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
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band both began to cover rock music for the first time, with the latter changing its name to "Jazz & Pop" as a result. In addition, following "Sgt. Pepper", established American publications such as "Vogue", "Playboy" and the "San Francisco Chronicle" started discussing rock as art, in terms usually reserved for jazz criticism. Writing for "Rolling Stone" in 1969, Michael Lydon said that reviewers had had to invent "new criticism" to match pop's musical advances, since: "Writing had to be an appropriate response to the music; in writing about, say, "Sgt. Pepper", you had to try to write something as good