The Beatles album George Martin thought would be reflected on as their masterpiece “in years to come”

What defines what will last and what will fade? It’s almost impossible to tell. Timelessness is something that philosophers could fuss over for eternities to come. But surely, The Beatles would be somewhere near the heart of their studies. The birth of the band is now closer to Henry Ford revealing his first ‘quadricycle’ than it is to the present day. Yet, you could argue that there is still no greater cultural force even though they folded from existence as an operating entity over half a century ago.

The whys and wherefores behind that are all up for debate, but when it comes to the masterpiece that they’ll be remembered for in another few centuries to come, their producer and proud fifth member, George Martin, figured that there would only be one. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the most famous album of all,” the silver-haired sonic whizz said in 1993.

“In years to come, when people say, ‘What was the great album of the 21st century?’, they will say, ‘It is Sgt Pepper‘. It may not be true, but it certainly is the one that sticks in everybody’s mind,” Martin opined. Indeed, it not only brought about a distinct new sound, but it captured the iconography and ideals of the era. If you think of the 1960s – culture’s greatest renaissance period since, well, the renaissance period – you think of Sgt Pepper first and foremost—that’s quite a feat considering man landed on the moon, JFK lost his head, and full-blown war broke out in Indochina.

For Martin, there were myriad reasons behind this. “The cover has just almost as much to do with that as the music that the cover contained,” he said. “The cover was a brilliant exercise in graphic art. By this time, covers became works of art in themselves.” This is far from a fastidious development either. The rise of cover art represents the dawn of pop culture as we know it, whereby music was more than sound. As The Beatles proved more than anyone, it was also about the look, the lore, and everything else that ties into modern identity ideologies.

No matter how forward-thinking Sgt. Pepper came to be, it was also proudly the culmination of all that came before it. It will be remembered as the defining record of the age simply because it grasped the age like no other. Pop culture had reached a fever-pitch by 1967, and The Beatles decided to pour all of this frenzied liberation, progression and discontent with the stilted status quo into an album that paired the depths of culture’s expanding pool with the new horizons made capable by blossoming studio technology. They asked Martin, “What new sounds can you give us?” And flooded that with a farrago of old influences.