Is Sgt Pepper the Greatest Album of All Time

Probably not, but......

In order to decide which Beatles album other records are better than, we need to set a scale of Beatles albums to compare them against. This is part two of that quest. If Revolver isn’t the greatest album of all time, but merely a flawed 7/10, could Sgt Pepper, the other Beatles album often claimed to be the Greatest of All Time, actually be the GREATEST OF ALL TIME?

Let’s see.

As mentioned previously, my parents had only two pop albums growing up and listened to Radios 3 and 4, so I had to do my discovering of pop music by myself. My earliest pop memories are discussions of ‘Uptown Girl’ and ‘Call Me Al’, and a joke about the Police that (I think) ended with the punchline ‘Under a vest’ in the school playground, Kajagoogoo on Saturday Superstore and some free pop stickers from weetabix (see below, there’s Kajagoogoo again). Around this time I also knew Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Yellow Submarine, and as I was about 8 years old, thought they were great.

Anyway sometime in the mid to late 80s I ended up with a tape of Sgt Pepper. I don’t think that I knew of it’s legendary status. Instead it was the album with Lucy in the Sky, and the song that was the theme music to ‘Points of View’ (When I’m 64), a silly song about a circus (Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite), a song about a brass band (the title track), a song about waking up (Good Morning, Good Morning), a song about a traffic warden (Lovely Rita), a song about friendship (With A Little Help from My Friends), a song about getting the bus (A Day in the Life), and some other songs that were honestly a bit boring and grown up, if you’re 8.

Fast forward a year or so to 1988 and we’ve moved to Aberdeen, I have my own radio, so can listen to the charts, and because we’re in Scotland we hear a lot of local boys Wet Wet Wet, who’s ‘Wishing I was Lucky’ really wasn’t too bad. The big Saturday night TV programme is Esther Ranzen’s ‘That’s Life’; we watched it for the oddly shaped vegetables and dogs saying sausages, but there was also the serious side of launching Childline, which involved re-recording the by now 20 year old Sgt Pepper with contemporary pop and indie artists as Sgt Pepper Knew My Father. The confluence of these two events meant that I ended up with the 7” pictured below, which is almost certainly the worst record I own. This is not because of the Wets, but because on the double A side Billy Bragg cannot sing and is covering Beatles dirge worse than Eleanor Rigby.

So that’s my history with Sgt Pepper. Come 1994-95 when Oasis arrive and everyone is Beatles crazy, I picked up CDs of Revolver, Rubber Soul, The Beatles and Abbey Road. I never went back to Sgt Pepper. It may have sounded incredible in 1968, the first time a band had access to a 24 track studio. It may have sounded good when I was 8. But by the mid-nineties to me it sounded horribly dated, even compared to the Beatles other work. Too many kids songs. Too many drugs.

Admittedly, ‘A Day in the Life’ is magnificent, probably the Beatles best song. There’s nothing wrong with ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ (though I prefer the version on Anthology 2; similarly there’s a better, rockier version of the title track) or ‘Within You Without’ (which I definitely did not get as a kid). But, ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is a dirge, the kids songs are great but for kids, and you know what, it’s influential, it’s a 8/10 if you’re 8 years old. It’s a 6/10 as an adult - but as with Revolver, if they’d replaced a couple of the weaker tracks with Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane (a 10/10, contemporaneous double A side single) you’d be looking at a 7 or maybe even a 8/10.

Next: a Beatles Album that is good all the way through, because that’s only fair.