Last and most important, Alan Pollack’s description of the vocals for this song are as follows– “The vocal arrangement is quite vintage, with Macca screaming single-tracked solo in the voices with a chorus of the others, in which the timbre of John’s voice figures prominently, for the refrain and the second bridge.” So although John does not apparently sing by himself as I thought, nonetheless he stands out in this section of the song. Second of all, Mark Lewishon’s Recording Sessions does not provide specific info as to who did what and where when he mentions “group backing vocals” for this particular song. First of all, the late Ian Macdonald (NOT Mccadonald as you have spelled it) has been shown to be a great writer in Revolution In The Head but some of his info on recordings and line-up assertions has been disputed, including here on this website. On 6 March they added the sounds of the imaginary audience and the noise of an orchestra tuning up, a combination of crowd noise from a 1961 recording of the comedy show Beyond The Fringe and out-takes from the 10 February 1967 orchestral overdub session for ‘A Day In The Life’.įor the segue into ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, meanwhile, they inserted screams of Beatlemaniacs from the recordings of The Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl.Įxcuse me Sebastian, but after investigating the aforementioned Beatle experts I beg to differ on your comment as regard to your sources. McCartney also recorded a lead guitar solo, leaving the song almost complete.

The song was then left for over a month, until the French horns were overdubbed on 3 March. The next day McCartney recorded his lead vocals, and he, Harrison and John Lennon taped their harmonies. They recorded drums, bass and two guitars – the latter played by Paul McCartney and George Harrison. On 1 February 1967 The Beatles taped nine takes of the rhythm track, though only the first and last of these were complete. The song ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was recorded over four days. On the album it segued into ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, and was reprised ahead of the finale, ‘A Day In The Life’. Every other song could have been on any other album. But it was not as put together as it sounds, except for Sgt Pepper introducing Billy Shears and the so-called reprise. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with the idea of Sgt Pepper and his band but it works ’cause we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. Sgt Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Intellectually, that’s the same thing he did by writing ‘He loves you’ instead of ‘I love you.’ That’s just his way of working. As I read the other day, he said in one of his ‘fanzine’ interviews that he was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public – and so there was this identity of Sgt Pepper. You know, when people were no longer The Beatles or The Crickets – they were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes, right? So I think he got influenced by that and came up with this idea for The Beatles.

Sgt Pepper is Paul, after a trip to America and the whole West Coast, long-named group thing was coming in.

Song sergeant key