Remember album cover art, that thing that was important before we could fit record stores in our pockets? The most famous example of the form–and perhaps the best–was Peter Blake’s design for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band theme album, which was a collage of famous, disparate figures–Lenny Bruce, Sonny Liston, Oscar Wilde, etc.– that disappeared the line between high and low art. In a Financial Times piece by Peter Aspden, the now 80-year-old artist reflects on his career (though not much on his most famous work): An excerpt:

“There is a tall, forbidding figure tucked inside the entrance of Peter Blake’s west London studio. It’s a waxwork model of Sonny Liston, the heavyweight boxer whose fights with Muhammad Ali in the early 1960s made him one of that decade’s most controversial sporting celebrities. The look on his face is distant, and a little scary. It is impossible not to think of him as a bouncer, guarding the treasure trove of artistic wonders that lie behind him. To anyone familiar with the iconography of popular music, he is also a recognisable figure. The model of Liston is present in Blake’s most renowned work, and one of the most famous pop images in history, standing solemnly among the motley collection of celebrities on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

For many people, Blake’s inspired collage summed up the frenetic times. Its improbable placings of modern history’s cultural icons – Lenny Bruce next to Karlheinz Stockhausen; Fred Astaire rubbed up against Edgar Allan Poe – could not help but make you smile. It was a playful fantasy, a light-touched piece of artistic mischief that could not hide its disregard for the pomposity of postwar ‘adult’ Britain. Very 1960s; very Peter Blake.

Blake today does not much care to talk about Sgt. Pepper, not necessarily because of his feelings towards the meagre reward he received for his art work (said to be about £200) but because he finds it a little boring and tires of strangers walking up to him, asking him to sign half-a-dozen copies, and instantly putting them on eBay. But the spirit of that irreverent cover is still vividly alive in the artist.”