The rise of toytown pop

Pop’s counterfactuals tend to be built on questioning mortality: what if Jimi Hendrix had lived? Or Buddy Holly? Rarely does geopolitics enter into the speculation. Nevertheless, there’s a case for arguing that the landscape of British pop would have been markedly different had Harold Wilson acceded to the wishes of President Lyndon Johnson and sent British forces to Vietnam.

That’s worth contemplating now, ahead of the latest reissue — deluxe and expanded and remastered, as these things always are — of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released last week for the 50th anniversary of the original album. The Beatles — along with Pink Floyd, who were recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in the adjoining Abbey Road studio — more or less determined the parameters of English psychedelia, shaping it in a way that was markedly different from what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

American psychedelic music was facing up to the death of young men. Vietnam hung over the music, in the anger of the Doors and Love and Jefferson Airplane; in the lyrics of songs like the Byrds’ ‘Draft Morning’. In the UK, things were different. Where American artists called for an end to war, British artists — with no fear their friends might end up being killed — barely got past calling for an end to tea.

Just as the Beatles were at the heart of all of British pop’s other 1960s leaps and bounds, so they were at the heart of this. With ‘Yellow Submarine’, on the 1966 album Revolver, and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on Sgt. Pepper, they more or less invented a style that became known to music nerds as ‘toytown pop’, in which musicians responded to LSD by opening their minds not to the possibilities of higher consciousness, but to nursery rhymes and doggerel.