Read The Beatles for Free Online Page A

accident in the song – not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene – were made up. Paul, who contributed lines to this part of the song, didn’t know at the time that John had Tara Browne in mind. He thought he was writing about ‘a stoned politician’.
    Browne was driving down Redcliffe Gardens in Earls Court after midnight, when a Volkswagen emerged from a side street into his path. He swerved and his Lotus Elan ploughed into a stationary van. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital. The autopsy revealed that his death was the result of “brain lacerations due to fractures of the skull”. His passenger, model Suki Potier, escaped with bruises and shock.
    Tara Browne, great grandson of the brewer Edward Cecil Guinness and son of Lord Oranmore and Browne, was part of a young aristocratic elite who loved to mingle with pop stars (but he wasn’t a member of the House of Lords). Although only 21 at the time of his death, he would have inherited a £1,000,000 fortune at the age of 25 and was described on his death certificate as a man “of independent means” with a London home in Eaton Row, Belgravia. After schooling at Eton, Browne married at 18 and fathered two boys before separating from his wife and taking up with Suki Potier. He frequented London nightspots such as Sibylla’s and the Bag O’Nails and had become particularly friendly with Paul and Mike McCartney and Rolling Stone Brian Jones. For his 21st birthday, he had the Lovin’ Spoonful flown to his ancestral home in County Wicklow, Ireland. Mick Jagger, Mike McCartney, Brian Jones and John Paul Getty were amongst the guests. Paul was with Browne when he first took LSD in 1966.
    Paul’s unfinished song, a bright and breezy piece about getting out of bed and setting off for school, was spliced between the second and third verses of John’s song. “It was another song altogether but it happened to fit,” Paul said. “It was just me remembering what it was like to run up the road to catch a bus to school, having a smoke and going into class…It was a reflection of my schooldays. I would have a Woodbine (a cheap unfiltered British cigarette) and somebody would speak and I would go into a dream.”
    The references to having a smoke, dreams and ‘turn-ons’ meant that the track was banned from the airwaves in many countries. There were even some who were convinced that the holes in Blackburn, like the holes Paul had been keen to fix, were those of a heroin user.
    In 1968 Paul admitted that ‘A Day In The Life’ was what he called ‘a turn-on song’. “This was the only one on the album written as a deliberate provocation,” he said. “But what we want to do is to turn you on to the truth rather than on to pot.” George Martin comments: “The ‘woke up, got out of bed’ bit was definitely a reference to marijuana but ‘Fixing A Hole’ wasn’t about heroin and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ wasn’t about LSD. At the time I had a strong suspicion that ‘went upstairs and had a smoke’ was a drug reference. They always used to disappear and have a little puff but they never did it in front of me. They always used to go down to the canteen and Mal Evans used to guard it.”

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
    With Sgt Pepper behind them, the Beatles immediately plunged into recording soundtracks for two very different films – Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour.
    Yellow Submarine , a feature-length animation project, wasn’t initiated by the group but they took a keen interest in its development. The Beatles were happy to see themselves turned into cartoon characters and contributed storylines as well as four original songs. The script was by a team of screenwriters, one of whom was Erich Segal, author of the best-selling novel, Love Story . A psychedelic fantasy, Yellow