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Post by delysid on Feb 12, 2017 4:10:07 GMT -5
Why would anyone resurrect this topic? What happened this board? We used to discuss whether Paul was replaced or not. We used to discuss clues. I don't even recognize Nothing is Real anymore. The clues are all still there, but its in the music and its nothing to do with mind control, secret UK bloodlines or ANY OF THIS BULLSHIT. Where can I go to just talk about Paul is Dead clues these days!? Where?! Where can I go to talk about weird Paul McCartney lyrics that suggest that he is a double without someone insinuating that he is a clone or an old woman or anything stupid like that? Signed, a Disgruntled Beatles Fan who is Disillusioned with the Paul is Dead Community Obviously the OP`s view is absurd by most standards. But much as I disagree with her/him, and think the cloning argument is also whacky, as well as disagree with the simplistic Illuminati views etc, you can get some information that comes out of threads like this ifyou separate the dross from the stuff of real value. What I see more and more is how so many prominent people are connected, not only by being privileged but through ancestry such as people of the aristocratic Stanley line even though there are descendants who have not had privilege for hundreds of years. It is as if they know their own. And with what we know now about the Beatles` very small world with stronger than portrayed connections with Manson`s group, what we now know about the Sergeant Pepper cover not being their original choice, and what I know through my research on the music industry and the active recruiting of entertainers to serve purposes that they do not necessarily understand at first (I am writing a book on a famous hiphop artists and how he believes he is somehow very important in the occult scene but is in fact ignorant of the agendas is one of my book`s foci), the Paul Is Dead theory becomes far more interesting and obtains a new credibility. Although I have time for the 'music-biz controlled by nefarious agents' argument as put forward by several authors, I am mindful of how these narratives appear to get published when there is an opinion-massage going on. I notice that what we now call the 'alt-right' (it may have changed its name by now as it's a movement thing) essentially takes up what were formerly 'whacko' ideas and plays them across many social media where they earn grass-roots support. Indeed, I have long noticed that even PID was somewhat infiltrated/corrupted by the presence of 'activists' who didn't seem /don't seem to know shit about their basic Beatles before they get onto their supposed 'secrets' which additionally happen, miraculously, to reflect a certain world-view where Beatles dating black women is assumed to be a bad thing. Yeah, didn't miss that. Saying that there's been grass-roots infiltration of topics groups and interest-groups used to be a very far-fetched idea to claim could be the case. Now that's very much changed. The success of The Don has built on such grassroots politicisation of interest-groups with the general theme 'Everything You Know Is Wrong', once a hippy lefty idea now repurposed as 'alt-right' fodder. Of course, the argument in it has merit. Anybody who thinks they get INFORMATION ONLY from the media is probably already locked and loaded to kill Satanic Faul at the earliest opportunity. For those who skipped the kool aid, the idea that authors could be targeted (based on pre-existing themes and interests) for 'information-bursts' they then write up is far from far-fetched. Being somebody who considered briefly back in the 80's that Frank Zappa might have been outing the origins of AIDS (on his triple album 'Thing Fish') based upon insider knowledge gained from his dad, I was quite surprised that an author I'd actually had dealings with, the late Dave McGowan of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon : Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream,
chose to take in his promo interviews, a stance of actually believing his material (he was very doubtful about the premise while writing it, I can tell ya). I guess he could have done so to fit in with the 'vibe' of sites like White Ice Radio (erm...I meant Red Ice Radio...or did I?) where Hitler was a good guy just trying to 'Make Germany Great Again' but then I wondered if there's a team of bought-and-sold writers and bloggers. That they hang around the Jan Irvin circuit of 'donate donate for this important alt right research' is worrying as who can have the slightest doubt that these guys would take CIA cash? They'll take cash from a baby ffs.
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Post by delysid on Feb 12, 2017 3:51:22 GMT -5
Apollo C Vermouth wrote: What profound effect did it have on Lennon, who went on to play in a movie titled, “How I Won the War". You've got it the wrong way round though. He got the line for the song from the movie he'd been in already, 'A Day In The Life' being a song that arose in 1967 with his film role being the previous year.
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Post by delysid on Feb 12, 2017 3:46:28 GMT -5
This just proves that you can match up any two random people in a fade pretty easily. That, in fact, was the idea of 'morphing' in the first place. Anybody remember when this tech came along in the 80's? People were going overboard with it on TV (Max Headroom etc) and then it was reborn on the web circa '97 when people did similarly. These days it's obviously mainly used to connect McCartney with...erm...like anybody you want.
