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This Was Their Sgt Pepper

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Like it or not there can be no doubting that Sgt Pepper was a game-changer.
Nothing would be the same after June 1, 1967 as every pop band in the land, fuelled by too much money and/or too many drugs, clambered over each other to record their own version of the Beatles’ psychedelic masterwork.
Most of them failed miserably of course but for those of us who were around at the time it was great fun watching them try.
Later, when the dust settled, the phrase “this was their Sgt Pepper” took on new meaning and entered the language as a way of describing an artist’s best or most ambitious album. Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief for example is often called “the Sgt. Pepper of folk rock”.

Let’s take a look at some of these efforts in a thread we’re calling “This Is Our Sgt. Pepper”

Please feel free to add your own examples

http://i.imgur.com/U1psv1X.jpg

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Comments

  1. Coming six months after Pepper in December 1967 The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request was the complete psychedelic package.
    It brought everything to the party: far out 3D* sleeve, fantastic costumes and the first recorded example of the word “Satanic” used in conjunction with the band’s name.
    The only thing they forgot to bring was the songs, most of which weren’t very good. The album was something of a damp squib at the time and prompted the Stones to give up the psychedelic lark and go back to what they did best.
    Satanic Majesties has aged well however and now has a cult following.

    * Lenticular actually

    http://i.imgur.com/yTamWpg.jpg

    • The only cult I know bigging up the execrable ‘Satanic’ is HP. It was widely derided on release, not least because it was such a risible attempt to ape the band the Stones worshipped. Just to emphasise its paucity of ideas, it even has a Bill Wyman song on it. Even the band have the good grace to realise what berks they look like on the cover.

  2. A Night at the Opera by Queen probably fits the bill. It’s ambitious, a bit barmier than most people think it is, has a memorable sleeve, and perhaps the most important point: fans of the band will tell you that actually, the album released just before it is their best album.

  3. Family, “Music in A Doll’s House” (1968)

    They were (so I’m told) toast of the town in 1967. Their first single, “Scene Thru the Eye of Lens,” was a psychedelic jewel produced by a pre-Stones Jimmy Miller. Their live set (at least as evidenced from BBC sessions) was more raucous and bluesy. The first album, however, is a fantastically over-produced suite of short songs, instrumental fragments, sound effects and dissonance, recorded with Dave Mason. Sometimes I think its’s wonderful, occasionally I suspect it’s a bit of a farrago. In any case, it only really makes sense alongside Sgt Pepper, and they never recorded anything like it again. And they got to use the album title that The Beatles wanted for the White Album.

    • Family were fantastic live, yes. And I love Music in a Doll’s House, definitely a Madeleine elpee for me, almost as much as Sgtthep. Family Entertainment too. Talking of which, not entirely irrelevantly…

          • Family were a great live band as long as you didn’t stand too close to the stage (If you’ve seen them you’ll know). Mr Chapman turned the Marquee Club into a particularly dangerous venue.
            I thought the band were at their best with Jim King on sax.

            • You’re referring to Chappo’s percussion antics, I take it?

              I recall seeing Family live and Roger would bash the tambourine against his thigh so violently it would eventually fall apart.

              Then he would throw the bits into the crowd.

              • Actually I meant his mic stand antics. Flailing it around until it flew apart with bits, including the lead base, hurtling out into the audience. Health & Safety be buggered.

                  • When I saw them at Warwick U there was no stage at all, band was on the floor same as the audience. The audience backed away a bit once they got going, but nobody was hurt.

                    • There was a ballroom in Chesterfield like that with no stage. I remember seeing Jethro Tull there in 1969 (with Mick Abrahams) when Ian Anderson really did look like a dangerous homeless person.

