The Beatles: Albert Stubbins and Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

Cover designed by Peter Blake

Albert Stubbins- 1930’s Liverpool player
The cover of the Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band depicts about 70 celebrities, all of them heroes to the Beatles and who they imagined would come to their concert. Amongst the athletes pictured are Johnny Weismulller of Tarzan fame and Sonny Liston, the heavyweight boxing champion of the early 60’s.
There is one soccer player that makes the cover, Liverpool’s Albert Stubbins who played in the 1930’s and 1940’s and scored 83 goals in 178 appearances for the club. Unfortunately for Stubbins he played only one international for England and that too was against Wales.
The cover was designed by Robert Fraser and Peter Blake. Albert Stubbins was #50 and he was surrounded by Karl Marx, Oliver Hardy, Marlene Dietrich, HC Westermann, Bobby Breen, Sri Lahiri Mahasya, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (whose picture was painted out at the request of EMI after Lennon’s controversial remarks about Christianity being a dying religion).