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Post by delysid on Feb 12, 2017 3:41:19 GMT -5
another clue as to the disparate nature between paul's character - dated black women, spoke out against the by-then miltel-infiltrated klan, etc. - and billy boy, here, in a csa officer uniform. well, well, well - how revealing. question is, will it deter faul's fanboys: Another clue as to the demographics that make up latter-day PID. Here we have someone who noted that Macca 'dated black women'. Also: was able to identify a 'csa officer uniform' (whatever that is) The question is will it deter sensible people from taking seriously what the (not so) veiled bigots say?
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Post by delysid on Feb 12, 2017 2:08:48 GMT -5
You don't seem to understand that virtually everybody's hands have "big lines in the right place", and that most hands are similar. Look at your friends' hands, and you will see that this is so. It's the details that matter. I did not say that "Paul has six toes"; I said Faul appears to, in some photographs. "Faul" is the replacement. You wrote: "I honestly took an open minded approach to PID. I really did. But the evidence just doesn't stack up." My impression is that you've taken anything but an open minded approach, and that you aren't the least bit interested in being objective about anything related to the matter. Of course, that's just my opinion, based on what you've posted so far. Here is a question I would ask you: Why would the Beatles spend 3 years putting "Paul is dead" clues in their records, and then, in addition, "Faul" continue to include such clues in his solo recordings, if there was no point to it? I am not saying Paul IS dead, but whether he was dead or replaced, what would be the point of saying he was dead if he clearly wasn't? Wouldn't it seem they would almost have to have replaced him for the clues to have any meaning? With respect, what you're doing here, as many are (and not just in PID these days), is taking as established the still-spurious idea that '...the Beatles spend three years putting "Paul Is Dead" clues in their records'. The chief reason this is a highly spurious idea is that the clues are actually being put in by those looking for them. Who could deny this? This entire board is about that activity and clues have now been put in to justify the most outlandish claims. Having said that, I actually do think that there was some of this going on from the fabs. But, as per McCartney's one or two lines of criticism of John Lennon on the "Ram" album, it's not reasonable to assume that McCartney was lying when he claimed that Lennon saw the whole album as being about him when it wasn't. There was a movie, 'Blow Up' by Antonioni that came out at the time which explores this very idea artfully. And there's no doubt that it was one of the big influential movies of the period so it's safe to assume a certain presence of the idea. Similarly, among the things going on around the band that they used creatively, I do think there was a certain recurrent subject of death, being as both writing principals had been devastated by the deaths of their mothers and, to quite some degree, as they have themselves said, were fired into their ambition by it, if just to avoid thinking about it. That it comes through is understandable. I've also no doubt that there was a general humourous thing around at the time in ALL of the bands about regular reports that one of them had died. People assume this to have been a Beatle exclusive but there are threads of reported-death throughout the history of many of the contemporary acts, backgrounded by more records by Buddy Holly, for example, emerging after his death than before. That they may have played with this theme is not an untenable idea. What is untenable is that clues 'found' later were not placed by the finders. That is especially true of everything found during the 'web period' of PID. Now we have 'evidence' of, well, you name something we haven't had 'evidence' for. McCartney and Montauk? Seen it. McCartney as Satan? Regular as clockwork McCartney and The NWO? Bored by it. McCartney as secret author of The Bible? Any day now What is REALLY boring though is to see someone who expressed their opinion after consideration of PID/PWR dismissed as being 'with eyes closed'. I've no time for that kind of dismissal, considering that the evidence stacking up against a quote 'normal, reasonable' view on the matter is limited to spurious ideas assumed-as-established-fact in order to justify more extreme ideas. As I've said before, it;s fun to engage in a 'let's pretend' game with all of this but the fun runs out when fanatical impulses overcome the game. I can't help thinking back to a few years ago when I was worried, here, that the extreme ideas being forced into PID by those holding the ideas external to PID was part of some kind of movement of infiltration by extremists. We've now seen this play out LARGE on the public stage
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 19:47:08 GMT -5
Why does anyone suppose the real McCartney would even know a thing about communist Russia, let alone long to return there?! It's a goofy notion--unless the real Paul never wrote that song at all, but someone who not only had been there, but agreed with communist goals and ideals, did. Well y'see he didn't live in America where commenting on things you know shit about as if you know all about them and backing that up with a gun if you;re challenged, is, like par for the course. Elsewhere in the world we kinda believe in being able to talk about anything without having to pander to some cockeyed conspiracy redneck bigots. Just sayin
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 19:40:04 GMT -5
By all accounts, John Lennon brought in a song that was almost like one of Ringo's efforts, sounding immediately like a cover version of another song. Spotting this and with Lennon asking for help finishing it, McCartney took charge and got rid of the Chuck Berry sound, slowing it down and 'swamping it up' with his funky bass and piano lines. Lennon, meanwhile, improvised the lyrics but, again, kept plagiarising his source, Chuck Berry's 'You Can't Catch Me' whose lyrics read pretty much the same. So much so that they DID catch him and he was eventually forced to settle the lawsuit by recording a cover of the Berry song and several others from the publisher on his 'Rock 'N' Roll' covers album.
