One Monday morning, during the summer of 1995, a hasty shopping trip was abruptly interrupted when I began to notice, to my great surprise, that more than half the music issuing from open shop doorways was by the Beatles and, of that, about half was music from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is far from an authoritative sample, of course, but it did cause me to wonder why it is that this music, now largely thirty years old, has continued to exercise such a hold on the sub-urban provincial imagination, and not simply the imagination of those in their forties and fifties.

If I fully knew the answer to this, of course, I should be making records (and presumably money) rather than writing books. None the less, in what follows I shall map out some of the strands which went into the making of Sgt. Pepper and some of the paths which have developed from it, in the belief that the more closely we can engage with our subject, the closer we come to provisional answers to such questions.

There seems little doubt that, whatever the album's musical value (which I shall discuss in chapter 4), it has had a greater effect on the imagination of suburban British life than any other, partly for reasons surrounding its reception (which I shall discuss in chapter 5). Indeed, it has also probably had a more marked effect on academic musical life than any other single sample of ‘pop’ music, from Wilfrid Mellers's early review and his fuller subsequent discussion, through to Jonathan Dunsby's afterword to an earlier volume in this series, where he asks ‘will a future dictionary of music have an entry for “Sergeant Pepper” somewhere between “Schoenberg” and “Sprechstimme”?’.