Mean Mr Mustard

Dear James,

Two Sundays ago, I decided to reorganise all my records by order of release. Man has yet to find a worse way to waste four and half hours. It did at least refresh my memory on this 1978 album. My record collection is full-to-brimming with cheap tat I picked up for 2 pesos while scouring various dusty parks and second hand shops in Buenos Aires (I have an alarmingly complete Cat Stevens and Carpenters collection) and no album is more indicative of this misspent time and money than the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Soundtrack.

This film, loosely-based on an off-broadway musical, tells the story of The Beatles, looking suspiciously like The Bee Gees, battling against the music industry and trying to stop people from stealing their instruments. Back in the 70s there was much demand for films about bearded men hanging on to their no-claims bonuses.

The album, as you might expect from the above video, is unrepentant shite. There are a couple of half-decent performances: Aerosmith manage a passable cover of "Come Together", while Earth, Wind and Fire flogged a million copies of their "Got To Get You Into My Life".



My friend Brandon Therun tells me that Rolling Stone magazine voted the album the worst album of all time. Rolling Stone evidently didn't get stoned and watch the movie before passing such judgement. And anyway, Rolling Stone's list of the best 100 songs of all time doesn't feature a single solitary Queen song, so they're stupid.

You'd think that one Beatles rip-off film would be enough for one decade, but you´d be wrong. SPLHCB came only two years after All This and World War Two. While having less emphasis on instrument theft and more stress on planes and bombs and stuff, ATAWWT had an even odder hotchpotch of artistes and Beatles songs: Keith Moon making When I'm 64 worse than you could ever have imagined it; Status Quo doing a Disney-flavoured version of Getting Better (interesting that Kaiser Chiefs later covered the same song); and, you'll like this, Leo Sayer doing a throat-busting version of "I Am The Walrus".