Detailed Tara Browne book: 'I Read The News Today, Oh Boy'

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A detailed, well-researched new book on Tara Browne is going to expand the information and discussion so significantly that, as with another book, Beatles 66-The Revolutionary Year just published, I think it needs its own thread here as people begin to explore it.

It's by Paul Howard, a respected biographer and is called I Read The News Today, Oh Boy -The Short and Gilded Life of Tara Browne, the Man Who Inspired the Beatles' Greatest Song.

Here's the blurb on it:

Few people rode the popular wave of the sixties quite like Tara Browne. One of Swinging London's most popular faces, he lived fast, died young and was immortalized for ever in the opening lines of 'A Day in the Life', a song that many critics regard as The Beatles' finest. But who was John Lennon's lucky man who made the grade and then blew his mind out in a car? Author Paul Howard has pieced together the extraordinary story of a young Irishman who epitomized the spirit of the times: racing car driver, Vogue model, friend of The Rolling Stones, style icon, son of a peer, heir to a Guinness fortune and the man who turned Paul McCartney on to LSD. I Read the News Today, Oh Boy is the story of a child born into Ireland's dwindling aristocracy, who spent his early years in an ancient castle in County Mayo, and who arrived in London just as it was becoming the most exciting city on the planet. The Beatles and the Stones were about to conquer America, Carnaby Street was setting the style template for the world and rich and poor were rubbing shoulders in the West End in a new spirit of classlessness. Among young people, there was a growing sense that they could change the world. And no one embodied the ephemeral promise of London's sixties better than Tara Browne. Includes a sixteen-page plate section of stunning colour photographs.

So far there seems only to be British/Irish publication of it, although it is listed on Amazon.com albeit only for imports at present.

This is the amazon.co.uk preview:
www.amazon.co.uk/Read-News-Today-Oh-Boy/dp/1509800034#reader_1509800034

[delysid]

Here's a review from The Irish Independent of the book which might help you parse it a little more.

www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/guinness-heir-who-inspired-the-beatles-35167960.html





Tara Browne's death 50 years ago was immortalised in the song 'A Day in the Life' and now Irish author Paul Howard has released his decade-in-the-writing story. Was it worth the wait? Oh boy, yes, says our reviewer.

All journalists sooner or later encounter a story so broad and layered that the quick-turnaround 1,600-worder is simply inadequate. Snipping away at a great story so that it can fit the allocated space can be a disheartening exercise, especially when key details have to be sacrificed to the editing room floor.

Before becoming a big-selling novelist, non-fiction author, playwright and rugger-bugger scourge, Paul Howard was, of course, a jobbing hack. This sensation was particularly pronounced following his submitting of a Sunday Tribune article about Tara Browne in 2006. It was the 40th anniversary of the flamboyant Guinness heir's death and what Howard had learned about Browne and the family background from brother Garech left him dismayed about his wordcount constraints.

Thus began a decade of research and compilation that has culminated in this thorough biography 50 years after the death of the man referred to by Rock Brynner (son of Yul) as "the Prince of Ireland".

What quickly materialises in the awkwardly titled I Read the News Today, Oh Boy is that Tara Browne's life would certainly have merited an elaborate treatment even had his tragic death at 21 not been immortalised by John Lennon in Sgt Pepper's… sublime coda, 'A Day in the Life'.

Howard puts forward a strong case for Browne being a prism through which to view the cultural paradigm shift that was the first half of the 1960s. While it's hard to argue with this assertion, there are very much two Taras on display here - the angelic, unschooled but precocious youngest son doted over by libertarian mother Oonagh, and the free-spirted, taste-making, thrill-seeking pretty thing preening himself around London's emerging hotspots.

It is the latter, with a supporting cast featuring Brian Jones, Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Sellers, Roman Polanski, Amanda Lear and even Salvador Dali, that is the lasting memory of Browne that the world was left with in 1966, the physical embodiment of the age when mutating attitudes to music, drugs and sex revolutionised a society rebuilding itself after the War. Howard does excellent work contextualising Browne's every footstep in a rapidly changing world where a young, employed middle-class had shed the baggage and was calling more and more of the shots.

