Paul McCartney shares how the title of one album came from a miscommunication with the band’s roadie.
On the March 13 episode of The Beatles member's podcast from iHeartPodcasts and Pushkin, Paul McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, McCartney discussed the composition of the 1967 hit, “A Day in the Life” with Paul Muldoon.
Along with dissecting the song’s exterior influences, the 81-year-old musician shared how even the album title the song is on, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club was inspired by accidental miscommunications.
“I was with our roadie Mal [Evans], a big bear of a man,” the music legend began to recall. “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.’”
He continued: “And I always returned to one of the things about the Beatles, and me and John [Lennon], was that we noticed accidents.”
The renowned songwriter shared that the album pulled inspiration from the radio medium and encouraged listeners to use their imagination when listening to the album — even dreaming up what “Sgt. Pepper” himself looked like.
“We all listen to the radio, and you have to use your imagination. Whereas in TV, it's OK. It's wonderful. But it's laid out for you. You can see,” said the “Hey Jude” songwriter.
“That was why no one could ever visualize Sgt. Pepper,” he continued, adding how there was a failed film focused on the album, “It was like, ‘Oh, don't do that because everyone's already got their own picture.’”
As for the sole image they provided audiences — the album artwork — he explained to Muldoon what he wanted the visuals to be. McCartney recalled that he told his bandmates: “I want each of us to come up with a list of favorite people… because we'll have pictures of them.”
“If you've got a passion for something, you want to be thorough,” he continued. “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, theater, performances, are concerned,” said the singer. “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.”
McCartney added that the idea and approach to the band’s eighth album was that they were “these four space cadets,” adding, “We’re just these four people in this slightly weird band.”
He noted how that approach was created to “free [the group] up,” said McCartney. “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."
