The Beatles "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" PCS 7027 g/fold + inner 1970

	£		15
	$		19

The Beatles ? "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"  Parlophone ?– PCS 7027 Vinyl, Stereo LP, Repress, issued in a gate-fold sleeve, with one EMI box on the labels.
1970 'one box' EMI pressing, with card insert and Gramophone text on rim. This was not issued with the red and white inner found on the original issue.
The vinyl appears to have been very lightly played and is in great shape. The gate-fold sleeve shows minimal signs of wear (apart from an "R" written inside the gate-fold) and is also in great condition. The insert is immaculate. Matrix/Run Out Side 1 ; YEX 637 -1 Matrix/Run Out Side 2 ; YEX 638 -1
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is the Beatles' eighth studio album. Released on 1 June 1967, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spending 27 weeks at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one in the United States. Time magazine declared it "a historic departure in the progress of music" and the New Statesman praised its elevation of pop to the level of fine art. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour.
Sgt. Pepper's album cover was designed by the pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth from an ink drawing by McCartney. It was art-directed by Robert Fraser and photographed by Michael Cooper. The front of the LP included a colourful collage featuring the Beatles in costume as the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people. Each of the Beatles sported a heavy moustache, after Harrison had first grown one as a disguise during his visit to India. The moustaches reflected the growing influence of hippie style trends, while the group's clothing "spoofed the vogue in Britain for military fashions", writes the Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould. The centre of the cover depicts the Beatles standing behind a drum skin, on which the fairground artist Joe Ephgrave painted the words of the album's title. In front of the drum skin is an arrangement of flowers that spell out "Beatles". The group were dressed in satin day-glo-coloured military-style uniforms that were manufactured by the theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd in London. Right next to the Beatles are wax sculptures of the bandmembers in their suits and moptop haircuts from the Beatlemania era, borrowed from Madame Tussauds. The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.
With certified sales of 5.1 million copies, "Sgt. Pepper" is the third-best-selling album in UK chart history. "Sgt. Pepper" is one of the most commercially successful albums in the US, where the RIAA certifies sales of 11 million copies. It has sold more than 32 million copies worldwide, making it one of the highest-selling albums of all time. In a 1987 review for Q magazine, the music journalist and author Charles Shaar Murray asserted that the album "remains a central pillar of the mythology and iconography of the late '60s". That same year Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis described it as an "enormous achievement" that "revolutionized rock and roll". In 1994, "Sgt. Pepper" was ranked first in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. He described it as "the album that revolutionized, changed and re-invented the boundaries of modern popular music." In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, honouring the work as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2003, Rolling Stone placed it at number one in their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, describing it as "the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists". In the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Larkin wrote: "[it] turned out to be no mere pop album but a cultural icon, embracing the constituent elements of the 60s' youth culture: pop art, garish fashion, drugs, instant mysticism and freedom from parental control." In 2006 it was chosen by Time as one of the 100 best albums of all time. That same year the music scholar David Scott Kastan described "Sgt. Pepper" as "the most important and influential rock and roll album ever recorded". The album was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.