A Dash of Pepper

THE TIME had come for experiment. The Beatles knew it, and I knew it. By November 1966 we had had an enormous string of hits, and we had the confidence, even arrogance, to know that we could try anything we wanted. The sales we had achieved would have justified our record­ing rubbish, if we had wanted to. But then, we wouldn’t have got away with foisting rubbish on the public for long.

The single of ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and the album Revolver, had been issued in August that year. So it was several months since we had been in the studio, and time for us to think about a new album. ‘New’ was certainly how it was to turn out.

I suppose the indications were already there. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, from Revolver, had been strong hints for those with ears to hear what was to come. They were forerunners of a complete change of style. Even I didn’t realise at the time how significant it was, nor the reasons for it. Flower Power and the hippy and drug revolution had been taking place, affecting the boys in front of my very eyes, yet my own brand of naivety had prevented me from seeing the whole thing for what it really was. I hardly knew what pot smelled like, although it was right under my nose! But I did realise that something was happening in the music, and that excited me.

Strangely, the Sergeant Pepper album originated with a song which was never on it, ‘Strawberry Fields’. That November John came into the studio, and we went into our regular routine. I sat on my high stool with Paul standing beside me, and John stood in front of us with his acoustic guitar and sang the song. It was absolutely lovely. Then we tried it with Ringo on drums, and Paul and George on their bass and electric guitars. It started to get heavy - it wasn’t the gentle song that I had first heard. We ended up with a record which was very good heavy rock. Still, that was apparently what John wanted, so I metaphorically shrugged my shoulders and said: ‘Well, that really wasn’t what I’d thought of, but it’s O.K.’ And off John went.

A week later he came back and said: ‘I’ve been thinking about it, too, George. Maybe what we did was wrong. I think we ought to have another go at doing it.’ Up to that time we had never remade anything. We reckoned that if it didn’t work out first time, we shouldn’t do it again. But this time we did. ‘Maybe we should do it differently,’ said John. Td like you to score something for it. Maybe we should have a bit of strings, or brass or something.’ Between us we worked out that I should write for cellos and trumpets, together with the group. When 1 had fin­ished we recorded it again, and I felt that this time it was much better. Off went John again.

A few days later he rang me up and said: ‘I like that one, I really do. But, you know, the other one’s got some­thing, too.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘they’re both good. But aren’t we starting to split hairs?’

Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word ‘split’, because John’s reply was: ‘I like the beginning of the first one, and I like the end of the second one. Why don’t we just join them together?’

‘Well, there are only two things against it,’ I said. ‘One is that they’re in different keys. The other is that they’re in different tempos.’

‘Yeah, but you can do something about it, I know. You can fix it, George.’

John always left this kind of thing to me. He never professed to know anything about recording. He was the least technical of the Beatles. He had a profound faith in my ability to cope with such problems, a faith which was sometimes misplaced, as I certainly felt it was on this occasion. He had presented me with an almost insuperable task. But I had to have a go. I listened to the two versions again, and suddenly realised that with a bit of luck I might get away with it, because, with the way that the keys were arranged, the slower version was a semitone flat compared with the faster one.

1 thought: If I can speed up the one, and slow down the other, I can get the pitches the same. And with any luck, the tempos will be sufficiently close not to be noticeable. I did just that, on a variable-control tape machine, select­ing precisely the right spot to make the cut, to join them as nearly perfectly as possible. That is how ‘Strawberry Fields’ was issued, and that is how it remains today - two recordings.

The next song we recorded was ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’; that was much simpler. It was the kind of vaudeville tune which Paul occasionally came up with, and he said he wanted ‘a kind of tooty sound’. So I scored it for two clarinets and a bass clarinet. I remember recording it in the cavernous Number One studio at Abbey Road, and thinking how the three clarinet players looked as lost as a referee and two linesmen alone in the middle of Wembley Stadium.

Following that came ‘Penny Lane’, which started life as a fairly simple song. But Paul decided he wanted a special sound on it, and one day, after he had been to a concert of Bach’s Brandenburg Concert!, he said: ‘There’s a guy in them playing this fantastic high trumpet.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the piccolo trumpet, the Bach trumpet. Why?’

‘It’s a great sound. Why can’t we use it?’

‘Sure we can,’ I said, and at that he asked me to organise it for him. Now, the normal trumpet is in B flat. But there is also the D trumpet, which is what Bach mostly used, and the F trumpet. In this case, I decided to use a B-flat piccolo trumpet, an octave above the normal. To play it I engaged David Mason, who was with the London Sym­phony Orchestra. It was a difficult session, for two reasons. First, that little trumpet is a devil to play in tune, because it isn’t really in tune with itself, so that in order to achieve pure notes the player has to ‘lip’ each one.

