‘Sgt. Pepper’ Artwork Isn’t Creator Peter Blake’s Favorite Commission

Artist Peter Blake said the work he’s best known for – the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – said it wasn’t his favorite commission.

Although he’s now in a wheelchair as a result of knee problems, the 91-year-old is still working, and recently completed the art to accompany Mark Knopfler’s star-studded charity single.

Asked about his feelings on the 1967 Sgt. Pepper cover, Blake told the Guardian: “I always say it’s been a mixed blessing. At that point I was pretty well established. It didn’t make me.”

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He added: “I’ve done about 20 album covers and in my mind it’s only one of those. The one that’s dearest to me is Gettin’ in Over My Head for Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.”

He went on to explain that the Beatles era had passed him by in many ways. “I’m not going to say: ‘Oh, the Swinging ‘60s was fantastic; that was my best decade,’” he reported. “It wasn’t. I wasn’t really a swinger. I never did any drugs at all.

“For me the 1950s were national [military] service and the Royal College, then there are those early pictures that became pop art, then in the 1970s I lived in Somerset and the pictures became idyllic. I came back to London in the 1980s. Each decade has its own character. I don’t feel nostalgic for a period.”

Blake discussed the term “pop art,” saying: “[I]n America, you got Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the early 50s, then the second wave with Warhol and Lichtenstein; and in England, at more or less the same time, you had the Independent Group.

Peter Blake Had Help With Mark Knopfler Artwork

“My contention is that the actual phrase was invented at a dinner party when I was talking to the critic Lawrence Alloway. I explained that I was trying to make an art that was the equivalent of pop music. And Lawrence said: ‘What? A kind of pop art?’ Other people would tell you a different story, but that certainly happened, and I think it was the first use of the phrase.”

Explaining his motivation in pursuing the form, he said: “I hoped that a different kind of people would look at art. I hoped the young fan of Elvis might look at my pictures in the same spirit.”

Admitting he was introduced to computers at an early stage, but didn’t understand their potential, Blake said: “I still can’t work a computer, but I work with somebody, which is brilliant. I’ve just done the cover for Mark Knopfler’s rerecording of Going Home to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust with the top 40 guitarists in the world. I got the images and worked with someone who cut them out and then I put them together.”