ABSTRACT
Sgt. Pepper thus finds the Beatles retreating to the safety of EMI Studios, their past represented by the mop-top wax effigies on the album sleeve, their present by the colourful uniforms of 'Lonely Hearts Club Band'. For the more perceptive, the colourful uniforms and vaudeville-style banter also evoked the cultural politics of the drop-out hippies and student and graduate activists: 'Eradicate the Victorian ethic of virtuous sacrifice and remind the world that love must be a constantly original and divine word'. Captured by Peter Whitehead in his documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London and in the American weekly magazine Time which, in 1966, dedicated an entire issue to 'the Swinging City', London was eulogized as the epitome of modern urban culture. Harrison's interest in Indian culture may have originated in 1965, when his friend David Crosby of the Byrds introduced him to Indian classical music and the work of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, with whom he subsequently studied.