Secondly, we had no music prepared. We just knew that we wanted little piping interjections. We had had expe­rience of professional musicians saying: ‘If the Beatles were real musicians, they’d know what they wanted us to play before we came into the studio.’ Happily, David Mason wasn’t like that at all. By then the Beatles were very big news anyway, and I think he was intrigued to be playing on one of their records, quite apart from being well paid for his trouble. As we came to each little section where we wanted the sound, Paul would think up the notes he wanted, and I would write them down for David. The result was unique, something that had never been done in rock music before, and it gave ‘Penny Lane’ a very distinct character.

Then came Christmas, and we agreed to get together again after they had written some more material. But in the meantime EMI and Brian Epstein had told me that they needed another single, since they hadn’t had one for a while. I said: ‘O.K. It means we’ll have to find extra material for the album, but let’s couple the best two we have so far - ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ - and issue them as a double-A-sided record.’ To this day I cannot imagine why that single was beaten to the number one spot, because for my money it was the best we ever issued. But there it was, and now we were left with ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ on its own for the new album.

We started work again in February 1967, and the boys began bringing in the various songs they had written. But ‘Sergeant Pepper’ itself didn’t appear until halfway through making the album. It was Paul’s song, just an ordinary rock number and not particularly brilliant as songs go. Nor was there anything difficult or special about the recording of it. But when we had finished it, Paul said, ‘Why don’t we make the album as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant Pepper was making the record? We’ll dub in effects and things.’ I loved the idea, and from that moment it was as though Pepper had a life of its own, developing of its own accord rather than through a conscious effort by the Beatles or myself to integrate it and make it a ‘concept’ album.

‘A Little Help from My Friends’, for example, was originally conceived as a separate entity, specially written for Ringo - we always felt there had to be some corner of each album that was for ever Ringo! The boys backed him with vocal choruses and so on, since he never did have a very brilliant voice, but the song suited him admirably.

Again, George’s contribution, ‘Within You Without You’, was, with all deference to George, a rather dreary song, heavily influenced by his obsession with Indian music at that time. I worked very closely with him on the scoring of it, using a string orchestra, and he brought in some friends from the Indian Music Association to play special instruments. I was introduced to the dilruba, an Indian violin, in playing which a lot of sliding techniques are used. This meant that in scoring for that track I had to make the string players play very much like Indian musi­cians, bending the notes, and with slurs between one note and the next.

But even such widely differing songs as these two seemed to merge into the whole once they had become the ‘work’ of Sergeant Pepper himself, from that first moment on the record when you hear the tuning-up noises of the band and the atmosphere of an audience. The way in which the record seemed to generate its own ‘togetherness’ became particularly apparent during the editing. A perfect example of that was ‘Good Morning’, an up-tempo, fairly raucous song with a curious, irregular metre to it. We normally faded out the music at the end of a song, but this time we decided to cover the fade with a host of sound-effects, particularly animals. We shoved everything in, from a pack of hounds in full cry to more basic farmyard noises. The order we had worked out for the album meant that that track was to be followed by a reprise of the ‘Sergeant Pepper’ song, and of course I was trying to make the whole thing flow. So imagine my delight when I dis­covered that the sound of a chicken clucking at the end of ‘Good Morning’ was remarkably like the guitar sound at the beginning of ‘Sergeant Pepper’. I was able to cut and mix the two tracks in such a way that the one actually turned into the other.

That was one of the luckiest edits one could ever get. At other times, we could only fall back on our own mad ideas in order to achieve the effects we wanted: no more so than with ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’. Like most of John’s songs, it was based on something he had seen; he would often pick up a newspaper and see some item which was the spur to a song. In this case it was an old placard for a circus and fair, which he had hanging in his house. It announced, ‘Being for the benefit of Mr Kite, a Grand Circus, the Hendersons, Pablo Fanques’ Fair ...’ and included all the acts which would appear, including Henry the Horse. When we came to the middle section of the song, where ‘Henry the Horse dances the waltz’, we obviously had to go into waltz-time, and John said he wanted the music to ‘swirl up and around’, to give it a circus atmosphere. As usual, having written a great song, he said to me, ‘Do what you can with it,’ and walked away, leaving me to it.