Browne, with his security and wealth a comfort to celebrities, was at the coalface of this change. He seems to have played the role of an unknowing catalyst, modelling for Vogue with equally stylish wife Nicki, getting papped out and about and introducing various movers and groovers to each other at Leicester Square's epicentre of cool, Ad Lib. Threads, tabs, tunes and engines consumed him as part of a rather dissolute lifestyle that led to his mother Oonagh taking his two young children away from him and Nicki. It was the newspaper report on this custody battle that sparked the lyric-writing hand of Lennon (who apparently was "too class-conscious" to befriend Browne to the extent McCartney had).

For the other Tara we must go back to Ireland, the country of his birth and the place that chiselled his persona. Life began in the sprawling halls of Castle McGarret, the Mayo superfarm where his father Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne, 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne (or "Dom"), presided over a staff of 150. Oonagh was the youngest of Ernest Guinness's three blonde, blue-eyed daughters, all considered "extraordinary beauties" in their day and all known to the gossip columnists as the "Golden Guinness Girls". When that marriage collapsed (in part due to Dom's "sexual wanderlust"), Oonagh, Garech and Tara decamped to Luggala, the exquisite gothic-revival lodge nestled into the steep-sided valley walls surrounding Wicklow's Lough Tay. Tara and Garech (who lives there to this day and hosted Howard on some 70 occasions during his research) frolicked unsupervised and were lavishly provided for. Around them buzzed such names such as Kenelm, Brinsley, Candida and the triple-barrelled mouthful of Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood.

What a time it was, and what stories Howard has unearthed. Luggala emerges during these formative years of Tara's as somewhere akin to Gatsby's West Egg pile, a place of luxury and wild hedonism where Oonagh (the Gatsby of the tale) imported her kicks in the form of distinguished artists, intellectuals and rabble-rousers. Brendan Behan, Lucian Freud and Garech's prototype Chieftains would mix it with royalty, peers and ministers. This smashing together of backgrounds was Tara's education, and by the time he was a teenager, he was perfectly at home in conversation with an adult about topics such as classical music or the sights of Paris or New York. He was also well adept at spending by that age, burning through more than the average industrial annual salary each month.

Browne is but another chapter in the saga of Ireland's most famous family, the history of which reads like a litany of scandals, ruinous romantic choices, legal battles, jaw-dropping extravagance and tragedy (he was not the first to either die before his time or indeed at the wheel). Much of that ancestral backdrop is provided here by Howard, and the reader is none the worse for the refresher course.

Although prone to the odd corny chapter cliffhanger ("Neither of them could have imagined they'd just spent their last Christmas together."), Howard reverts to his feature-writing roots here, drawing up the progression of Browne's short lifespan and sidestepping into recesses to explain the landscape.

The title and Christmas release suggest Picador have an eye on a corner of the Beatles/rock-biog market, but in truth there are broader themes - Irish class history, post-war Britain, pop culture - that speak to one another throughout.

In the meantime, Rolling Stones and models party by a stout-coloured lake in deepest, darkest Wicklow, a sybaritic Adonis hurtles towards immortality, and a former journalist finally releases a caged story to the world.

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And another, this time from The Irish Times wherein the book is described as a 'masterpiece':
www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy-review-like-an-irish-great-gatsby-by-way-of-ripping-yarns-1.2825755


This doesn’t look good: a decade-in-the-writing biography of a privileged Irish fop who was only ever a footnote in the cultural history of the 1960s by being alluded to in a Beatles song. The Hon Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune, lived fast and died young. Aged just 21, in the throes of a bitter divorce, having lost custody of his two young children to his mother and having never done an honest day’s work in his life, he was speeding through London one night when he was killed in a car crash.

