With a little help from her friends: Sgt Pepper artist’s all-female version

Jann Haworth, who had a key role in the Beatles’ album cover, explains why she’s righting a wrong in a mural that is coming to the UK

It can take a generation to put right a wrong. For the American artist Jann Haworth it has taken half a century to correct a particularly high-profile piece of historical bias.

In 1967, Haworth and her then husband Peter Blake made one of the most famous commercial artworks of the modern age: the cover of the Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Among the 65 different people it featured, from Albert Einstein, Fred Astaire and HG Wells to the occultist Aleister Crowley, there were only 12 women and, as Haworth admits, three of those were different images of child star Shirley Temple.