Macca, 1967:

I was thinking of nice words like Sergeant Pepper, and Lonely Hearts Club, and they came together for no reason. But after you have written that down you start to think, "There's this Sergeant Pepper who has taught the band to play, and got them going so that at least they found one number."

The suggestion is tantalizing: the accidental concatenation of "Sergeant Pepper" and "Lonely Hearts Club" is enough to generate the whole narrative: the album's guiding concept resides fully formed in the words. (A step further: the words reside fully formed in the S and P marking the packets Paul and Mal received with their food on the plane back from Nairobi. This kind of trumps Lennon's use of found texts.)

There's a crucial ambiguity in the quotation: is the idea that Sergeant Pepper may have "got them going" without teaching the band any particular song, or is it that he taught them at least one number? (From the latter it is a small leap in imagination to the shocking possibility that he taught them only one number.) In any case, Paul's dark saying poses an important question: What did Sergeant Pepper teach the band?