In order to get a hurdy-gurdy effect, I got Mai Evans, the roadie, to play his enormous bass harmonica, while John and I did our thing on two electric organs, a Wurlitzer and a Hammond. John was to play the basic tune, and around it I was to play the swirly noises - chromatic runs based on it. Unfortunately, my digital capacities on an organ fall short of spectacular, and I found that I couldn’t achieve the speed I wanted for these runs. So I told John: ‘What we’ll do is to slow the whole thing down by a half. You play the tune twice as slow and an octave down, and I’ll do my runs as fast as I can, but an octave down as well. Then, when we double the tape speed, it’ll come out all nice and smooth and very swirly.’

Of course, we could always have got a professional organist in to do it, but our attitude was ‘Why the hell! Why should we let someone else in on our fun?’ Besides, we were doing it all off the top of our heads: to bring someone else in would have meant delay and a lot of tedious explanation.

But even when we had done it this new way, it still didn’t sound quite right, and I told John that I would think about it. Then I found the answer. I got together a lot of recordings of old Victorian steam organs - the type you hear playing on carousels at county fairs - playing all the traditional tunes, Sousa marches and so on. But I clearly couldn’t use even a snatch of any of them that would be identifiable; so I dubbed a few of the records on to tape, gave it to the engineer and told him, Til take half a minute of that one, a minute and a half of that one, a minute of that one,’ and so on.

‘Then what do I do with them?’ he asked.

‘You cut that tape up into sections about a foot long ‘

‘What?!!’

‘Cut it up into little parcels about a foot long, and don’t be too careful about the cuts.’

Clearly thinking I had lost my senses, he did it, leaving me with a bunch of pieces of tape some one foot long -about sixty in all. ‘Now what?’

‘Fling them up in the air.’

Believing by now, I suppose, that the world had gone completely insane, he did as asked.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘pick them up in whatever order they come and stick them all back together again.’

The poor chap couldn’t contain himself. ‘What did you do that for?!!’

‘You’ll see,’ I said.

After he had laboriously stuck them all together again, we played the tape and I said: ‘That piece there’s a bit too much like the original. Turn it round the other way, backwards.’ We went on like that until the tape was a whole amalgam of carousel noises, but meaningless in musical terms because it was composed of fragments of tunes connected in a series of fractions of a second. It was an unreal hotch-potch of sound, arrived at without rhyme or reason; but when it was added as a background ‘wash’ to the organ and harmonica track we had already made, it did give an overall impression of being in a circus.

Compared with Paul’s songs, all of which seemed to keep in some sort of touch with reality, John’s had a psychedelic, almost mystical quality. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was a typical John song in that respect, and a lot of analysts and psychiatrists were later to describe it as the drug song of all time. They were talking rubbish, but the tag stuck. I was very offended recently when I saw a television programme about the drug raid, Operation Julie, in which some major world suppliers of LSD were rounded up. The programme was prefaced with ‘Lucy’, as though it were the drug song - a ‘fact’ which people have taken as finally proven simply because ‘Lucy’, ‘Sky’ and ‘Diamonds’ happen to start with the letters LSD.

The gospel truth of the matter is that Julian, John’s young son, came home from school one day carrying a picture of a little girl in a black sky with stars all round her. John asked if he had done the picture, and when Julian said he had, John asked him, ‘What is it, then?’

Julian’s best friend at school was a little girl called Lucy, and he replied, ‘It’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.’

John’s imagery is one of the great things about his work - ‘tangerine trees’, ‘marmalade skies’, ‘cellophane flowers’. I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious, but I always saw him as an aural Salvador Dali, rather than some drug-ridden record artist.

On the other hand, I would be stupid to pretend that drugs didn’t figure quite heavily in the Beatles’ lives at that time. At the same time they knew that I, in my schoolmasterly role, didn’t approve, and like naughty boys they would slope off into the canteen, lock the door and have their joints. Not only was I not into it myself, I couldn’t see the need for it; and there’s no doubt that, if I too had been on dope, Pepper would never have been the album it was. Perhaps it was the combination of dope and no dope that worked, who knows? The fact remains that they often got very giggly, and it frequently interfered with our work; never more so than in the episode with John.

We were overdubbing voices on one of the Pepper tracks, and John, down in the studio, was obviously feeling unwell. I called over the intercom, ‘What’s the matter, John? Aren’t you feeling very well?’

‘No,’ said John.

I went down and looked at him, and he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m feeling very strange.’

He certainly looked very ill, so I told him, ‘You need some fresh air. Let’s leave the others working, and I’ll take you outside.’

