RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — English speakers got their moment in the Carnival sun on Monday as a wild, Beatles-themed street party let them shake it up, baby, with a samba swing to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

"Sargento Pimenta," Portuguese for "Sergeant Pepper," is one of more than 400 raucous street parties that spring up throughout Rio de Janeiro during Carnival season. Hundreds of thousands of people turn out for the largest of the "blocos," packed, sweaty open-air dance parties where the crowd sings along to a repetitive medley of Carnival songs — usually in Portuguese, of course.

As many as 850,000 tourists descend on Rio for the five-day-long Carnival free-for-all, and blocos offer plenty of nonverbal opportunities for fun: If drinking till you pass out doesn't suit your fancy, you might try racking up as many snogging partners as humanly possible during a single street party, a common Carnival game here.

But even with such tantalizing diversions, it must be acknowledged that singing along to the blasting music — usually played live by a band atop a sound truck, with a cordoned-off percussion section trailing behind — is at least half the fun.

Enter Sargento Pimenta, the brainchild of Gustavo Gitelman, a music lover and doctor by trade.

Gitelman quickly rounded up an enthusiastic group of Beatles aficionados — so many, in fact that the Fab Four became more of a Fab 70 at the party's debut last year. On Monday, a dozen or so singers dressed in T-shirts hung with gilded epaulettes like those on the "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover belted out a medley from atop a sound-truck. The percussion band that accompanied them was swallowed up in the sea of humanity that turned out for the show, but their rhythms rocked the crowd.

The group gives the Beatles repertoire a Brazilian tweak, adapting "All My Loving" to the peppy beat of a traditional Carnival "marchinha," or march, and infusing "Hard Day's Night" with a Rio funk sound.

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