The South Bank Show (1978–…): Season 15, Episode 25 - The Making of Sgt. Pepper - full transcript

(♪ Reverberating chord)

It's 25 years now since it was issued,

and there aren't many records
which really last in the memory

for a quarter of a century.

I suppose it is a museum piece.

♪ It was twenty years ago today

♪ Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play... ♪

(George Martin)
It invoked the spirit of the age,

of the Carnaby Street and Mary Quant.

It was a joyous spurting-out of life.

♪ The act you've known
for all these years



♪ Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band J

♪ I get by with a little help
from my friends... ♪

It was colourful, and it was peace,
and it was love, and it was music.

♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds... ♪

The songwriting team thing will keep
going on whatever happens, will it?

Yeah, we'll probably carry on
writing music forever, you know?

♪ It's getting better all the time... ♪

That's probably the big difference,

is that people played it a bit safe
in popular music,

but I think that's what we suddenly
realised, that you didn't have to.

♪ I'm fixing a hole
where the rain gets in J

-♪ She...
- ♪ We gave her most of our lives

♪ Is leaving... ♪

♪ For the benefit of Mr Kite



♪ There will be a show tonight
on trampoline J

♪ We were talking

♪ About the... ♪

I remember track by track,
it was exciting at that time,

nothing like it had ever been.

♪ Will you still need me,
will you still feed me

♪ When I'm sixty-four J

♪ Lovely Rita meter maid

♪ Nothing can come between us

♪ When it gets dark,
I tow your heart away J

♪ Good morning, good morning,
good morning J

♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club... ♪

♪ Found my way downstairs
and drank a cup

♪ And looking up I noticed I was late

♪ Found my coat and grabbed my hat

♪ Made the bus in seconds flat J

(George Martin) In 1966,

the Beatles had been working
most successfully for three years.

They'd conquered the world in a way
nobody else had done before.

♪ Ah, ah-ah-ah

♪ Ah-ah-ah... ♪

And yet, things started to fall apart.

All sorts of troubles beset them.

John Lennon had made
his famous remark

about being more popular
than Jesus Christ,

which, although arguably true,
caused a great deal of upset in America.

They were performing incessantly.

They had heavy guards
wherever they went.

And when they went to the Philippines,
they barely escaped with their lives

after they'd offended President Marcos

by not turning up
at one of his receptions.

And Imelda Marcos was outraged
at the way the Beatles had ignored her.

So, they decided they didn't want
to tour again. They were fed up.

They really wanted to lead
something of a normal life.

I remember we all used to run in the back
of these big vans they'd hired.

And this one was like
a silver-lined van, chromium,

nothing in it, like a furniture van
with nothing in it, just chrome.

And we were all piled into this
after this really miserable gig.

And I said, "Right, that's it!"

No, we were absolutely fed up
with touring.

And why were we fed up with touring?

Because we were turning
into such bad musicians.

Because the volume of the audience

was always greater
than the volume of the band.

And for me personally,

on stage there was no chance in hell
I could do a fill,

because it would just disappear.

So I ended up just hanging on
to the off-beats

and watching the other guys' bums

and trying to lip-read
to see where we were, you know?

It sounds marvellous,
being a multi-millionaire pop star,

having the whole world at your feet,
girls screaming wherever you go.

In actual fact, it's hell.

And that was happening
wherever we went, even in India.

You know, we went to India
from the Philippines.

I planned to go there
to buy a sitar, actually.

I was thinking, "At least
this is going to be one place

"where we can have a bit of peace."

And when we got off the plane, there
was all these Indian faces in the night,

all shouting, "Beatles! Beatles!"

Paul went to Kenya,

went on a safari trip
as I remember,

and John had already been
booked by Richard Lester

for a part in "How I Won The War".

So he went off to Spain to film.

And Ringo joined him there for a while,
just to hang around with him.

George went to India
and worked with Ravi Shankar.

There was no question
of disbanding at that point.

It was just,
"We gotta get off this road."

(Paul) And at that time, a lot of other things
were changing. Society was changing.

The psychedelic era was coming in,
and we were very much part of that.

And I think we really felt that

it could be done better from a record
than from anything else.

The record could go on tour,
was the theory.

I think Paul made the phone call.

Paul always made the phone call.
"Let's go back to the studio, lads."

It used to terrify John and |
cos we'd be in the garden,

and Paul would want us to work
all the time, cos he's the workaholic.

(George Martin)
On 24th November 1966, a Thursday,

the Beatles came into Abbey Road
Studios to start the new album.

