From The Beatles Anthology, the Fab Four and their producer George Martin, reveal the story behind the phenomenally successful Sgt Pepper's album.

John: Sgt Pepper is Paul, after a trip to America. The whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in, when people were no longer the Beatles or the Crickets - they were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes. I think he got influenced by that. He was trying to put some distance between the Beatles and the publlic - and so there was this identity of Sgt Pepper.

Paul: It was at the start of the hippie times, and there was a jingly-jangly hippie aura all around in America. And so, in the same way that in "I Am The Walrus" John would throw together "choking smokers" and "elementary penguin", I threw those words together: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I took an idea back to the guys in London: "As we're trying to get away from ourselves - to get away from touring and into a more surreal thing - how about if we become an alter-ego band, something like, say, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts."

"I've got a little bit of a song cooking with that title. We would be Sgt Pepper's band, and for the whole of the album we'd pretend to be someone else."

Ringo: Sgt Pepper was our grandest endeavor. It gave everybody - including me - a lot of leeway to come up with ideas and try different material. The great thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea (it didn't matter who), that would be the one we'd use. That's why the standard of the songs always remained high.

George Martin: I introduced the Beatles to some new sounds and ideas, but when Sgt Pepper came along, they wanted every trick brought out of the bag. Whatever I could find, they accepted.

Ringo: We were putting in strings, brass, pianos, etc. and George (Martin) was the only one who could write it all down. Sgt Pepper was great for me, because it's a fine album - but I did learn to play chess while we were recording it.

George: It became an assembly process - just little parts and then overdubbing - and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring. I had a few moments in there that I enjoyed, but generally I didn't really like making the album much. I'd just got back from India and my heart was still out there. It was a job, like doing something I didn't really want to do and I was losing interest in being "fab" at that point.

Ringo: The song "With A Little Help From My Friends" was written specifically for me, but they had one line that I wouldn't sing. It was: "What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?" I said, "There's not a chance in hell am I going to sing this line," because we still had lots of really deep memories of the kids throwing jelly beans and toys on stage; and I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes.

John: I saw Mel Torme introducing a Lennon-McCartney show, saying how "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was about LSD. It never was and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the thruth: my son (Julian) came home with a drawing and showed me this strange looking woman flying around. I said, "What is it?" and he said, "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds," and I thought, "That's beautiful". I immediately wrote a song about it. The images were from Alice In Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty.

George: John got the idea for "Mr Kite" when we were filming in Sevenoaks in Kent. We had a lunch break, and we went in an antique shop on the way to the restaurant. We were looking around when John came out of the shop with a little poster which had more or less the whole lyric of the song "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite" on it.

John: (The poster) said the Hendersons would also be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair. There would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogshead of real fire. Then there was Henry the Horse. I hardly made up a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word, really. I wasn't very proud of that. There was no real work. (Later) there were all kinds of stories about Henry the Horse being (on) heroin. I had never seen heroin in that period. "When I'm Sixty-Four" was something Paul wrote in the Cavern days. We just stuck a few more words on it like "grandchildren on your knee" and "Vera, Chuck and Dave". It was just one of those ones that he'd had, that we've all got, really; half a song.

Paul: There was a story in the paper about "Lovely Rita", the meter maid. She'd just retired as a traffic warden. The phrase "meter maid" was so American that it appealed, and to me a "maid" was always a little sexy thing: "Meter maid. Hey, come and check my meter, baby."

John: I was writing "A Day In The Life" with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about 4000 potholes in the streets if Blackburn, Lancashire. There was still one word missing in that verse when we came to record. I knew the line had to go: "Now they know how many holes it takes to something the Albert Hall". It was a nonsense verse, really, but for some reason I couldn't think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall? It was Terry (Doran) who said "fill" the Albert Hall. And that was it.

Paul: John and I sat down, and he had the opening verse and the tune. So they all got mixed together in a little poetic jumble that sounded nice. Then I threw in a little bit I played on the piano: "Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a come across my head" which was a little party piece of mine, although I didn't have any more written. Then we thought, "Oh, we'll have an alarm clock to start it," which we did on the session. We just divided it up.

