This double-album came out in that delightful period when you carried significant  LPs about with you as a kind of badge of membership of the cognoscenti – just as having long hair on men, belled trousers, full-length Afghan sheepskins, skinny-rib t-shorts and paisley jackets..(etc), these things were part of the I.D. parade of unfolding Sixties culture. But for art students and designers the Sgt Pepper album had an even greater significance – the cover was designed by Peter Blake – one of the great British Pop-Art pioneers (along with Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton), and WHAT’S MORE it contained references to many of the cult heroes of recent times – and these included a leading icon of the Beat movement (William Seward Burroughs); Mystics (Alastair Crowley, Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yuckteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya); an Electronic-Music  composer (Karlheinz Stockhausen); several Film Stars (Mae West, W.C. Fields,  Tom Mix, Huntz Hall, Tyrone Power, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, Johnny Weissmuller, Marlene Deitrich), avant garde and music-hall comedians: (Lenny Bruce, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, W.C. Fields, Issy Bonn, Tommy Handley), a footballer (Albert Stubbins); communist-theorist (Marx),; scientists (Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Dr Livingstone); writers (George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Terry Southern, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allen Poe, Aldus Huxley; some cool artists (Richard Lindner, Wallace Berman, Richard Merkin, Simon Rodia, Stuart Sutcliffe, Larry Bell, Aubrey Beardsley) and some rockstars – Bob Dylan, Bobbie Breen, Dion (of the Belmonts) – and a few others!

Having a pictorial code of Beatles counter-culture heroes to discuss was like a cult book – not since Bob Dylan’s first album, not since the Tom Lehrer L.P.s, since Christopher Logue’s Red Bird, or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinde, since Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde double-album, had Long-Playing records been so cool.

Thanks Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, John, Paul, George and Ringo, and George Martin – and Michael Cooper who took the Edwardian uniform pictures. Inspirational!