This post is dedicated to Pete Smith who died recently. Pete was the talent coordinator for Live Aid and Live 8. He promoted The Who, Bill Haley and the Comets, The Kinks, Roger Waters, and Al Stewart amongst many others. His last music business foray was publishing fine art prints of album cover artwork, including Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd’s Animals.
I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with him.
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Sometimes it's frustrating knocking on the doors of the famous. They don't need me in their life. They have answered all the questions already. Having researched the origins of the Edgar Allan Poe daguerreotype (to be revealed in a future Substack post) appearing on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I still had an itch to know who might have chosen him. My speculation is John Lennon.
I was aware that, not only was Sir Peter Blake still alive, my friend Dr. Simon Warner, music journalist, writer on Beat poetry and music, Course Leader of a BA on Popular and World Music, had co-curated the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery at Leeds University in 2005. The gallery, which survived until 2013, included a complete set of Peter Blake’s signed, artist proof editions, album sleeve art. It boasted the only public showing of a signed print of the Sgt. Pepper's artwork, which Simon described as the Mona Lisa of rock 'n' roll.
Simon put me in touch with Pete Smith who was the other co-curator of the Blake Gallery and Sir Peter Blake's art publisher. Pete was the event coordinator for the 1985 Live Aid concert. The Live Aid poster artwork and Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas? cover were designed by Peter Blake.
In 2021 I contacted Pete Smith and although this didn't prove to be an open door to Sir Peter Blake's studio, our dialogue was highly enjoyable, loopy and fun. Having suggested a few alternative routes, Pete shared his personal thoughts on Sgt. Pepper's:
I have various personal, parlour game, interests in the album. One key question for me is to ask myself is exactly who is Sergeant Pepper? Once that question is answered the connections in the artwork begin to surface, like twisting that colourful plastic cube thingy. I think that I have the answer to who Pepper is. Poe probably falls into this fascinating game of Only Connect. That's an approach that you may find useful. Follow the yellow brick road. That's a clue. It is not necessarily the persona that you should focus on. The point is the culture or platform that they each themselves represent in relation to the overall theme of the album, or the "concept". So much is made of this being a "concept" album without duly exploring what the concept is. Often the answer lies in asking the right, less obvious, questions. It is surely something that goes beyond facile list making by band members. There is a madness to the method, as Poe may have said. As a pertinent and parallel exercise, check out the artwork for Pink Floyd's Division Bell album. That is exactly the same subject or "concept". I know. Storm Thorgerson confirmed it to me over lunch one day in Primrose Hill. Alternatively, revisit The Wizard of Oz movie. That was surely the starting point for The Beatles themselves in creating Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. It's all in there, including Poe.
All the best, Pete.
Storm Thorgerson was the creative genius and co-founder of the graphic art group Hipgnosis; designer with Aubrey Powell of many memorable single and album covers. I was surprised to realise that I had never actually seen The Wizard of Oz, or if I had I had forgotten it. I watched it that night, then replied to Pete.
Thanks Pete, I like your Sgt Pepper's Parlour Game. Sgt Pepper's as cultural pedagogy, with The Wizard of Oz hiding at the centre of a spinning Rubik's Cube. Yellow bricks & rubrics. The random connections: the co-writer of the screenplay of The Wizard of Oz was Edgar Allan Woolf.
The figures on Sgt Pepper's could well make a good tarot deck.
Will check out Division Bell. 'There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps / Running before times took our dreams away’1.
Peter Blake has probably had enough questions about Sgt Pepper's over the years. But maybe he doesn't know the story of the Poe twin daguerreotypes that were created in Jack Kerouac's hometown. I'm sure Kerouac should have been on the cover. Anyway, his beat buddy, Burroughs got there. Burroughs, cut out and cut in, just under Poe. Burroughs' photo also has been subject to a mis-attribution of original source image (it was also from a set taken on the same day, a couple in the same location. Actually also often mis-located: Pont Neuf, not Pont Des Arts, according my research and reading). I think even Miles got it wrong.
