Today on the Fab 4 at 4, I'm talking about The Beatles after touring ended.

The final show, at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on 29 August, was their last commercial concert. It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by touring that included over 1,400 concert appearances internationally.

Freed from the burden of touring, the band embraced an increasingly experimental approach as they recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in late November 1966.

According to engineer Geoff Emerick, the album's recording took over seven hundred hours. He recalled the band's insistence "that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different.

The sessions initially yielded the non-album double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" in February 1967; the Sgt. Pepper LP followed in June.

The musical complexity of the records, created using relatively primitive four-track recording technology, astounded contemporary artists.

For Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, in the midst of a personal crisis and struggling to complete the ambitious Smile, hearing "Strawberry Fields" was a crushing blow and he soon abandoned all attempts to compete with his friendly rivals.

Listen to The Beatles on iHeartRadio.