But by a process of literary alchemy Paul Howard has transformed this short and gilded life into a dramatic and engrossing sociocultural treatise. Stylistically, it bears comparison to Brenda Maddox’s masterful biography of Nora Barnacle. Both works deal with subjects who found themselves in remarkable surrounds, and Howard, like Maddox, is scrupulous about details and eschews psychobiographical intrusion.

The book opens with Browne’s 21st-birthday party at his childhood home in Luggala, Co Wicklow. Anita Pallenberg, stoned on LSD, thought that Mick Jagger was the Devil, so she locked him in a courtyard; David Dimbleby mingled with John Paul Getty and Marianne Faithful; Brian Jones got out his sitar. The aristocracy were introduced to their heirs, the popocracy, and in the middle of it all stood a beaming Browne: “rich, handsome, effortlessly cool and always at the centre of everything”.

The opening chapters read like an Irish Great Gatsby by way of Downton Abbey and Ripping Yarns. “Tara grew up liberated from the concerns of ordinary children . . . and he was sophisticated to a degree that disarmed people” is how Howard introduces him.

As a child, in his blue satin pyjamas, he would walk barefoot along the table whenever his mother, Oonagh, Lady Oranmore, would be hosting a dinner party. “Hello, I’m Tara,” he would say to the guests in turn. Once, at Claridge’s in London, he caused diners to drop their spoons when he shouted, “I asked for cold vichyssoise, not hot, you c**t” at the waiter.

He left school when he was 11, continuing his education instead in the independent principality of Luggala, where he would listen in to “the Duke of Brissac and Brendan Behan having a row with the director of the Bank of England about the Grand National”.

A velvet-suited, Gauloises-smoking 13-year-old who instructed his mother’s friends how to mix his cocktails and who had a monthly allowance that was more than the Irish annual average industrial wage, he was in fact lovable in all his precociousness and privilege.

It’s the way that Howard conveys this that gives this book its dynamism. As a “son of Irish royalty” Browne was a celebrity here to the extent that the “Guinness heir” filled the social columns for the duration of his life. Reporters would doorstep him, anxious to know if he would ever take up his allotted place at Eton, then Oxford.

But Oonagh (who is deserving of a book herself) instead brought him around Paris, Venice and the south of France, where figures such as John Huston, Igor Stravinsky, Lucian Freud and Salvador Dalí wandered into his life.

Indeed, the supporting cast here is a thing of wonder: you turn a page to find names as diverse as Roman Polanski, the Everly Brothers, Richard Nixon and someone delightfully known as “the biggest bitch in London” entering the action.

It was a spoilt, vertiginous life, yet it yielded a young man who, though being cynically self-aware enough to know that “people only like me for my money”, was so abundantly charming that Paul McCartney would seek out his company in London nightclubs.

“Fast cars, modern jazz and recreational drugs” was all he could put on his CV, but there was obviously something about Browne, and, as Howard shows, his life was as a palimpsest.

Given that this book screams about its Beatles connection, only the final third is given over to Browne’s London days. It becomes a different sort of book. Gone are the beautifully evoked scenes of Tara and Oonagh cruising the Champs-Élysées in their white Lincoln Continental and the richness of detail surrounding his early life; in their place comes a young man not yet turned 20 in a faltering marriage with two children he doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with.

There’s a different tone here: Howard has some astute observations about the way the casual use of LSD changed the course of the decade – it was Browne who gave McCartney his first acid tab – and there’s a well-worked argument that what we know as “the Sixties” was actually only the period between 1962 and 1966.

“It was like a death knell sounding over London,” Faithfull says about Browne’s early death. This book tells us why so many felt that way about the young Irishman’s death.

Just eight months after the bell-bottomed trousers and miniskirts had celebrated his 21st on a night remembered by many as the high-water mark of the 1960s they were back “to Tara’s home at the bottom of a valley in the Wicklow mountains, openly weeping as they said goodbye to him”.

