Designing the packaging for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

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Saturday morning, I had my pocket money. I used to go down to this big department store called Lewis’s, get the record that I’d been saving up for, then get on the bus and unwrap it. Then I had half an hour to look at it… and read the sleeve note and look at the pictures and everything. We designed Sgt. Pepper with that in mind. The person who’s just been to his version of Lewis’s, he’s got that half hour so we’ll give him masses. He can look at this one for months!

Paul McCartney – From the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” box set, 2017

The Fool’s concept for the “Sgt. Pepper” cover

In 1966, The Beatles struggled to come up with a title for their next album and only decided on “Revolver” after several brainstorming sessions at the end of the recording sessions. In 1967, they took a different approach for their next album. The concept was for The Beatles to adopt the persona of a fictional band, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The name of the fictional band became the album title, and they started working on designing the packaging for the album roughly two months before the end of the recording sessions (on April 20, 1967).

Many of Paul’s friends had ideas for the sleeve, in particular John Dunbar, who thought that a totally abstract picture with no text or explanation would be a great idea: ‘People will know what it is, man, people will know what it is!’ But Paul was unconvinced and thought that the idea was too radical. He explained to John that the Beatles had fans from nine to ninety years old, and though the group in their mid-twenties would get it, many of the others wouldn’t.

From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

Initially, The Beatles had approached The Fool, a Dutch design collective in the psychedelic style of art, to come up with the artwork for the album. Marijke Koger, a member of the collective, presented a rough concept that initially excited The Beatles.

There was a group called the Fool who made clothes for everyone — Simone and Mareika, from Holland, who came over to join the hippie London crowd. They were quite loose, very nice people. They started an art thing called the Fool. They designed clothes for Apple, did murals for us on the Baker Street building. And they were going to do the inside cover of Sgt Pepper.

Robert [Fraser] started getting into the visuals and he said, ‘I think you should get Peter Blake involved.’ Because I came back with this idea of having the Beatles being presented by a Lord Mayor or something with a municipal award — very Northern — and I wanted it to be by a floral clock, which is very British.

Paul McCartney – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

Did you allow [The Fool] a free hand with the sleeve design, or did you prescribe a specific idea of what you were after?

I think we discussed it. They pretty much had a free hand, we didn’t dictate. We knew each other well enough and they knew what we liked. We may have said put some faeries hidden in the undergrowth or that type of thing. […]

Paul McCartney – From Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art”, February 2012

[The Beatles] invited us to the recording session party for “A Day in the Life” at the EMI studio on Abbey Road on February 10, 1967, which was to be released as a single June 1st. I danced around with sparkles and blowing bubbles enjoying myself very much, it was great fun. I have never been much of talker and Simon [Posthuma] with his “gift of the gab” was always our spokesperson and interacted with the celebrity participants. After that we were commissioned to work on sketches for the Sgt. Pepper album cover. I painted a rough idea on paper in gouache, the final artwork to be done after approval. It was just an initial concept sketch but everyone assumed it was the final artwork and established elitist art dealer Robert Fraser rejected it; he preferred to promote an artist of his own stable and ultimately only my inner disk sleeve design was used. However, after all, the final “Sgt. Pepper” cover collage by Peter Blake turned out great! […]

Marijke Koger – From marijkekogerart.com, August 11, 2021

We went to the studio where they were recording and Paul showed us the design [The Fool]’d come up with. It was a Yellow Submarine-style cartoonish drawing of a mountain covered in little gnomes with an aeroplane flying overhead. He didn’t like it and asked us for ideas.

Jann Haworth – From Express.co.uk, May 13, 2017

The cover that the Fool had done looked quite groovy and I don’t think George was too happy about abandoning it. I thought it was fun, quite entertaining, and if you’d heard the music, which I hadn’t, probably apt, in terms of the psychedelia. I don’t think the final Sgt Pepper cover is at all psychedelic. Neither Peter nor I had anything to do with drugs and it was very much a continuum of both his work and mine.

Jann Haworth – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

[The Fool] hadn’t somehow checked on the album size and their design was just out of scale. So they said, “Oh, OK, we’ll put a border on it,” so we now had this design which was too small and a border being added just to fill up space. I said to the fellows, “What are we selling here, a Beatles album or a centrefold with a design by The Fool which isn’t even ready? Hadn’t we better get a picture taken of the four of you, and stick that in so we can see who you are?” So they posed for a picture and that went in the middle.

Neil Aspinall – From “It Was Twenty Years Ago Today” by Derek Taylor, 1967

Robert Fraser becomes the art director of “Sgt. Pepper”

In 1965 or early 1966, Paul McCartney met art dealer Robert Fraser and they became friends. In early 1967, Paul and the other Beatles approached Fraser to discuss the artwork for “Sgt. Pepper.” They were advised not to use Marijke Koger’s psychedelic artwork and instead were suggested to approach pop artists Peter Blake and his then-wife Jann Haworth for the album artwork.

