ABSTRACT
The Beatles “Sgt Peppers” album, released at the height of the 1967 British “Summer Of Love”, combined electronic experimentalism with harmonic adventure, creating sounds that evoked an aural representation of the psychedelic experience, becoming signifiers of the counterculture of the era. The Beatles conventional assignment of instruments also diminished in importance, and together with their “studio as instrument” ethos would make stage performance of those songs by the performers on the record impossible. Paradoxically, the 50th anniversary of the album’s release in 2017 included a multitude of live presentations of the album, bringing together performers and audiences to share in a musical conceit and recreate something that never actually happened. The recreation on stage of the album by Alain Pire’s Lonely Hearts Club Band provided a unique opportunity for collective practice as research to deconstruct available recordings and studio outtakes, as an autoethnographic study to examine and reproduce performative aspects of the recording process, with live mixing establishing the final balance. This chapter considers how recreating important sonic features is entwined with notions of authenticity, staging, performance and entertainment, and discusses the value of practical reconstruction and shared tacit knowledge in the understanding of forgotten techniques.