“A lucky man who made the grade”, as The Beatles have it in A Day in the Life? This book removes Browne from a song lyric and repositions him as an alluring figure of wonderment.

It took 10 years and more than 100 interviews to produce this biography. The sources and endnotes take up 56 pages alone. Was it worth it? Jesus, yes. This is a masterpiece.

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And here's a detailed piece which directly mentions PID (well illustrated so check the original article which I've also quoted text of) on Tara Browne by the author (that may already be on the boards somewhere) published in the Daily Mail earlier this month:
www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-3836673/I-news-today-oh-boy-decadent-playboy-Guinness-heir-tragic-death-inspired-Beatles-classic-sounded-death-knell-swinging-Sixties.html

I made the news today oh, boy...
The decadent playboy and Guinness heir whose tragic death inspired a Beatles classic and sounded the death knell of the swinging Sixties

By Paul Howard
15 October 2016

The death of Tara Browne at 21 inspired the opening lines of a Beatles classic. And now a brilliant new biography of the society playboy’s short but decadent life reveals how he introduced Paul McCartney to LSD – and put the swing into the Sixties

Just after midnight on December 18, 1966, in a London festooned with Christmas lights, 21-year-old Tara Browne, a Dublin-born brewery heir, music lover, style icon, racing car driver and sometime Vogue model, lost control of his light-blue Lotus Elan in South Kensington, London, and collided with a black van.

His passenger, girlfriend Suki Potier, later claimed that Browne wasn’t going particularly fast – although that would have been wildly out of character for the speed-obsessed young aristocrat. In her version of events, a white car – either a Volvo or an E-Type Jaguar, never traced – emerged unexpectedly from a side street and forced Tara to swerve.

Tara's mother Oonagh (right), painted by royal portrait artist Philip de Laszlo, and (left) Oonagh on the cover of Tatler

Browne’s final act in life was to pull the steering wheel to ensure that he, not Suki, took the full impact of the collision. ‘A gentleman to the very end,’ said his friend, the model and actress Anita Pallenberg.
A month after that fatal crash – and the day after Browne’s mother Oonagh won custody of her late son’s two small children in the High Court – John Lennon, suffering from writer’s block during the making of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, propped a copy of the Daily Mail on his piano music stand and turned over the front page. There, in the middle of page three, was an article headlined: ‘Guinness Heir Babies Stay with Grandmother’.
John had heard about Tara’s death, though unlike Paul McCartney, he hadn’t known him well. The two Beatles had just been discussing whether or not Browne, son of Lord Oranmore and Browne, would have inherited his father’s seat in the House of Lords had he lived.

Lennon touched the piano keys and out came the opening line of a song:

‘I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade…’

Fifty years on, Tara Browne is familiar to many as the man in the first verse of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life, who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ and then drew a curious crowd of onlookers who wondered whether he was ‘from the House of Lords’.
Sung by John in a disembodied, almost spectral voice, A Day In The Life is considered by many to be The Beatles’ greatest song – a musical high point of the decade and a haunting coda to an album that represented the last hurrah of Swinging London.

To the pop stars, models and aristocrats who knew him, the tragic end of Tara Browne had a similar significance. Singer Marianne Faithfull, with whom Browne had ‘a little scene’ weeks before his death, would later describe the news of Tara’s fatal crash as ‘like a death knell sounding over London’.

Pallenberg, girlfriend of Tara’s close friend, the doomed Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, said that after Browne died, ‘the Sixties weren’t the Sixties any more’.
Rich, handsome and effortlessly cool, Tara was the living, breathing quintessence of Swinging London – a dandy with the air of a young prince, always right on the heartbeat of the moment in everything he did, whether introducing Paul McCartney to the mind-expanding possibilities of LSD in his Belgravia mews, turning heads in his psychedelic AC Cobra or gadding about London’s West End with Peter Sellers or Roman Polanski.
Browne thrilled to danger of any kind – experimenting with the newest drugs, shooting the breeze with the East End villains who popped into his motor repair shop in Chelsea, and tearing up the King’s Road in a low-slung sports car, a record player built into its dash, the needle skipping across the vinyl as he weaved through the traffic.

