New and Improved – The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Remixed

If you are a fan of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that changed the parameters of recorded music for all time, you need to hear this interview of Giles Martin by NPR’s Bob Boilen.

Giles Martin is the record-producing son of famous Beatles long-time producer George Martin, and keeper of the Beatles’ vault.

About a year ago, a 50th Anniversary remix of this iconoclastic album was released.

But why remix the entire album now?

Here’s Giles Martin’s answer:

I mean, it’s the most famous album of all time. It’s not as though it sounded bad. But if you think about when Sgt. Pepper was made, which is 50 years ago, it was really designed for mono, and the band spent a lot of time on the mono mixes. The mixes, in those days, were a performance [there was no automation, all hands were on the mixing console], they were live — and the band, with my father George Martin and with Geoff Emerick, mixed Sgt. Pepper. When the stereo [mixes] were done, they were done very quickly. But no one listens to the monos.

The 50th anniversary marked the appropriate time revisit the mono mixes that defined how The Beatles themselves wanted to album to sound, and to translate with loving care their original vision for how the album should sound in the stereo environment that is now ubiquitous. And when you add in the use of the original pristine recording tapes, the results are fantastic. You can hear samples of comparisons between the three versions (mono mix, stereo mix, new remix) in the NPR interview.

I’m wondering why I’m only learning of this now? I am the target market and I completely missed it.

Well, better late than never.

Who knew the most influential band of all times – The Beatles – could be “new and improved” fifty years after its creation?

Theodore Levitt and Peter Drucker would be proud.

NPR Sgt. Pepper’s Interview with Giles Martin

Barry Linetsky is a lover of Beatles music, specializing in value-driven strategic management, and author of the acclaimed business biography The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success (Theme Park Press, 2017), available from amazon. Visit www.BarryLinetsky.com. Twitter @BizPhilosopher.