Art, life and everything - with Vaughan Gunson

Author Vaughan Gunson.

The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of the first records I bought because I'd read somewhere that it was the best album ever.

Yet despite its strengths I've always struggled to enjoy it wholeheartedly, which feels a little blasphemous, like standing under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and remarking, "It's okay".

Being the 50th anniversary of the album's release I thought I'd give it another listen.

It opens with a great three song combination. The rocking title track is followed by Ringo dolefully singing With a Little Help From My Friends, conveying a sentiment that still resonates, particularly on the call and response chorus: "Do you need anybody, I need somebody to love/ Could it be anybody, I want somebody to love."

Lennon is at his surrealist best on the shimmering Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. My favourite lines: "Picture yourself on a train in a station/ With plasticine porters with looking glass ties." Side one is let down somewhat by McCartney's Getting Better; not saved by Lennon singing in the background "It couldn't get much worse".

Fixing a Hole is much better, with McCartney coming to the party with strong lyrics: "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/ And stops my mind from wandering/ Where it will go."

She's Leaving Home is a worthy attempt to address the generation gap and a young woman fleeing her parents "with a man from the motor trade". But the strings are too sanguine, the sentiment laid on too thick.

Lennon's carnival stomp Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite! is light but fun, the studio sound effects and tape loops used to great effect. Ringo's drumming is brilliant, as it is throughout the album.

Side two opens with Harrison's eastern meditation Within You Without You, which has huge merit for bringing a whole other music tradition into Western popular music. While it still doesn't gel for me with the rest of the album, its international sound means it hasn't aged (to these ears) like some of the other tracks.

Which is certainly the case with the next song, When I'm Sixty-Four, with its British music hall origins - though it's an example of a gracious quality about The Beatles. As much as they wished to push boundaries and explore all aspects of the 60s counter culture, they wanted to bring everyone along with them for the ride. This is the unifying spirit of Sgt Pepper.

McCartney's Lovely Rita and Lennon's Good Morning Good Morning aren't standout songs, though they contribute to the theme of "ordinary people going about their lives" which runs through the album.

The true masterpiece of course is A Day in the Life, which closes the album. It's a study of weary alienation and release through drugs perhaps, but mostly music, which builds to its famous climax and long final note sounded by an entire orchestra, an ending like the abyss of death itself. Lennon's vocal is achingly beautiful.

Listening it to again I'm reminded that Sgt Pepper is an album whose sum is bigger than its parts. Yet it could have been even better. George Martin, The Beatles' producer, said it was the greatest professional mistake of his career to bow to record company pressure and release Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever as a double A-side single, rather than keep them for the album. We can speculate which songs they'd replace, but oh boy, Sgt Pepper would have been lifted higher into the stratosphere of 20th-century popular music.