The problem was where to go; there were the usual five hundred or so kids waiting for us at the front, keeping vigil like guard-dogs, and if we had dared to appear at the entrance there would have been uproar and they would probably have broken the gates down. So I took him up to the roof, above Number Two studio. I remember it was a lovely night, with very bright stars. Then I suddenly realised that the only protection around the edge of the roof was a parapet about six inches high, with a sheer drop of some ninety feet to the ground below, and I had to tell him, ‘Don’t go too near the edge, there’s no rail there, John.’ We walked around the roof for a while. Then he agreed to come back downstairs, and we packed up for the night.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned what had happened. John was in the habit of taking pills, ‘uppers’, to give him the energy to get through the night. That evening, he had taken the wrong pill by mistake - a very large dose of LSD. But Paul knew, and went home with him and turned on as well, to keep him company. It seems they had a real trip. I knew they smoked pot, and I knew they took pills, but in my innocence I had no idea they were also into LSD.

Paul’s thoughtfulness in going home with John was typical of one of the best sides of his character. But during the making of Pepper he was also to give me one of the biggest hurts of my life. It concerned the song ‘She’s Leaving Home’. At that time I was still having to record all my other artists. One day Paul rang me to say: ‘I’ve got a song I want you to work with me on. Can you come round tomorrow afternoon? I want to get it done quickly. We’ll book an orchestra, and you can score it.’

‘I can’t tomorrow, Paul. I’m recording Cilia at two-thirty.’

‘Come on. You can come round at two o’clock.’ ‘No, I can’t, I’ve got a session on.’

‘All right, then,’ he said, and that ended the con­versation.

What he did then, as I discovered later, was to get Neil Aspinall, the road manager, to ring round and find someone else to do the score for him, simply because I couldn’t do it at that short notice. In the end he found Mike Leander, who could. The following day Paul presented me with it and said, ‘Here we are. I’ve got a score. We can record it low.’

I recorded it, with a few alterations to make it work better, but I was hurt. I thought: Paul, you could have waited. For 1 really couldn’t have done it that afternoon, unless I had just devoted everything to the Beatles and never dealt with any other artist. Paul obviously didn’t think it was important that I should do everything. To me it was. I wasn’t getting much out of it from a financial point of view, but at least I was getting satisfaction. The score itself was good enough, and still holds up today, but it was the only score that was ever done by anyone else during all my time with the Beatles. However, it had happened, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Then we came to the major piece of the whole album, ‘A Day in the Life’. It started out very much as one of John’s songs, culled from the pages of newspapers: ‘I read the news today, oh boy.’ For example, there was the bit where he referred to ‘four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’. Some wizard of analysis claimed that this referred to the holes in a junkie’s arm, but the truth was that John had read a little newspaper piece about the deplorable state of the roads in that town. A local coun­cillor was quoted as saying: ‘It’s about time they did something. Do you know, I’ve been around Blackburn and I’ve counted four thousand holes.’ John simply wrote that into the lyric.

Then John asked Paul if he had anything to go into the middle part of the song, and Paul came up with ‘Woke up, got out of bed . . ‘, which is really a completely dilferent song. But it merged into the other one, because it provided a sort of dream sequence. We divided the two sections with what was in effect a very long musical pause. When we recorded the original track it was just Paul banging away on the same piano note, bar after bar, for twenty-four bars. We agreed that it was a question of ‘This space to be filled later’. In order to keep time, we got Mal Evans to count each bar, and on the record you can still hear his voice as he stood by the piano counting: ‘One - two - three - four. . . .’ For a joke, Mal set an alarm clock to go off at the end of twenty-four bars, and you can hear that too. We left it in because we couldn’t get it off!

The question was, how were we going to fill those twenty-four bars of emptiness? After all, it was pretty boring! So I asked John for his ideas. As always, it was a matter of my trying to get inside his mind, discover what pictures he wanted to paint, and then try to realise them for him. He said: ‘What I’d like to hear is a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world. I’d like it to be from extreme quietness to extreme loudness, not only in volume, but also for the sound to expand as well. I’d like to use a symphony orchestra for it. Tell you what, George, you book a sym­phony orchestra, and we’ll get them in a studio and tell them what to do.’

‘Come on, John,’ I said, ‘there’s no way you can get a symphony orchestra sitting around and say to them, “Look, fellers, this is what you’re going to do.” Because you won’t get them to do what you want them to do. You’ve got to write something down for them.¹

‘Why?’ asked John, with his typically wide-eyed ap­proach to such matters.

