The Fab Four did well, mind, with Revolver, which preceded Sgt Pepper, and the White Album, which came two years after it, emerging as the albums that people loved and, perhaps more importantly, still listened to regularly. In a straw poll of around two dozen of my acquaintances, more than half of whom have what might be termed an obsessive devotion to popular music, I could not find a single person, even among the three Beatles fanatics, who placed Sgt Pepper in their top five albums of all time. The strange thing is that almost everyone I know who has a genuine interest in popular culture agrees with me. There is simply too much expensively produced, endlessly manicured filler to make this an enduring work of pop art. At worst, the album's hippy-trippy veneer only barely conceals the twin curses of unbridled nostalgia - the mawkish She's Leaving Home or the self-congratulatory With a Little Help From my Friends - and ersatz eastern spirituality - the interminable Within You Without You. Apart from a couple of tracks, such as A Day in the Life, on which an LSD-scrambled Lennon fleetingly rediscovers his mordant wit, Sgt Pepper is the sound of pampered psychedelic self-indulgence rather than true iconoclasm.
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