Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "A Day in the Life". Producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick helped realise the group's ideas by approaching the studio as an instrument, applying orchestral overdubs, sound effects and other methods of tape manipulation. Recording was completed on 21 April 1967. The cover, depicting the Beatles posing in front of a tableau of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by the British pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. "Sgt. Pepper" is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while
The Beatles (album) "should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making". Richard Goldstein of "The New York Times" considered the double album to be "a major success" and "far more imaginative" than "Sgt. Pepper" or "Magical Mystery Tour", due to the band's improved songwriting and their relying less on the studio tricks of those earlier works. In "The Sunday Times", Derek Jewell hailed it as "the best thing in pop since "Sgt. Pepper"" and concluded: "Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that