Sir Peter Blake was paid ‘so little’ for Beatles cover art

Sir Peter Blake has admitted he was ‘frustrated’ that he and his ex-wife were paid ‘so little’ to design the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

The sleeve to The Beatles’ 1967 record – which features a photo of the band and images of 85 other characters – was designed by Sir Peter and Jann Haworth, the American artist and his then-wife – and features rows of famous faces including Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe and Karl Marx.

However, the celebrated graphic artist, now 92, has complained about the £200 flat fee he and Ms Haworth were paid, instead of royalties, for co-designing the LP that went on to become one of the biggest selling ever.

Asked on the This Cultural Life podcast if after seven decades of working as an artist he found it ‘frustrating’ that he is still most associated with a pop album he said: “On one level, it’s frustrating, and it’s frustrating that we were paid so little.

“I mean, there was never any royalty or anything like that. That was a set fee, a flat fee of 200 quid... I mean, I’m not irritated anymore. That was a long time ago, and there was a time when a little extra money would have been helpful.

“Now we’ve gone on from there, and it doesn’t matter.”

Sir Peter explained how he and Ms Haworth had come to create the album cover for a record that would go on to sell more than 30 million copies – for a fee that would be the equivalent of around £4,000 in today’s money.

“The Beatles were making the record,” he said. “They were friends with Robert Fraser, the gallerist who the gallery I was with. He then got the contract, which was, I think, a thousand pounds.

“So he subcontracted me for 200 pounds to do my work. Jann helped a lot doing it. So I decided she deserved to be credited. We were married by then, so we shared it [the fee].”

The original idea for the cover was an audience for an imaginary park concert, using cardboard cutouts of 57 famous people. It contrasts the image of the band during their early Beatlemania era, using waxwork models from Madame Tussauds, with the bright look they adopted in the later 1960s.

EMI, the record label, rejected the inclusion of Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi, over fears of controversy.

‘George chose about six Indian gurus’

“What we did was I asked all the Beatles and Robert and myself and Jann to make a list of people because they decided to be Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and they’d had the uniforms made and Paul had some kind of idea of them being in some kind of group.

“So my contribution was to put them in front of a crowd and the crowd could be anybody they wanted. This was their audience, this was their fans.

“So that was my big contribution. So they all made a list. Ringo just said, ‘Oh, whatever the other lads want, that’s fine’ so he didn’t choose anybody. George chose about six Indian gurus.

“And then it was a very mixed list from Paul and John, and then myself and Jann. It’s interesting to know who chose who. I mean, for years, people thought John had chosen. In fact, Paul had chosen.

“And I’m still not sure who chose Dylan Thomas, for instance.

“It became a kind of game to work out who they were. And eventually a diagram was printed and one person was unrecognised and eventually somebody recognised him.

“In fact, it was Wally Berman, who was a West Coast kind of pop artist.”