It was 50 years ago (yes-)today
Sergeant Pepper sold his soul to lay
The roots for all that afterwards came
Even though most of it was pretty lame
So even though I’m not for bossing
I’m gonna curse you with a fucking zebra crossing

(Altogether!)

Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club ba-a-a-and,

Trumpets, etc., etc., etc…

I’m so fucking old that I remember vividly when Abbey Road came out. Because the Beatles invented ‘hype’. Without ever doing anything. A Beatles album was just an event of massive world-wide excitement and significance. They were ‘hype’.

That was 1969.

Two years before, my brother was 14 and already something of a genius of the electronic variety. So he’d made a little amplifier which could play the new-tangled ‘thing’ which was called ‘stereo’. Music out of not one, but TWO channels. Before that we just had… music. But stereophonic sound gave you two different tracks played on either side which ‘made you feel like you were there’. And Brother made his little amp from egg cartons, empty washing-up bottles, discarded razor blades, some wire and a transistor. We didn’t even know if it would work because no albums had been recorded ‘in stereo’.

Then we bought Sergeant Pepper. Which was so recorded. And we put it on, plugged in (sellotape, sticking plaster and string) the headphones (we didn’t own TWO speakers) and I remember listening to ‘Lucy in the Sky’ with the sound swirling round my head magically and thinking ‘this is so good I need to get some serious mind-bending drugs for my barmitzvah’. The sound was just spectacular. Because if you make an album that is destined to sell 12 billion copies, you just don’t need to skimp on the technical or the innovations.

The cover for the Abbey Road album was shot outside their studios, in Abbey Road. And in fact yesterday was NOT the 50th anniversary of the album, which is next month, but of the (fucking) photo being taken. If you can believe how… fanny, fans can get. I’m not sure if its a more iconic album cover than Sergeant Pepper’s, but it is by far the most damaging. As it inspires ‘pilgrims’ (read: tossers) to walk across that crossing at all times of every day and every night, having their photo taken “right where John, Paul, George and Ringo did!!!!!” Tossers. The traffic tails back to the Euston Road as the crossers stop to pose, then the next, then the next, then… ad infinitum. And much as I love the right of anyone to be a total tosser (mobile phone users excepted) I just always see these people and think: GET A LIFE!! Though I’m normally thinking that inside my car creeping along at 3 metres an hour and late for whatever.

Zero tolerance. To anything. That’s what we need. All my troubles seemed so far away.

Happy Friday

A xxxx