MARK CUNNINGHAM: Recreating Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve, designed by Sir Peter Blake; possibly the most famous album cover of all time.

In the spring of 1987, Mark Cunningham took on the most bizarre project of his musical career: a re‑recording of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ten years later, as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original album, Mark revisits his curious sessions.

Several years before I gravitated to the business of music journalism, I was a full‑time producer and session musician, operating my own production company from offices which overlooked Essex FM in Southend‑on‑Sea. A number of my commissions were jingles and 'idents' for this ILR station, and as a result I often found myself being a sounding board for various promotional ideas. At the beginning of 1987, I was casually asked by the Station Manager if I had any brainwaves for Essex's Summer Roadshow season, to which I replied: "Well, there's going to be an awful lot of hype surrounding the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper and its CD release this June. Why not theme the roadshow around it?" I did not dream for one moment the consequences of this suggestion.

"Great!" he replied. "What you should do, Mark, is put a band together and play Sgt. Pepper live around the county." He obviously did not appreciate the technical problems involved in attempting to recreate this complex recording live with a four‑piece. Even The Beatles themselves avoided it, and that was a good enough reason for me not to even consider it. But there was another option.

"Give me the budget to go into the studio and re‑record the album as faithfully as possible, and I'll get a bunch of guys together to mime to playback on the road," I said. "How much will this cost?" inquired the man with the wallet, nervously assuming that several months at Abbey Road would surely be what it would take. Anticipating a huge challenge ahead of me, but not wanting to price myself out of the inevitable excitement that would follow, I foolishly answered: "No more than £2000... I'll do it locally to keep the costs low." The Station Manager smiled a wide smile. I started to sweat. The pressure was on as I began planning the most bizarre project of my entire musician career.

The studio at which I did most of my production work at the time was Diploma Studios near Chelmsford in rural Essex, a compact and bijou 24‑track analogue facility owned by Jim Woodford, whose step‑son Darren was chief engineer (and would later become the lead guitarist with Sunscreem). I had been a Beatles fanatic from my childhood, and Sgt. Pepper and the period from which it originated had always held a strange fascination for me, even though I had never performed any of its songs, not even in private. Familiar with the album's every nuance, I decided that the best way to reproduce the original's highly distinctive sounds and atmosphere would be to play as much of the instrumentation that I could cope with myself. And by removing the need for a room full of session musicians (who might not be quite so pedantic about authenticity) I would at least preserve a large slice of the budget. The control freak in me had just been born.

Starry‑Eyed Drummer

For three weeks leading up to the first session, I walked around obsessively listening to The Beatles' masterpiece on my Walkman (the CD wasn't out yet) and making copious notes about even the most subtle ad lib which, according to my own ground rules, had to be performed accurately on my re‑recording. By the time I arrived at Diploma in April for the first day's work, every one of my friends was convinced I had gone totally Upminster — several stops past Barking (mad). I was equally convinced that the moustache I had sprouted (and the fact that I was the same age as George Harrison — 24 — when he made the original) was going to influence the outcome. God knows how the project might have turned out if I'd gone the whole hog and taken LSD!

Unhappy with the sampled cellos, I performed these 'analogue stylee' on a real cello — my debut on the instrument.

The first couple of hours at Diploma were spent EQing and copying the whole of Sgt. Pepper on to two 2‑inch 24‑track tapes, running at 15ips on the Lyrec 532 machine. For good measure, I also added 'Strawberry Fields Forever', 'All You Need Is Love' and 'Magical Mystery Tour' to boost the psychedelic period theme of the programme, but we eventually decided not to include the album's Indian number, 'Within You Without You', the reason for which will soon become apparent. The idea behind the tape transfers was not to 'steal' from the original but to give me something to play drums to as I built the backing tracks from the ground up. In cases where 'straight in' intros occurred, Darren would turn the multitrack tape over and I would listen to the Beatles' songs in reverse, clicking my drumsticks over the twisted‑sounding intros to provide a two‑bar timing and cue reference when the tape was returned to forward mode.

From the start of the sessions, eerie coincidences emerged, as if we were being guided by an spiritual force. The four‑piece house drum kit, like Ringo's, just happened to be a Ludwig, and an old, dusty one to boot. Rather than mic the kit as I would for a regular session, we purposely kept the mics to a maximum of six: top snare, hi‑hat, inside the bass drum, two high above the toms, and a wall‑mounted PZM which picked up the room ambience of the kit. Not that there was much of a reverberant quality about the room, what with its carpeted walls and foam‑lined corners.