  4. The Hollies – Evolution.
    Recorded virtually alongside Pepper at Abbey Road in early 1967 and released only weeks after the Beatles’ LP, Evolution could hardly be accused of bandwagon-jumping. Even so, the sleeve was designed by the Fabs’ mates The Fool and like Sgt Pepper the album contained no UK singles.
    Evolution didn’t set the world on fire but it sold respectably and is still rated as perhaps the best Hollies album.

    http://i.imgur.com/0dQNUMr.jpg

  5. In one episode Bart Simpson was about to pull off an elaborate practical joke when he looked at the camera and said, “This prank is my Sergeant Pepper’s” A phrase that must have mystified millions of younger viewers.

    While I’m here, the film A Hard Day’s Night was once described as “The Citizen Kane of juke-box movies”

  7. Status Quo – Picturesque Matchstickable Messages from the Status Quo

    Released in late 1968 before the switch to denim-clad boogie, the Quo’s debut was a full-on pop psych affair.
    There was a creditable cover of the Lemon Pipers’ Green Tambourine and some songs were penned by 50s rocker Marty Wilde – huh?
    The cover shows the band atop a mountain of Swan Vestas boxes “the smoker’s match”(Pictures Of Matchstick Men – geddit?)

    http://i.imgur.com/GAXOoiC.jpg

  10. Excuse lack of imagery but….

    The Who Sell Out – the strident move away from straight down the line Mod/Rock, RnB to a genuinely different thematic record. Adverts? Drone rock? Music Hall? All here.

    The Zombies -Odessey and Oracle. Similar juddering of the pop sound creaking on its axis into an English country garden version of pastoral California.

  14. I always thought Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello was his try at a “Sgt Pepper” type album, just the complexities of the songs made me think that. Plus it was engineered by Geoff Emerick. Not got that this bit in the book so not sure if Im right…..

  15. How about the Pretty Things `S. F. Sorrow`, released in 1968 and tells a similar story to The Who`s `Tommy` which was released 2 years later.

    Er, Pete Townsend has stated that `S. F. Sorrow` was not an influence on the very much similar story-line of `Tommy`, well that settles that. Anyhow have a listen to the Pretties much neglected masterpiece.

    • I was quite surprised that this was featured on BBC 4’s recent Psychedelic Britannia.
      Not psych in my book. The Moodies saved that for the albums that followed. Still, it does fit the “Sgt Pepper moment” bill though.

  30. Priest = Aura by The Church is definitely an SPLHCB. Like the HJHs, it’s their eighth album in less than a decade, it’s the one that moves away from the more accessible chart-friendly material, and it’s written in the honeymoon phase of a marriage to Class A substances that would soon (and in both cases, temporarily) drain all enthusiasm and critical judgement out of their music.

  31. London Calling – The Clash. Put the cap on their career as a punk rock band and showed a whole world of influences from fifties rock and roll to dub to funk that would power them for the rest of their career. It’s surely the Sgt Pepper of new wave

  32. When I got `No Other` in 1975, it was released in 1974 and as far as I remember had no Record Label promotion whatsoever I reckoned that this was a great album (after several listens). Gene Clark was one of the reasons The Byrds were, IMHO a great band writing one of their best songs (Feel A Whole Lot Better) but his solo career, as has been recorded here many times just seemed to drift into obscurity. A pity.

