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As anyone remotely interested in rock music knows, The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band regularly features in lists of all-time greatest albums.
As the 50th anniversary of its release hits us, people will argue over whether it's The Beatles' greatest album or their most influential.
Is it better than The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds? Would it have been better if it had included Strawberry Fields Forever?
Right now a new deluxe box set is available with alternative takes, remixes, studio banter and backing tracks all intended to show us how it was done and of course to make a lot of money.
Sadly all this only serves to miss the point of Sgt Pepper and to drag it into exactly the mundane and confining everyday world inhabited by winners and losers, best and better, that The Beatles were rebelling against when they made the album.
The lasting power of Sgt Pepper starts in realising first what it is not.
Some have called it the birth of the "rock" album. It isn't.
First of all, and this is part of its power, it isn't a rock record. It is a glorious amalgam of music hall, nursery rhymes, Indian music, blues and classical music.
Second up, it isn't even the first coherent long player. Bob Dylan had done that in creating Highway 61 Revisited.
Others call it a psychedelic masterpiece that offers a nudge and wink about drug use and yet if you listen, and I mean really listen, to either Highway 61 or Blonde on Blonde you find immediately much more articulate reflections of altered reality and the revolution in the head that was changing western society in 1966-67.
When Dylan sings on Highway 61's Tombstone Blues:
The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers are trying to endorse
The re-incarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous.
His senses are deranged and he's delivering a work of art that cuts a hole in the heart of American politics and materialism in a way the Beatles would never dare to do.
The power of Sgt Pepper lies in the fact it is a wolf in sheep's clothing, documenting competing realities. The dilemma for the Beatles was how to do this truthfully without sacrificing their considerable popularity and power over their audience.
Perhaps the genius of Pepper is it's sometimes saccharine packaging — and there is much of it along the way — that disguises precisely what's on the sugar cube. Acid, LSD and all that goes with it. A mind-altering view of the world.
The album has at its heart one question: How does mankind, capable of great insight, reconcile its dreams with everyday reality?
As Paul McCartney remarked in an interview at the time, when asked about the impact of taking LSD, "we only use one tenth of our brain, imagine what we all could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part?"
Sgt Pepper born out of moment full of danger
Pepper is utterly subversive and confronting without appearing to be so.
When McCartney created the idea of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band he did so because he misheard a friend saying pass the salt and pepper.
But the idea of a band being created as an alter ego to the Beatles was a powerful one.
Like other artists before and after, the alter ego allowed the Beatles to push the boundaries of what a modern record album might be and do.
It's easy to forget their records had been burnt in America.
Their greatest single record at that point had failed to reach number one and many were suggesting they were past their best.
Confronted by this they did what any great artist does: they ignored the public, pointed their middle finger at the sky and followed their instinct.
As the rock critic Paul Williams observed more generally, this was the moment when an artist breaks free of the expectations of their audience. It's a moment full of danger.
I'm not going to bore you with a track by track analysis of the album, but if you take the song cycle that makes up the first side of the record after the introductory Sgt Pepper it is a work of remarkable and understated coherence.
Very much like a child's story book revealing a simple and yet a profound truth.
To open with a song like With a Little Help from My Friends sung by the least accomplished singer in the group is risky stuff but suggests an artistic high-wire act like nothing ever seen before.
The point is the apparently simple verses are set in counterpoint to a series of uncomfortable questions highlighted by the line,
"What do you see when you turn out the light, I can't tell you but I know it's mine".
Lucy in the Sky takes on the theme where a delightful melody accompanies a mind altering scene only to be sonically smashed by a thumping chorus of horrible benignity.
Arguments about the art miss the point
An argument can be made that Sgt Pepper would have been better if Strawberry Fields Forever had been included along with Penny Lane … but that again misses the point.
Each song on the album confronts the growing gap between a generation unprepared to accept the apparent truths handed down by their parents and the new reality brought on by intellectual rebellion, a more open society, technology and the use of mind-altering drugs.
The Beatles have always been coy about the relationship between their art and the chemicals they ingested.
The reality is it's entirely possible they may not have realised consciously the impact they were having.
The Beatles themselves admit that when George Harrison turned up with the song that opens side two, Within You Without You, they simply indulged George with his Indian thing.
Curiously, it now stands as one of the centrepieces on the album — because it precisely and less deceptively tackles the themes apparent on the rest of the record.
How do we gain self knowledge and then even if we do, how do we use it? How does mankind seek perfection? How can we be truly happy?
It's a testimony to the subversive nature of the record that even when John Lennon reveals his sometimes violent nature directed to his "woman" this was barely remarked on but horribly revealing.
Celebrate Sgt Pepper for what it is
Books have been filled with reflections about the final track on the album: A Day in the Life.
It's a song that begins as a dreamscape with Lennon singing a song inspired by the story of Tara Browne dying in a motor car crash.
Tara was the archetypical scenester of London in that period.
Lennon's observations, "he blew his mind out in a car, he didn't notice that the lights had changed", are chilling in their matter-of-factness, and yet they remain a warning metaphor of a looming future where excess reigns.
Each successive other-worldly observation of Lennon's about the English army and holes in the road are married to McCartney's depictions of a person making their way in the workaday world.
At each turn we hear the refrain I'd Love to Turn You On, but there is nothing saccharine about this.
A Day in the Life documents the search for awareness and the dangers when we think and see too much.
The BBC's response? Let's ban the song. Perhaps they understood the real import of the work. It wasn't nice, it wasn't comfortable and it wasn't safe. It was a work full of ambiguity.
This is the power of Pepper. It was, and is, its subversion of pop to produce art that matters.
Listen to it, wallow in it, celebrate it for what it is and the next time you see a list, throw it in the bin.
Topics: music, arts-and-entertainment, united-kingdom