George Martin: In terms of asking me for particular interpretation, John was the least articulate. He would deal in moods, he would deal in colours almost, and he would never be specific about what instruments or what line I had. I would do that myself. Paul, however, would actually sit down at the piano with me, and we'd work things out. John was more likely to say (as in the case of "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite"): "It's a fairground sequence. I want to be in that circus atmosphere; I want to smell the sawdust when I hear that song." So it was up to me to provide that.

Paul: This album was a big production, and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting. Everyone agreed. We liked the idea of reaching out to the record buyer, beacuse of our memories of spending our own hard earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money. So, for the cover, we wouldn't just have our Beatle jackets on, or we wouldn't just be sauve guys in turtlenecks... it would now be much more pantomime, much more "Mr Bojangles".

For our outfits, we went to Berman's, the theatrical costumers, and ordered up the wildest things, based on old military tunics. That's where they sent you if you were making a film. We just chose oddball things from everywhere and put them together. We all chose our own colours and our own materials. At the back of our minds, I think the plan was to have garish uniforms which would actually go against the idea of uniform.

John: Pepper was just an evolvement of the Beatle boots and all that. It was just another psychedelic image.

Paul: To help us get into the character of Sgt Pepper's band, we started to think about who our heroes might be: "Well, then, who would this band like on the cover? Who would my character admire?" We wrote a list. They could be as diverse as we wanted; Marlon Brando, James Dean, Albert Einstein or whoever. We got artistic people involved. I was very good friends with Robert Fraser, the London art dealer; a guy with one of the greatest visual eyes that I've ever met. He represented the artist Peter Blake, and he was very good friends with the photographer Michael Cooper. Robert said, "Let Michael take some pictures. We'll get Peter to do a background, and then we'll collage it all together." I went down to Peter's house and gave him a little drawing of mine as a starting point. The cover was going to be a picture of a presentation somewhere up north: the Beatles being given the keys to the city by the mayor, beside a floral clock like the one they have in the municipal park. And then, inside the cover, we were going to be sitting there, with pictures of our favourite icons around us. That was the original plan, but then Peter collaged it into one big idea. It all came together and we had the photo session in the evening. We had all the plants delivered by a florist; people think they're pot plants - marijuana plants - but they're not, it was all straight.

At that time, EMI was very much a colonial record compnay. It still is - they sell records in India and China - so they were very aware of Indian sensibilities. I remember Sir Joe (Sir Joseph Lockwood, EMI chief) - (a good old mate, actually) coming round to my house in St John's Wood and saying, "I say, Paul, we really can't do it, old chap. You can't have Gandhi (on the cover)." I said, "Why not? We're revering him." "Oh, no, no. It might be taken the wrong way. He's rather sacred in India, you know." So Gandhi had to go. John wanted a couple of far out one like Hitler and Jesus, which was John just wanting to be bold and brassy.

John: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do.

George Martin: It was the record of that time, and probably did change the face of recording, but we didn't do it consciously. So it became a different kind of art form - like making a film rather than a live performance. That affected their thinking and their writing, and it affected the way I put it together, too. I think Pepper represents what the young people were on about, and it seemed to coincide with the revolution in young people's thinking. It was the epitome of the Swinging Sixties.

John: It took nine months. It wasn't nine months in the studio, but we'd work then stop a bit, work it out, rest, work - I just like to get in and get out. I get bored. Generally, our other albums took three intensive weeks of work.

Paul: I loved it. I had a party to celebrate - that whole weekend was a bit of a party, as far as I can recall. I remember getting telegrams saying: "Long live Sgt Pepper." People would come round and say, "Great album, man."

George: I liked Sgt Pepper when it was finished. I knew it was different for the public, and I was very happy with the concept of the cover. "A Day In The Life" had the big orchestra and the big piano chord, and "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" I liked musically. But the rest of it was just oridnary songs.

Ringo: Sgt Pepper seemed to capture the mood of that year, and it also allowed a lot of other people to kick off from there and to really go for it. When that album came out the public loved it. It was a monster.

Paul: The mood of the album was in the spirit of the age, because we ourselves were fitting into the mood of the time.

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