The establishment and the elder generation preferred pop music resembling Irwing Berlin´s songs in the 1930s. The Beatle music was too bluesy or expressive for the elder. The establishment and the elder generation didn´t discover The Beatles when they made their breakthrough in 1963.It was the youth. The reason why the album became so famous is this, as I see it. People would have to say, ‘What?’ We’d had quite a few pun titles – Rubber Soul, Revolver – so this was to get away from all that. I wanted a string of those things because I thought that would be a natty idea instead of a catchy title. The idea was just take any words that would flow. The idea was to be a little more funky, that’s what everybody was doing. That’d be crazy enough because why would a Lonely Hearts Club have a band? If it had been Sergeant Pepper’s British Legion Band, that’s more understandable. I just fantasised, well, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. All that culture of the sixties going back to those travelling medicine men, Gypsies, it echoed back to the previous century really. I just strung those together rather in the way that you might string together Dr Hook and the Medicine Show. There’s lot of those about, the equivalent of a dating agency now. Then, ‘Lonely Hearts Club’, that’s a good one. So I said, ‘Sergeant Pepper,’ just to vary it, ‘Sergeant Pepper, salt and pepper,’ an aural pun, not mishearing him but just playing with the words. Mal said, ‘What’s that mean? Oh, salt and pepper.’ We had a joke about that. Me and Mal often bantered words about which led to the rumour that he thought of the name Sergeant Pepper, but I think it would be much more likely that it was me saying, ‘Think of names.’ We were having our meal and they had those little packets marked ‘S’ and ‘P’. I thought we can run this philosophy through the whole album: with this alter-ego band, it won’t be us making all that sound, it won’t be the Beatles, it’ll be this other band, so we’ll be able to lose our identities in this. We could say, ‘How would somebody else sing this? He might approach it a bit more sarcastically, perhaps.’ So I had this idea of giving the Beatles alter egos simply to get a different approach then when John came up to the microphone or I did, it wouldn’t be John or Paul singing, it would be the members of this band. What would really be interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know. Then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. There was now more to it not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach.
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