Sir Peter Blake was the co- designer of the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP cover art with collaborator wife Jann Haworth. This cover art imagery has been one of the most widely adopted, copied and parodied designs in the music and art illustration business. The work is sometimes referred to as ”People We Like”.
Blake’s iconic album art for Apple Records was a definitive and defining representation of pop culture at the height of psychedelia. Sergeant Pepper marked a point of reference for the Baby Boomers and became identified uniquely with this generation. The notoriety of the album cover was enhanced by clever marketing and the strategic placing of cryptic clues among the numerous details and points of reference. Beatle manager Brian Epstein was not beyond instigating a hoax sometimes known as the McCartney Code. This is with respect to the conspiracy theorists assertion that ”Paul is Dead”
Peter Blake-On The Balcony (1955)
Blake for $500 signed away all copyright to the art and its potential royalties and licensing agreements, perhaps on the advice of art director Robert Fraser. Sergeant Pepper has sold over 32 million copies. At $6,000 it was the most expensive album artwork to that time.
Peter Blake has been termed a wannabe Andy Warhol, a Warholesque copy of paler proportions and a ”playfully innocent observer.” Also, a genial pop artist without psychological depth. Blake was a respected pop art painter and collage artist well before Sergeant Pepper’s and his pop art painting pre-dates Warhol. However, the self-promoting powers and marketing genius of Warhol permitted him to appropriate Pop Art as an indigenous American invention with himself as center of this universe. Also, Blake is far less prolific, introverted, less eccentric and lacking the necessary demeanor from which to project his ego. But, there is no disputing his talent.
Blake’s world in that era involved an artistic perception that the post-war period provided a leitmotif for recurring themes of accumulation and materialism. The Sergeant Pepper cover shows the Beatles appearing static and statuesque ,with fixed expressions, inert as mannequins at Harrod’s. Or, as they sing, ”W’ed like to take you home with us…” The four musicians are no more virile than the Madame Tussaud wax figures or cardboard cutouts that form the composition. The Fab Four accumulate objects (celebrities and fame) in this work, and they in turn are exploited,copyrighted and sold as well.
The Beatles were part of the same mechanism Blake saw, whereby the trade and traffic of cultural goods requires increasing quantities of celebrities to idolize. This is supported by mass media to provide the mechanism of delivery of the now ”branded” product. Culture could now be categorized as a cultural ”industry” devoted to marketing cultural goods.Quality could be supplanted by phenomenon. The Sergeant Pepper cover art mocks celebrity while also embracing this cult as economic reality; a gravy train on the emerging post-modern Magical Mystery Tour
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