For most of two eight‑hour days, I sat behind those drums willing my nose to grow in the hope that I might summon that unique 'Ringo feel'. Although I started my musical career as a drummer, it had been years since I played a kit in anger and it took some time to loosen up and replicate all the classic fills in the right places. On 'Strawberry Fields' I recorded two kit overdubs on top of the main drum track — floor tom quarter beats and the main drum pattern double‑tracked — from the point when the orchestra entered. I tried desperately to recreate the feel of the manic percussion of The Beatles' version, which is best heard on the Anthology 2 out‑take. This ad hoc overdub had been recorded one night with all four Beatles and their roadies, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, on timpani, bongos, tambourine, shakers and various hammered objects. Apart from this number, the remainder of my drum tracks were fairly standard, but to obtain just the right flavour, compression was used in abundance.

Ah yes, compression. The sound of Sgt. Pepper, but also the previous album, Revolver, which initially put into place many of the techniques employed on the 1967 classic, as explained in the December 1995 issue of SOS. When engineer Geoff Emerick became George Martin's balance engineer for the Revolver sessions in April 1966, it was his marriage of previously unheard‑of miking techniques with over‑compression and heavy limiting which took The Beatles' sound into new territories. On Ringo's drums he positioned the mics much closer than ever before and, for the first time, he put a mic inside the bass drum (he had to obtain a letter of permission from the Abbey Road management to proceed with this, as the rules prevented the mic being any nearer than 18 inches from the bass drum, for fear that the air pressure would damage the mic diaphragm). The kit was then put through incredibly expensive Fairchild limiters — hence the big dynamic sound of both Revolver and Pepper. Down at Diploma 20 years later, however, we relied simply on Drawmer's more affordable technology.

Bass 'N' Guitars

Every now and then I would escape from the drum booth to check my performances in the control room, and whenever I was happy I would break up the session by overdubbing my bass parts. I chose to play my old faithful 1975 Fender Precision and EQ'd it in such a way that it resembled the sound of McCartney's Rickenbacker 4001S. The bass was DI'd to the 32‑input M Jay broadcast desk (which always seemed to have at least one channel down) and a line was taken out to my tall 200 watt Vox Super Foundation bass stack. This was miked from a distance (about six feet) with a valve AKG C12, to capture the amp warmth and dynamic 'boom' of the high‑register notes present in 'With A Little Help From My Friends', 'Good Morning Good Morning' and 'Getting Better', among others. Aspects of this miking method were close to the original, I later discovered. Geoff Emerick told me in 1995: "We would always reserve one track of the 4‑track tape for Paul's bass overdubs. He used to stay behind some nights with me just for that purpose. We would put his bass amp in the middle of Studio Two and mic it from about eight feet away with an old valve C12, and sometimes use a second mic even further away and mix the two signals together. The quality of the bass on those numbers was outstanding."

Being a long‑time scholar of Macca's lines and a bass player by trade, I was pleased to be able to 'knock off' most of the bass tracks in one or two takes, leaving myself the lion's share of the first two days to almost, but not quite, perfect the drums. I was delighted to find that I completed this part of the project with two hours to spare, and wisely spent this time recording the backwards hi‑hat for 'Strawberry Fields', in exactly the same way as I'd done for the intro cues, and most of the percussion, such as bongos, tambourine, wind chimes, hand claps and cowbell, all with an SM57.

By the time I arrived at Diploma in April for the first day's work, every one of my friends was convinced I had gone totally Upminster — several stops past Barking (mad).

