The immediate reception accorded Sgt. Pepper took three forms. The general public had a little advance warning of the album: the erstwhile jazz paper Melody Maker announced the title on 22 April 1967, while on 6 May both main British music papers (Melody Maker and the more poporientated New Musical Express) gave advance notice of the running order. The latter also proclaimed that the disc would not be banded, so that it would play in a ‘virtually continuous’ fashion. So begins the myth of the unity of Sgt. Pepper. By this time, the Beatles had already completed most of the work on Magical Mystery Tour.

A week prior to public release, journalists were gathered at Brian Epstein's home for a ‘listen-in’, avidly reported in both Melody Maker and New Musical Express on 27 May. Thereafter, published interest is strangely patchy. In the NME's undated ‘Summer Special’, journalist Andy Gray complained that by spending as long as three months working on an album, the Beatles ‘soon become forgotten’. NME's Allen Evans reviewed the album on 20 May (clearly on only one hearing, judging from the superficial quality of the response), the Times's William Mann on 29 May, Melody Maker's Chris Welch on 3 June and the Sunday Times's Derek Jewell on 4 June, followed by general publications such as the New Statesman (Wilfrid Mellers, 2 June) and, in the USA, the New York Times (Richard Goldstein, 18 June), Village Voice (Tom Phillips, 22 June) and Newsweek (Jack Kroll, 26 June) by the end of the month.