There's a crossroads on the yellow brick road. Dorothy takes one of three options. Maybe there's more than one Wizard of Oz.
Best wishes
Roger
Pete came straight back:
Hi Roger, the Division Bell has three Wizards, as you allude. Take a good look at it. Sgt. Pepper himself is one of one, as is The Wizard of Oz in the grey suit; The Great Oz has spoken! Probably best to leave Sir Peter out. He tires of Pepper questions.
All the best, Pete.
My partner, Rachel, is amused when I read her this exchange. As a creative writer herself, she appreciates the imaginative play and interplay of the dialogue. There's an Oz-like elusive logic to it all.
My boyfriend at Leeds University was called Blake, she reminded me. He was named after Peter Blake.
Tell me more! I prompted.
Well, his mother, Bobi Bartlett, was a good friend of Peter Blake, when they both lived in London. Bobi's son would have been born late 60s and Bobi was a single parent. Bobi was a costume designer at the BBC and no doubt part of the London swinging 60s scene.
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Robina 'Bobi' Bartlett died at her home in Brighton in April 2013. She trained as a fashion designer at the Royal College of Art in London, worked in the fashion industry, and launched her own design label selling young person’s, trendy clothes, before going into film costume design. If you do an internet search you will get reams of Doctor Who fan pages. Bobi was a costume designer for the popular sci-fi T.V. series from 1968-1971. She designed the crystal-headed Krotons, the Ice Warrior commander for the Seeds of Death story, and redesigned the Cybermen in 1968. Her final work on the series was 1971's The Mind of Evil. David J Howe, writer of numerous books on Doctor Who, wrote an obituary for Bobi in which he quotes an anecdote she tells, regarding an episode from this series:
There was a location sequence, early on in the story, which featured some children playing in a park in a London square, and I remember that my son Blake appeared as a little boy on a tricycle. He and some other children were asked to be extras, as the director had decided at the last moment that he wanted to have them there to complement the action. Very conveniently my son had come along that day to see Jon Pertwee performing his scenes as the Doctor.2’
Blake never mentioned that to me! said Rachel, bemused. Bobi moved to East Grinstead so Blake could go to the Steiner School in Forest Row. I stayed with them in a grand house. She liked me, and saw me as something of a surrogate daughter. Her liberal, alternative, outlook was quite an eye-opener for a Catholic Yorkshire girl!
I loved Doctor Who when I was a kid. I don't know if I watched The Mind of Evil, but I was terrified of the Cybermen; Bobi Bartlett made me hide behind the sofa. Their metallic heads, with pinhole eyes were more troubling than the Daleks whose neurotic voices and accessibility-limited shape sometimes lead to laughter rather than fear. The Cybermen were effective as some sort of shadow cybernetic version of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
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Rachel was only six months old in 1969, when Bobi Bartlett, fresh from the very first episode of the Vera Lynn TV series, was managing the costume and wardrobe department for Pop Go the Sixties. This was an end of decade, New Years Eve, 75 minute, TV pop celebration including The Who, The Kinks, Adam Faith, Lulu, The Batchelors, Sandie Shaw, The Hollies, Tom Jones, Cilla Black, The Shadows, Cliff Richard, and Dusty Springfield. The Beatles appeared in the form of a couple of archive clips from the documentary The Beatles at Shea Stadium. Sadly, the show went out at 10.35 pm, and I can't remember if, at eight years old, my parents would have let me stay up to see the new year in with The Beatles and Dusty.
High Hopes by David Jon Gilmour / Polly Anne Samson. The Division Bell, Pink Floyd 1994.
http://howeswho.blogspot.com/2013/05/bobi-bartlett-rip.html
A fascinating set of entanglements, Roger. I’m glad you were able to speak to Pete Smith before his rather premature death. It looks as if he very much enjoyed the exchange. This isn’t exactly psychogeography you’re dealing with, perhaps psychohistory!