Robert used to come round to my house in Cavendish Avenue, which was my bachelor pad in the sixties. It was bit more of a salon really — everyone just came round, anyone stuck for somewhere to stay. And Robert would ring and say, ‘Do you want to go out to dinner?’ His day revolved around dinner. Once he’d got dinner set, everything else fell into place. So he’d come round and I’d play him all the new stuff we were making. He was interested to hear all the demos, then he’d move to a visual on it, which eventually came true on the Sgt Pepper cover. By that time we were firm friends.

So Robert and I would just sit around, chatting late into the night, and I’d come back from America one time with this idea for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the concept was we’d pretend that the Beatles were this band. That would liberate us from our egos, so we’d be able to approach a microphone and think, ‘This is not me doing a vocal, this is someone else.’ That was very liberating and I think the album echoes that. So Robert would get all this.

Robert represented to me freedom, freedom of speech, of view. Mainly he was the art eye that I most respected. He turned me on to a lot of good art, and he turned me off a lot of not so good art, which was very helpful. Robert was very instrumental in getting the Sgt Pepper cover together. He really became the art director on Sgt Pepper.

Paul McCartney – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

By that time, I’d become involved with the gallerist Robert Fraser. He was really knowledgeable about art so I would hang with him a lot. He was gay which worried a few of my hetero friends but it didn’t worry me and we got on great. He collected great art and I was collecting art through him, so when we came to do Sgt. Pepper’s one of the ideas we’d had besides The Fool thing was this idea of Sgt. Pepper having alter egos. Being us – but dressed as alter egos. So it was going to be us posing with a kind of floral clock, the type of thing you would see in Northern towns across England. Robert Fraser, who was listening to me talk about this, said. “Well look. this is really ambitious. you need someone really good -you should get someone from fine art.” So he pulled in one of his artists: Peter Blake. I did a little drawing of how I’d envisioned it and talked to Peter about it. I went around to his fiat and saw his wife Jann Haworth who was making these life-size figures from cloth and different materials – she had a quirky thing going. The idea grew into what it became and then Michael Cooper took the photos.

After all that, Robert Fraser, who’d become important to the process, didn’t feel the Fool’s work would fit with the new front cover and we said, “No we think it’s great and will make a good centerpiece”. So for quite a while we were going to use it. We really liked it and didn’t want to let down our friends who had done this work. But in the end we reluctantly realized that Robert was right and the design became what we all know it as today.

Paul McCartney – From Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art”, February 2012

Robert Fraser, a friend of the Stones, owned the gallery I was with. A cover for Sgt Pepper designed by The Fool already existed and was very psychedelic – swirly orange and green and purple – there were a lot of others like it. Robert thought it would be interesting to have the first cover done by a fine artist as opposed to a record cover designer.

Peter Blake – From “It Was Twenty Years Ago Today” by Derek Taylor, 1967

Right up until the end we knew the cover was going to be Michael Cooper/Peter Blake, but we wanted this inside cover to be the Fool’s drawing. Robert kept saying, ‘I don’t think you should use it.’ I’d say, “Well, Robert, it’s our album and we’re gonna use it.’ And the other Beatles were quite adamant too. A week would go by, then Robert would say, ‘I really don’t think you should use it. It’s just not well drawn. It’s not right. It’s bad art.’ We said, ‘Let us be the judge of that. It’s our album cover, not yours. You’re just the art director. We don’t have to listen to you.’ In the end he came round with the cover as it exists now, with the four of us gleaming hopefully out. Give everyone a love vibe. He’d come round, saying, ‘I say, I think, this should be the inside cover. It’s much better. Works with the front, works with the back.’ And he put the package together as it eventually was and persuaded us finally not to use the Fool’s artwork. And he was right. I’ve seen it since and he was really right. With things like that he was pretty right. He had an opinion and stuck to it. He could be a little bit too arrogant — luckily not to me. I would just say, piss off or whatever. I had a little way of deflating him, which was all right. I can see what my kids didn’t like about him. It was just Eton overbearing, I’m just superior to you, which is what you’re taught at Eton.

Paul McCartney – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

Peter Blake and The Beatles: previous connections

Before working on the “Sgt. Pepper” cover, there were some connections between Peter Blake and The Beatles. In 1963, Blake created a portrait of The Beatles called “The Beatles 1962” as part of a series featuring pop musicians. Additionally, in 1966, Paul McCartney asked Blake to paint a piece for his newly acquired Scottish farm.

