The Artist Behind the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Cover Wasn’t a Beatles Fan
The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band probably has the most famous album artwork ever. Despite this, one of the artists who created the cover wasn’t much of a Beatlemaniac. At the time, she was more interested in one of the singers who inspired The Beatles. She discussed what she thought of the Fab Four after spending some time with them.
An artist compared working on The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ cover to meeting Marilyn Monroe
Jann Haworth and her then-husband Peter Blake were the artists behind the Sgt. Pepper artwork. During a 2017 interview with Good Times, Haworth revealed she wasn’t too impressed with The Beatles at the time.
“I always had a fairly detached sense with The Beatles, because my ear was American and I was interested in, you know, Bo Diddley and that area of music,” she said. “Chuck Berry and stuff was what I was tuned to.” That’s an interesting comment, considering The Beatles covered Berry songs like “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Rock and Roll Music.”
Haworth didn’t see The Beatles’ music as high art. “To me, this was kind of a ‘boy band,’ and coming as I did out of Hollywood — if you grow up on the backlots, nothing impresses you very much,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything to have met Marilyn Monroe, because you don’t know her, you just have met her, and so what? So it wasn’t something that to me was like an arc of excitement.”
What Jann Haworth thought of The Beatles and Yoko Ono after encountering them
Haworth was more interested in visual artists than musicians. “It simply was a band … they’re just people,” she said. “It was more interesting to me that I had dinner with Francis Bacon, because there’s more common ground to talk about, more curiosity, more sort of interest for me personally. [Pop musicians] have a way of being very ordinary.” The Beatles were many things, but “ordinary” was not one of them!
Working with The Beatles didn’t change Haworth’s perception of the group. She later saw one of Yoko Ono’s performance pieces. She wasn’t impressed with that either. Haworth found Yoko’s work odd and irritating. Haworth’s opinion is a bit surprising since she and Yoko were both avant-garde artists from the same time period.
How ‘Sgt. Pepper’ performed on the charts in the United States and the United Kingdom
Sgt. Pepper went on to become a huge hit in the United States. It was No. 1 for 15 of its 233 weeks on the Billboard 200. The title song eventually became a minor hit. It reached No. 71 and stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks.
The Official Charts Company reports Sgt. Pepper was massive in the United Kingdom upon initial release. There, it was No. 1 for 28 of its 277 weeks on the chart. Upon rerelease, the album hit No. 3 and charted for another 16 weeks.
Haworth was never a big Beatles fan but she’s still an important part of the band’s history.