And the track they started with
didn't appear on the album.

It was a song called "Strawberry Fields”,

and the way it was done that night,
that Thursday,

was virtually complete,
we actually made virtually a master.

And it was the way I heard it originally
when John sang it to me,

and it was a sweet, gentle,
simple song,

starting with the verse, you'll notice,

- not the chorus.
- ♪ Misunderstanding all you see

♪ It's getting hard to be someone,
but it all works out... ♪

We were still in our primitive state
in technology in those days, 1966.

We were just recording on 4-track.

- ♪ No one I think is in my tree
- Bass and guitar, add to it.

- ♪ I mean, it must be high or low
- Still nothing else.

Dead simple.

♪ That is you can't you know tune in,
but it's all right... ♪

Now we have a slide guitar
played by George added.

- Curiously enough, on the vocal track.
- ♪ Let me take you down

- Listen.
- ♪ Cos I'm going to

- ♪ Strawberry Fields
- Just on the vocal track.

♪ Nothing is real

♪ And nothing to get hung about

♪ Strawberry Fields forever

♪ Strawberry Fields forever... ♪

I think that version is very charming.

♪ Strawberry Fields forever J

A very simple version
of a very simple song.

But in fact, it never appeared like that,
and no one's ever heard that one since.

We left that evening,

and John thought about it, and
Paul thought about it over the weekend,

and on Monday we tackled it
again quite differently.

John decided he wanted it
in a lower key.

It had an introduction
for the first time

which was played on that
weird instrument, the mellotron,

and became a really key feature.

And it started with the chorus
rather than the verse.

(♪ Intro to "Strawberry Fields Forever”
on mellotron)

"Strawberry Fields" immediately, isn't it?

♪ Let me take you down

- Double-tracked voice right away.
- ♪ Cos I'm going to

♪ Strawberry Fields... ♪

Again, all rhythm instruments
on one track.

Voices on three and four.

♪ And nothing to get hung about... ♪

But John thought about it and said,
"I think I can do it better than that."”

He said, "I want to have
a bit more bite in it. Brass. Strings."

So, I said,
"OK, let's give it a whirl."

♪ Let me take you down cos I'm going to

♪ Strawberry Fields... ♪

Double-tracked voices on three and four,
but with percussion as well on three.

♪ Strawberry Fields forever... ♪

Swarmandala.

An Indian instrument
that George had brought back.

Like a kind of harp.
Had a marvellous effect.

♪ That is you can't you know tune in,
but it's all right

- Backward cymbal on track one.
- ♪ That is I think it's not too bad... ♪

(Imitates backward cymbal)

Always sounds like
Russian language to me.

♪ Strawberry Fields

♪ Nothing is real... ♪

Brass stabs and so on with a cello.

But underlying it all,
this wonderful rhythm section.

(5 Drums play)

About nine or ten players there.

♪ Strawberry Fields forever

♪ Strawberry Fields forever

♪ Strawberry Fields forever J

Well, we finished up then with a track

which would show the way
that "Pepper" was going to be.

This was our first psychedelic track.

I mean, when I started songwriting,
it wasn't to write rock 'n' roll,

it was to write for Sinatra.

It was to write cabaret.

In fact, one of my first songs was
"When I'm Sixty-Four”, which was...

♪ Da-da-doo-da-da,
ba-dee-oo-eh, hey! Ooh bop! ♪

You know, it's big band stuff
kind of thing.

And so your aims weren't set
to doing rock 'n' roll.

But when we started working together,

I think... I certainly,
and I think John, too,

wanted to be a Rodgers and
Hammerstein, a Lennon/McCartney.

We consciously wanted to be a team.

I mean, the funny things is,
I wanted McCartney/Lennon,

but of course John was
always bossier and he said,

"No, no, it sounds much better
the other way, Lennon/McCartney."

So I gave in.

The next song we did, actually,
was "When I'm Sixty-Four”,

but that was one that harked back
quite a long way.

The one immediately after that was
curiously allied to "Strawberry Fields".

It was "Penny Lane".

Penny Lane was a place
that John knew about,

so for me to just say,
"I've got a song called 'Penny Lane",

he knew exactly what I was doing.

Similarly, "Strawberry Fields".

I knew about that from when I used
to go and visit him when we were kids.

It was the place right opposite him,

where you used to go and play
in the garden.

So it was kind of a magical
childhood place for him.

And we transformed it
into the sort of psychedelic dream.

It's like everybody's magic place,
instead of just ours.

We took them from being little localised
things and made them more global.