  42. Malcolm McLaren is not a musician. In fact, by this point he is regarded as something of a charlatan. The Great Rock n Roll Swindle’s retrofitted explanation of how The Sex Pistols’ career was all his genius situationist prank is not bought by anyone. He’s somehow f****d his relationship with this generation’s greatest frontman and the nation’s biggest pop star in double quick time.
    He is not a musician. In the recent Steve Jobs biopic, Michael Fassbender’s Jobs explains “I don’t play an instrument. I play the orchestra”. Malcolm has an idea for a record – a whistle stop tour of ground level sounds from around the world. One sound in particular appeals – the emerging hip hop music of New York City with its use of the turntable itself as an instrument. Malcolm’s not a musician – he likes this idea vey much.
    But he’s not a musician, so he needs to assemble his own orchestra. He approaches Trevor Horn with tales of depression era songs reincarnated (just like The Beatles channelled music hall!) and tapes from his travels.
    Trevor is crazy enough to like this idea. He’s just got himself a Fairlight synthesiser, and he and his musical partner Anne Dudley have been messing with sampling all sorts of noises with a view to creating their own musical project. Once again, perhaps more by good luck than anything else, Malcolm has hit the jackpot.
    Malcolm’s zeitgeisty idea of a musical tour of world music is always going to be interesting. But thanks to Trevor Horn’s magnificent orchestration – tying the eclectic sounds into a radio show concept, tidying the half-baked ideas into choc-chip topped pop cookies, Duck Rock drops like a bomb into the popverse of 1983.
    And in case the music’s not enough, Malcolm’s off again: the record company heard this and said “we can’t put this out, it’s not even music”, so a copy gets out to the djs who play it to a rapturous reception. The djs demand to know why the record hasn’t come out and the record company relents..
    – Malcolm, he’s an ideas man, not a musician.

    (Buffalo Gals)

    • @sewer-robot I enjoyed reading that, thank you. Malcolm was ridiculed for these forays (perhaps deservedly for Opera House (?) ) but he put together some amazing pieces of work.

      I was only showing the Double Dutch video to my girls recently (to show them the skipping) and they loved the song too.

      I had the 12″ of Madame Butterfly as a teenager and still enjoy it. Never got old.

    • I still enjoy the Malcolm McL album, mainly because of Horn’s fantastic production. There’s some very exciting tracks on it, particularly the great ‘Soweto” song. The instrumentation on that track is so compelling that I can never just listen to it the once.

      • @sewer-robot

        The following is a true excerpt from an Oasis fan forum – to which the answer is no. DOYS = Dig Out Your Soul

        I was just thinking … seeing all the pychodelic parts in the SOTL videoclip and the DOYS album cover … and Liam in this SOTL with his glasses on .. really looking just like Lennon in some moments…
        reminds me of The Beatles in there Sgt. pepper period. Is it a statment they are trying to make?

        I mean .. we haven’t heard all the songs and all that, and those we’ve heard .. some are good, some are a little less good, but overall, also listening to people who already heard all the songs … they are very enthousiastic (more then normal).
        And it seems that Oasis has been more experimental then they used to be …

        It just seems that this album will become a very important and historical album. Like Peppers was for the Beatles ….

        Ofcourse we’ll all see when the album is released, but meanwhile it’s nice to speculate.

        This is just me being me, thinking these things .. what d’ya think?

  47. Might be on shaky ground here vis a vis the OP criteria but for some reason this came to mind: the Gordon Beck Quartet’s ‘Experiments With Pops’, on Major Minor, released early 1968. Recorded at Lansdowne Studios, producer Ray Horricks. It was, I believe, the first time a British jazz act had mined the pop charts of the moment (i.e. of mid to late 1967) for material. It was a controversial thing for the time.

    Beck normally operated a trio but he expanded it for a handful of gigs around London and this LP by adding John McLaughlin on guitar.

    Here’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’:

  49. Please don’t take this as a seal of approval – but I was immersed in the lead up to and the release of ELO’s Out of the Blue due to excitable teenage brothers eagerly anticipating it.

    It is an impressive package, two discs, a very elaborate cover with artwork peppered (!) with significant hidden meanings and no expense spared in the studio.

    The following album Discovery was a more efficient one disc with better, shorter pop songs on it.

  50. The Damned – The Black Album.

    Maybe not their most revered or respected album (that is probably Machine Gun Etiquette), but the one where they seemed to invest more time and craft. Mixing goofy punk-pop(?) with Psychedelia and Goth.
    Perfectly capable of playing everything at 100mph, and generally dicking around, a (short lived) career could’ve been eeked out lumped in with 2nd Generation Punk bands like The Exploited or Peter & The Test Tube Babies.
    John Lydon pushed onto something new with PiL, and now The Damned were about to do the same – how many other Punk bands would’ve been brave enough to attempt (and succeed) giving an entire side of an album to what can only be described as a Prog-Psych-Goth-Masterpiece.