‘Because they’re all playing different instruments, and unless you’ve got time to go round each of them individ­ually and see exactly what they do, it just won’t work.’

But he did explain what he wanted sufficiently for me to be able to write a score. For the ‘I’d like to turn you onnnnnnnn . . .’ bit, I used cellos and violas. I had them playing those two notes that echo John’s voice. However, instead of h’ngering their instruments, which would pro­duce crisp notes, I got them to slide their fingers up and down the frets, building in intensity until the start of the orchestral climax.

That climax was something else again. What I did there was to write, at the beginning of the twenty-four bars, the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note each instrument could reach that was near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar. The musicians also had instructions to slide as grace­fully as possible between one note and the next. In the case of the stringed instruments, that was a matter of sliding their fingers up the strings. With keyed instru­ments, like clarinet and oboe, they obviously had to move their fingers from key to key as they went up, but they were asked to ‘lip’ the changes as much as possible too.

I marked the music ‘pianissimo’ at the beginning and ‘fortissimo’ at the end. Everyone was to start as quietly as possible, almost inaudibly, and end in a (metaphorically) lung-bursting tumult. And in addition to this extraordi­nary piece of musical gymnastics, I told them that they were to disobey the most fundamental rule of the orchestra. They were not to listen to their neighbours.

A well-schooled orchestra plays, ideally, like one man, following the leader. I emphasised that this was exactly what they must not do. I told them ‘I want everyone to be individual. It’s every man for himself. Don’t listen to the fellow next to you. If he’s a third away from you, and you think he’s going too fast, let him go. Just do your own slide up, your own way.’ Needless to say, they were amazed. They had certainly never been told that before.

To perform this little extravagance, John and Paul.had asked me for a full symphony orchestra. But although by then I had grown used to pretty lavish outlays where the Beatles were concerned, my sense of EMI-induced caution had not entirely deserted me. So I said: ‘With all due respect, I think it’s a bit silly booking ninety musicians just to get an effect like this.’ So I settled on half a symphony orchestra, with one flute, one oboe, one bassoon, one clarinet and so on, instead of two of each. We ended up with forty-two players.

The recording was to take place in Number One studio at Abbey Road, and we all felt a sense of occasion, since it was the largest orchestra we ever used on a Beatles recording. So I wasn’t all that surprised when Paul rang up and said, ‘Look, do you mind coming in evening dress?’

‘Why? What’s the idea?’

‘We thought we’d have fun. We’ve never had a big orchestra before, so we thought we’d have fun on the night. So will you come in evening dress? And I’d like all the orchestra to come in evening dress, too.’

‘Well, that may cost a bit extra, but we’ll do it,’ I said. ‘What are you going to wear?’

‘Oh, our usual freak-outs’ - by which he meant their gaudy hippie clothes, floral coats and all.

Came the night, and I discovered that they’d also invited along all their way-out friends, like Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Simon and Marijke, the psychedelic artists who were running the Apple shop in Baker Street. They were wandering in and out of the orchestra, passing out sparklers and joints and God knows what, and on top of that they had brought along a mass of party novelties.

After one of the rehearsals I went into the control room to consult Geoff Emerick. When I went back into the studio the sight was unbelievable. The orchestra leader, David McCallum, who used to be the leader of the Royal Philharmonic, was sitting there in a bright red false nose. He looked up at me through paper glasses. Eric Gruenberg, now a soloist and once leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was playing happily away, his left hand per­fectly normal on the strings of his violin, but his bow held in a giant gorilla’s paw. Every member of the orchestra had a funny hat on above the evening dress, and the total effect was completely weird. Somewhere there is a film of the affair, taken by an Indian cameraman the Beatles knew.

The orchestra, of course, thought it was all a stupid giggle and a waste of money, but I think they were carried into the spirit of the party just because it was so ludicrous. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that the only time we have had real objections from an orchestra was during the recording of ‘Hey Jude’, the biggest-selling single of all. I wanted them to sing and clap their hands as well as play, and one man walked out. ‘I’m not going to clap my hands and sing Paul McCartney’s bloody song,’ he said, in spite of the fact that he was getting double rates for his trouble.

In the end, of course, the ‘Day in the Life’ party was not a waste of money, because it produced an incredible piece of recorded sound. In fact, looking back on it, I think I should have been more extravagant and booked a full orchestra. But even so, I ended up with the equivalent of not one but two full orchestras. After rehearsal, we recorded that sound four times, and I added those four separate recordings to each other at slightly different intervals. If you listen closely you can hear the difference. They are not quite together.