(♪ Johann Sebastian Bach:
"Brandenburg Concerto No.2 In F Major")

That actually was what
Paul heard me play on television.

It's the second "Brandenburg Concerto”,
as you know.

And he was obviously sitting at home
and saw this little trumpet,

and thought, "Well, that's a new
gimmick and a new sound,”

and he'd just written "Penny Lane"
and had had a rather bad backing track,

so apparently that was
how I came to do it.

And eventually, of course,
we got to what he liked,

and this is what he wrote.

(♪ Plays solo from "Penny Lane")

(♪ THE BEATLES:
"Penny Lane")

♪ Penny Lane is in my ears... ♪

(George Martin) The reason that
"Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane"

didn't appear on the album

was that Brian Epstein,
their manager, was worried,

and said to me, "The boys need a lift.
They need a great single.

"What have you got?"

Well, I said,
"We've got two wonderful songs.

"Let's issue them both."

In those days, we didn't include
single releases on albums,

as we thought that was
rather conning the public.

One of the biggest errors I ever made.

(♪ ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK:
"Release Me")

♪ Please release me

♪ Can't you see... ♪

A newcomer with the unlikely name
of Engelbert Humperdinck

had a song called "Please Release Me",

and for the first time, a Beatles single
failed to reach No.1 in the UK charts.

♪ To live a lie would be a sin J

(George Harrison) We were in this
big white room that was very dirty.

It hadn't been painted
for years and years,

and it had all these old sound baffles
hanging down

that were all dirty and broken.

Not a very nice atmosphere.

When you think of the songs
that were made in that studio, No.2,

it's amazing, cos there was
no atmosphere in there.

We had to make the atmosphere
ourselves.

The great thing about these studios
in Abbey Road

was that you were always
bumping into people.

Sir Malcolm Sargent would look in
at the session and wave

in his pin-striped suit and his carnation:
"Hello, boys."

And George would say,
"Sir Malcolm would like to say hello."

"Hello, Mal." "Hello, boys."

I remember seeing Sir Tyrone Guthrie
on the steps here,

you know, the great man himself.

So, it was always very like that.

It was a joke, really.
They had this toilet paper like lino

that had EMI on every piece.

The refrigerator had a padlock on it,

so if you wanted a cup of tea,

we'd have to break open the padlock
on the fridge to get the milk out.

EMI being this huge monster company,

when they bought the 8-track,
the first 8-track in England,

they were so cheap,
they didn't buy the plug to plug it in.

It was going to be boring
to just make another Beatles album.

And we'd stopped touring, we now had
this huge, liberated opportunity.

We could do anything we wanted.

I went on a trip to America
and came back

and had this idea on the plane.

"Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band".

It was all very
"Uncle Joe's Medicine Show

"with dancing bears
and elixir of life",

you know,
those kind of jokey titles.

Everything about the album
will be imagined

from the perspective of these people.

So it doesn't have to be us,

it doesn't have to be the kind of song
you want to write,

it could be the song
they might want to write.

(George Martin) "Sgt. Pepper”,
the opening track of the album,

really a good, old-fashioned rocker,

starts off with applause
or rather atmosphere noise

from a recording I made up in Cambridge
with the Beyond The Fringe crowd,

Dudley Moore and company,

and this super electric guitar.

And tied together beautifully
by a great rock voice from Paul.

- ♪ It was 20 years ago today
- Listen to this.

♪ Sgt. Pepper
taught the band to play

♪ They've been going
in and out of style

♪ But they're guaranteed
to raise a smile

- He got sawdust in his voice there.
- ♪ So may I introduce to you

♪ The act you've known
for all these years... ♪

And then a bit of classical work,
bringing in four French horns.

(♪ French horns play)

Always there's the audience
punctuating the whole thing.

♪ We're Sgt. Pepper's Lonely... ♪

And then the chorus,
singing the chorus.

♪ We hope you will enjoy the show

♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

♪ Sit back and let the evening go... ♪

And together with the audience
and the horns,

it's an exciting thing saying,
"Come and join our show, listen to it.

- "We're a great band."
- ♪ ...Lonely Hearts Club Band J

(♪ THE BEATLES:
"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds")

♪ Picture yourself
IN a boat on a river

♪ With tangerine trees
and marmalade skies

♪ Somebody calls you,
you answer quite slowly... ♪

(Ringo) I remember him
going up on the roof.

John went up on the roof
and got lost and came back.

♪ Cellophane flowers... ♪

He took an aspirin. Know what I mean?
And it turned out to be something else.

