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October 24th, 2026 · 12:00pm BST
In order to truly understand the thinking behind The Beatles’ classic album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, you need to rewind the clock a year earlier.
While Sgt Pepper might be widely considered the first ever proper concept album by many listeners, the brains behind the record, Paul McCartney, would tell you that the record was a direct result of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which came out a year earlier. The overall feel of the record, its ambitious nature, the way each track is linked to the next and the last, all led to the creation of Sgt Pepper.
“I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence. If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed [Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band] and my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album. John was influenced by it, perhaps not as much as me,” said McCartney.
“It was certainly a record we all played—it was the record of the time, you know? I’ve often played Pet Sounds and cried. It’s that kind of an album for me.”
Prior to the ‘60s, it was rare for albums to link songs. Artists released singles a lot more than they released LPs, and so albums essentially were all compilations. It wasn’t until the ‘60s that albums started to have a common theme running through them, be that a narrative direction, a sound, or a style. This idea was on display more than ever in Pet Sounds, and so with Sgt Pepper, Paul McCartney took said mindset and emphasised it by a thousand, not just linking songs, but claiming they were the product of a fictional band and plastering them on the cover.
George Martin, the band’s producer and honorary fifth Beatle, said that the band all knew they were onto something special when they wrote the record; however, he was also worried they might have overdone it. You can appreciate his hesitation, as this kind of album hadn’t been made before, so taking the overriding theme, and pairing it with large orchestral numbers, experimental soundscapes and abstract lyricism felt like a risk.
“What happened with Pepper was that it became an astonishing success,” he said, “When we were making it, we were all very much aware that we were onto something; it was almost growing by itself. And when it was finally finished, I wondered whether we’d gone too far.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The quick answer is, Sgt Pepper did go too far, for the day, but it was a step too far that needed to be taken. As more people were making albums that were bodies of work rather than just collections of songs, the term “concept album” was starting to lose meaning, and basically applied to every single LP getting released. With Sgt Pepper, The Beatles managed to add a strict definition to something that was becoming hard to define. It was overly ambitious for 1967, without a doubt, but without the band being willing to take that step too far, other concept albums that we celebrate today would not have ever been made.
The Who are responsible for a lot of these, and Pete Townshend dubbed the innovation of Sgt Pepper “genius” because of how much it opened up the world of concept albums to him. He also gave Pet Sounds its flowers, recognising that without The Beach Boys album, The Beatles would likely have never been made.
“These two great albums indicated the future but passed on no tools, codes, or obvious processes that would lead to a door,” said Townshend. “I ached for more than just a signpost pointing to the future, which is what these albums were to me.”
He continued, “Those two albums are seminal changes in what we all believed was going to be possible if you were in a band making records.”
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