Paul McCartney has revealed how he came up the title of The Beatles‘ iconic album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
Speaking about the 1967 record on a recent episode of his podcast Paul McCartney: A Life In Lyrics, McCartney said that it happened after a misunderstanding with one of his road crew.
“I was with our roadie Mal [Evans], a big bear of a man,” he said. “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.’
“And I always returned to one of the things about the Beatles, and me and John [Lennon], was that we noticed accidents.”
He also went to talk about how the band came up with the iconic cover which featured a host of celebrities and famous people throughout history.
McCartney recalled that he told his bandmates: “I want each of us to come up with a list of favourite people… because we’ll have pictures of them.
“If you’ve got a passion for something, you want to be thorough. 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?’”
He added: “I do think that I have always had the totality thing where music, theatre, performances, are concerned. 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 went on to say that the idea and approach to the album was that they were “these four space cadets in this “slightly weird band.”
He continued: “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.”