Although people will try to read significance into anything, a comparison of the two songs lyrics may lead you to the conclusion that he just added stream of consciousness improv to Berry's lyrics, not completing the process to the point where he's differentiated the song from its inspiration:
"New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours I was rollin' slowly 'cause of drizzlin' showers Here come a flat-top, he was movin' up with me Then come wavin' goodbye in a little' old souped-up jitney I put my foot on my tank and I began to roll Moanin' siren, 'twas the state patrol So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn Bye bye New Jersey, I've become airborne
Now you can't catch me Baby you can't catch me 'Cause if you get too close, you know I'm gone like a cool breeze"
Read more: Chuck Berry - You Can't Catch Me Lyrics | MetroLyrics
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 19:10:27 GMT -5
It's all lies. I reckon Paul had to go back to jail for not being Paul OR He unwisely asked for his weed back.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 19:06:05 GMT -5
Egad. The guy sitting next to Lennon-with-a-beard is the guy well known to anybody who's read ANY of The Beatle biographies including the one that's BY him. But since nobody on this page appears to have, why not, like go and read one before awarding yourselves the expertise (? or just 'basic familiarity') that would be required to sit in on a discussion of minutiae which may or may not reveal something amiss in the story of Paul and The Feables (sic) Also, a basic try-out with a camera and a light on anybody you fancy (or even somebody you don't) might reveal that the key differences in the 6 Paul pics are: 1. LIGHTING (I'll make exception for the top middle one where the explanation is 'Teenage Puppy Fat' since he's about 14 in it) As for those that see a 'square chin' on any of em, why not try Specsavers?
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 18:00:00 GMT -5
There are definitely several edits of the run out groove, some of which were generated by different pressings and masters or edits (like the one for the 1987 CD which was an actual re-performance of several cycles of the 'run-out groove' from vinyl. But there is also at least one bootleg cut which is a long take in which the run-out groove section occurs. Somewhere in my collection I have that cut and I'll try to get back and post it if I find it.
