The Guardian
100
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band gets a muscular remix in this heritage outing for an album that seems as much about panic as hippy-era optimism
In 1987, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on CD for the first time. It was, by some considerable distance, the most ballyhooed reissue in the history of pop. A two-hour documentary about the album and its place in history was shown at prime time on ITV, even then a very peculiar place to find Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman discussing LSD and the Exorcism of the Pentagon protest.
Elsewhere, the reissue was promoted by EMI as “the most important record ever released on compact disc” and, bizarrely, as “the Beatles’ first great album”, the latter comment both ludicrous and in keeping with the kind of hyperventilated judgment that Sgt Pepper attracted from the off: “a decisive moment in western civilisation”, opined theatre critic Kenneth Tynan in the Times, shortly after the album’s original release.
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Thu May 25 14:00:31 GMT 2017