Who was rejected for the Sergeant Pepper album cover?
The collage on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band shows a gathering of over 70 famous figures, cultural icons, and waxworks. How were the people chosen? The organising principle is that The Beatles have chosen who will feature. Their choices are engagingly random. English comic Tommy Handley shares the stage with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, for example. Very much alive, Fred Astaire is next to the long-dead nineteenth-century author, Edgar Allan Poe. Film star Sophia Loren is in the image - but you can't see her. She and fellow Italian Marcello Mastroianni are hidden behind the waxworks of The Beatles. Who missed out? Changes were made right up to the last moment. Some very unlikely options were considered. A cardboard cut-out of Hitler was produced but (wisely) removed from the photoshoot at the last minute. Brian Epstein rejected John Lennon's suggestion of Jesus. He did not wish to reignite the controversy of the p...