That sound was used twice during the song. The first time, we ended it artificially, by literally splitting the tape, leaving silence. There is nothing more electrifying, after a big sound, than complete silence. The second time, of course, came at the end of the record, and for that I wanted a final chord, which we dubbed on later. I wanted that chord to last as long as possible, and I told Geoff Emerick it would be up to him, not the boys, to achieve that. What I did was to get all four Beatles and myself in the studio at three pianos, an upright and two grands. I gave them the bunched chords that they were to play.

Then I called out, ‘Ready? One, two, three - go!’ With that, CRASH! All of us hit the chords as hard as possible. In the control room, Geoff had his faders - which control the volume input from the studio - way, way down at the moment of impact. Then, as the sound died away, he gradually pushed the faders up, while we kept as quiet as the proverbial church mice. In the end, they were so far up, and the microphones so live, that you could hear the air-conditioning. It took forty-five seconds to do, and we did it three or four times, building up a massive sound of piano after piano after piano, all doing the same thing. That chord was a fitting end to ‘A Day in the Life’.

Well, almost the end. When we came to putting the record together, Paul said: ‘You know, when these records are pressed, there’s a run-out groove that takes the needle to and fro to get the automatic change working. Why don’t we put some music in there? Something silly.’

‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘if you want a bit of a joke. I don’t think anyone’s ever done it, but why not?’

‘Let’s go down and do something in the studio, then,’ he said. So the four of them went down and chanted silly little things, each one different, without any sense; ‘yum turn, tim ting’ sort of sounds. I snipped about two seconds off the tape of that and put it into the run-out groove so that it went round and round for ever. Of course, when the record came out, all the fanatics heard this weird noise on the run-out groove and started wondering what it was, and why they had done it. Then the interpretations started. Finally, it came back to rne as the craziest of all Beatle analyses: ‘Hey, if you play that backwards, it says an obscene phrase.’ Well, with a huge stretch of the imagi­nation I suppose it did, but that was certainly never intended. It was simply typical of what the Beatle cult could produce, with every record being turned inside-out and upside-down in an effort to discern hidden meanings.

They even discovered the dog’s recording, which was intended, but only as a private joke; it was never publicly announced. Not content with his nonsense in the run-out groove, Paul had said, ‘We never record anything for animals. You realise that, don’t you? Let’s put on some­thing which only a dog can hear.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘A dog’s audio range is much higher than a human’s. Let’s put on a note of about 20,000 hertz.’ It was a little private signal for dogs. They heard it, all right. But they weren’t Beatle-lovers; they hated it, and they whined whenever it was played. I doubt very much if it’s still there on modern pressings of the record. Know­ing the EMI hierarchy, I expect they have said, ‘It’s a silly waste of time. Snip it off.’ Not being a dog, however, I just don’t know.

When it came to putting the record out, the boys were convinced, rightly, that they had done something really worthwhile, which no one else had ever tried. They were determined that the cover should be equally original. So they got a man called Peter Blake to stage it for them. It cost a great deal. They wanted the faces of all the people they had ever admired to be in the photograph with them, together, just for the heck of it, with a lot of people they didn’t admire at all. They borrowed wax models of them­selves from Madame Tussaud’s, together with the effigies of Diana Dors and Sonny Liston. Well, why not? Marlene Dietrich was there as a cardboard cut-out, along with D. H. Lawrence. Then they added all the things that they felt were indicative of their times: musical instruments, a hookah, a television set . . . and marijuana plants. There was a row about that, naturally.

There was also a row about the cover as a whole. In fact, EMI were, to put it mildly, outraged. They rang me up and said: ‘We can’t have this cover. You can’t put this record out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because ... do you realise? ... all the faces on that cover . . . we’ve got to get permission from every one. We’ve even got to get permission from estates. We know Marilyn Monroe’s dead, but we still have to ask the executors. Same with W. C. Fields. Mae West’s still alive, so we’ll have to ask her direct.’ And so it went on. In some cases, they didn’t know who the people on the cover were, and they would ring up to ask. EMI were worried sick, and I suppose they did have some reason for it. Someone like Marlon Brando might have taken exception. They had to write hundreds of letters all over the world in order to get all the clearances.

On top of everything else, the Beatles decided to have special uniforms made in fine silkwork by Douglas Hay-ward, a trendy tailor of the time. Having donned these uniforms for the photograph, they wanted to hold some very un-Beatle instruments - John a French horn, Ringo a trumpet, Paul a cor anglais, and George a flute. The only trouble was that they didn’t know how to hold them!

