. We can record it now.' I was hurt, he could have waited." Martin has referred to this unfortunate incident as "one of the biggest hurts of my life." but it's hard to deny the beauty of Leander's work.

Every Beatles album, traditionally, featured a track sung by Ringo but, as Pepper neared completion, there was no sign of one. On 29 and 30 March this was rectified with A Little Help From My Friends, which John and Paul had knocked together in Cavendish Avenue, "Paul had the title line, and some kind of structure for it," remembered John, "but we wrote it pretty well 50/50. That line 'What do you see when you turn out the light, I can't tell you but I know it's mine' - that's mine."

It was, however, on this track that the grandiose plans for a Sgt Pepper stage show collapsed. "We got as far as Sgt Pepper and Billy Shears in With A Little Help From My Friends," recalls Ringo, "then everyone said 'Ah, sod it, it's just two tracks." Nevertheless, by running a number of tracks together and reducing the gap between others to a minimum, George Martin and the band still managed to make the album sound like a coherent whole.

Completing the illusion on 1 April was the last track to be recorded, the brief Sgt Pepper Reprise, which had been suggested by Neil Aspinall. Intriguingly, though, the album finishes with a tantalisingly incomprehensible backwards tape-snippet of conversation, recorded onto the run-out groove so that it repeats endlessly. "Some fans came round my door," says McCartney, "and asked if the backwards bit said 'We'll fuck you like Superman'. When they'd gone, I played it backwards and there it was, plain as anything. I thought, Jesus, what can you do?"

Depending on whose figures you choose to accept, recording Sgt Pepper had cost between £25,000 and £100,000, a staggering amount in those days. It was only fitting then, that the most extravagant album in rock history should be clad in the most extravagant cover.

On 30 March The Beatles came together in artist Peter Blake's Chelsea studio to have their picture taken for the cover. Work on the cover, an ambitious life-sized collage of the Beatle's heroes, had been proceeding for some time before their presence in the studio was required. Brian Epstein's personal assistant, Wendy Hanson, had spent an entire week doing nothing but obtaining clearances from celebrities who were to be included. "I spent many hours and pounds on calls to the States. Fred Astaire was very sweet; Shirley Temple wanted to hear the record first; I got on famously with Marlon Brando, but Mae West wanted to know what she would be doing in a Lonely Hearts Club."

A few days before the album was officially released, a select group of West London residents enjoyed a sneak preview. "It was six in the morning and we went down the King's Road to see Cass Elliott of The Mamas And The Papas," explains Neil Aspinall. "We had the album with us, finished at last. She had a great sound system. Her flat was in a block of houses, back to back, and we put the system on a window ledge and the music blasted throughout the neighbourhood. 'We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club…'. It sounded great. All the windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up."

Although under doctor's orders to remain for a complete rest at The Priory private hospital, Brian Epstein slipped out to host the Sgt Pepper launch party on 19 May at his Chapel Street apartment. Melody Maker journalist Ray Coleman was invited and recalls "There was a typical Epstein array of gourmet foods and fine wines. The glazed poached salmon, the caviar, the vintage champagne." In the course of the evening Coleman chatted to Paul about A Day In the Life. "Paul said there was a problem with the BBC about the words. It was about one line. Paul said 'Went upstairs and had a smoke'." As a result of that line, of course, the song was indeed banned by the BBC. (censorship)

Coleman also spoke with George Harrison at the party. "I have this vivid memory of George telling me he felt they'd broken through a real barrier with the album. He said 'We've really jumped up onto a new layer with this one.'"

Released on 1 June, Pepper was at No1 two days later, a slot it held for 22 weeks, as well as turning up in the singles chart at No21. "The biggest single tribute for me," says McCartney, "was that it was released on the Thursday and, on the Sunday, we went to the Savile Theatre and Jimi Hendrix opened with Sgt Pepper and he'd only had since Thursday to learn it."