Tara Browne dies

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Tara Browne, an Irish socialite based in London and heir to the Guinness fortune, shared a friendship with Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Tragically, on this day, Browne’s life was cut short in a car accident.

This incident sparked the inspiration for some lyrics in the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life“, a track from their 1967 album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band“. The lyrics poignantly depict:

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords

While Paul McCartney initially provided an alternative interpretation for these lines in 1997, he later clarified in his 2021 book, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, that they indeed referenced Tara Browne’s untimely demise.

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Then the tricky one that the BBC banned – ‘A Day in the Life’. It’s been said that this is a sort of requiem to Tara Brown (the heir to the Guinness Trust, killed last December in a car crash in London).

I’ve heard that. I don’t think John had that in mind at all. The real words to that are ‘Read the news today’. There’d been a story about a man who’d made the grade, and there’d been a photograph of him sitting in his car. John said ‘I had to laugh’. He’d sort of blown his mind out in the car.

Paul McCartney – Interview with The Observer, November 1967

I was reading the paper one day and I noticed two stories. One was the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. In the streets, that is. They were going to fill them all. Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ I had the bulk of the song and the words, but he contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he couldn’t use for anything. I thought it was a damn good piece of work.

John Lennon – From interview with Playboy, January 1981

The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John’s head it might have been. In my head I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights and he didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The “blew his mind’ was purely a drug reference, nothing to do with a car crash. In actual fact I think I spent more time with Tara than John did. I’d taken Tara up to Liverpool. I was with Tara when I had the accident when I split my lip. We were really quite good friends and I introduced him to John. Anyway, if John said he was thinking of Tara, then he was, but in my mind it wasn’t to do with that.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

I did once have an accident in Liverpool where I fell off a moped and busted my lip open, and we had to get the doctor round to my cousin Betty’s house. That was around this same time, when I was twenty-something and going out on the moped from my dad’s house to Betty’s house. I was taking a friend, Tara Guinness. He died later in a car accident. He was a nice boy. I wrote about him in ‘A Day in the Life’: ‘He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed’. Anyway, I was with Tara and had an accident – fell off my moped, busted my lip, went to Betty’s, and she said, ‘Get a doctor, get a doctor. It needs stitches.’

Paul McCartney – From “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, 2021

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Last updated on December 9, 2023