But in the end everything turned out all right, like the best fairy stories, and the album was the biggest seller they had ever had. For my part, I felt it was the album which turned the Beatles from being just an ordinary rock-and-roll group into being significant contributors to the history of artistic performance. It was a turning-point -the turning-point. It was the watershed which changed the recording art from something that merely made amusing sounds into something which will stand the test of time as a valid art form: sculpture in music, if you like.

Technically, it was a bit of a nightmare. If I had had eight- or sixteen-track recording facilities, I could have done a much better job. I only had four-track, and I had to stretch it to the limit. Anyone who listens to that record must realise that there have to be more than four tracks to provide the sounds on some of the songs, as indeed there were. What I did was to dub from one four-track machine on to another, sometimes not once but twice. Harking back to what I wrote earlier, that would mean, of course, losing up to nine generations of sound quality. The signal-to-noise ratio, if I dubbed down twice, would be nine times worse.

What I did was this. I would record the rhythm, the loudest part of the recording, on to four original tracks. These I would dub down to one track on a separate machine, leaving me three spare tracks. If I needed more once these had been recorded, I would dub the second lot of four tracks down to two tracks on a third machine, leaving me two more spare tracks. This meant that it was only the original rhythm sound which was impaired nine times in quality, and because of its essential loudness it was unlikely that the listener would be able to hear the quality difference. The second lot of three fresh tracks, when dubbed on to the third machine, would only lose four generations of sound quality. By this technique, I was able to prise up to nine tracks out of our four-track facilities.

That should have been the end of the Sergeant Pepper story as far as I was concerned. But in November 1976, nearly ten years after the album was made, I was approached by Robert Stigwood to do the musical score for the Sergeant Pepper film he was making.

My first inclination was to say no out of hand. I knew in my heart of hearts that the Beatles would not have approved, and, although I don’t need their permission to run my life, I still wondered if it was right to go over old ground. On the other hand, Robert assured me that if I took the job on I would have complete artistic control over the music, and would be able to dictate exactly what it should sound like. In addition he was dangling a small fortune under my nose, more than I had ever had for a film before. Then I asked myself whether I was really thinking of doing it because of the money. If you do something for money which otherwise you don’t want to do, you are doing it for the wrong reason and you shouldn’t do it at all.

I was trying to be honest with myself, but one is seldom sure of one’s own motives in situations like that. In the end it was Judy who made up my mind for me, as wives often do. She said: ‘I understand the problems you’re going through. You want to be sure that you’re doing the right thing artistically. But have you ever considered that if you don’t do it, someone else will, and you will hate what they’ve done? So you won’t be defending the music’s integrity - and on the other hand, if you do it, you’ll be in a position to ensure that the music isn’t maltreated.’ That, and Robert’s promise of total freedom, which in the event was fully honoured, finally decided me.

Shooting was planned to start in April 1977, but then they started having difficulties in getting the right artists. The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton were signed up, but no one was cast for the other roles, and all sorts of names, some plausible, others highly implausible, were being ban­died about. Then there was trouble with the director. The first one they hired was a television director, who proved to be unsuitable, and it took some time to find a replacement.

When they did find him, it was absolutely the right choice - Michael Schultz, who had shot to fame through his direction of the film Car Wash. He and 1 hit it off from the moment we met. I found him very easy to get to know, and, more importantly, we were of one mind about the way the music should be handled. That was fine, but to make a film you need artists, and casting was going very slowly. They got George Burns to play Mr Kite; then there was talk of Mick Jagger for another role, eventually filled by Aerosmith, the American ‘heavy metal’ group. With all these delays, the shooting didn’t finally start until October 1977.

Before that could happen, I had to prepare all the music tracks. Since it was a musical film, all the musical sequences had to be mimed to existing recorded perfor­mances. It didn’t mean making finished tracks, but pro­viding them with the nucleus, the rhythm and voices. With nearly two hours of music in the film, there was obviously a mountain of material to record before they could even start shooting. I started work in Los Angeles on 1 Septem­ber. For the rhythm section, I engaged Max Middleton, an old friend from the Jeff Beck group, as the keyboard man; Wilbur Bascombe, also from Jeff Beck, on bass; Bernard Purdie, a great drummer out of New York; and Robert Awhai, a guitar player who had worked a lot with Max.

