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Tracklist
Side A
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- With A Little Help From My Friends
- Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
- Getting Better
- Fixing A Hole
- She's Leaving Home
- Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite !
Side B
- Within You Without You
- When I'm Sixty-Four
- Lovely Rita
- Good Morning Good Morning
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
- A Day In The Life
Labels & dead wax
Visual reference for this specific pressing. Click any image to enlarge.
How to authenticate this pressing
Specific verification cues for this exact variant.
The white Odeon labels with red print and gold borders (plus the Hör Zu logo on both sides) indicate the first SHZE 401 pressing, distinguishing this release from all later German pressings. The label is white (cream, not black like Parlophone), with a gold-brown border around the perimeter, the title "Odeon" and the track listing in red print. To the left and right of the central Odeon logo (a lighthouse with sound waves) is the Hör Zu logo in the magazine's characteristic italic font. Later pressings from 1969-1970 (which still bear the SHZE 401 number) have a different logo, the added ST/33 marking in two circles, and other distinguishing elements.
An additional feature, confirmed by various sources, is that on the first pressing, the Hör Zu logo on the front cover was not printed, but rather in a form of a factory-applied sticker. This sticker tended to peel off over time, so today, a significant number of surviving SHZE 401 copies have a cover with glue marks in the lower left corner. A copy with the complete original sticker is significantly more valuable than one without it.
Historical context & other notes
Hör Zu wasn't a record label, but a German weekly with a television program, one of the most popular glossy magazines in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Hör Zu entered into a joint marketing agreement with EMI's German subsidiary, Electrola, under which several Beatles albums were released in a special series under both brands. Hence the catalog prefixes SHZE (stereo Hör Zu Electrola) and HZE (mono Hör Zu Electrola). This series included: Die Beatles (the German equivalent of Please Please Me), Help!, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Magical Mystery Tour. According to a source from Beatles Collecting, for legal reasons records bearing the Hör Zu logo could not be sold outside Germany under this brand, so export versions to Switzerland and Austria were only released as Odeon SMO 81 045, without the Hör Zu logo.
Other releases
This album's releases in other countries, or special editions within the same market. Full per-country chronology lives in each country's hub page.
