Iconic Album Cover Designs - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The late 60’s through to the mid-70’s produced some of the finest and memorable music ever committed to the audio medium. It was also a time when not only the album or long player was maturing into an art form of its own, but the graphic design of album covers produced instantly recognisable icons that succeeded in their purpose of branding the album as a separate, yet intertwined, product to the band.

This series aims to celebrate these individual covers, focusing on the conception, the production, and the joy they’ve brought to millions.

And so we kick off with perhaps the most iconic album cover ever. In writing a series that celebrates these designs you can’t go far wrong in starting with the granddaddy of them all, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It’s not just an album cover, but an icon of the 20th Century in its own right. I’m sure you don’t need an image to know what it looks like, as at the very least you’ll be able to conjure up a visual representation of varying detail in your mind. This is testament to how album and cover have become ingrained in our consciouses in the 41 years since its release.

The man responsible for its design was a British Pop artist named Peter Blake.

Blake came to prominence in the early 60’s when some of his work was exhibited alongside the already established David Hockney; he was also featured in a documentary "Pop Goes the Easel", by controversial film director Ken Russell.

The cover itself, should we need reminding, features John, Paul, George, and Ringo dressed in brightly coloured military attire, in their guise as the ‘Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band’. They are surrounded on all sides by an array of famous faces, including waxwork versions of their younger selves, borrowed from the Madame Tussauds museum. Also featured, in a list of more than 70, are Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and HG Wells. They are grouped together like a huddle of funeral mourners in front of a floral tribute spelling out the band name. This concept is said to be symbolic of the Beatles burying their old image as the innocent, ‘mop-top’ rock ‘n’ rollers, for the more serious songwriters and album-orientated band they were set to become. In fact, Sgt. Pepper wasn’t only a turning point in the career of the Beatles, but it led what was to be a turning point for popular music and rock in general.

The psychedelic movement brought about a tide of musical experimentation on a never before seen scale. This flowed over into not only magnificent and startlingly original album cover design, but also live performances, which for a short period of time became ‘events’ and ‘happenings’, incorporating all manner of visual mediums. Incidentally it was when they began recording this album that the Beatles announced they were to quit touring.

Interestingly there were a number of famous faces that were omitted from the final cover shoot. John Lennon had requested the inclusion of both Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, but both were removed for fear of causing offence, particularly so close to Lennon’s ‘... bigger than Jesus...’ statement. Mahatma Gandhi was also excluded at the behest of EMI so as not to offend the Indian market. Elvis Presley was removed for reasons that have remained unknown, and there are a few others, Judy Garland included, who were abandoned because they requested a fee for the use of their likeness.

Peter Blake had originally intended the cover to show the Sgt. Pepper band performing in a park, a common Sunday morning sight at bandstands across Britain in those days. Of course, the twist would’ve been the brightly coloured, day-glo uniforms they wore, but this concept eventually became the cover we all know today.

The list of faces to be included was compiled by the band (excluding Ringo Starr), Blake, and his wife, Jan Hawort, and rendered as life-size cut-outs. The collage that makes up the cover was the assembled by Blake and his wife at the studio of Michael Cooper, the photographer responsible for the finished shots.

The album was eventually issued as a gatefold LP, one of the first of its kind, but this was due to the original intention of it being a double LP. The covers had already gone to print when it was realised that there would not be enough material to fill two slices of vinyl.

Released in 1967, the cover went on to win the Grammy award for ‘Best Album Cover’ in 1968.

As stated at the beginning of this article, it has since gone on be one of the most widely recognised album cover images in existence, and this has led to it being affectionately parodied to this day still. What better testament is there to its enduring resonance and impact?