Sergeant Pepper

I'm trying to be more disciplined, and to post something every day . . . but I was just too late getting back in last night, so this is what I would have posted yesterday . . .

Fifty years since Sergeant Pepper! This is the album that arguably changed everything, or at any rate it changed quite a lot. It was a remarkable achievement that had in its time a considerable impact on the world of popular music, and for that matter still does today.  It was certainly one of the significant steps that helped cement popular music as a serious art form, and no longer just "entertainment".

All I can really comment on, though, is its impact on me, at that time a somewhat green and naive sixth former at a small boarding school in the Midlands. Looking back, I'm a little amused at just how little we knew about life, for all that we tried to present ourselves as young men of the world. I guess we were aware of the existence of hallucinogenic drugs, but Woodbines and black coffee were pretty much the limit of our experience, as we listened to "Sergeant Pepper" in the dubious comfort of our rather ramshackle sixth form study. Even the village fish and chip shop was considered morally dubious, as I recall.

I was, therefore, especially susceptible to this strange new record, with its window into a world very different from mine at the time, but which, at the age of sixteen, I couldn't wait to become part of. Whenever I listen to it, each song sparks into life some particular memory, not so much of places, people or events so much as of how I felt at the time, of the dreams and longings we had. But they are all positive memories. I've always been a Beatles fan - not to the exclusion of other bands and singers, nor for that matter of other types of music, but the Beatles had been there throughout my adolescence, the musical backdrop to some times of utter misery and genuine pain, but also to my hopes, expectations and dreams, to the first confusing experiences of sexual identity, to the first breathtaking goes on that fairground ride called love.

And now, this! It's not my favourite album; it's not even my favourite Beatles album, which is, for the record, "Revolver". But it remains a (maybe the) pivotal moment in popular music, and in me. And fifty years on, as I look back and listen again, the sheer eclecticism of it all still thrills me, as does the fact that here was something that no-one had really ever done before. I'm reminded, too, that some of those dreams and hopes I had never did get achieved, and time is getting short. I'm not yet ready to stop . . .