Although I prepared certain scores for them, we mainly worked from what, are called ‘head arrangements’. That meant that I would give them chord symbols and bass lines, but the actual style was decided on the studio floor. I would tell them: ‘This is the feel I want, this is the rhythm I want, this is the style of playing, these are the modulations, this is how we go from here to there. We need so much instrumental here, and so much vocal there ...’ and so on.

In laying down those tracks I had to work very closely both with the film director, who would tell me how iong the scene was going to be and what was going to happen in it, and with the choreographer, who had to decide how people were going to move during the scene. In many cases, they would say, “This song isn’t long enough as it stands. We need a section here where they strut through the town hall’ - or wherever it was. I would have to add so many bars of rhythm, working to their specifications. Then, with the rhythm tracks recorded, we would bring in the artist to make the final vocal tracks.

Working with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton was very easy. The Bee Gees are extremely professional, and in a curious way there was a sense of deja vu for me. Although I had never thought of them as being like the Beatles, they do have the same irreverent sense of humour, and it was strange how certain situations and experiences seemed to be revived, ten years on.

When it came to harmony singing, they were incredibly facile. The film was not limited to songs from the Pepper album, and when we came to ‘Because’, from the Abbey Road album, I decided that the backdrop should be the authentic Abbey Road sound; that is, the choral structure of the voices, the electric harpsichord which I played on the original album, and the generally very thin backing. So I again laid down the electric harpsichord track myself, and then gave the Bee Gees the notes of all the very complicated harmonies. There were three tracks, each bearing three voices, and the way the lines moved was quite complex, but they got them almost as easily as the Beatles had done. That was surprising. A group of profes­sional singers would have had more difficulty with it, hut the Bee Gees had an innate sense of where it should go.

With some of the other songs and singers, though, there was more of a problem. Many of the songs had been written for either John Lennon or Paul McCartney to sing, and they have very distinctive voices. Without those there is inevitably something lacking, particularly if the new voices are very different from theirs. ‘Strawberry Fields’, for example, originally written and sung by John, was sung in the film by Sandy Farina. The key in which she sang it was a good fourth away from John’s original key, and 1 found it intriguing to hear how that altered the whole character of the song. It had a completely different texture.

Even then it had to be altered, as did a number of the tracks, because what Michael had done visually sometimes didn’t fit the music. So then the music had to be made to fit the picture. I had originally intended doing ‘Strawberry Fields’ in a very raunchy and hypnotic sort of way. But in the film she sings it at a very tender moment between herself and Peter Frampton, and I had to soften it, adding strings and so on to make it more suitable as a love song. There was quite a lot of other deviations from the original Beatle concepts of the songs, but it was done with a definite idea in mind. My basic premise was that where the group in the film, played by the Bee Gees, were starting out in their raw state, the song should be reproduced as near as possible to the original. But as they got more successful and sophisticated in the film, the music changed too, becoming more ‘hip’ and sophisticated.

Where artists outside the group were performing, I didn’t regard myself as being confined to the original at all. For example, Mr Mustard, the malevolent electronic genius played by Frankie Howerd, has two female robot assistants. They sing the song ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ from Abbey Road, which was originally a kind of quick, throw-away number. I slowed it down, and made it a bit more groovy. But there was also the problem that the singing voices of these two androids should sound like—well, singing androids. I did this with an instrument called a Vocoder, which takes the syllables and consonants of a human voice, but leaves out the tone. You can then super­impose its output over the tone of a synthesiser, which you can play, producing a distinctly eerie and robot-like voice.

Making the film was a lot of fun, and a challenge. There was one sequence where the band marches through the streets, symbolising the different periods from the First World War onwards by the style in which it is playing. So I had to arrange the tune ‘Sergeant Pepper’ in ragtime, Charleston, Gershwin, swing, big-band and present-day style - all to be performed in the course of three minutes!

The film has not been a huge success, although the soundtrack album was a multi-platinum seller. I enjoyed the enormous amount of work involved in the film, but the irony for me is the adverse comparisons which have been made with Yellow Submarine. In that cartoon film, apart from the many Beatle tracks, I had to write an original film score of about an hour’s length. That was very rewarding, both artistically and financially. In the Pepper picture, no original music was allowed to be included, but I had to prepare two hours of music with many different artists, involving far more work than Yellow Submarine.

Yellow Submarine has been lauded as a work of art; Sergeant Pepper has been received less kindly. I think perhaps its very title was a disadvantage. It certainly was not a film of the record. But then, I do not think anyone now could ever make a film of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was, and is, unique.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 975