Much of the guitar work was accomplished over the next two days, firstly using my Epiphone jumbo acoustic with a heavily limited Neumann U87, and then a Stratocaster and Gibson 335 for all of the electric rhythm and lead parts. I managed to lay my hands on a beaten‑up Marshall 4x12 cabinet, driven by a 1960s Selmer amp that also looked like it had seen better days but sounded kosher. The only guitar pedal effect used was an antiquated Fuzz Face for the title track and the Hendrix‑flavoured 'Good Morning Good Morning' solo, whereas for 'Lucy' we sent the main guitar riff through a fast‑rotating Leslie speaker, miked with a pair of SM57s. This remained the guitar rig for all the songs, with the exception of 'Fixing A Hole', for which we put the double‑tracked guitar licks and solo through a small Tandy speaker, and gave it plenty of middle EQ on the desk to achieve the slightly nasal sound of the original. That Strat solo was probably one of the most authentic reproductions of the project. It was in no small degree helped by the use of a Roland Chorus Echo box, on which we dialled up an approximation of the ADT (Artificial Double Tracking) effect originally conceived, at John Lennon's request, by Abbey Road's general manager Ken Townsend during the Revolver sessions. The effect was created when, during mixing, information was taken from the sync head of the multitrack machine and advanced before the replay head onto a quarter‑inch machine, after which varispeed was used to create a ghost image on top of the original sound.

At this point I made the decision to include all of the vocals, even though for live playback purposes there would be an optional mix with the lead vocals reduced in level. But before the first note was sung there was much work to be done with keyboards, an area which was far from being my speciality. On the resident Schumann baby grand (miked with two Sennheiser condensers) I could handle the basic piano parts, such as those for 'Strawberry Fields' (a one‑chord vamp!), 'A Day In The Life' and 'With A Little Help...', but it was still clear that I would have to bring in an expert, namely Nick Page, a local session player who frequented Diploma.

I fuelled Nick with numerous cups of tea and sarnies while he sat in the lounge with a cassette of 'When I'm Sixty‑Four' and the barrelhouse solo from 'Lovely Rita', busily writing out all the dots to read later. He did a marvellous job of recreating George Martin's 'Rita' solo, and was very quick too. I later got Nick to play the piano flourishes on the tailpiece of 'Magical Mystery Tour' and after he left the session we fed the piano track through the Leslie, recording its sound and gradually increasing the reverb and ADT level as the speaker began to rotate. The effect was just a tad too heavy‑handed when compared to the Fabs' version, although, funnily enough, it sounds like an exact replica of McCartney's later 1993 reworking on the album Paul Is Live.

Don't Mention The 'S' Word

A genuine Hammond B3 was hired in for me to play on the organ tracks, and also on the hire list was a '70s Wurlitzer electric piano for 'Getting Better'. Apart from these 'real' instruments, the keyboard sounds now relied on what was still relatively new technology in 1987: sampling. I had wanted to avoid sampling as much as possible in favour of using the real McCoys, but I could see from an early stage that the budget would not allow this. So out went the 'Strawberry Fields' Mellotron flute sound and swarmandel (Indian table harp), and in came useful hybrid approximations from the Akai S900, played on the master keyboard: a state‑of‑the‑art Yamaha DX7. Similarly, the 'Lucy In The Sky' celeste and droning tampura, 'Fixing A Hole' harpsichord and 'She's Leaving Home' harp were created with this setup, often involving the merging of a number of Akai and Yamaha factory sounds to get close to the exotic instrumentation.

How to orchestrate without an orchestra was the next obstacle, and it was at this juncture that the project could have fallen on its knees if not for the patience and skills of one Dave Brock, the keyboard maestro from top cabaret band Triple Cream. Dave realised how obsessive I was about giving this project 100% in all areas, and he very kindly spent several evenings scoring every subtle string and horn line until his manuscript pad looked a complete mess. Only he would understand it! He came in one Thursday morning looking very pleased with himself, played around with various disks and dials on his S900, ordered Darren to cue the multitrack for 'A Day In The Life' and grinned at me as he sat behind his Korg DW8000.

At the point where the 'I love to turn you on' line would later appear, Dave cued a violin bank sample and started making his way up the keyboard towards E major, spectacularly emulating the random upward movements of the original's orchestral rush. It blew me away! He then paused for the 'Woke up, fell out of bed' section, then played the more melodic bridge before delivering the dramatic climax. Once the violin section was on tape, Dave repeated the formula for each one of the '41‑piece orchestra' as we occasionally bounced these tracks together to give him sufficient room.

How to orchestrate without an orchestra was the next obstacle.

