Among the selection of vast advertising hoardings lining Liverpool’s Erskine Street, one currently stands out. If you’re driving into the city, it suddenly confronts you with an immense black and white image of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, in profile, his hand resting on his chin, as if listening intently to someone. The other side of the hoarding bears a message: “Brian Epstein died for you.”
The same two images keep cropping up around the city centre: on an electronic billboard at Lime Street Station, flyposted on the windows of empty shops, alongside adverts for new albums and forthcoming gigs. This is artist Jeremy Deller’s contribution to Sgt Pepper at 50: “Sixteen days of performances, installations, spectacular outdoor shows, music, theatre and dance” celebrating the golden anniversary of the classic Beatles album’s release.
The city has commissioned 13 pieces of art, one for each track. If you want to witness a parade inspired by Lovely Rita (with Australian cabaret artist Meow Meow performing in an oversized dress made of parking tickets) or enjoy “breakfast time entertainments” informed by John Lennon’s scabrous assault on the mundanity of everyday life, Good Morning Good Morning, you’re in luck.
The question of how daunting a task it is to be commissioned to make an artistic response to a Pepper track is an intriguing one. On the one hand, as Jeremy Deller points out, it’s an album with a “a lot of content, it’s pretty rich and dense, it’s full of stories”. On the other, it’s probably the most discussed and dissected album in history. The issue of whether there’s really anything more to be said about it hangs heavy over the event.
It’s occasionally difficult to avoid the suspicion that some artists have struggled to find a fresh response. Within weeks of the album’s release in 1967, people were already releasing music inspired by Sgt Pepper that wasn’t anywhere as interesting as the original, a tradition to which DJ Spooky’s ambient electronic track based on Getting Better, part of a multimedia installation at Fact arts centre, clearly belongs. In some cases, the whole Pepper angle feels slightly grafted on: the firework display devised by Christophe Berthonneau for the event’s opening night is awe-inspiring: a spectacular, relentless bombardment of pyrotechnics in a park dotted with performers in illuminated costumes. But it would work whether or not they played Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds in the middle of it.
Equally, it’s hard not to be impressed by the creativity of some approaches, the way they cast Sgt Pepper’s contents into an intriguing new light. Mercifully, the event inspired by Within You Without You concentrates on its music rather than the smug philosophising of the lyrics: Ragafest is a day-long event at St George’s Hall featuring acclaimed Indian musicians performing both traditional and contemporary music. Rock fans whose knowledge of Indian music extends no further than the obligatory sitar or tambura lending a knowingly exotic flavour to umpteen psychedelic tracks tend to think of it as music that wafts around like incense smoke, feeling pacific. But watching Pandit Sengupta playing a Hindustani raga on the sarod, what’s striking is how intense and visceral the sound is: there’s nothing pacific about it at all. Witnessing it live is to understand why George Harrison was so energised by it.
Deller’s haunting Brian Epstein posters, meanwhile, are his interpretation of With a Little Help from My Friends, the jovial ode to marijuana-infused camaraderie – shifting the focus from Ringo Starr trying and failing not to sing out of key and on to the man without whose assistance the Beatles might never have happened, but who died of an overdose of barbiturates three months after the album’s release, just as the decade his actions had helped kickstart reached its zenith. If you think of the perpetually troubled, doomed Epstein while the song’s playing, it suddenly doesn’t seem jovial, but strained and desperate.
Elsewhere, Judy Chicago’s giant mural graces the side of a derelict grain silo in Liverpool Docks, capturing the band in early 60s mop-top mode, in front of a giant psychedelic sunburst. Rather fittingly – given that it’s inspired by Paul McCartney’s dreamy paean to the pleasures of DIY, Fixing a Hole – the work is still covered in scaffolding, with a lone painter in overalls in the process of finishing it. Painted beneath it, in suitably groovy typeface, is the legend: “Four lads from Liverpool.”
If it’s not the most radical of the responses, it nevertheless raises an intriguing point. There’s an argument that the Sgt Pepper celebrations represent a kind of Beatles land-grab on the part of Liverpool, a game attempt to claim ownership of an album made three years after the four lads had departed the city – three years, it might be added, in which the band and their music changed almost beyond recognition. The George Harrison of Within You Without You, musing on the meaning of life while tamburas drone and dilrubas saw away, is clearly a very different person to the 20-year-old who moved to London in 1964. One of the reasons Deller’s piece works so well is that it’s about what the Beatles left behind – both Liverpool and their doomed manager, increasingly sidelined after the band had stopped touring.
Despite co-curator Sean Doran’s claim that Liverpool is “the rightful home of Sergeant Pepper”, a cynical voice might suggest that it’s audibly less a product of their hometown than of the bohemian demi-monde of mid-60s London – where Paul McCartney, in the company of new hipster pals including Eton-educated art dealer Robert Fraser and writer Barry Miles, encountered the avant-garde influences that permeate the album; or Weybridge, where an increasingly frustrated John Lennon sought to pacify his boredom with life in the Surrey stockbroker belt via vast quantities of LSD; or even Bombay, where George Harrison had spent six weeks in 1966, studying the Indian music that informs his major contribution.
In the face of such naysaying, however, you might point to Beatles press officer Derek Taylor’s famous assessment of the album as the sound of “four Scousers exploring inner space and finding more and more Scouser down there”. From the start, LSD seemed to cause the band’s principal songwriters to reflect on their past. “When I was a boy, everything was right,” sang Lennon plaintively on 1966’s She Said She Said, a description of a tumultuous acid trip he’d taken in California – and if there’s nothing on Sgt Pepper as explicit in its LSD-soaked evocation of Liverpool as the two tracks on the single that preceded it, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, it’s still suffused with just about enough reflection and nostalgia to support another claim made at the opening press conference, this time by Culture Liverpool’s director Claire McColgan: “They never left here.”
Nevertheless, the most successful works I see are the ones that approach the album’s tracks in a tangential way, that aren’t about the Beatles themselves. Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Carl Hunter’s fascinating short film A Day in the Life – starring, of all people, comedian and former Name That Tune host Tom O’Connor – has less to do with the Lennon and McCartney song than it does with the misery of a life spent working on a zero hours contract: no one blows their mind out in a car, the only bus journey you see isn’t a pot-fuelled transport of delight but a grinding, empty experience. Nevertheless, you can detect echoes of A Day in the Life’s radical editing and use of varispeed in the look of the film, in its shifts between static, moving and sped-up images.
Meanwhile, the 20 Stories High theatre company’s play inspired by She’s Leaving Home may be the festival’s highlight. Performed in a small Toxteth living room – there’s only room for about 10 in the audience, alongside the two cast members and a solitary musician – it transplants the song’s subject matter to present-day Liverpool. But what the show, which boasts an extraordinary performance by Brodie Arthur, really shares with She’s Leaving Home is its empathy and even-handedness, its sense that that small details have the biggest emotional impact.
Amid all the Sgt Pepper at 50 festivities, this performs the same function as She’s Leaving Home does on the original album: it’s a quiet, low-key triumph surrounded by expansive spectaculars.
