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   CLUB SANDWICH 45

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THE PACKAGING OF 'PEPPER'

Mike Evans, organiser of 'The Art of The Beatles' gets behind the cut-out figures of the Pepper album cover and reveals the background of the cover concept.

            I remember coming back from playing with Liverpool rock 'n roll groups in Germany, late in May '67. Everywhere from Frankfurt to London to Liverpool was rife with rumours about the new Beatles album with the extravagant title Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
            First hearing was on a sunny Merseyside morning after my return. Even twenty years on, it's crystal clear like all good dreams. I recall
looking as much as listening, fingering the cover, opening the gatefold, referring to lyrics on the back as the magical music produced that prickle down the back of the neck that only happens when it's really special -although that always happened with a new Beatles album.
            ' But this time the impact was visual as well.
            Who were all the people on the cover?
            Johny Weismuller, Bob Dylan, Marilyn, Marlon - instantly recognized . ..others, not so familiar.
            At first glance I thought perhaps the four Beatles, Ruritanian bandsmen moustached and solemn, were collage cut-outs like the rest. The perspective was odd, the effect slightly surreal. Like the layer-upon-layer music of
Pepper, the more you delved into the cover the more there was to explore...
            The music was certainly more 'visual' than anything the Fab Four had
produced before, rich in imagery ranging from the circus tumblers of 'Mr Kite' to the Alice in Wonderland landscapes of 'Lucy', the stark suburban melodrama of 'Leaving Home' and nightmare recollections in 'A Day In The Life'.
            This visual quality was further enhanced by the packaging itself, in a sleeve that was to become - like the record - the most celebrated and discussed in pop history.
            The Beatles' album covers had always been an event in themselves, charting not just the group's music but signposting the stylistic changes of the 'sixties.
            The grainy black-and-white of
With The Beatles and Hard Day's Night, the early psychedelia of Rubber Soul, all heralded (rather than reflecting) the graphic moods of the time. It was inevitable, therefore, that the record they had spent most time and care on, in the visually rich atmosphere of early 1967, should be an entertainment for the eye as well as the ear.
            There were several concurrent themes which made up popular style in late '66/early '67, and which came together in the concept of the 'Pepper' sleeve.
            It was the era of Pop Art.
            Pop Art proper, as conceived by its American and British advocates, involved the everyday graphics and images of advertising, movies and so on,
being used in the more rarified situation of framed paintings. Most pop art was American in inspiration if not origin -Coca Cola, Marilyn Monroe, the stars and stripes, these were its icons.
            At the same time, mid 'sixties 'Swinging London' harked back to the British imperial past in the vogue for mock-military Victorian and Edwardian regimental uniforms - which the Beatles anticipated in 1965 in stage appearances - all high collars, brass buttons and epaulettes. Harold Wilson's 'I'm Backing Britain' campaign encouraged the Union Jack mugs and T-shirts of tourist ephemera, but the fashion went much deeper than Carnaby Street and shops like
7 Was Lord Kitchener's Valet'.
            Trend-setting magazines like
Town, Queen and Nova revelled in the Art Nouveau of the early century, and the illustrative style of Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha in particular. (Beardsley's influence is clearly apparent in Klaus Voorman's line drawings for the Revolver sleeve.)
            With the opening of the Biba boutique in 1966 there was a move to the
            Art Deco fashions of the 'twenties and 'thirties, reflected in the success of the film
Bonnie and Clyde and the fad for old movie stars from the pre-war era.
            Amidst this rampant nostalgia came the first hints of the vision-expanding effects of hallucinatory drugs - specifically LSD. First hinted at in the
Disney-like lettering and distorted image of the Rubber Soul cover in late '65, so-called psychedelic graphics really proliferated with the influence of the US West Coast underground.
            The psychedelic poster, with typography exaggerated to the point of being illegible, came into its own during 1967, attempting to simulate the experience of an 'acid trip'. There was a subsequent rash of record covers in the same style, which now look decidedly dated; the Beatles managed to avoid this pitfall, so what was to become
the visual artefact of the era in fact leaned more to the 'nostalgic' described above than the overtly psychedelic.
            The summer of '67 was a watershed in popular culture. It was when the various strands of 'swinging '60s' youth movement came together - when the underground, the pop scene, fashion and politics seemed to gell for a few frantic months. At the time, optimism was rife, there was a feeling that the world really could be changed for the better...all you needed was love. Against a brightly painted backcloth of cultural revolution and self indulgent hedonism, the Beatles reached what many feel was their peak.
            Originally, there
was a plan for a psychedelic style cover, designed by the Fool-Simon and Marika, a pair of Dutch artists who were two archetypal hippies who went on to create the exotic clothes

Club Sandwich 45