      • I had both of these on original vinyl, you know. Oh yes. Also the crap “third album” by “Lovecraft”. There’s a nice live boot floating around, too. And a non-album single. They were a very strong band.

        • True story. Around 1969 I was in a Sheffield pub during a trip back home to see the folks when a speccy bloke and his hippy bird came up to me and coughed nervously. “We thought you might like these” he said, pulling the two Lovecraft LPs out of his shoulder bag and handing them to me.

          I thanked him and the pair left without another word.

          I kept the LPs for some years but at some point they got traded in at Honest John’s on Portobello Road, like so many other great records. I probably got a quid each for them.

          I have picked them up again more recently, but they never really grabbed me. I must give them another go. How would you sum them up?

          • No need to answer that. I just played the first LP for the first time in maybe 40 years.

            I found it to be much more MOR and folky than I remembered. Kind of like the 5th Dimension meets the Association, with a touch of the Mamas & Papas thrown in.

            Those vocal harmonies are very West Coast and the none more pop cover of Let’s Get Together was a little unexpected.

            Also features covers of Fred Neil and Randy Newman.

            Not nearly as psych as I expected.

            • The first album’s not pyschodelic at all. They came from Chicago, I think? But it’s a fine piece of work. Great harmonies. Then they moved to the coast and chewed some blotter and were never quite the same again. The difference between the two albums is as clear as the artwork.

  53. Donovan – H.M.S Donovan (1971)

    He’d had his share of eye-watering psych album covers before of course (some of them pre-dating Pepper) but few of Donovan’s albums can have been so ambitious or failed so spectacularly.

    A double LP of children’s songs and nursery rhymes issued on Pye’s prog offshoot label Dawn records simply didn’t capture the mood of 1971 and despite guest spots from McCartney HMS Donovan sank without trace.

    The sleeve design was by Scottish artist Patrick who did all those Humblebums and Gerry Rafferty covers (and later the Beatles Ballads sleeve).

    http://i.imgur.com/5h23l3X.jpg

  54. Got a soft spot for records which were genuinely a group’s ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ as they only made one LP which was exactly like ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’!

    Rainbow Ffolly, July, Skip Bifferty, Tomorow, Five Day Week Straw People…..
    I love you all.

  55. There’s a good case to be made for this 1968 double LP: not least because Peter Blake reputedly only designed three covers in the 60s and this was one of them. And no, I’ve no idea what the third one was.

  56. We’ve had a few Incredible String Band suggestions already, but to my mind their Sgt Pepper was undoubtedly the 1970 double LP “U”.

    It contained the music to an overblown stage play (complete with bizarre costumes and choreography) which the band had conceived and in a long line of increasingly “difficult” ISB albums it was virtually unlistenable (and I speak as a major ISB fan).

    As a footnote to this, @rubyblue will no doubt recall that in his book Elvis Costello confessess to attending a live performance of “U” at the Roundhouse in 1970. “But it was not the kind of thing you admitted to in 1977” he adds.

    http://i.imgur.com/IBlwag0.jpg

      • Wee Tam & The Big Huge is one of a number of 60s double albums which were also released as individual single LPs (often with very different sleeves).

        I guess it was because, at a time when a double LP was actually twice the price of a single LP, some people couldn’t justify the outlay.

        I know of the following examples

        Cream – Wheels Of Fire
        The Who – Tommy
        Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
        Donovan – A Gift From A Flower To A Garden
        Incredible Sting Band – Wee Tam & the Big Huge

        Any others?

  63. Hmmm, my loathed ‘Disraeli Gears’, the only psych LP that sounds like it was recorded in about 1975 (a VERY bad thing).

    Brian Matthew has just played the sublime ‘Michaelangelo’ by the 23rd Turnoff, a reminder that many ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ were mini-versions of the album, as few groups were afforded the luxury of an album release…..unlike Eric Clapton…..hmmm.

