How Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and The Sex Pistols poked fun at The Beatles
Some albums cast a very long shadow, and The Beatles‘ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the most cumulative of the lot. Since its release, the 1967 album has taken on greater and greater significance. Today, it is regarded as a complete game-changer, opening the floodgates to the wave of musical extravagance and experimentation that defined the climactic finale of the 1960s. With that kind of pop cultural clout, it’s no wonder the album’s iconic cover has been parodied by so many.
The cover in question needs little introduction. The four Beatles, decked out in their technicolour Edwardian garb, stand behind a large military drum bearing the album’s title. In the foreground, an arrangement of red flowers forms the word “Beatles.” In the background, a constellation of famous faces, including Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, and wax models The Beatles themselves, stare blankly on.
Designed by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, directed by Robert Fraser and photographed by Michael Cooper, the cover was created using cardboard cut-outs of the listed celebrities. “I offered the idea that if they [the Beatles] had just played a concert in the park, the cover could be a photo of the group just after the concert with the crowd who had just watched the concert, watching them,” Blake once recalled. “If we did this by using cardboard cut-outs, it could be a magical crowd of whomever they wanted.” The Beatles drew up a list of celebrities, almost all of whom – apart from Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ – were included in the final photograph.
The first artist to parody the cover was, rather unsurprisingly, The Rutles, who released their parody album, the brilliantly-titled Mr Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band, the very same year.
This lighthearted homage gave way to a more sneering parody by Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, whose third studio album, released a year after Sgt Pepper’s, features Zappa and the band posing in front of a military drum bearing the words We’re Only In It For The Money, suggesting that they were perhaps less impressed by The Fab Four’s latest studio effort than the majority of their peers. Interestingly, the Mothers’ cover features a real-life Jimi Hendrix.
The Sex Pistols, albeit against their will, have also parodied Sgt Pepper. The British punk outfits’ unofficial Swedish release, Bad Boys, features a collage of photos of the bandmembers alongside portraits of members of the rock aristocracy, such as David Bowie, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Frank Zappa. Pink Floyd suffered the same fate, though their bootleg LP Lonely Hearts In Pepperland is perhaps truer to the original, featuring photos of David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason dressed in The Beatles’ Day-Glo military outfits.