♪ Towering over your head... ♪

(George Harrison)
He accidentally took some LSD.

It'd certainly keep him awake
for a while.

♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds... ♪

At that point, the session
was in effect over.

I was rather offended
when the album came out

and people said, "Lucy In The Sky
With Diamonds - LSD, you know?"

Which was nonsense.

(Paul) The real story about
"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was

I showed up at John's house one day,

and he said to me, "Look at this
great drawing Julian's just done."

And he showed me,
I remember it very well.

It was a kid's drawing, and kids
always have people floating around

like Chagall does in all his things.
They're always just floating.

I think it's something to do
with kids not realising

that people have to be put on the ground.

I've seen the painting
that this little kid does.

I don't know if you've got kids,

but they just slap paint everywhere
and say it's a painting.

And of course we put them in frames
and put them on the wall. And...

And it was just this crazy little kid's
painting. "What is that?"

John had said,
"What's it called, then?"

And Julian had said,
"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."

And John went, "Ding!"

(George Martin) They were able to
conjure up a wonderful, evocative image

with very sparse material.

And the opening to "Lucy"
is really a case in point.

(♪ Plays intro to
"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds")

And it's a most wonderful phrase.

I think, if Beethoven was around,
he wouldn't have minded one of those.

And over that very, very simple
and beautiful phrase,

John sang just one note.

He developed it. He had a way
of finding out what he wanted to sing,

even as we were recording.

But to begin with, all he sang was,

"Picture yourself on a boat on a river..."

♪ Newspaper taxis
appear on the shore... ♪

Notice the tape echo
on the voice already,

even though this is
a very early rehearsal take.

♪ Climb in the back
with your head in the clouds... ♪

- No bass again.
- No.

Because it was much better for me
to work out the bass later, you know?

And it allowed me to do...

That's me.

The good thing about doing it later was
it allowed me to get melodic bass lines.

(♪ Imitates bass line)

Which was always... All the bass lines
were always very interesting.

On this album,
I think that was one of the reasons.

♪ With plasticine porters
with looking glass ties

♪ Suddenly someone
is there at the turnstile

♪ The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes...

Go for it!

- (♪ Drum beats)
- Hey!

The climate was influenced
by the psychedelic era.

I think the only difficulty about
talking honestly about that period

is that now the drug scene
is a much heavier thing,

and if you're now in any way seen
to incite or advocate drug-taking,

you're now talking about crack,
you're now talking about glue sniffing,

you're now talking about
life-threatening things.

So, I don't actually like doing it,
because it can easily be misconceived.

If you could get back to the period

and everyone could understand how
the period was and how innocent it was,

then it is easier to talk about it.

It mightn't have affected creativity
for other people.

I know it did for us,
and it did for me.

I mean, the first thing that people who
smoked marijuana and were into music

is that somehow it focuses
your attention better on the music.

And so you can hear it clearer.

Or that's how it appeared to be.

You could see things much different,

I mean, LSD was something else.
It wasn't just...

I mean, marijuana was just like
having a couple of beers, really,

but LSD was more like
going to the moon.

We found out very early on that,

you know, if you played stoned
or derelict in any way,

it was really shitty music,
you know?

So we would have the experiences
and then bring that into the music later.

Famous old story of one of the cleaners
at the Hammersmith Odeon saying,

"That Ray Charles must be a mean git,
you know?

"I just saw two of his musicians
in the toilets sharing a cigarette.

"He can't pay them anything!"

I knew that the boys smoked pot,

and they equally knew that I disapproved,
and they never did it in front of me.

They would always have Mal
roll them a joint

and they'd nip out to the canteen
and lock it

or else to the loo and have a smoke
and come back again,

beaming all over their faces.

(Paul) We mainly wrote
in the afternoons.

I'd either go to John's house
or he'd come to mine.

So I'd drive out to Weybridge.

Now, you don't want
to be stoned doing that.

So we'd go out, and we'd have
an afternoon of it,

and it would be later, listening,
in the evening

that the little wine might come out
and this and that might come out.

But I say, you know...
it's very difficult for me

because I realise now
being a father of four kids

that if I make this sound
as exciting as it was,

the natural corollary is
for someone to say,

"Well, why don't we write like that?"

And I don't want to be seen to do that,

cos now, as I say, it's a much more
dangerous ballgame.

There was a kind of spirit of adventure
that they both had.

They were going to conquer the world.

But there was that element
of competition,

and the competition was the essential
thing that made them work so well.

