It’s 53 years since The Beatles released ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’

Today marks 53 years since The Beatles released their eighth studio album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the UK.

Named the greatest album of all time by Rolling Stone, the 13-song album, released June 1, 1967, holds some of the band’s greatest hits. Among the album tracks are ‘A Day In The Life’, ‘When I’m 64’, ‘Good Morning, Good Morning, Good Morning’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Blues’.

The album, which was recorded over a 129-day period beginning in December 1966, spent 27 weeks at number one on the UK Album Charts and 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US when it was first released. As of 2011, it has sold more than 32 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Not only was the album a massive hit among fans, but it was also a turning point for the band. “We were fed up with being Beatles,” Paul McCartney said decades later in Many Years From Now, a biography of McCartney by Barry Miles. “We were not boys, we were men… artists rather than performers.”

“Sgt. Pepper was our grandest endeavour,” Ringo Starr said in the band’s 2000 autobiography, The Beatles Anthology. “The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea — it didn’t matter who – that was the one we’d use”

Meanwhile, American professor Langdon Winner wrote that the “closest Western civilisation has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt Pepper album was released. In every city in Europe and America, the radio stations played [it]… and everyone listened.”

With a line-up compromising of John Lennon, George Harrison, McCartney and Starr, The Beatles stormed the charts right across the globe for more than a decade. During their lifetime, the English rock band released a dozen studio albums, still being played today.

But on April 10, 1970, McCartney broke millions of hearts as he announced The Beatles would be splitting up for good. Contrary to popular belief, The Beatles’ last live performance was not at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, but on January 30, 1969 on the roof of an elegant five-story Georgian mansion on Savile Row in London, the headquarters of Apple Corps.