Born in 1945, Tara was the younger son of Dominick Browne, the fourth Lord Oranmore and Browne, and Oonagh Guinness, a glamorous society beauty and member of the sixth generation of the brewing dynasty, whose surname was as famous as Ireland itself.
His parents divorced when he was young, and Tara rarely saw the inside of a classroom, forming his personality at the feet of his mother’s coterie of writers, intellectuals and aristocratic black sheep, including the painter Lucian Freud, film director John Huston and writer Brendan Behan.

Even as a small child, he was precocious to a degree that would leave strangers open-mouthed in shock.
During his mother’s dinner parties at Luggala, her grand gothic home in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains, he would walk down the centre of the table barefoot in blue satin pyjamas, greeting the guests.
At the age of eight, while other children sat meekly in school, Tara was on one of Huston’s film sets in Italy, watching Humphrey Bogart arm-wrestle the eccentric, flamboyantly homosexual writer Truman Capote for money. As a 13-year-old, sophisticated far beyond his years, he travelled everywhere in his mother’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, splurging a £720-a-month allowance at a time when the average industrial wage for a man was £546 per year.
By the time he was 18, having already travelled the world with his vivacious mother, Browne was married with a child, but that didn’t stop the charming, well-connected young man finding his true purpose at the centre of a suddenly swinging London.

He became a central character at a club near Leicester Square called the Ad Lib, the hippest of London hotspots, where Britain’s once-sacred class structure was being shaken like a snow globe, as pop stars and criminals mingled with debutantes, aristocrats and – it was rumoured – royalty, in the form of Princess Margaret.
On any given night, you might see Terence Stamp catching up with his old housemate Michael Caine; David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton twisting on the dance floor; or John Lennon and Paul McCartney, home from conquering new worlds and sharing their experiences with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who would soon be making the same crossing to America.

‘Tara was absolutely central to it,’ remembered Sixties socialite Jane Ormsby-Gore. ‘We were meeting people from different walks of life, but we needed somebody in the middle saying, “Oh, so-and-so, have you met such-and-such?” And that was what Tara did.’

In the great social switchyard of the Ad Lib, it was inevitable that Tara and McCartney would meet. One had a ravenous curiosity about the world; the other, the assured air of a privileged young man who had seen and done it all. Introduced by McCartney’s brother Mike, they bonded over clothes, cars, music and drugs. From that moment on, Tara took Paul into his circle of high-born friends.
Tara and his wife Nicki’s mews house in Eaton Row, Belgravia, became the centre of an after-hours scene. Every Friday morning, Nicki bought five-dozen eggs to make breakfast for whichever guests had improvised beds for themselves on the living room floor.

‘The house was always strewn with bodies,’ she remembered. ‘You never knew who was a Beatle, who was an Animal, who was a Trogg and who was a Pretty Thing.’

Peter Sellers and his wife, Britt Ekland, who were living around the corner, popped in from time to time, and Roman Polanski was another regular caller. Tara and the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones would drink the finest Hine cognac, listen to Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys and shove the furniture against the wall to play with Tara’s latest Scalextric set.