And the official 'interpretation' of the backward play was always 'We'll Fuck You Like We're Supermen' until this century when someone suggested it sounded like 'We'll all be magic supermen' which I've never heard it sounding like that even with a bit of imagination. The incumbent McCartney (or one of his triples) hasn't dealt with this more than a couple of times but the fullest version was in a book of interviews with Paul Gambuccini (Paul McCartney In His Own Words, published in 1975). And actually, I just went to my digital version of that book and found that it contains a bit more PID-relevant stuff than I remembered so here is the relevant bit in fullness of context (especially noting McCartney's run-in comment immediately before Gambuccini inserts a PID article from the underground paper RAT -SUBTERRANEAN NEWS):
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Paul Gambuccini: When you do have rough edges on an album, you're open to interpretation. There's the famous example of John and Yoko's 'Wedding Album', where the reviewer reviewed the tone on the test pressing and said that the subtle fluctuations in this tone were very arty. Paul McCartney: The whole analysis business is a funny business, it's almost like creating history before it's been created. When a thing happens you immediately start analyzing it as if it was fifty years ago, as if it was King Henry VIII who said it. It is daft, actually, but you can't blame anyone for doing it, they've got to write something. Unless they can say "I was around at his house and he gave me a nice cup of tea... funny little blue cups he gave it in...'' they've got to say, well, what did you mean by this, or what was that tone. PG: With one song you mentioned just a few minutes ago, 'Hey Jude,' everyone was trying to figure out who Jude was. PM: I happened to be driving out to see Cynthia Lennon. I think it was just after John and she had broken up, and I was quite mates with Julian (their son). He's a nice kid, Julian. And I was going out in me car just vaguely singing this song, and it was like "'Hey, Jules." I don't know why, "Hey, Jules." It was just this thing, you know, "Don't make it bad/Take a sad song…" And then I just thought a better name was Jude. A bit more country and western for me. In other words, it was just a name. It was just like "'Hey Luke" or "Hey Max" or "Hey Abe", but "Hey Jude" was better. To one fellow Jude meant Jew, "Juden Raus," "Jew Get Out." At the time we had the Apple shop. I went in one night and put whitewash on all the windows and rubbed out 'Hey Jude' as a big ad. I thought it was a great thing, nothing happening in the shop, let's use the window as a big advertising thing for the record. So I did this 'Hey Jude' right across the window and some feller from a little Jewish delicatessen rang up the office the next day. He said "If my sons vere vif me, I'd sent von of them round to kill you. Yuu are doing this terrible thing with the Jewish name. Wat you want, Juden Rans, you trying to start the whole Nazi thing again?" Those are the kind of things, you know, that do happen. But really in nine cases out of ten, even when all this bit went down after the Beatles, John writing a song at me, me supposed to be writing songs back at him... OK, there was a little bit of it from my point of view, certain little lines, I'd be thinking, "Well, this will get him." You do, you know. Christ, you can't avoid it. 'Too Many People,' I wrote a little bit in that, "too many people preaching." That was actually the only thing I was saying referring to John at the time. What I meant to say was, once you get analyzing something and looking into it, things do begin to appear and things do begin to tie in. Because everything ties in, and what you get depends on your approach to it. You look at everything with a black attitude and it's all black. RAT SUBTERRANEAN NEWS “It’s High Time Our BILLY Received The Credit He Deserves” - DAD (Editors' note: Lee Merrick, an old friend of ours, sent this RAT exclusive by cable just a day before publication.) by Lee Merrick London - October 26. Paul McCartney is dead. All the Beatles, of course, know it but they aren't talking. All the insiders at Apple Corporation have known it for a long time without ever leaking a word. It's been the world's best-kept secret. But, in the last few days I have discovered absolute proof of Paul's death; and I think it's time that the world knew the truth. The hoax has gone on long enough. I have gotten to know a lot of people at Apple Corp, pretty well during the six months that I've hung around jamming and doing various studio gigs. I had seen the Beatles, including ‘Paul’, many times around the studio and offices. Rumors about them are a dime a dozen. I had heard the one about Paul's death, but it was just one of scores that went around. Even when the death rumor received international press coverage, I didn't take the whole thing very seriously. But my opinion changed radically as a result of a party I attended last Wednesday. The party, at the house of a London rock musician, included the usual assortment of hip writers, rock-stars and hangers-on. Several Apple friends also showed up. The latest Beatle rumor was, of course, the main topic of conversation. Everyone there considered himself to be very in with the Beatles, and they all joked about the obvious foolishness of the latest out-cropping of Beatlemania. After a while, several of my Apple friends and I decided to split to one of their apartments to smoke a little dope and check out some new tapes that had just come in. People eventually drifted off to crash or ball, living only myself and my friend. I had noticed earlier that the light talk about Paul's rumored death had put him very up tight, and the idea to leave had been his in the first place. In the past few months we had grown pretty close - and we were pretty stoned - so I began to question him about the whole affair. The story I drew out of him over the next few hours went like this:
Remember the first cut on the Sgt. Pepper album? The one with the line "And now we introduce to you the one and only Billy Shears"? Did you ever wonder just who ‘Billy Shears' actually was? Of if he even existed? Billy Shears was a young London rock musician who did short gigs in London nightclubs and occasional tours, waiting for the chance to make it big. As the fifties rock-and-roll craze spread across to Europe, he got a chance to play various clubs on the Continent. In 1962 Shears played on the same nightclub bill as Paul McCartney. In fact, he was virtually a dead ringer for Paul. Of course, you could tell the difference if they stood side by side. Billy had a somewhat over-sized, beak-shaped nose. But in photographs or at a distance, they were absolutely indistinguishable. Their friendship remained intermittent over the next year or so as their respective tour paths occasionally crossed. When fame came to the Beatles in 1964, however, they lost touch with obscure Billy who drifted from small bandsman to studio musician.