He had just got the Mull of Kintyre [property, in 1966] and had bought a painting of Highland cattle in a stream. I said: ‘Let’s do a picture to match that and I’ll draw a nice stag for you.’ The best stag ever is the Landseer painting The Monarch Of The Glen. I did it in acrylic, which is incredibly stupid, because to get all that mistiness in a paint that dries very quickly is very difficult. It would’ve been much easier to do it in oil paint.

Peter Blake – From artnet.com, February 20, 2017

The way Blake approached the “Sgt. Pepper” project differed from his then-wife Jann Haworth’s approach, which may explain why Haworth’s contribution was somehow overlooked in collective memory.

In my mind, I was making a piece of art not an album sleeve.

Peter Blake – From the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” box set, 2017

They were a white boy band. I wasn’t that interested in that music. […] It’s just a record cover and I don’t think that’s very important.

Jann Haworth – From ft.com, June 5, 2023

Designing the “Sgt. Pepper” cover

The concert emerges

The cover concept for “Sgt. Pepper” began to take shape during a series of meetings at Paul McCartney’s London home (reportedly on March 7 and 15), EMI Studios at Abbey Road, and the artists’ home. Paul created several sketches to fuel the discussions.

The cover concept includes a colourful collage featuring the Beatles dressed as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band“, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people. At the center of the cover, the Beatles stand behind a bass drum with the album’s title painted by fairground artist Joe Ephgrave. In front of the drum, there is an arrangement of flowers spelling out “Beatles.” The group is dressed in vibrant, military-style uniforms made by London theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd. Next to the Beatles, there are wax sculptures of the band members in their suits and moptop haircuts from the Beatlemania era, on loan from Madame Tussauds. Among the greenery, there are figurines of the Eastern deities Buddha and Lakshmi.

I offered the idea that if they had just played a concert in the park, the cover could be a photograph of the group just after the concert with the crowd who had just watched the concert, watching them. If we did this by using cardboard cut-outs, it could be a magical crowd of whomever they wanted.

Peter Blake – From Mojo Special Limited Edition: 1000 Days That Shook the World (The Psychedelic Beatles – April 1, 1965 to December 26, 1967).

I did drawings of us being presented to the Lord Mayor with lots of dignitaries and friends of ours around. It was to be us in front of a big northern floral clock, and we were to look like a brass band.

Paul McCartney – From the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” box set, 2017

I suggested that we all think of heroes that the members of Sgt. Pepper’s Band might have, which would help us fill in their imaginary background story. I did a couple of sketches of how the band might look and, as we made the album, we experienced a sense of freedom that was quite liberating. […] When we were done, I took my sketches and our ideas to a friend of mine, Robert Fraser, a London gallery owner who represented a number of artists. He suggested we take the idea to Peter Blake, and John and I had discussions with Peter about the design of the album cover. Peter and his then wife Jann Haworth had some interesting additional ideas and we all had an exciting time putting the whole package together.

Paul McCartney – From the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” box set, 2017

I remember asking [Peter Blake] for painting hints. I asked him to give me a couple of lessons but it just fell by the way. Recently he said, ‘Oh, did I? Oh, I would have, I’d have been pleased to.’ But I really wanted little hints, like how do you get a hair off the canvas when it gets on there?

So, I showed him my little drawings and said, “Look, we’re on a little hill like this, and we have a floral clock there, what can we do with this? This is my idea so far, you can mess it round, I’m not fixed. I’d love your input.’ And from there it grew. Now that Peter was involved, Robert [Fraser] actually had a role; it led Robert to becoming an unofficial art director on the project.

The idea did get a bit metamorphosed when Peter was brought in; they changed it in good ways. The clock became the sign of the Beatles in front of it, the floral clock metamorphosed into a flower bed. Our heroes in photographs around us became the crowd of dignitaries, and it was them that was presenting us with something, except no one was getting presented with something any more. So the idea just crystallised a bit. Which was good. It took a lot of working out but it’s one of the all-time covers, I think, so that was great.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

Paul now says that he came up with the original sketch showing the band standing in front of a crowd – but he really didn’t have much of an idea what he wanted. There’s also a sketch of the cover by John Lennon coming up for auction soon, expected to fetch £50,000 or more – but that was absolutely drawn after we’d designed the album. It includes details that we only added at the last minute.

Jann Haworth – From Express.co.uk, May 13, 2017

Of late, the whole “credits question” has become a bit of a circus or perhaps a Wonderland ‘Caucus Race’ that, like the record itself, goes around in circles. Who credits Joe Ephgrave for the drum skin on Pepper– or the photographers who took the images of the heads, or the guy who brought the flowers and made the flower guitar?

I wish I could see justice done for me and my fellow artists, but I fear I never will.

