The first concept album?

Although the Beatles distanced themselves from the claim, many rock historians have dubbed Sgt Pepper the first in a long line of concept albums – when all the songs on an LP are linked by a theme. In the case of this release, the main device used was the running of songs together one after the other.

In fact, the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out pre-dated Sergeant Pepper and is considered by others to be the first concept album – a sneering farce about rock music and America as a whole. Paul McCartney has said it influenced Sgt Pepper considerably. 

Also released before Sgt Pepper was The Kinks’ Face To Face from 1966, sometimes classed as a concept album as it is a collection of Ray Davies’ character studies of ordinary people. None of these early efforts of albums with a unified theme attracted a wide commercial audience.

All this changed with Sgt Pepper. With its release, the notion of the concept album came to the forefront of popular music. However, some critics, including the Beatles’ producer George Martin, have pointed out that the term can only loosely be applied to the LP as the songs don’t have a great deal of connection with each other. 

Martin said, “We made it appear whole by editing it closely and by tying it up with the idea that the band, themselves, were another band. To heighten that effect, I used sound effects of audiences and laughter and so on, which gave the impression it was a show but in truth, the songs didn't have a great deal to do with each other.”

While debate exists over the extent to which Sgt Pepper qualifies as a true concept album, there is no doubt that its reputation as such helped inspire other artists to produce concept albums of their own, and inspired the public to accept them – The Who Sell Out in 1967, The Pretty Things’ SF Sorrow in 1968, The Who’s Tommy in 1969, not to mention hundreds of concept albums from progressive rock bands of the early 1970s including Genesis and Jethro Tull.

Oasis and other fans

Sgt Pepper’s influence has spread well beyond the 1970s. Britpop band Oasis wear their love for the Beatles on their sleeve, performing numerous cover versions of their songs, both live and on recordings, and have even enlisted Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey as their temporary drummer. 

In 2004, Noel Gallagher sat on a panel to decide on the most influential of pop artists to be included in the UK Music Hall of Fame, and was quoted as saying, “They (the Beatles) inspire me more now than they did when I was a kid and are still the greatest.”

In a surprising outcome (not least for the band themselves), Oasis’ debut album Definitely Maybe was voted the greatest of all time in 2006, beating Sgt Pepper. Noel Gallagher must have felt he’d proved something to himself – he told Q in 1996, “It's beyond an obsession. It's an ideal for living. I don't even know how to justify it to myself. With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles.”

You can also notice the influence of Sgt Pepper on the music of Beck, XTC, the Chemical Brothers, Blur, the Stone Roses, the Verve, and more recent British bands such as the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines. 

Critics

Not everybody is in agreement. Some critics think that in the late 1960s and 1970s, rock music went in exactly the opposite direction to everything the Beatles and especially Sgt Pepper stood for, and that in successive decades the album was irrelevant. Instead of seeing it as a catalyst for change, it has been argued that the LP was simply released at the right time to receive credit for everything that happened during the decade. 

But for good or bad, the Beatles have had a huge influence on the way pop music is today – the massive hype, the nicknaming of band members as "the shy one" or "the cute one", merchandise, slick album packaging, printed lyrics so we can all sing along at home, the using of the recording studio as a writing tool and TV appearances.