Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Recorded between November 1966 and April 1967 across more than 700 studio hours — a previously unimaginable quantity — Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band emerged from the band's first period away from the road since 1962. McCartney conceived it as the work of an Edwardian-revival alter-ego band, partly to free The Beatles from being themselves, partly because the live-touring penny had finally dropped. Brian Epstein, the manager who had made them famous, would die of an accidental overdose in August 1967, four months after Pepper's release.

Two synced four-track Studer J37 machines were used to give an ad-hoc 8-track capability — extensive bounce-downs were the cost. Geoff Emerick remained engineer, Richard Lush and Ken Townsend his seconds. Townsend's invention of Artificial Double Tracking (ADT) was used everywhere; the Leslie cabinet became Lennon's preferred vocal effect; the pianos were close-miked and limited to within an inch of their lives. The orchestral session for A Day in the Life on 10 February 1967 was open to friends — Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, Mike Nesmith, Pattie Boyd among them — and was filmed for a TV special that never aired.

A Day in the Life welds two unfinished Lennon and McCartney songs together by means of a 41-musician orchestral glissando from low E to high E (the players were instructed only on the start and finish notes; how they got there was up to them). Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, taken from a drawing by 4-year-old Julian Lennon. Within You Without You, George's dronesome statement of Indian classical philosophy, opens side two. She's Leaving Home borrowed its plot from a Daily Mirror story about a runaway and was the only Pepper track without any Beatle playing an instrument.

Released 1 June 1967, in the week the BBC banned A Day in the Life for its 'Found My Way Upstairs and Had a Smoke' line. Twenty-seven weeks at UK number one. The Peter Blake / Jann Haworth cover assembled 57 cardboard celebrities (Mae West, Aleister Crowley, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Bob Dylan, the band themselves in Madame Tussauds form) and contained a printed lyric sheet on the back — the first time any LP had done so.

Sgt. Pepper made the album the dominant unit of pop attention. It established the LP as an art-form requiring sleeve, lyrics, narrative and conceptual framing — and made every subsequent significant album, from The Who Sell Out to OK Computer, make its case to the same standard. Its critical reputation has fluctuated since (it now polls behind Revolver in many lists) but its cultural pivot remains undisputed.