This was all in complete contrast to what actually went down at Abbey Road in January '67, of course. The original backing track for 'A Day In The Life' was recorded in a standard manner on one 4‑track machine, then bounced down with additional Beatle overdubs. In the middle of the song, between Lennon's verse and McCartney's section, a long 24‑bar void was marked out by McCartney's four‑to‑the‑bar piano prodding, while Mal Evans counted out the bars for reference (as heard on Anthology 2) and aptly set off an alarm clock to indicate the end of the passage (I even added the clock to my rendition). Something would fill that space later, though quite what they had in mind would not become concrete until 40 seasoned orchestra professionals arrived at Studio One, the large orchestral room.

McCartney, with guidance from Martin, had decided to plug the gap by writing a score which would have each member of the orchestra play the lowest note possible on their instrument and, over the course of the 24 bars, rise in pitch before ending on an E major chord. Violin leader Erich Gruenberg was among the confused musicians that evening. A few years ago, he told me: "Paul wanted the orchestra to generate some excitement, but there was no score. After experimenting with different approaches it was decided we would all start on our lowest note and finish on top E on the 21st bar. The 'A Day In The Life' session was quite a party. The Beatles were wandering around with cine cameras, pointing them at people. Everyone entered into the spirit."

To simulate an even larger orchestral sound, Abbey Road's ambiophonics system was used. This employed 100 loudspeakers around Studio One to feed delayed signals from the orchestra into the studio and back into the control room console. For some peculiar reason, I could not find any such facility at Diploma.

Despite such shortcomings, my versions were now really coming together, and Dave's skills inspired me to try my hand at 'playing' the thunderous string and trumpet parts for 'Strawberry Fields'. Unhappy with the sampled cellos, I performed these 'analogue stylee' on a real cello — my debut on the instrument — with a dynamic mic thrust as near to the bridge as was comfortable. Knowing that the original had a laconic feel, owing to the variations in recording speed, I asked Darren to speed up the tape for all the overdubs (including the soon‑to‑be‑recorded vocals) so that the slurred flavour would be reproduced on the final mix. With hindsight this was the best track of the bunch, even though it did not share the same edited technique as the original. As Beatles trainspotters will know, 'Strawberry Fields' was actually formed from two separate takes, each one of them in a different tempo and key, but by the grace of God (and Ken Townsend) each take was seamlessly aligned.

The sampled saxophones for 'Good Morning Good Morning' sounded too polite, so to dirty them up we literally overloaded the desk. I quickly discovered that, although groups of sampled instruments sounded passable, solo orchestral instruments suffered from the limitations of mid‑'80s technology. The Akai was no match for the real thing and compromise became the name of the game, especially on 'She's Leaving Home' which is totally orchestral. I now wince whenever I hear the sound of the looping sampled violins. Sometimes we were able to disguise the short sample times by overlaying sounds at different points so that the loops were covered over. Inevitably, though, it was the one area of my project which could justifiably be labelled 'Mickey Mouse', and it was this experience which made me shy away from re‑recording 'Within You Without You', as the Akai's representation of sitars and dilrubas was, quite frankly, crap! With the benefit of today's hardware, of course, one can achieve an incredibly close reproduction of these instruments (but I am not about to repeat this exercise!).

Vocals & Effects

About 10 days into the sessions, still with odd musical inserts to be recorded, we started work on the lead vocals. The plan was that I would sing McCartney's and Starr's parts, while my erstwhile band colleague, ex‑Pinkee Paul Egholm, was to take care of Lennon. However, we ended up swapping roles on 'Strawberry Fields', 'Lovely Rita' and the 'Sgt. Pepper' title track, much to the confusion of everyone. All the vocals — including the harmonies, which were done in one dedicated session — were recorded with a Neumann U87. A little varispeed was applied to the recording of my vocal on 'When I'm Sixty‑Four' to capture the childlike quality of Macca's version, and the Lennon section of 'A Day In The Life' was recorded with tape delay on the multitrack, as he would have liked it himself. There are two schools of thought about McCartney's 'Sixty‑Four' vocal. While Sir George has said that it was recorded at slow speed in order for it to sound like a wispy old gent on normal playback, it could equally be conceived that McCartney wanted his voice to appear more like it sounded at the age of 16, when he originally penned the song.

