Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is, like nearly everything the Beatles do, bizarre, wonderful, perverse, beautiful, exciting, provocative, exasperating, compassionate and mocking. More than either of their previous adventurous LPs - Rubber Soul and Revolver - you'll have to give this one time to grow on you. I think you will find it's worth it. You may at first be fascinated by, say, 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds', but that's just a string of pretty images which, if they mean anything at all, are important only to their creators; this sort of thing in any case is surprisingly easy to do.

The marvellous tracks, to my mind, are the apparently simple ones, like 'A little help from my friends', and the astonishing 'She's leaving home', a documentary verse story of infinite knowingness and breathtaking melodic charm. Or the mickey-taking ones like 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite!', with its fairground noises and Victorian handbill language. And what about 'When I'm sixty-four?' On the face of it a pastiche of mid-thirties George Formby, it nevertheless has a kind of gentle affectionateness about it - and a certain meaty substance - which raise it well above mere kidding. Another track I keep going back to is 'Fixing a hole', an engaging tune that alternately lollops and soars.

There's plenty of electronic gimmickry on the record (the transistors are really overworked on the track the BBC has banned, 'A day in the life') but that isn't the heart of the thing. It's the combination of imagination, cheek and skill that make this such a rewarding LP. By the way, owners of automatic cut-outs are in danger of missing the final sounds on Side 2, some weird gibberish which fills the centre circle like a tape loop.