Tara didn’t impress both of the chief Beatles. Nicki remembered John Lennon being at Eaton Row, drunk, with Sellers. Tara gave John a copy of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play lampooning, of all things, Britain’s rigid class system.
But John was still too class-conscious to ever warm to Tara, according to Nicki. ‘I think he really sneered at people from Tara’s background,’ she said.
Tara, his mother and the BBC’s Derek Hart at Tara’s 21st birthday party

With Paul, it was a different matter, and the pair would share dangerous adventures that would alter the course of the band.
Tara quickly picked up on the arrival in London of psychedelic drugs. LSD changed the landscape of Swinging London utterly, and it was Browne who introduced McCartney to the drug.
The prospect of taking LSD terrified Paul. ‘I’d not wanted to do it,’ he told Barry Miles, his friend and the author of the authorised biography, Many Years From Now.
However, he knew he would succumb to peer pressure in time, and an opportunity presented itself one night back in Tara’s mews, in the company of various friends and a handful of girls from cool haunt The Scotch of St James.
According to Nicki, Tara didn’t take it that night. ‘Because it was Paul’s first time,’ she said, ‘he felt it was important for him to stay lucid just in case Paul had a bad trip. And what Paul did was he spent his whole trip looking at this art book of mine called Private View. He wasn’t interested in any of the females there. He wasn’t interested in listening to music either. He just stared at this art book.’
Paul had an engagement the following day, but he couldn’t get it together. When Brian Epstein’s secretary tracked him down to Tara and Nicki’s mews, he told her he had flu and asked her to cancel his commitments for the day. For all McCartney’s ambivalence about taking acid, it would have a profound effect on him.

The Stones, who were fast earning a reputation as dangerous delinquents, also hit it off with Tara’s circle of switched-on, decadent Chelsea friends. Mick Jagger in particular had the arriviste’s hunger to be taken to the bosom of the aristocracy. His future girlfriend Marianne Faithfull famously characterised him as someone who would ‘attend dinners given by any silly thing with a title and a castle’.
The rough musicians and the posh young men bonded over their shared interest in art, music, clothes, drink, drugs and, once they all got to know each other a little better, sexual partners.
‘These aristocratic kids were meeting these musicians on equal terms, because they had all the same things in common – they were all young, good-looking and rich,’ said Faithfull.
Tara and Brian Jones hit it off instantly. With their Carnaby Street threads and their identical pudding bowl haircuts, they resembled twins. In the dark recesses of the Ad Lib, they were often mistaken for each other.
‘Excuse me,’ a stranger would say, interrupting Tara, mid-conversation, ‘aren’t you that chap from..?’
‘Sorry,’ Tara would answer, cutting them off, ‘I’m actually the chap’s younger brother.’

Paul McCartney’s invitation to Tara and wife Nicki to visit Liverpool at Christmas 1965 would write a strange chapter into Beatles lore.
Paul rented a pair of mopeds, and on Boxing Day night, after smoking several joints, Paul and Tara went for a ride.
When they returned a few hours later, Paul’s face was heavily swollen and stitched up.
He had gone over the handlebars, breaking a front tooth and splitting his lip.

The spill would later become the source of the outlandish but nonetheless enduring ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory.‘
In 1969, three years after Tara’s death, a rumour started by students on a university campus in Iowa claimed that Paul McCartney was dead, citing ‘clues’ in Beatles album covers.
One theory, which still circulates on the internet, suggested that Paul was killed when he crashed his moped, and that he was replaced by a lookalike – Tara Browne.

‘They said Tara had had cosmetic surgery to make him look like Paul,’ Nicki remembered.
‘I always thought that Tara would have been very amused by that story.’

Browne and Jones were partners in crime, and would head into the countryside in Brian’s black Rolls-Royce, tripping on acid. ‘We’d drive to Staffordshire to look for UFOs,’ said Pallenberg, Brian’s girlfriend at the time. ‘We’d stay up all night, just lying on a hillside, looking up at the sky, then we’d drive back to London.’
Tara himself soon came to wider attention. In 1965, he appeared in the fashion magazine Gentleman’s Quarterly, and the following year posed with Brian Jones for a Vogue spread on how men’s clothes had become informed by women’s fashion.

