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Let us not forget that, in addition to everything else, The Beatles were British. Today, The Beatles Bible tells us, “John and Cynthia Lennon, George and Pattie Harrison and Brian Epstein took afternoon tea at Sunny Heights, the house owned by Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen.”
Meanwhile, the BBC was previewing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for its listeners, playing excerpts from every song except “A Day in the Life,” which had been banned from airplay because it “could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking.” The preview was accompanied by a taped interview with John, Paul, and Ringo, which ironically displays a rather permissive attitude to drug-taking, if only indirectly. Here’s an excerpt:
[radio host] KENNY EVERETT: How long would you say… you got into technical details like phasing?
JOHN: (excitedly) Oh, phasing is GREAT!
PAUL: Double-flanging.
JOHN: Double-flanging, we call it. Now there you go, right? We’re on the same thing. Flanging is great. We’re always doing it.
KENNY: You used it on “Lucy In The Sky”…
JOHN: (giggling) You name the one it isn’t on! You know, you name it!
PAUL: (laughing)
JOHN: (giggling) You spot it, you get a prize! You get a Sgt. Pepper badge!
You can read a full transcript of the interview here. Enjoy it perhaps with a nice cup of tea.
It was reported, somewhere, well before the release of the album, that the suspect lyric in the song was “A thousand purple holes in my arm.” Not sure where I got that tidbit back then, it being before the rise of the “rock press” or underground radio (save Larry Miller’s midnight show at KMPX in San Francisco), but I, at age sixteen, thought the lyric was super-cool and edgy. The source was probably the SF Chronicle, now that I think about it. Ralph Gleason or John Wasserman.