"It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play." Although it is now well over 20 years since we were first introduced to Sgt Pepper, it is still hard to say that sentence without singing the words, such is the impact of the remarkable album first released in 1967.
The Beatles' masterpiece was a sort of multicoloured variety show. It offered little jewels of very different kinds of music: love songs, sad songs, psychedelic trippy numbers, songs with comedy, wit and not least, a zither-loaded part-instrumental offering wise words with a hint of Hindu philosophy.
As for the cover, where else would the likes of Johnny Weismuller, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Shirley Temple and Bob Dylan - to name just a few - have come together so comfortably? Icons of the century, or just diverse people representing a broad spectrum of societies and thought? In the middle of the cover, dazzling in brilliant colour, were the Beatles themselves. The album-sleeve design by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth was eye-grabbing. Staring at it today, we realise that we are looking at old friends. These are the people we grew up with and have grown older with. When the pop album of the century is to be picked, this is likely to be it.
Personal favourite
Much as I like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, however, I must admit it is not my personal favourite. There are so many artists and other albums worthy of note and each of us have our own preferences. But when I do think of a particular album, I tend to think of its cover. This probably comes from early childhood when my older sister plonked me down in the basement room of her friend's house. Over the din of an Elvis record, she'd roar at me to sit quiet. I looked up at hundreds of curled lips, droopy eyes and a sea of black-haired Elvis heads on albums nailed to the walls. Close up and intimate, the King was here among us in this damp basement shrine.
The heady combination of art and music developed hand in hand down the decades. Joe Brodsky's Strange Days (The Doors), with its midgets, strongman, jugglers and trapeze artists drove home the message that yes, people are strange. Cheap Thrills (Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company) introduced the infamous R. Crumb cartoon, later of Keep on Trucking and Fritz the Cat fame. I cringe now to think of college days and the symbolic covers of the Moody Blues albums. Nothing brings back so vividly the banal, yet necessary teenage ponderings of those years.
Art or trash?
Our burgeoning interest in sex was fed by, among others, the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album cover. Maybe I'm mistaken but I seem to remember two different versions of this - the UK one showing a man's groin in tight jeans and the gimmicky US cartoon version with a pull-down zipper. In either case, the point was perfectly clear even to the uninitiated.
Were album covers of those days art, trash or the subliminal hard-sell of record companies? Probably some combination of the three. Whatever you feel about them, these covers were the foot-and-a-half-square images of our lives and our generation. It was the only art many of our homes ever saw, exempting pictures of the Sacred Heart and Kevin Barry on the walls.
It's difficult to explain to my children the attraction of the old covers. I point disparagingly to the palm-held five-inch CD cover and they look at me and shrug their shoulders. These lucky young ones not only have money for teen magazines but have their favourite bands and singers at the touch of a button. Videos are in every house and MTV runs all day and night. They don't have to wait for Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night to see if their favourite artists appear. The album cover has evolved into a music video.
This brings me back to the Beatles and the foresight they showed in one of the last albums they recorded together as a band. It's also the one which, if pressed, I'd say was my favourite. A perfect culmination of many styles and moods, the double "White Album" (The Beatles) is superb. And the cover is, well, white, of course. Was it to tell us that the album as visual art was finished? Living in an age where too many images now compete for our attention and the too little time we have, perhaps white was a visionary choice. Or maybe they thought we had seen it all?
Exhibition
We all can think of particular album covers which meant something to us at one time or another - which is why "Cover Versions", an exhibition of record album artwork, including favourites chosen by the likes of David Norris, Mick Lally and Patricia McKenna, should have a widespread appeal.
The show is the brainchild of the producer Pete Holidai, and the culmination of course work done under his tutelage by students in Sound Access, an EU-funded training programme offering training in the arts for disadvantaged groups. "Cover Versions" runs at the Central Library in the ILAC Centre, Dublin, until October 22nd.