Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles It Was Forty Years Ago Today

The first concept album in the history of popular music, the soundtrack of the Summer of Love or 'Hippy Symphony No. 1': Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is first and foremost the album that gave rise to 'hopes of progress in pop music' (The Times, 29 May 1967). Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles commemorates the fortieth anniversary of this masterpiece of British psychedelia by addressing issues that will help put the record in perspective. These issues include: reception by rock critics and musicians, the cover, lyrics, songwriting, formal unity, the influence of non-European music and art music, connections with psychedelia and, more generally, the sociocultural context of the 1960s, production, sound engineering and musicological significance. The contributors are world renowned for their work on the Beatles: they examine Sgt. Pepper from the angle of disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, literature, social psychology and cultural theory.

List of figures and tables, List of music examples, Notes on contributors, General editor’s preface, Preface, ‘Their production will be second to none’: an introduction to Sgt. Pepper, 1 ‘Tangerine trees and marmalade skies’: cultural agendas or optimistic escapism?, 2 Sgt. Pepper and the diverging aesthetics of Lennon and McCartney, 3 Sgt. Pepper’s quest for extended form, 4 The sound design of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 5 The Beatles and Indian music, 6 The Beatles’ psycheclassical synthesis: psychedelic classicism and classical psychedelia in Sgt. Pepper, 7 Cover story: magic, myth and music, 8 Within and without: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and psychedelic insight, 9 The whatchamucallit in the garden: Sgt. Pepper and fables of interference, 10 The act you’ve known for all these years: a re-encounter with Sgt. Pepper, 11 ‘A lucky man who made the grade’: Sgt. Pepper and the rise of a phonographic tradition in twentieth-century popular music, References, Index of names, Index of songs, albums, films and musical works

Olivier Julien teaches the history and musicology of popular music at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), France.