In November, 1966, Paul McCartney was involved in an auto accident - a fatal accident. John, George and Ringo first wanted to stage a gigantic funeral in memory of Paul. But super-sharp manager, Brian Epstein, feared that Paul's death would destroy the Beatles mystique and managed almost entirely to suppress the news. Epstein's calculating mind had already devised a scheme for keeping the Beatles intact - at least for the public. With a minor nose job, Billy Shears would make a perfect replacement for Paul. Though hesitant at first, Shears soon accepted Epstein's offer. What musician could resist the opportunity to step into the shoes of one of the superstars of the rock world. In the first album after Paul's death, Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles cryptically introduced the new "Paul" in the first cut. The album closes with "A Day in the Life", the story of Paul's death. (" ...He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the light had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared/They'd seen his face before ... ") Knowing perhaps that the ruse couldn't last, the Beatles have hinted at the truth in every successive album. On the Sgt. Pepper album centerfold, only 'Paul' faces away from the camera. Epstein did not want a large close-up of 'Paul' to be shown until people became accustomed to the slight difference from the deceased Beatle. On the Magical Mystery Tour insert, only 'Paul' wears a black rose. "Revolution Number Nine", on the double album, contains the phrase "I buried Paul" when played backwards. The cover picture of the most recent Abbey Road shows the Beatles walking single file. The first two, Ringo and John, wear mourning clothes; 'Paul' is barefoot and dressed as for burial; George follows in the work clothes of an English gravedigger. Even though I knew that my friend, who asked to remain un-named, had known and worked with the Beatles from the early days in the fifties, his story seemed almost too fantastic to believe. And certainly people who did not know him would have no reason to believe that Billy took Paul's place three years ago. So, for the next few days, I searched for evidence to absolutely confirm the story. My search ended in the quiet Chelsea section of London where I talked with Philip Shears, father of the new Paul McCartney. At first, Mr. Shears hesitated to discuss the matter. He had kept his lips sealed for three long years in the pleasant, middle-class home his son had bought for him. But after I repeated the story my Apple friend had told me, the elderly Mr. Shears relented and confirmed the facts. "Mums and me always knew that it couldn't stay secret forever. The Beatles are a bunch of wonderful lads and have made a whole new world for us." But, he added, "It’s high time that our Billy received the credit he deserves." And now he has. Paul McCartney: This other idea of Paul Is Dead. That was on for a while. I had just turned up at a photo session and it was at the time when Linda and I were just beginning to knock around with each other steadily. It was a hot day in London, a really nice hot day, and I think I wore sandals. I only had to walk around the corner to the crossing because I lived pretty nearby. I had me sandals on and for the photo session I thought I'd take my sandals off. Linda McCartney: No, you were barefoot. PM: Oh, I was barefoot. Yeah, that's it. You know, so what? Barefoot, nice warm day, I didn't feel like wearing shoes. So I went around to the photo session and showed me bare feet. Of course when that came out and people start looking at it they say "Why has he got no shoes on? He's never done that before." OK, you've never seen me do it before, but in actual fact, it's just me with my shoes off. Turns out to be some old Mafia sign of death or something. Then the this-little-bit-if-you-play-it-back-wards stuff. As I say, nine times out of ten it's really nothing. Take the end of 'Sergeant Pepper', that backwards thing. "We'll fuck you like Supermen." Some fans came around to my door giggling. I said, "Hello, what do you want?" They said, "Is it true, that bit at the end? Is it true? It says 'We'll fuck you like Supermen.' " I said, "No, you're kidding. I haven't heard it, but I'll play it." It was just some piece of conversation that was recorded and turned backwards. But I went inside after I'd seen them and played it seriously, turned it backwards with my thumb against the motor, turned the motor off and did it backwards. And there it was, sure as anything, plain as anything. "We'll fuck you like Supermen." I thought, Jesus, what can you do? Paul Gambuccini: And then there was "I buried Paul." PM: That wasn't "I buried Paul" at all, that was John saying "cranberry sauce." It was the end of 'Strawberry Field Forever.' That's John's humor. John would say something totally out of synch, like "cranberry sauce." If you don't realize that John's apt to say '"cranberry sauce" when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think "Aha!" PG: When you were alive and presumed dead, what did you think? PM: Someone from the office rang me up and said "Look, Paul, you're dead." And I said, "Oh, I don't agree with that." And they said, "Look, what are you going to do about it? It's a big thing breaking in America. You're dead." And so I said leave it, just let them say it. It'll probably be the best publicity we've ever had and I won't have to do a thing except stay alive. So I managed to stay alive through it. A couple of people came up and said "Can I photograph you to prove you're not dead?" Coincidentally, around about that time, I was playing down a lot of the old Beatle image and getting a bit more to what I felt was me, letting me beard grow and not being so hung up on keeping fresh and clean. I looked different, more laid back, and so I had people coming up saying "You're not him!" And I was beginning to think, "I am, you know, but I know what you mean. I don't look like him, but believe me." PG: You were supposedly Billy Shears, according to one of the theories. PM: Ringo's Billy Shears. Definitely. That was just in the production of Sergeant Pepper. It just happened to turn out that we dreamed up Billy Shears. It was a rhyme for "years"... "band you've know for all these years... and here he is, the one and only Billy Shears." We thought, that's a great little name, it's an Eleanor-Rigby-type name, a nice atmospheric name, and it was leading into Ringo's track. So as far as we were concerned it was purely and simply a device to get the next song in.