For sure, credit on Sgt Pepper’s has been horribly mixed…for example, Paul McCartney now claims 100% authorship of the concept for the cover, which is an utterly fabricated memory. Peter Blake also claims 100% – that he did it all while I claim 50%, so it is a 250% baby!  I can’t gnaw at this bone. It is only a record cover, and not Rosalind Franklin’s photo of the structure of DNA which, for me, is a far more powerful breakthrough.

Jann Howarth – From Album Cover Hall of Fame.com, November 4, 2020

A certain amount had already been established: the concept of their being a band within a band, for instance. They’d had their uniforms made already. I think my contribution was to talk a great deal to them about the concept and try to add something visual to it. Paul explained that it was like a band you might see in a park. So the cover shot could be a photograph of them as though they were a town band finishing a concert in a park, playing on a bandstand with a municipal flowerbed next to it, with a crowd of people around them. I think my main contribution was to decide that if we made the crowd a certain way the people in it could be anybody. I think that that was the thing I would claim actually changed the direction of it: making a life-sized collage incorporating real people, waxworks, photographs and artwork. I kind of directed it and asked the Beatles and Robert (and maybe other people, but I think it was mainly the six of us) to make a list of characters they would like in a kind of magical ideal film, and what came out of this exercise was six different sets of people. Robert Frazer chose artists, and I chose Johnny Weissmuller, people like Bobby Breen who was a child star, and Shirley Temple. And then we went to Madame Tussaud’s where I heard Sonny Liston would probably be melted down soon. He was no longer world champion, and so I got him and I still have him.

Peter Blake – From “It Was Twenty Years Ago Today” by Derek Taylor, 1967

A very strange scene met us the first time we went over to the studio. The Beatles were recording, and their ‘court’ of Marianne Faithfull and all these weird spaced-out people sat around the walls. Peter and I were probably the only people who were stone-cold sober. It was really funny, two very upright people doing this psychedelia.

Paul played us the tape of Sgt Pepper, which was still being worked on, and Peter thought the idea of making a Lonely Hearts Club would be interesting, a group of people with the Beatles in front. Early in the sixties Peter had done some things, cutting out Victorian heads, engravings, sticking them down, then doing a circus act in front of that. He maintained at that time that Paolozzi nicked that idea from him, the collage effect of people and things, dissimilar but in the same environment.

Jann Haworth – From “Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser” by Harriet Vyner, 1999

Theories about the inspiration for the cover

Over the years, various theories have emerged about the inspiration for the cover. One theory suggests that Paul may have been consciously or unconsciously inspired by an obscure EP of Beatles covers released in Sweden in 1964. This EP was given to him when The Beatles visited Stockholm in July 1964.

Another theory noted the similarities between the “Sgt. Pepper” cover and this photo of Jim Mac’s band, which was a jazz band led by Paul’s father, Jim. According to Kate Robbins, who is a singer, songwriter, and actress and also happens to be Paul McCartney’s first cousin once removed, this photo is found in most McCartney households.

The “Sgt. Pepper” outfits

On the cover, The Beatles are dressed in satin day-glo-coloured military-style uniforms that were manufactured by the London theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd. On March 3, 1967, a representative of Berman’s, the theatrical costumiers, visited The Beatles and brought samples of fabric for the uniforms.

For our outfits, we went to Berman’s, the theatrical costumiers, and ordered up the wildest things, based on old military tunics. That’s where they sent you if you were making a film: ‘Go down to Berman’s and get your soldier suits.’ They had books there that showed you what was available. Did we want Edwardian or Crimean? We just chose oddball things from everywhere and put them together. We all chose our own colours and our own materials: ‘You can’t have that, he’s having it…’

We went for bright psychedelic colours, a bit like the fluorescent socks you used to get in the Fifties (they came in very pink, very turquoise or very yellow). At the back of our minds, I think the plan was to have garish uniforms which would actually go against the idea of uniform. At the time everyone was into that ‘I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet’ thing; kids in bands wearing soldiers’ outfits and putting flowers in the barrels of rifles.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

While this type of clothing was primarily chosen to fit the retrospective image of Sgt. Pepper’s band, it was also a current fashion style. Trendy clothes shops Granny Takes A Trip and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet catered for the capital’s in-crowd with second-hand Edwardian and Victorian clothes and their own similar designs. Indeed, surrealist trad-jazz trio The Massed Alberts had appeared on stage wearing this style of outfit since the early 1960s. The Alberts’ offbeat theatrical production An Evening Of British Rubbish had amused both The Beatles and George Martin, who recorded them.

From “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” boxset’s accompanying book, 2017

After the cover shoot, The Beatles wore the “Sgt. Pepper” outfits again for the filming of the “Hello Goodbye” music videos, on November 10, 1967.

In 1989, Paul McCartney reused his suit in the “My Brave Face” music video, which features a Japanese McCartney-fanatic who acquires McCartney memorabilia, films, and audio by all means including robbery.

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