Sergeant Peppper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

 
 

The Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the best selled albums of the British band The Beatles. The album contains thirteen songs including Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles are very famous of course, but I don't want to talk about them. I'm going to talk about the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and especially about its cover.

 

The cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album is designed by the British artist Peter Blake. Sir Peter Thomas Blake was born on 25 June 1932 in Dartford in Kent. He has studied on the Royal College of Art in London and after that he was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. His first solo exhibition was in 1960 and in 1961 he immediately won the John Moores junior award for his Self Portrait with Badges. Peter Blake's best known work is The First Real Target, made in 1961. All his art is belongs to the pop art.

The Sgt. Pepper's Loney Hearts Club Band's album cover is famous and has won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in 1967. The cover features a colourful collage with around sixty celebrities from all over the world. The celebrities aren't painted but they are photographed, each person in his own style. The Beatles stand behind a drum skin, on which the name of the album is painted, and they wear coloured military-style outfits. John Lennon in lime, Ringo Starr in pink, Paul McCartney in blue and George Harrison in orange. Besides the real Beatles, there are also four waxworks of them on the cover. These can be found on the left side of the real ones.

 

The other characters on the album cover are inter alia musicians, writers and film stars. Amongst them are also some Indian gurus at George Harrison's request. 

 

This cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is actually not the original one. Because some people from the original cover are cancelled from this version. One of them was Leo Gorcey. He was remover from the album cover, when a fee of $400 had been requested for the use of hise likeness. The Indian politician Gandhi was also removed, because his appearence would lead to lower sales of the album in India. Another removed person is Jesus Christ, because John Lennon requested so. Other removed characters are Adolf Hitler and Germán Valdés.

 

At first sight you think you just see the Beatles in front of a bunch of people. But later on, when you take a closer look, you see that that bunch of people contains all sort of famous characters. This may lead to confusion and because of that confusion people start to think about the ideas of the photographed characters on the album cover.

 

A lot of parodies have been made of this Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. These are just a few examples: