The short life of Tara Browne

I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously ‘blew his mind out in a car’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, the one that begins ‘I read the news today oh boy/ About a lucky man who made the grade’. (He was similarly elegised in ‘Death of a Socialite’ by The Pretty Things.) I knew Tara well during the Paris phase of his brief trajectory and my first reaction to news of this biography was that it would be quite a short book, Tara having died in a car crash in Redcliffe Gardens in 1966, aged 22.

John Lennon affects detachment in the lyric, ‘He didn’t notice that the lights had changed’, but he knew Tara and it is clear from the song’s elegiac mood that his death stood for something in the life of the band, that it marked the end of the party. The last line ‘Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall’ expresses the mood of disillusion, or so I like to think, because that was the way I felt about Tara’s death myself. Before it, the innocent phase of the 1960s, the Twist, the mini-skirt, ‘I wanna hold your hand’. After it, long hair, old clothes, psychedelia, Altamont, the rock-and-roll deaths. Before it, for me at least, the carefree present tense. After it, fatherhood, work, the future.