He'd write "Strawberry Fields",
I'd go away and write "Penny Lane".

If I'd write "I'm Down", he'd go away
and write something similar to that,

to compete with each other.

But it was very friendly competition,

because we were both going to share
in the rewards anyway.

But it was a real... it was this.
It really helped step...

So we were getting better and better
and better all the time.

(George Martin) John and Paul always
wrote a song for Ringo on every album.

"With A Little Help From My Friends"
proved to be the song.

And Paul wrote that song
and wrote it beautifully simply

with just five notes
that Ringo had to carry,

all within one little phrase,
which was...

(♪ Plays "With A Little Help
From My Friends")

All in those notes.

Terribly simple. Terribly effective.

♪ What would you think
if I sang out of tune... ♪

Like his drumming,
Ringo's voice is most distinctive.

And on this track,
he put in a really super performance

that makes the song his very own.

♪ And I'll try not to sing out of key

♪ Oh, I get by
with a little help from my friends

♪ Mmh, I get high
with a little help from my friends... ♪

The original line was,

"What would you do
if I sang out of tune,

"would you stand up
and throw tomatoes at me?"

Or "Would you throw tomatoes at me?”,

and I would not sing that line,
"tomatoes at me", because...

I hated the line anyway,

and in those days they used to throw
all sorts of stuff at us on stage,

and I didn't want this
to become a habit either.

And I just hated the line, so I refused
to sing that line, "tomatoes",

so they changed it to, "Would you
stand up and walk out on me?"

♪ Do you need anybody

♪ I need somebody to love... ♪

Besides changing that line,

it took a lot of coaxing from Paul
to get me to sing that last note.

I just felt it was very high.

I always worry about the vocals,
you know?

I'm insecure when I do the vocals.
I still am, and I was then.

And so he would get me up,
and we finally got that last note.

♪ ...from my friends J

(George Martin) The role of a producer
had changed over the years.

I mean, when we started in 1962,

my job was really an organiser
to get them into some kind of shape,

make sure they were tidy in the studio,
musically, I mean.

Gradually that changed.

By the time "Pepper” had come along,

I suppose I was a realiser
of their ideas,

so that if John wanted
something really weird,

I had to try and provide it for him.

Or if Paul wanted some
extraordinary orchestration,

I had to try and find out
what he wanted.

What I think his great skill then was
to allow us to do what we wanted.

So his role changed
from really deciding what was done

to allowing us to do it.

I think the role with George
became easier,

because at first he was to us...
we were kind of frightened,

because we were these nervous kids,

and he was like this big
schoolteacher sort of person

who we had to find
and have a relationship with.

George was like the big cheese.

He would come in as the producer,

and we were all a little...
not afraid, but...

We knew he was the man.

And he was very good,
and he was very humorous, so...

That's how George really got
into our good books,

because we were very tight,

the little four of us were
really tight together.

Very seldom did we let anybody in.

We always felt George
had just got off his Spitfire:

"Oh, hello, chaps.
Yes, it's chocks away."

We always felt
he was a bit one of them.

And I think we just grew
through those years together,

him as the straight man
and us as the loonies.

He was always there for us
to interpret our strangeness.

Da, da...

(Ravi Shankar)
When George Harrison came to me,

I didn't know what to think.

But I found he really wanted to learn.

I never thought our meeting
would cause such an explosion.

(George Harrison)
I'd heard the name of Ravi Shankar,

it must have been around 1965,
maybe 1966.

The third time I heard this name,
I went out and bought the record.

It was strange, because intellectually
I didn't know what it was.

It didn't make any sense to me,

but somewhere inside of me,
it made absolute sense.

It made more sense
than anything I'd ever heard before.

♪ We were talking

♪ About the love that's gone so cold... ♪

I found it very fascinating, actually,
working with George on that.

Him trying to get
from English musicians

what the Indians
were already giving us.

It started out by George working
with a dilruba player,

which is a kind of Indian violin.

And then I had to copy that
with a bank of English violinists.

Here we have the dilrubas on two,

and our English instruments joining in
on track three,

but George answering on sitar.

Here it is.

(♪ Sitar plays)

And pizzicato strings
accompanying him.

(♪ Pizzicato strings, cello)

A bit of slurpy cello.

Doing the same thing as the dilruba.

(' Dilruba plays)

♪ We were talking... ♪

And here he is singing the same tune
as the dilruba

in exactly the same way,
the same kind of swoops

that the dilruba does.

You hear his voice.

You hear the dilruba.

