The Beatles’ eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in May 1967, has one of the most famous album sleeves in music history. It was designed by the then-married couple Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. Blake is renowned as a pioneer of British pop art (Barber). He does both commercial and more traditional works that are displayed in exhibitions and museums. Though he did not do other work for the Beatles, Blake’s portfolio includes album covers for The Who, Paul Weller, and the Live Aid poster (BBC). As for Jann Haworth, her portfolio does not include other musical commissions, but she did other collages of people, like her mural Work in Progress, and even did a modernized version of Sgt. Pepper for Salt Lake City, called SLC Pepper. This new version has none of the original figures, except for a metal cutout of the Beatles, though their faces and hands are hollowed to allow the visitors to be included in the piece (Haworth). 

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Sgt. Pepper’s art was achieved by arranging a careful selection of life-sized famous figures as a crowd behind the band, with some of Madame Tussaud’s wax statues and cloth dolls added into the mix (Thorpe). The drum was painted to have the name of the album, and the band’s name which was written in flowers . 

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Both the music and the artwork are heavily influenced by 1960s culture. As Paul McCartney said, “the Beatles weren't the leaders of the generation but the spokesmen.” There is a connection to be made between the duality of low and high art in both the art style and the music. Pop art, the cover’s art style, uses ‘low’ art elements to make ‘high’ art. Here, it is the use of pop culture elements with other artistic techniques like painting that make it so. The music itself is a blend of art music and pop music; in a way, the rock and pop music of the Beatles appealed to a wide and vast audience, while the techniques and sounds used to produce the songs were experimental and innovative (Beatles). For example, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has a multimetric rhythm, uses a variety of instruments (like the organ and the tambura), and experiments with Leslie speakers, reverb, and delays (Cristofaro). However, the lyrics are universal: simple, easy to understand, they describe a childlike, hazy world, and do not tackle any heavy theme. 

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Another way the album is entrenched in 1960s culture is in its use of pop culture and the counterculture movement. In the music, we can hear the influence of drugs, popular at the time, through the psychedelic style of some songs, or even the multiple drug references. In the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” for example, many think that the title is a veiled reference to LSD and that the song reflects the hazy feeling of an acid trip (Flood). A key aspect of the hippie movement was to turn towards alternative religions, mostly from India. On the cover art, this can be seen with the figurines representing Buddah and Lakshmi, or with the inclusion of multiple gurus of the Self-Realization Fellowship (Wikipedia). The song “Within You Without You” is a good representation of that turn towards eastern culture. Not only is the music heavily influenced and inspired by Indian classical music, the lyrics also reference a lot of the Hippies’ values and beliefs. For example, the line “With our love, we could save the world, if only they knew” alludes to their ‘peace and love’ mentality. 

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I think that Sgt. Pepper is so deeply rooted in the culture of the 1960s that listening to the album and seeing the art is like experiencing time travel. However, this makes it a little hard for me to connect with it, since psychedelia and the Hippies’ movement are not my reality. The experimental sounds in certain songs, with reverb and the heavy distortion, are also not sounds I really enjoy listening to, but I do think, however, that the album is a very interesting piece of art, as well as an historical artefact, in a way. Multiple songs, like “Within You Without You” have beautiful lyrics and an unusual, though pleasant, sound, which proves once again the musical genius of the Beatles.