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 17:55:59 GMT -5
Here's another clue for you all: It would seem that some PIDers, possibly a LOT of PIDers don't actually spend any time with The Beatles but simply jump on some of the wilder (and much more recent) PID tropes, like 'He was killed by the Illuminati' as a way to confirm their general world-view. I say this because there's so much live Faul on YouTube that finding out if he sweats or not during a gig shouldn't be a matter of posting a question here and waiting days or weeks to get an answer. Or am I just an Illuminati shill?
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 17:49:04 GMT -5
Good shout! Definitely remember being in the company of a few PIDheads when this was released, rolling a fat one on the vinyl album sleeve and discussing this sleeve for clues. It's a shame this is a small jpeg as I might be able to remember more but my take was that the old Paul was pasted over the new Paul (on Let It Be) and that the Apple bonkers and glove below fingered The Blue Meanies who had forced the secret to be secret. Also that 'P." was very significant as in 'Paul, full-stop' Not that PID was anything but fun in those days. Nobody started to get scared we were dicing with Satanists or Illuminati.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 16:32:20 GMT -5
stevem - there are certainly some interesting anomolies in the history of the Beatles' cars. I checked the DVLC site for George's Aston KPP 4C and it says that it was manufactured in 1964, but that it was first registered in 2004 - and that it is now green! Clearly it has been resprayed and re-registered. Presumably it was off the road for some time and whoever has it now either does not know of its past, or simply doesn't care. Of course you are basing your assumptions on there having been a fatal car crash in the first place, which, I would suggest, is a moot point. For example, this site, which contains some details on Beatles' motors, suggests that Paul popped his clogs in an Austin Healey - which is a new one on me and I have read a lot of theories! With regard to Pepper and its meanings and symbolism I suggest you read my excellent tome ' The Sgt. Pepper Code'. Yes on the 'assuming there was a fatal car crash'. I think a lot of us here would agree that several stories have been conflated to form the 'died in car crash' before you even get near any clues or Tavistock Institutes. The argument where Paul stormed off DID occur, when he was told to f*ck off by Lennon while attempting to take control of the latter's song 'She Said She Said', the only 'performed as band' song they put on record which didn't have Paul playing bass, as George finished the track on bass after his departure from the session. But that didn't happen at any date near when the rumours of car crashes specify a death occurred. Once you add an actual car crash (Browne) and a Beatle reference to it ('A Day in the Life') you DO genuinely get to an understandable worried-fans kick-off of the 'Paul Is Dead' vibe that finally exploded after Fred LaBour's genial prank collation and additions to all existing rumours in '69. The actual decision by the fab four to cash in their beatle suits and dress like actors who are between movies by observing and extending a long tradition of growing beards and looking very different than the hit part they've just played, AND their dedication to mastering studio technology and taking their songs well away from 'Thank You Girl for please pleasing me sending all your loving yeah yeah yeah' territory and it's not really a surprise that confusions ruled. Of course, judging by the general level of Beatle scholarship among PID-enthusiasts, particularly in this century (Tina Foster, I'm looking you in your third eye), it doesn't seem like many of the actual Beatle fans with first-hand knowledge of the period pursued PID once zealots who I say are actually, a lot of them, part of the 'Make America Great Again (Like It Was Before Those Beatles Ended Segregated Gigs' took control of what should be fun, not politics. But that's just my 'left-wing pinko-liberal' opinion from watching too much Hilary TV (as you know, Beacon, she has a dedicated channel in the UK I think the 'Austin Healy' story comes from the 'Paul McCartney Really is Dead' mockumentary (which I refer to as 'Mocks Well') which *may* be intended as disinformation to put off informed Beatle fans discovering PID but is definitely intended to aggravate PID-enthusiasts by getting everything annoyingly wrong in a way that parodies how annoyingly wrong they often get it anyway, from the perspective of a person who's actually read a Beatle biography or seventeen. Oh how we laughed And thank you Mister Beacon for your 2016 revision freebie of The Sgt Pepper Code. I bought the original and enjoyed it and enjoyed the new update all the more. Keep on keepin on!
