“Their manager said that they needed a change of direction and he was going to call them The Pop Art Group. He has also had a friendly working relationship with the Who since he first met them in the early 60s: he has designed two of their album covers. He is a fan who has got to know his idols, which led him from making a fan’s image of the Beach Boys in 1964 to collaborating with Brian Wilson. It’s a dangerous thing to say, I hope that won’t be your headline: ‘Peter Blake doesn’t like the Beatles.’”īut this is not a criticism of the Beatles so much as a reflection on what it is to be a “fan”, which Blake is: and it is at the very heart of his work. I’ve never been an enormous fan of the Beatles like I am of the Beach Boys. These were his personal music passions, as well as bebop and R&B – “Bo Diddley I was an enormous fan of.” Out of that came the Beach Boys and the Lettermen,” says Blake. “I loved people like the Four Freshmen, the Hi-Lo’s and Kirby Stone Four. We were talking about Blake’s love of doo-wop, the harmonious genre of male singing invented in the 1940s US that fed into modern pop music.Ī conceptual spectacular … Blake with the artwork for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, we weren’t discussing Sgt Pepper when Chrissy got worried. He brings the same innocence and sincerity to Under Milk Wood as he has done to all his crazes. Blake has recreated the characters’ funny, filthy dreams in tender watercolours and portrays all the people of the imaginary village Llareggub with photographic clarity, as if it were a documentary instead of a dream play. To celebrate his birthday, he has an exhibition at the Waddington Custot gallery in London, of a passion to which he has dedicated four decades: visualising Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood. Blake, with his first wife, the artist Jann Haworth, designed perhaps the most famous album cover in history for the Fab Four’s conceptual 1967 spectacular Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: ever since, his fame as an artist has been inextricable from this one crazy image of John, Paul, George and Ringo posing in lurid neo-Edwardian garb among a crowd of famous and less famous heroes.Ĭhrissy is, of course, right – it’s not as if this was the be-all and end-all of Blake’s vision.