♪ And lose their soul... ♪

(George Harrison) "Within You,
Without You" was just my way

of trying to make a Western pop song

using some of those instruments
and some of those sounds.

We all knew George liked Indian music,

and there was a kind of toleration,
if you like.

But it was a welcome one,
because we actually liked the sounds.

The joss sticks even were OK.

They covered the smell of pot.

(♪ THE BEACH BOYS:
"Wouldn't It Be Nice")

♪ Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

♪ Then we wouldn't have to
wait so long... ♪

(Paul) To me, the single biggest influence
on "Sgt. Pepper”

was the Beach Boys' record
"Pet Sounds".

And I think Brian Wilson
was a great genius.

♪ You know it's gonna make it
that much better

♪ When we can say goodnight
and stay together... ♪

I think of "Pet Sounds" in my head,
and I think of "Sgt. Pepper's”,

and I think, "Gosh! That's not..."

Those two albums
aren't very alike at all,

only in that they're very creative.

They must've picked up on the creativity
of "Pet Sounds”, not the sound.

It's actually very clever on any level.

If you approach it from a writer's
point of view, it's very cleverly written.

The harmonic structures
are very, very clever.

If you approach it
from an arranger's point of view,

the kind of instruments he's got
on there, an oscillator, a harpsichord...

It's got some crazy stuff on there.

Well, I remember...
I combined an organ with the guitar.

And phew! What a sound,
It really worked great.

We got them so that they were
absolutely enhancing each other.

It was like a miracle,
a miraculous process.

(♪ THE BEACH BOYS:
"Here Today")

♪ Keep in mind love is here... ♪

Because of the work they'd done,

it didn't seem too much of a stretch
for us to get further out than they'd got.

(Audience laughing)

We always loved
the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang.

When we were kids, it was a TV thing,

a little bloke came on
and they all pushed him out of the way.

But it was those giant big bass...
(Imitates sound)

And John used to play harmonica,
so we always liked that.

But when I heard them
on "Pet Sounds"...

There's a lot of harmonica,
bass harmonica, he uses that...

The instruments he uses and the way
he places them against each other,

it's very cleverly done,
it's a really clever album.

So we were inspired by it
and nicked a few ideas.

(♪ THE BEATLES:
"Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!")

♪ The celebrated Mr K.

♪ Performs his feat on Saturday
at Bishopsgate... ♪

I remember we walked into
an antique shop in Sevenoaks in Kent,

and we were looking
at what they had there,

and John pulled out this thing
that he found,

which said, "The Benefit of Mr Kite".

And it was virtually
all the lyrics to that song.

(George Martin) When I saw it,

it was hanging up in the hall
in his house in Surrey,

and it had everything
that the song has on it.

It had the Henderson Twins
and Pablo Fanque's Fair,

all those words were written
on the poster.

And it obviously inspired him to write
a song about a fairground or a circus.

That's how you do it.

You get ideas,
you hear people say stuff, or...

you hear a phrase that sounds good
and you write it down or remember it.

So I think he was just advanced
for those days

in his awareness of putting...
everything could be put into a song.

(George Martin)
He wanted to create a sound picture

of what the song was all about.

And he actually said to me,
"I want to smell the sawdust."

But to get the smell of the sawdust,

we, John and I,
both sat on different organs,

Wurlitzers and Lowreys
and Hammonds,

and with double-speed techniques
created a kind of whirly atmosphere.

And the backing... I had visions
of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

who had a little pipey organ in their hut.

John thought slightly differently.
He thought of "Magic Roundabout".

But it was a tooty kind of sound
that we were able to create,

and together with that, we had
this weird and wonderful tape

consisting of all little sections
of real steam organs,

cut up, joined together in a very
haphazard manner, some back to front.

To give us no tune at all,

but just a noise that would convey
what we wanted.

And this is what it is.

(♪ Piano strikes up)

♪ The band begins at ten to six

♪ When Mr K. performs his tricks
without a sound... ♪

Double-tracked vocal form John.

♪ And Mr H. will demonstrate

♪ Ten summersets he'll undertake

- Ringo on his cymbals.
- ♪ On Solid ground

♪ ...days in preparation,
a splendid time is guaranteed for all

- And now, here, in come the whirly bits.
- ♪ And tonight Mr Kite is topping the bill J

(♪ Fairground music)

This is the track
with all the little sounds on it,

the melange of tapes.

And along with that is the little
tooty backing on this track, track four.

(♪ Flute solo)

And that's it. A splendid time
IS guaranteed for all.

I mean, when I first met them,
they really couldn't write a decent song.

