Fifty years ago, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band fired a starting pistol for the Summer of Love. It is now 2017 and, to judge by social media, we are entering a political Summer of Hate. In these circumstances, returning to Sgt Pepper might seem like a nostalgic retreat from our current woes. Yet that old, overfamiliar snapshot of long-gone sunshine can shed light on our current situation. According to Sgt Pepper, there is a route out of our current divisions.
Most psychedelic music from the 1960s focused on the inner journey; when it looked outwards to address the wider world it was typically divisive. From Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ to Monkey Island by the 13th Floor Elevators, the older generation and their culture was mocked, feared or uncategorically rejected. A famous 60s activist slogan was “Never trust anyone over 30.” Psychedelia positioned itself as separate from mainstream society. Sgt Pepper is such an integral part of psychedelic culture that it is easy to overlook just how different it is: the album is for and about everyone.
Sgt Pepper is not a rejection of post- and prewar Britain. It is an album about post- and prewar Britain, viewed from a perspective informed by blazing illumination. From the opening crowd noises to Peter Blake’s group sleeve, it is entirely inclusive. The original release even included a sheet of cardboard cut-outs for kids. It may gaze inwards on occasions, but it knows that to get by we need With a Little Help from My Friends. It deals with the 60s generation gap, as in She’s Leaving Home, but the uncomprehending older generation is still portrayed with compassion and understanding. When other bands of the era were just parroting the slogan, the Beatles understood the psychedelic lesson that we are all one.
On Sgt Pepper, the beauty of psychedelia is not separate from the mundane, everyday world but something that grows out of it. For every Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, there is a polite enquiry as to whether the parking warden Lovely Rita would take some tea. At the start of side two, the Indian raga on Within You Without You flows into the music hall oompah of When I’m Sixty-Four, with only the sound of laughter to join the two. On the album’s peerless closer A Day in the Life, the mundane and the visionary slide back and forth to reveal them to be entirely dependent on one another.
The songs on Sgt Pepper are predominantly vignettes about ordinary people, performed in wildly different musical styles. In this, the album has more in common with the first great work of British culture, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, than it does with much of American psychedelia. Canterbury Tales is also a series of stories told in a wide range of styles, from a courtly romance to a bawdy yarn. The people in the stories range from a knight and prioress to a cook and miller. Chaucer’s inclusion of all aspects of medieval British society transformed Canterbury Tales from a miscellaneous collection into a portrait of England. As the poet John Dryden declared, the book contains “God’s plenty”.
Like the songs on Sgt Pepper, the stories in Canterbury Tales have more impact together than they do apart. Such is the foundation of community: the true nature of your friends and family is only revealed when they interact. Like Chaucer’s stories and Sgt Pepper’s songs, they are more than the sum of their parts.
The result is an unashamedly British album. When the Beatles took acid and looked within themselves, they saw they were part of the communities, music, culture, landscape and jokes that had nurtured them. Sgt Pepper takes us from the music hall to the bandstand and the circus, and tells us: “Every summer we can rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear.” It has become such a touchstone in British culture that when you visit the United Kingdom pavilion at Walt Disney World’s Epcot in Florida, you find a stereotypically English village complete with a pub, a fish’n’chip shop – and a shop selling Sgt Pepper merchandise.
For the people of the UK who reject the idea of being a “citizen of nowhere”, culture deeply rooted in a sense of place is exactly what they are searching for. Sgt Pepper shows us that it is only by embracing and including everybody that such visions of Albion are created. The album includes German and American people on its cover, because they were culturally important to the Liverpudlian Beatles. And it includes Indian musicians because they inspired the band, thanks in part to the historic links between the two countries.
Seen in this light, the failure of populist nationalists to produce an [cultural work] expression of Englishness worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Sgt Pepper or The Canterbury Tales is understandable. The story of Britain is the sum of everybody who has lived on these islands. To exclude sections of their culture is to diminish or distort Britain’s true character, and if we wish to be grounded in a sense of place isolationism will not achieve this. You do not find Englishness by kicking away anything that might appear non-English. You find Englishness simply by being in England and interacting with what life has in store.
The only way to heal a divided culture is to find a perspective that doesn’t dismiss either side, and which does not raise one side above the other, but which reveals them to be integral parts of something larger. This might be done by a political treaty, such as the Good Friday Agreement, or by something as simple as an image, such as the Tudor Rose, which helped unite the warring houses of York and Lancaster after the Wars of the Roses. Historically, this is pretty much the only way divisions are ever healed. It is when such a higher perspective cannot be found, for example with the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, that they do not heal.
We in Brexit Britain are lucky in this respect, for we have a higher perspective available that could heal our divisions if we wished to use it. Sgt Pepper shows us that expressing English identity, engaging with the wider world and not rejecting others are entirely compatible. Indeed, to fully achieve one is dependent on accepting the other.
The songs on Sgt Pepper tell us a lot about being British that we might at times forget. Fixing a Hole tells us that we can roll up our sleeves and fix things that are broken. Getting Better shows us that we can be optimistic, even when the future looks bleak. Within You Without You tells us to look inwards, and understand who we are. But this can only be achieved, the album reminds us, With a Little Help from My Friends.
- John Higgs’s book Watling Street: Travels Through Britain in Its Ever-Present Past is available from the Guardian Bookshop.