While launching his own boutique, Dandie’s, and conducting an affair with model Amanda Lear – allegedly ‘given’ to Tara as a 21st birthday present by wife Nicki, who didn’t reckon on the pair falling in love – Browne spent most of 1966 disqualified from driving thanks to a speeding ticket.
But he still had fun with his AC Cobra, painted in all the colours of the rainbow by the people who would later paint Paul McCartney’s famous upright piano. It was a car so of the moment that art dealer Robert Fraser exhibited it in his gallery window.
By the end of the year, however, Tara’s life was in chaos. His marriage was unspooling. He lost Amanda to the great surrealist Salvador Dali, who wanted her for a courtier. And his two tiny children were in Ireland, where his mother had taken them, dismayed by how her son and daughter-in-law were behaving as parents.

‘I said to him, “Tara, we need to go and get the children back right now. They’re our children – not hers,” remembered Nicki, who died in 2012. ‘And that’s when he said the strangest thing to me. He said, “What’s the point? I’m not going to live very long anyway.”’

Tara, normally so cool, so effortlessly self-possessed, found himself overwhelmed by the weight of worries as Christmas 1966 approached. On Wednesday, December 14, he got his driving licence back and wasted no time in getting back behind the wheel in a borrowed Lotus.
The night he died, he had a date with new girlfriend Suki, and they left a restaurant on Abingdon Road in South Kensington just before midnight, driving west just for the hell of it, with no particular place to go. Neither alcohol nor drugs were a factor – Tara had consumed less than one pint of beer – though speed may well have been a cause.
Several witnesses claimed he flew past them, accelerating and braking fast, while the car made a loud noise. Seconds later, there was a bang and the sound of the engine stopped.
Tara suffered a fractured skull and lacerations to his brain. Suki survived with bruises and shock. She held Tara, dying in her arms, while she waited 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. He was taken to St Stephen’s Hospital in Fulham. Two hours later, he was pronounced dead.
That morning, Brian Jones was doorstepped by a reporter, who broke the news of his friend’s death to him. He wept uncontrollably. ‘I am numbed,’ he said. ‘It’s ghastly. He was so full of life.’
Marianne Faithfull agreed. ‘It was the end of the Sixties for many people,’ she said. ‘To have someone who was so so full of joy suddenly taken from you, it made you very pessimistic and cynical about the world – which is what we’d all been trying so hard not to be.’
Sixties London wasn’t one single scene – it was a collection of different ones. Yet, somehow, Tara Browne had seemed to be at the centre of most of them, a first-hand witness to the events and trends that shaped and coloured the decade.

Eight months before his death, Browne celebrated his 21st birthday with a party at Luggala, the Guinness family’s exquisite Gothic revival house in the Wicklow Mountains near Dublin.
For one weekend, the world capital of cool was transplanted to a remote corner of the Irish countryside. Mick Jagger and girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton were there.
So were Jagger’s fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg (pictured, en route to the party), among a big social stew of pop stars, aristos, debutantes, artists, chancers, billionaires, models and hangerson. Paul McCartney sent his apologies. He wanted to be there, but The Beatles were busy, recording Revolver at Abbey Road.
Oonagh Guinness paid Tara’s favourite band, American rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, $10,000 to fly over and play.

‘If you asked me to sum up the Sixties in a single moment,’ said Butler, ‘then I would just describe the weekend of Tara Browne’s 21st birthday party.’
At one point, according to the press, a taxi was called to chauffeur an unnamed rock star the 30 miles to Dublin to ‘see Nelson’ [his column in Dublin, which had been blown up by Republicans].

‘Anita and I got it into our heads that Mick Jagger was the devil,’ remembered Tara’s wife Nicki.

‘We locked him into the courtyard and then we ran into the woods at the back of the house. We had these walkietalkies. We were in the woods and we were talking on these things, out of our heads, and paranoid, of course, watching Mick trying to get out of the courtyard.’

In photos of the night, Tara, wearing one of his signature black velvet suits, looks the epitome of Swinging London: young and stylish, with an undeniable air of never-had-it-so-good contentedness, a cigarette in one hand and a knowing smile at his lips.

By the end of the year, he would be gone.