It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.