    Other examples on 45 –
    ‘Scene Thru The Eyes of a Lens’ by The Family (their finest record by a very long way), ‘The Madman Running Through the Fields’ by Dantalion’s Chariot, ’14th Hour Technicolour Dream’ by The Syn, ‘Father’s Name Is Dad’ by The Fire, and, of course, the greatest 45 ever, ‘Beeside’ by Tintern Abbey.

  67. Could give a mention to any of the 4 brilliant Tyrannosaurus Rex LPs, all of which would have been unthinkable before the summer of ’67 and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’.

  68. Taking Sewer Robot’s guidance viz Pepper = musically ambitious, eclectic, inventive, rule book shredding, there are some good examples here: Piper (Dark Side? as JC says like it or not, it was a game-changer), Freak Out, 12 Dreams, Pentangle, OK Computer. To which I would add Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard A True Star. It fits SR’s terms and conditions. It was certainly a game-changer for TR and still stands as a landmark of early 70s creativity.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYWicGTNMuo

    • Remember an NME caption from the mid-70s: a drongo, a true klutz.

      Tells us a lot about the cool words being used then.

      Drongo is standard Oz parlance, I think. Whereas klutz would be Yiddish, I imagine. So that’s where coolness comes from!

  70. On second thoughts, Donovan’s Pepper was surely A Gift From a Flower to a Garden from December 1967.

    It ticked all the boxes:

    It was a double LP (one psych rock and the other acoustic)
    It came in a box!
    It included a folder of illustrated lyric sheets
    Donovan was pictured holding hands with the Maharishi on the back

    http://i.imgur.com/1kH0Acf.jpg

  71. If the consensus is, in 2015, that the 4 Tyrannosaurus Rex LPs suck, by the very definition of seeming to suck in 2015, they MUST BE FABULOUS.

    I’d packed them away too……oh well, out they will have to come……this is most unsatisfactory……do you know how much effort that will take?

    I’ll also have to dig out the compilation with the 5 As and Bs…..do have a heart next time.

    • I still have those Tyrannosaurus Rex LPs and take them out once in a while.

      I marvel at the old school Regal Zonophone label, the great sleeve designs (especially the absurdly titled debut My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows) the John Peel sleeve poem etc

      But this far down the road, I just can’t listen to more than a couple of tracks.

      • I see what you mean but it has its uses. I taught a class of 5 year old to play ‘Cat Black – (The Wizard’s Hat)’ on ukulele a fe years ago. The utterly bollocks lyrics bothered them not a jot.

    • Bloody hell, a mention for the house band at my medical school, stalwarts at Old Boys Night every year at the Christmas Show. A paediatrician, a public health Dr and a clap clinic consultant, along with, at one time, the great Alan Coren, father of Giles and of Disappointment Bobs amanuensis (in his dreams). On double bass.
      Here’s their paean to Tring:

  73. This thread is a lot of fun. I’m going to throw in The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The Byrds were already in friendly competition with the Beatles, and this was a decisive leap in studio production values from anything they had done before, was more self-consciously psychedelic, and seemed to be moving away from their signature guitar sound. I love this short album, although it does seem like bit of an anomaly in their career. Maybe Younger Than Yesterday is their Revolver?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDlupaHDWyM

  78. An interesting thread with a wealth of views! Loved the exchange on Family, one of my favourite bands.

    I would nominate:

    ‘Tarkus’ – ELP

    ‘Close To The Edge’ – Yes

    ‘Bookends’ – Simon & Garfunkel

  80. Late to the party, but even the neo-doo wop pop merchants Four Seasons had a Sgt Pepper moment with this strange offering from 1968 The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.

    It’s not bad actually, in a kind of the Turtles meet the Association sort of way.

    Check out the velvet jackets and frilly shirts. The face fungus seems confined to the left-had side of the sleeve I notice.

    http://i.imgur.com/jhnrsff.jpg

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