Paul Egholm did brilliantly at the mic, even though at first he seemed a little intimidated by the thought of 'impersonating' his hero. Nevertheless, it had always been his forte, and this was the ultimate showcase. At the close of the last vocal session, Paul and I fumbled around with the last remaining duties, such as the comb and paper blasts on 'Lovely Rita', the 'When I'm Sixty‑Four' tubular bell and the dubbing of BBC sound effects discs (audience noise and various animal and hunting sounds — the latter to be featured at the end of 'Good Morning'). We were set for the mix.

All Hands On Desk

I took a week off and tried to distance myself from Sgt. Pepper for a while, although it proved impossible to think of anything else. I felt like an athlete who had been undergoing intense training for the Olympics, and the big day was just ahead! And so on a sunny Monday morning in May, I arrived with a large bag of Pot Noodles and alcoholic refreshments to begin a mammoth mixing session that would take me through to the Wednesday afternoon. Yes, I was that mad! We chose to mix in mono, as The Beatles themselves preferred, and I was constantly spurred on by my physical aching to hear through those Tannoy monitors a sound that may well have emanated from Abbey Road's Studio 2, 20 years before.

I had wanted to avoid sampling as much as possible in favour of using the real McCoys, but I could see from an early stage that the budget would not allow this.

We ignored the Lexicons and Rolands in the outboard rack, and kept the effects simply to tape delay and a spring reverb which had the annoying habit of always going 'Boing!' at critical moments. The mix mostly went like clockwork, although there were a few moments when the kind of automation I had been used to on sessions at Eden and AIR would have come in very handy. The segue from 'Sgt. Pepper' into 'With A Little Help...' was a real bitch, but even worse was 'A Day In The Life' which called for six people to push faders up and down, re‑EQ and turn aux knobs between the ambient and dry sections. The last item on the agenda was the mix for 'Strawberry Fields', at which time I painfully noticed a single timing glitch on the drums after the first vocal line. It was too late to repair it now, so it remains, sticking out like a giant sore thumb every time I hear it. Another rule I set myself was that there would be no fade endings, and so on 'Strawberry Fields', for example, I chose an appropriate point near the end to insert into the mix a loop of a delayed piano. This replaced the fade‑out/fade‑in arrangement of the original.

A Splendid Time

After a total of 120 hours at Diploma, the project came in £150 under budget and I emerged, grey‑skinned but on top of the world, satisfied that I had probably come as close as anyone would get to recreating this landmark album. Certainly, when I premiered the recordings to the folks at Essex FM on June 1, the actual 20th anniversary, they were amazed to the point that some believed they were listening to the 'real' album and that I had conned them out of a couple of grand. A back‑handed compliment if ever I'd heard one! While I allowed a limited edition of cassettes to be distributed amongst the press and selected VIPs, I refused to release the work commercially — a decision I still stand by. Later on in the year, to my delight, I received unexpected acknowledgements from two of those VIPs, George Martin and Paul McCartney, and The Beatles' Monthly gave the project a major thumbs‑up. It also attracted the attention of the now‑defunct Sound Engineer & Producer magazine, which saw fit to send a mad American journalist to my flat to interview me for a feature.

The sampled saxophones for 'Good Morning Good Morning' sounded too polite, so to dirty them up we literally overloaded the desk.

Strangest of all was an hour‑long interview I gave on BBC Radio with Trevor Dann, who was obviously a Beatles aficionado and appeared quite over‑awed by what I had done, insisting on playing extracts from each of my recordings. Interesting then, that when he took charge of Radio One's programming he controversially decided to ban The Beatles' reunion single 'Real Love' from the playlist, on the grounds that it was not suitable for his listeners.

This project taught me huge lessons about the recording of music, the first one being that I had taken so much for granted. One can learn to play, sing and record a sequence of musical notes, parrot fashion, but it's impossible to recreate an atmosphere — especially when one is playing out the roles of four people (five, if you count George Martin). It made me realise that so much of what went onto tape on the original Sgt. Pepper was not so much down to the way the music was performed, but more about the interaction of human beings. It also gave me a deeper appreciation of the limited resources available to The Beatles in 1967. They were still using the 1‑inch 4‑track method (actually bouncing between more than one machine), whereas I had 24 tracks at my disposal and occasionally moaned about not having 32 for the 'orchestra'. And if it was not for their demolition of perceived technical boundaries in the 1960s, it is highly likely that 48‑track recording would still be a mere twinkle in some eccentric designer's eye. Spoilt rotten, we are.