In 1967, Haworth and her then husband Peter Blake made one of the most famous commercial artworks of the modern age: the cover of the Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Among the 65 different people it featured, from Albert Einstein, Fred Astaire and HG Wells to the occultist Aleister Crowley, there were only 12 women and, as Haworth admits, three of those were different images of child star Shirley Temple.
What is more, Haworth, a young female artist at the time, found her own key role in creating the cover was ignored for years.
Now Haworth and her daughter, Liberty Blake, are bringing to Britain a work they started together in 2016 to set straight the record of women’s achievements. Their Work in Progress mural – seven panels, 28ft long and 8ft wide – displays the faces of more than 100 influential women who have either been written out of history or marginalised.
The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper reworked by jazz musicians
Listen here- Released digitally, a new album called A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper features a number of ‘new jazz’ artists from The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It includes Sons Of Kemet’s Shabaka Hutchings tackling “Good Morning Good Morning” (with The Ancestors), Onyx Collective covering “Within You Without You” and Makaya McCraven taking on “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. by Sam Richards - Uncut.co.uk
Explains Hutchings: “I took melodic fragments from throughout the song and used these as starting posts for my imagination to complete the phrases as I saw fit. I tried to see the tube as a mine of raw materials whereby I extract core musical information then process it into what I define as beauty.”
Onyx Collective added: “Recording ‘Within You Without You’ was a very humbling and uplifting opportunity. Of all the great songs on the album, this one felt the most serendipitous for us to vibe out on. We now perform it as a part of our live repertoire.”
Listen to the full album below. A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper will be released on vinyl in January.
A psychedelic painting created as the original album artwork for The Beatles classic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is up for sale at Sotheby’s.
Beatles: the unused artwork, by Dutch art collective The Fool, is expected to sell for more than $100,000 during an online auction which begins this week. (Source: justcollecting.com )
The sleeve for the 1967 album is amongst the most famous in music history – but it could originally have looked very different.
The iconic cover, filled with cardboard cut-outs of historical and famous figures, was created by artist Sir Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, using an original concept sketch by Paul McCartney.
The album was also the first rock record to feature the lyrics to every song on the reverse of the sleeve.
But the band decided to release the album with a gatefold sleeve, giving them twice the space of a conventional LP, and commissioned a Dutch art collective known as ‘The Fool’ to create the central artwork