"Love Me Do" was the best
they could give me.

Yet they blossomed as songwriters
in a way that is breath-taking.

It had an amazing effect
on the way people saw records.

I mean, people suddenly thought,
"Oh, you can do that?"

Well, they've done it,
so of course you can do it.

So I suppose it made...

it opened a door and showed everybody
that there was another room

and that you could play around
in that other room,

and actually it could still be called
a commercial record.

♪ Good morning, good morning

♪ The best to you each morning

♪ Sunshine, breakfast, Kellogg's
Cornflakes, crisp and full of sun... ♪

Ah, "Good Morning".

"Good Morning" of course
was inspired by a commercial.

You know, a breakfast commercial.

And I suppose that triggered something
in John that made him write the song,

and again he drew his inspiration

from very mundane, ordinary things
like "Time for tea and 'Meet The Wife".

"Meet The Wife"
was a television serial.

It kind of indicates
the suburbanality of his songs

and the very Englishness
of the whole thing.

"Good Morning" was typical of him

that it was of odd meters,
but sounded perfectly natural.

I mean, he would have
a 3/4 bar, 4/4 bar,

5/4 bar even, without knowing it.

One-two-three, one-two,

one-two-three-four, one-two,
one-two-three-four.

It was to be a very hard-driving,
punchy thing.

The tune itself is quite simple.

But it was full of accents
all over the place.

♪ Go to a show you hope she goes... ♪

John wanted to finish this song
with a collection of animal noises,

starting off with a cock,
identifying with a Kellogg's commercial...

- (Cockerel crows)
- ...and then each animal was capable

of either devouring
or frightening the one before it.

And we had a whole string of them here.

(Cat miaows)

(Dog barks)

(Barking)

(Horse neighs)

(Sheep bleats)

(Elephant trumpets)

It took a long time,

and it took longer for me,
because I would do the basic track.

We would do the basic backing track.
We'd do the drums.

And then it would be days or weeks,

even months sometimes,
to come back to the track

and put on overdubs like the hi-hat

or, listening again,
there's lots of conga drums.

I'm not a percussionist.

That's another field of drums.

I'm on playing the congas,
and there's lots of maracas,

and all that stuff
sort of came on at the end.

So there was lots of huge gaps.

The biggest memory I have of "Sgt.
Pepper" is, I learned to play chess on it.

We were changing our method
of working at that time,

and instead of now looking for catchy
singles, catchy singles, catchy singles,

it was more like writing a novel,
"Sgt. Pepper", I think for me, definitely.

It was much more a kind
of an overall concept, "Wow...I"

And you can see that in the packaging.

♪ And it really doesn't matter
if I'm wrong I'm right

♪ Where I belong I'm right

♪ Where I belong

♪ Silly people run around,
they worry me

♪ And never ask me
why they don't get past my door... ♪

(George Martin)
Cover art in the mid-Sixties

hadn't really been exploited
up to "Pepper”,

and when the boys decided
what they wanted,

they wanted really to put
all of their heroes on the album

in some form or another.

And by recruiting Peter Blake,
who was an avant-garde artist again,

to assemble their ideas
and realise them,

in the same way
I was realising the music,

they did, I think, a pretty smart thing.

I think what happened straightaway
was that it was very mysterious.

It was like a game.

There were quizzes to see
if you could spot who everyone was,

and of course nobody could.

And I think a kind of cult
built up around it,

and then the myths and stories
that built up around it,

it became an interesting talking point,
I think.

I think we just thought
we'll do the best we can

in this very far-out new way
that we had of thinking.

Get it to be something...

I still think that is the best philosophy,
to really try and please yourself.

Probably the most momentous song
on the album, "A Day In The Life",

began in a very simple way.

And we've got the rehearsal take,
take one,

the very first time we heard it,

with John giving a few instructions
to people, as usual,

just before he starts it.

(John) 'Have the mike on the piano
quite low.

'Keep it like maracas, you know.'

John was singing while he was playing
his acoustic guitar.

Paul was on piano.
George was playing maracas, I think.

And certainly Ringo was on bongos.

John counts in by saying,
"Sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy."

(John) 'Sugar plum fairy,
sugar plum fairy.'

(♪ THE BEATLES:
"A Day In The Life")

♪ I read the news today, oh boy

♪ About a lucky man
who made the grade... ♪

Even in this early take,
he has a voice...

- ♪ And though the news was rather sad
- ...which sends shivers down the spine.

