Fifty years after the Beatles’ 'Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' was released, Merton marks the anniversary with a radio series in which he imagines what would have happened if his favourite band had reunited, made another album, and played live one more time.
From Radio Times, May 2017
“It would have been 1974,” he says, firmly.
He’s worked on it painstakingly, plotting when these events could have actually happened as the Beatles’ solo careers were soaring and diverging, their personal lives rocking and rolling, and their finances still affected by the messy legal wrangles that plagued their final years.
He’s even done the set list for the “concert” and ordered the tracks for the “record” himself, stitching together lesser-known songs from the solo Beatles’ catalogues and live shows.
“To be honest, I’ve been doing this for years,” he says, “John Lennon said in the 70's that if you want to create a Beatles album, just take tracks off individual albums and put them together, and I always wondered, could you create something that feels right? Then work out when they could have played together, around solo records, having children, trying to get green cards? And then I developed a theory…”
Another reason Merton has enjoyed creating an alternative history is a personal one: he became a Beatles obsessive after his heroes split up. Born in 1957 in south London, he was five when they released their first album, 'Please Please Me', and 12 when they broke up, but he spent his childhood, amazingly, largely unaware of their music. “I was the least rock ‘n’ roll child ever. My parents listened to the Light Programme, and that was it, really. I was completely out of touch with what was happening in pop culture, projecting old 8mm silent films to myself and the wall. My only album was an Al Jolson album!” But as Merton’s teens whirred onwards, the Beatles’ music seeped in. He’d heard and loved 'Here Comes the Sun' from the last album they recorded together, 'Abbey Road', while wandering around Woolworths one Christmas, and borrowed the vinyl from his local library. “I remember the librarian going: ‘What, you really haven’t heard 'Rubber Soul' or 'Revolver'?’” He mimics a little boy lost. “And I was, ‘Er… no?’”. Soon he was back every other Saturday, borrowing every album in chronological order of release, like a mini-history project; he was agog at the extraordinary transitions the band had made in seven short years. “I basically did the Beatles in three months, in fortnight-long bursts, through headphones I got for my birthday, completely lost in their world.” He didn’t share the music with his friends, as he didn’t really go out to parties, he says; instead, he’d stay at home with his clunky tape recorder making compilations of tracks by the band together, and, prophetically enough, apart.
From day one, Merton loved 'Sgt Pepper'. “It’s not a rock ‘n’ roll record, really, is it? It does whimsy very well. It’s also got this strangeness, this hugeness, this going-upstairs-to-have-a-smoke-and-go-into-a-dream stuff. It’s a record that’s soaring above nature.” As a teenager, he even fantasised he might pay someone to put a photograph of him onto the 'Sgt Pepper' cover one day. Lennon is Merton’s favourite Beatle, who once said he’d rather have been a comedian than a pop star, although Merton himself gives this idea short shrift. “Rose-tinted glasses there, I think, John. I mean, when you’re in a band, you haven’t got another band heckling, trying to get you off the stage all the bloody time, have you?”
