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Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band
Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band

Released

1 June 1967

Recorded

6 December 1966 – 21 April 1967

IOU and Shallow Sound Studios, London

Genre

Psychedelic Pop, Pop Rock

Length

39:42

Label

Aristophone

Preceded By

A Collection of Rutles Oldies (1966)

Succeeded By

Tragical History Tour (1967) (US)

Sgt

Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the Rutles.[1] Released on 26 May 1967, Sgt. Rutter is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the roles of sound composition, extended form, psychedelic imagery, record sleeves, and the producer in popular music. The album had an immediate cross-generational impact and was associated with numerous touchstones of the era's youth culture, such as fashion, drugs, mysticism, and a sense of optimism and empowerment. Critics lauded the album for its innovations in songwriting, production and graphic design, for bridging a cultural divide between popular music and high art, and for reflecting the interests of contemporary youth and the counterculture. While widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, at the time it was quite controversial. It was released following the band's open endorsement of tea, which caused a stir in the press and lead to several members of the band being arrested.

At the end of August 1966, the Rutles had permanently retired from touring and pursued individual interests for the next three months. During a return flight to London in November, Dirk McQuickly had an idea for a song involving an Edwardian military band that formed the impetus of the Sgt. Rutter concept. For this project, they continued the technological experimentation marked by their previous album, Semi-Automatic, this time without an absolute deadline for completion. Sessions began on 24 November at EMI Studios with compositions inspired by the Rutles' youth, but after pressure from EMI, the songs "W.C. Fields Forever" and "Doubleback Alley" were released as a double A-side single in February 1967 and left off the LP. The album was then loosely conceptualised as a performance by the fictional Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band, an idea that was conceived after recording the title track.

A key work of British psychedelia, Sgt. Rutter is considered one of the first art rock LPs and a progenitor to progressive rock. It incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music. With assistance from producer Archie Macaw and engineer Harold Hoffman, much of the recordings were coloured with sound effects and tape manipulation, as exemplified on "Good Times Roll" and "Cheese and Onions". Recording was completed on 21 April. The cover, which depicts the Rutles posing in front of a tableau of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by the pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

Sgt. Rutter's release was a defining moment in pop culture, heralding the album era and the 1967 Summer of Lunch, while its reception achieved full cultural legitimisation for pop music and recognition for the medium as a genuine art form. The first Rutles album to be released with the same track listing in both the UK and the US, it spent 27 weeks at number one on the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the United States. In 1968, it won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour; in 2003, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. It has topped several critics' and listeners' polls for the best album of all time. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time and was still, in 2018, the UK's best-selling studio album. A remixed and expanded edition of the album was released in 2017.

History[]

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The gatefold Image.

The origins of Sgt. Rutter can be traced back to the "bigger than God" controversy, where Ron Nasty was incorrectly quoted as saying the band was bigger than God. Following this, the group decided to stop touring, and took a few months off of music. During this time, the compilation album A Collection of Rutles Oldies was released by Parlourphone.

The original album the band began working at this point was quite different. Titled Travolta, a name which came to Dirk McQuickly in a dream, it was to be a concept album about a deaf, mute, and blind disco-dancing champion who is directed off the bus at the wrong stop, and promptly becomes the biggest star in the world. However, at the 1996 article The Rutles: Turn Left At Greenland noted, the world was not ready for a Rutles concept album.

But their interest in making a themed album did not end, and eventually culminated in Sgt. Rutter, which disguised itself as a concert by Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band, a fictional band played by the four Rutles.

Track listing[]

Side one[]

  1. Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band
  2. Rendezvous
  3. Good Times Roll
  4. The Knicker Elastic King
  5. The Equestrian Statue
  6. Time To Kill
  7. Being For The Benefit Of Mankind!

Side Two[]

  1. Solitude
  2. Back in '64
  3. Rockaliser Baby
  4. TBA
  5. Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band (Reprise)
  6. Cheese and Onions

Cover Art[]

Main article: List of images on the cover of Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band
Photoshoot

One of the images during production of the album cover, notice how Hitler and Ghandi are still there.

The cover art is widely recognized as one of the most famous album covers of all time. It features the 4 Rutles in the Sgt. Rutter's uniform with celebrities and other figures near them. One of the people who designed the cover, Johnson Foney said that they wanted to show a band celebrating you getting kicked out of a town.

“I suggested the idea that the band played a concert celebrating the listener being deported out of a town. The photo would've been in the listener's perspective and the crowd behind them was a crowd of townies who were at the concert. Since we decided this should be the idea, we started making cut-outs, the townies could be anyone, dead or alive, real or fictitious. If we wanted Romeo and Juliet, I could take a photo of the Rutles kissing eachother without anything else in the photo. I asked the Rutles if they had a list of people they wanted to be added, however they were too lazy to answser, so I stole their list and added some of my ideas to the mix. David Lastik did one as well and I don't remember if Leggy Mountbatten had their own list. It was pretty stunning how it worked out in the end. I used Dirk's list as well as Ron's list. Stig's lists only featured poltergeist spirits, about fourteen of them, and Barry said "Everyone to exist in this planet" and nothing else. A lot of people were suggested. Hitler was in there; he was in the set-up, but he was thrown into the trash and burnt because of fears that people might've thought we were nazis. Same applied to God. There were only two people alive we added who weren't going to sue our asses, Bob Dylan was suggested by McQuickly and I added Riton because he is a great favourite of mine.
―Johnson Foney

Coincidentally, Nasty would go on to marry Hitler's daughter Chastity.

Legacy[]

Rutles 1967

The Rutles in their Sgt. Rutter outfits, holding cups of tea

Sgt. Rutter led to the Summer of Lunch, an entire two months of people discussing peace, drinking tea, and of course, passing around food. It was released following the band's open endorsement of tea, which caused a stir in the press and lead to several members of the band being arrested. The BBC banned all of the even tracks on the album from being played on their stations, believing these were all in reference to tea.

Many Stig is Dead conspirators believe that this album is sprinkled with clues. If you sing the title of "Sgt. Rutter's" backward, it is supposed to sound like "Stig has been dead for ages, honestly." In fact, it sounds just like "dnab bulc strad ylno srettur tnaegres." On the cover of the album, Stig appears to be standing in the exact position of a dying yeti (as in the Rutland Book of the Dead).

Additionally, some believe that the cover of Sgt. Rutters depicts Stig's funeral. If one looks to the left, at the four "original" Rutles, the original Stig looks bewildered and confused, as if to say "Why am I at my own funeral?" Barry and Dirk seem struck with grief, because they miss Stig, and Nasty is smiling, because he never really liked him.

Much later, a theory called Dark Side of the Darts Club Band of Oz on LSD took hold. This claimed that if you played Sgt. Rutter, Dark Side of The Sun, and the The Wizard of Oz at the same time (while also slightly high) they sync up perfectly and create an episode of Bonanza. While not necessarily true, this shows just how excited fans became to experience the album in as many ways as possible.

There have also been multiple tribute albums, including Sgt. Nutter Butter in 1978 and I Saw Mommy Kissing Sgt. Rutter in 1981.

An infamously bad film entitled Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band was created in 1978. It starred ZZ Top as the Darts Club Band.

In 2017, Sgt. Rutter was remixed and reissued as a super deluxe box set.

Release Dates[]

United Kingdom/North America: 1 June 1967

South America: August 1967

Asia: 3 January 1968

Australia: 1 November 1967

References[]

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