Comments on: “the note that she hoped would say more”: sergeant pepper five decades on https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on Lollards in the high church of low culture Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:40:31 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: when the gang chooses you: or how the puffin club turned me into a punk rocker – hashtag tashlan https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on/comment-page-1#comment-2362172 Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:40:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30260#comment-2362172 […] 1: The 10-ish years covered the time from the first LP that mattered to me, though bought by my dad for my mum: Sergeant Pepper. Here’s a post on that. […]

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By: tmsky https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on/comment-page-1#comment-2165843 Sun, 11 Jun 2017 17:09:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30260#comment-2165843 many thanks

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By: Paulito https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on/comment-page-1#comment-2163471 Wed, 07 Jun 2017 23:16:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30260#comment-2163471 Fantastic post, Mark. Great contributions above too. Nice to see the underrated “Fixing a Hole” is your favourite, Lonepilgrim! I love its abstracted, day-dreamy quality and the sheer amount of space in the arrangement. Those qualities, for me, make it a less ‘heavy’ cousin of “A Day in the Life” (these being my joint favourites on the album along with “She’s Leaving Home”).

That’s a well-made point about Pepper being a more muscular album – in parts, anyway – than it’s given credit for. The tracks you mention, along with “Lovely Rita”, all rock fairly hard. Yes, there’s some whimsy elsewhere: I find “Within You Without You” turgid and pretentious (sorry Mark!), and “When I’m 64” is charming but a tad twee for my tastes. Generally, though, the album’s music hall elements – so often derided by iconoclast journos in later years – are finely balanced and wedded with contemporaneous rock in delightfully imaginative ways. The highlight in this respect is surely “…Mr. Kite”, an astonishing cornucopia of sound and image that brings to life a Victorian circus in all its dizzying danger and grotesquerie.

Track for track, ‘Pepper’ may not be their best album but, as pointed out by many far more eloquent commentators than I, its greatness lies in far more than just the music: its art-concept, its visuals, its packaging and above all, its status as a cultural touchstone. It’s surely also their most evocative album – such is the vividness of its lyrics, arrangements and production that almost every track seems to transport the listener to a kind of otherworld. More than any other Beatles album, listening to ‘Pepper’ today still conjures up all the same images and emotions it did when I first heard it as a ten year old kid almost 30 years ago.

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on/comment-page-1#comment-2161268 Sun, 04 Jun 2017 22:16:41 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30260#comment-2161268 My father gave my mother Revolver for her (45th) birthday in 1966, and Pepper the following year; I remember he specifically chose the mono pressings, on the penny-wise basis that we didn’t have a stereo system. (No more we did, until all of two years later.) I think we – specifically my teenage sisters – got far more use out of them than our mother did.

I also turned seven in 1967, a few days after my Mum’s birthday. I liked a lot of Pepper – I remember thinking ADITL was very profound and mysterious – but I have to say a lot of it went over my head. I remember asking my mother if she thought my sisters would eventually leave home at 5.00 a.m. one day, leaving a note ect ect. She said she hoped not, but I couldn’t quite work out what would make the difference. I found SLH puzzling all round, in fact – in the chorus, who were all these young men lamenting that they’d sacrificed everything for this girl?

These days I think my favourite track is Good Morning Good Morning (speaking of songs that went right over my head at the time). As well as the sound – which is at once ferocious and ferociously controlled – I like the nihilism of it and the open-endedness: is he skiving off work for one day or is he having a breakdown and walking out of his life? We’ll never know.

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By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/06/the-note-that-she-hoped-would-say-more-sergeant-pepper-five-decades-on/comment-page-1#comment-2160985 Sun, 04 Jun 2017 14:30:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30260#comment-2160985 thanks for this Mark.
My dad bought the LP some time in the summer of 1967 – possibly because of the positive Times review that you mention – but apart from a copy of the ‘She Loves You’ single and an Edith Piaf EP this was the only pop music my parents owned. They went on to get the Magical Mystery EP but then their interest ceased for a while. I too was seven when Pepper was released and my sister was also five at the time. We also cut out the Peter Blake inserts and I would ponder the mystery of the lyrics – unless we too were jigging around the room. I used to find ‘She’s leaving home’ almost unbearably sad then and it kindled a life long suspicion of men ‘in the motor trade’. One of the qualities I admire about the Beatles is their inclusiveness and it’s one of the chief strengths of the album IMO that it can be enjoyed (probably more) without picking up on the drug/counter culture references.
About 5 years later we got our first portable cassette player and I persuaded my dad to get Revolver as our first cassette. I enjoyed it as much as, not more than, Pepper – but gradually years of reading the music press – and not actually listen to Pepper – encouraged me to assume the common wisdom that Revolver was the superior album.
It was Marcello’s review over at Then Play Long that persuaded me to revisit the album and to listen to it after possibly a 30 year gap – this time with over 30 years exposure to a variety of different music pre and post Pepper. What surprised me – after years of assuming that it was a rather insipid confection of harpsichords and mellotrons – was how muscular and Rock-y it was. (cf title track/ Getting Better/ Good Morning). It had far more in common with the White Album than I imagined. It splits the difference between its predecessor and successor in terms of studio trickery and ‘back to basics’.
I listen to the album quite a lot now – partly out of nostalgia but largely because I still enjoy it.
Favourite track: Fixing a Hole

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