It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Bea­t­les: Sgt Pep­per and Beyond

They say you can’t judge a book by its cov­er, but by lin­ing John, Paul, George and Ringo along­side a host of lumi­nar­ies includ­ing Albert Ein­stein, Lewis Car­roll, George Bernard Shaw, Mar­lon Bran­do and TE Lawrence, the icon­ic sleeve design of ​‘Sgt Pepper’s lone­ly Hearts Club Band’ announced to the world that 1967’s new Bea­t­les album was clear­ly intend­ed as a work of his­tor­i­cal significance.

Five decades on, the record has become part of the cul­tur­al fir­ma­ment, its com­bi­na­tion of time­less melodies, ambi­tious pop craft and breezy music hall whim­sy reg­u­lar­ly win­ning it a place in ​‘great­est ever albums’ lists. Fans and com­men­ta­tors may argue that the Fab Four’s pre­vi­ous record, ​‘Revolver’, was more ground­break­ing, or that the sub­se­quent ​‘White Album’ is a bit fur­ther-out, or that the vale­dic­to­ry ​‘Abbey Road’ aches with a deep­er end-of-an-era melan­choly. But right­ly or wrong­ly ​‘Sgt Pepper’s’ remains lodged in the pub­lic con­scious­ness as the icon­ic slice of Bea­t­les vinyl.

Which is pre­cise­ly why it is cel­e­brat­ed in this fea­ture-length doc – although you do have to won­der if there’s real­ly any­thing new to be said about it after all these years. And if there isn’t, can this film at least make a case to sell the album’s great­ness to a new post-post-post-Beat­le­ma­nia gen­er­a­tion whose musi­cal appetites are fed by dig­i­tal stream­ing and MP3 files clog­ging up their smartphones?

Well, the first thing to say here, in terms of wel­com­ing new­com­ers to the par­ty, is that there isn’t a sin­gle note of the actu­al album to be heard, nor any images of the record itself and its famed cov­er art. Rights issues were pre­sum­ably the stick­ing point, but the upshot is that this par­tic­u­lar cel­e­bra­tion is strict­ly BYOB – Bring Your Own Beatles.

Point­less then, for any­one expect­ing a help­ful primer on why those 13 tracks have more than stood the test of time, since what we get instead is reams of archival TV news footage with the band being pur­sued by var­i­ous mid­dle-aged reporters, plus a wealth of first-hand inter­view mate­r­i­al with biog­ra­phers, back-room staff and fam­i­ly mem­bers. Yet we don’t actu­al­ly hear from the Bea­t­les them­selves, unless you count orig­i­nal drum­mer Pete Best (which nobody does), who was replaced by Ringo in 1962.

Direc­tor Alan G Park­er is him­self an obses­sive fan, which per­haps explains why the inter­est here is in all the trim­mings rather than the meat itself. There’s a semi-intrigu­ing through-line con­cern­ing the band’s dis­il­lu­sion­ment with tour­ing; the free­dom of the stu­dio giv­ing them greater cre­ative licence; the sidelin­ing of man­ag­er Bri­an Epstein lead­ing to his acci­den­tal fatal over­dose; and band’s spir­i­tu­al mis­ad­ven­tures with the Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi. But again, no real detailed insight into the cre­ation and lega­cy of ​‘Sgt Pepper’s’.

Too much mak­ing-of cov­er­age would per­haps have drawn more atten­tion to the lack of the actu­al music, but it seems insane to have a ​‘Sgt Pepper’s’ doc which doesn’t at least explore, for instance, how they achieved the huge orches­tral crescen­do-and-fade at the end of ​‘A Day in the Life’. One for ded­i­cat­ed com­pletists only, then.