Paul McCartney has explained how he came up with the title ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, the iconic album for the Beatles.
The singer spoke about the inspiration behind the album’s name on his podcast: Paul McCartney: A Life In Lyrics.
In the episode, the music legend explained how the he came up with the iconic album cover, which featured many celebrities and famous people over the years.
“will you pass the salt and pepper”
On a recent episode of his podcast, Paul McCartney said that the naming of this album came about following a misunderstanding with one of his road crew.
“I was with our roadie Mal [Evans], a big bear of a man,” McCartney said.
He continued, “I was coming back on the plane, and he said, ‘Will you pass the salt and pepper?’ And I misheard him. I said, ‘What? Sgt. Pepper?’ He said, ‘No, salt and pepper”.
“And I always returned to one of the things about the Beatles, and me and John [Lennon], was that we noticed accidents”.
McCartney also added, “I want each of us to come up with a list of favourite people… because we’ll have pictures of them”.
“If you’ve got a passion for something, you want to be thorough. I think that’s the thing sticking with it means that you’re actually thinking about it and thinking, ‘Well, if we’re going to call it ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, what does it look like?’”.
“I do think that I have always had the totality thing where music, theatre, performances, are concerned. So I’ve always been very involved in that, the Beatles thing. The idea that we had a uniform was sort of one of the original ideas”.
Paul McCartney On The “four space cadets”
The episode also saw Paul McCartney reveal that the album’s approach came from “these four space cadets in this “slightly weird band”.
He also added, “So we’re not going to be the Beatles, which we’re now getting a little bit sort of inhibited by having to be ‘Those boys.’ We’ll now just shuffle that away and we’ll be these guys”.
On his podcast, Paul McCartney also spoke about his favourite Beatles song. More on this from Nova here.
