Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album carried on the childhood and Liverpool theme with its circus and fairground effects, its pervading atmosphere of the traditional northern music hall that was in both its main creators' [McCartney and Lennon's] blood." "Sgt. Pepper" album cover was designed by the pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. Blake recalled of the concept: "I offered the idea that if they had just played a concert in the park, the cover could be a photograph of the group just after the concert with the crowd who had just watched the concert, watching them. If we did this by using cardboard
The Beatles Among music critics, acclaim for the album was virtually universal. Gould writes: "Sgt. Pepper" was the first major pop/rock LP to include its complete lyrics, which appeared on the back cover. Those lyrics were the subject of critical analysis; for instance, in late 1967 the album was the subject of a scholarly inquiry by American literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier, who observed that his students were "listening to the group's music with a degree of engagement that he, as a teacher of literature, could only envy". Poirier identified what he termed its "mixed allusiveness": "It's unwise ever