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 16:08:58 GMT -5
If anyone here has digital copies of any of these, I'll swap for the digitals of the new Beatles 66 and Tara Browne books! I'd order the hardcopies but they're already expensive so adding international postage just makes them an absolute no-no for me. I might be crazy but I'm not THAT crazy
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 15:59:26 GMT -5
Just to get back on this, I've now got this book and had a fairly quick read through it and will have a slower one in a week or two. I can tell you it does have some detail about the September to December 66 period we're most interested in here but not as much as I'd hoped as the period after Candlestick Park before the French/Kenya holiday is really just filled in with a new Lennon-sourced quote about "Paul is too busy doing up his house" (paraphrasing just now but will grab the text proper in due course) Anybody else reading it? Quite apart from any new clues and info, it's a damn fine read for the mostpart although he kinda runs out of steam by the end of the year and jumps around the chronology a little too much. Could do with a tighter edit for the paperback edition.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 15:51:39 GMT -5
Oh hey, I didn't know the Left Wing'd media had a username on here. CNN, is that you?! Covering the more important story by diverting to Mainstream Media tactics. Alex Jones would not be impressed. LOL. Not being in America, I don't get a feed of CNN or FoxNews for that matter, especially as I don't have a TV. I do try to keep up with what's happening in Mickey Mouse Country though and heard it through the grapevine that Donald Duck is now president. Left, right, left, right, marching off to war. Also, I spotted the books and read the reviews and thought that some people here who aren't too busy listening to Alex Jones might dig the fact that a couple of, like, ACTUAL researchers have spent a few years not listening to Alex Jones and, like, writ summat worthwhile. Innit.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 15:42:00 GMT -5
I hadn't realised until just this moment that I must be quite a Clare Kuehn fan. I certainly recognise her style of writing in this affidavit, particularly the bits that she cut and pasted from her article ABOUT the affidavit. Talking of which, I wonder where you get to file an affidavit in the UK. But if Bob...I mean Paul's son is listening I can probably get him in touch with a grief-counsellor.
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Post by delysid on Nov 14, 2016 15:39:07 GMT -5
There ain't no meat on those bones, Boss.
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Post by delysid on Nov 3, 2016 15:45:29 GMT -5
Ugh. I can't abide another visit to the narcisstic shambles that is Tina Foster. She redefines 'fake' and the utter transparency of her censorship of any comment that detracts from the right-wing agenda she's using PID to front is puke-inducing. Plastic is right. That site is like a blog she posts to herself (she certainly comments on herself ad nauseam and without the slightest idea that this is not only transparent to intelligence but to website analysis). I keeping with her operational standards, I encourage nobody to visit it so that it really IS her mirror.
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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 17:54:36 GMT -5
PAUL MCCARTNEY IS BIG LEGGY
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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 9:37:53 GMT -5
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.htmlI 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.
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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 9:31:23 GMT -5
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-1.2825755This 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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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 9:10:03 GMT -5
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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 9:06:25 GMT -5
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.htmlTara 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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Post by delysid on Oct 30, 2016 9:05:48 GMT -5
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
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