♪ Well, I just had to laugh

♪ I saw the photograph

♪ He blew his mind out in a car

♪ He didn't notice
that the lights had changed... ♪

(Phil Collins) Well, I think
he's vastly underrated, Ringo.

The drum fills on "A Day In The Life"
are in fact very, very complex things.

You could take a great drummer
from today

and say, "I want it like that,"
and they really wouldn't know what to do.

♪ They'd seen his face before

♪ Nobody was really sure
if he was from the House of Lords... ♪

I could only play the drums
the best I could, you know?

You know, I've said it before
that I was very lucky

that I was surrounded
by three frustrated drummers.

All three of them can play drums,
but only one sort of style.

There was one great moment
with John who played a record to me

and wanted me to...
"Well, play it like that, Ringo."

I said, "But, John, there's two guys."
He says, "Don't let that bother you."

(George Martin) The first part of the song
"A Day In The Life" was John's,

but it was incomplete.

He went to Paul and said, "Have you got
anything to pad it out in the middle?"

Paul had another song
which he was working on,

which really had no connection with
"A Day In The Life", but it was good.

♪ Woke up, fell out of bed

♪ Dragged a comb across my head

♪ Found my way downstairs
and drank a cup

♪ And looking up, I noticed I was late... ♪

So John said,
"Well, let's shove it in the middle

"and see if we can't connect them up
in some way."

We connected them
with a series of empty bars

on either side of Paul's section
before we came back into John's reprise,

and we knew we had to fill those bars
with something sensational.

And we didn't know
what it was going to be yet.

In order to keep the 24 bars

so that everybody knew
when to come back in again,

dear old Mal Evans stood
by the piano counting the bars.

(Mal) 'Seven, eight, nine, ten...'

And just to add further weight to it,

he set off an alarm clock at the end of it
to trigger everybody back into it.

'Seventeen, eighteen,

- 'nineteen, twenty!'
- (Alarm clock rings)

They told me they wanted an orchestral
climax to fill these empty bars,

a giant orgasm of sound

rising from nothing at all
to the most incredible noise.

And this is what we came up with.

(♪ Orchestral crescendo)

(♪ Crescendo stops, piano plays)

And with that, we joined up
the two parts of the song.

♪ Woke up, fell out of bed

♪ Dragged a comb across my head... ♪

I think there's lots of better songs
out on different records.

It's just...
it was the time, the attitude,

it was the concept,
the world was trying to change.

It didn't quite make it,
but it made a small move.

It was in the air...

For me, the psychedelic years
were the most exciting.

It's like a period. If you listen to music
from the '20 or the '30s,

it has a sort of sound to it,
and I think that's important.

If you want to listen to something like
a Hoagy Carmichael tune,

well, it's partly the song that you like,
and it's partly the way he did it,

and it's also partly the way
it was recorded,

how the microphones
sounded in those days,

how the tube amplifiers
in the boards...

You know,
it's all that kind of atmosphere,

and it becomes a little period piece.

(Phil Collins)
The concept of the thing,

I mean, before concept albums
became a dirty word,

you'd put it on and sit down and say,

"For the next 50 minutes,
I'm gonna be going there."

So, it was very new
from that point of view.

♪ And though the holes
were rather small... ♪

(Ringo) Well, you know, the whole
flower power thing fell apart in the end.

I mean, there's still some
great, old hippies out there,

travelling in their vans, but...

It wasn't the movement
that I felt it could have been.

I must confess that when we were
going through "Pepper",

people were saying, "How's it
coming along?" I'd say "Fine."

And I must confess, as we were getting
longer and longer into the album

and more and more avant-garde,

I was wondering whether we were
being a little bit over the top

and a little bit... maybe pretentious.

Just a slight niggle of worry. I thought,
"Is the public ready for this yet?"

The musical papers
which I used to read

were starting to slag us off,
because we hadn't done anything,

because it took five months to record.

And I remember with great glee
seeing in one of the papers,

"Oh, the Beatles have dried up.
There's nothing coming from them.

"They've been in the studio.
They can't think what they're doing."

And I was sitting rubbing my hands,
saying, "You just wait."

(♪ Reverberating chord)

♪ Friday morning,
at nine o'clock

♪ She is far away

♪ Waiting to keep
the appointment she made

♪ Meeting a man from the Motortrade

♪ She...

♪ What did we do that was wrong

♪ ...is having

♪ We didn't know it was wrong

♪ ...fun

♪ Fun is the one thing
that money can't buy

♪ Something inside
that was always denied

♪ For so many years

♪ She's leaving home

♪ Bye, bye... ♪