...Well, tomorrow really as it was the Saturday that Sgt. Pepper was released. There must have been some considerable advance publicity for, though more a Stones than a Beatles boy, I dashed from the house early sans breakfast in order to be outside the one and only record shop in town prompt at nine ack emma in order to be the first kid on the block with the album. (Did we not call them 'LPs' in fact in those distant days? 'Album', I suspect, being a later American import.)
Bedroom windows thrown wide open in order that the neighbours should not escape the honour of hearing this strange new music - and strange we knew it would be - I belted through the whole album (let us stick to modern terminology) time and time again. Actually it was as much the sleeve that first drew the studied attention: did I know who all these people were - I doubt I did - but the Beatles' clothes, oh my weren't they wonderful?
Psychedelia and Surrey met face to face. In fairness then I should blame the Beatles and not my juvenile desperate taste for the subsequent flood of crushed velvet loons or flowered shirts with wing collars borrowed from a Jumbo jet. (The wearing of a black velvet suit to the funeral of a senior family member was not well received, though one suspected Granny would have understood - she was always the subversive one.)
But though 'Day in the Life' did signify, Sgt. Pepper was not the turning point. That point had been turned and with far more vigour by others already. There was something of the 'us too' about the album. The Beatles showed they could do white magic. How clever of them. But then came the Maharishi and all that silly nonsense with a palpable fraud.
For some of us had already heard Frank Zappa's 'Freak Out!', which came out just as The Beatles started recording Sgt. Pepper. So too had they it seems. Canny lads. Typical Scousers.
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