An Irishman's Diary

TARA BROWNE died as he had lived his life: at breakneck speed and in the metaphorical fast lane. There was no fast lane, though, when he drove down Earls Court Road into Redcliffe Crescent in Kensington, west London, just a week before Christmas in 1966.

Browne, as befits a man in a hurry, was driving a Lotus Elan sports car. According to his girlfriend Suki Potier, a woman The Irish Timeswould later coyly call his "girl companion", Browne tried to avoid a car coming straight at him. He swerved to avoid it and crashed into another one. He died the following day.

Browne was just 21. He was the son of Dominick Browne, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who spent 71 years in the House of Lords having succeeded his father who, cruelly, was also killed in a car crash.

Tara Browne's mother was Oonagh Guinness, one of the famed Guinness sisters and the owner of the beautiful Luggala estate in Roundwood, Co Wicklow.

The word had not been invented at the time, but Eton-educated Browne would be known nowadays as a 'Trustafarian'. According to the newspapers at the time, Browne stood to inherit around £1 million on his 25th birthday. Even at the age of 21, he left £56,069 in his estate, a sum which would have made
him a millionaire today. His inquest described him as a man of "independent means".

He embraced the swinging sixties as only a young man with wealth and means could do. He was, as the song would later say, "a lucky man who made the grade".His 21st birthday party was a lavish affair and he knew Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Paul McCartney's brother Mike McCartney and John Paul Getty
among others. He experimented with LSD. The author and journalist Ferdinand Mount called Browne "a golden child of the sixties".

Yet, he was also a married man. At the age of 18 he married Noreen McSherry, the daughter of a County Down farm. The couple had two children, aged three and one, and were already estranged in what was then a very public battle for custody in the High Courts.

According to Suki Potier, Browne was not going particularly fast when he drove down Earls Court Road into Redcliffe Gardens, but independent witnesses at the inquest suggested otherwise and their testimony would appear to be borne out by pictures of the crumpled bonnet and torn-off roof of the sports car.

Suki Potier escaped unhurt, but her life was dogged by tragedy. She was Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones' girlfriend when he drowned in a swimming pool in 1969 and, having survived the accident that killed Browne, she and her husband were killed in a car-crash in Portugal in 1981.

The death of Tara Browne made the front page of The Irish Times, well disposed then to the goings on of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, but he would not have been remembered except by his nearest and dearest had it not been for John Lennon.

Lennon read an account of Browne's inquest in the Daily Mailon January 17th, 1967, while he was lazing around and tinkering at the piano. The story of a young aristocrat "who blew his mind out in a car" proved to be irresistible to Lennon who had a passing acquaintanceship with Browne.

Lennon's dream-like lyrics complemented the slight piano intro. "He hadn't noticed that the lights had changed/a crowd of people stood and stared/they'd seen his face before/nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords".

In the same newspaper, Lennon read a nonsense story about 4,000 potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

He put the two together. At the same time, Paul McCartney was working on a song of his own. A dreamy sequence about lighting up a cigarette on the bus on the way to school (or was it marijuana?) had a tempo and theme entirely different from Lennon's contribution, but this was the Beatles at the height of that astonishing period of fecundity which stretched from the time when they quit playing live in late 1966 until they split up in 1970.

It worked not well, but brilliantly. The two segments meshed together seemlessly and George Martin introduced a full orchestra which was invited to play through the scale finishing on a big E chord, the E chord symbolising heaven. Then there is the infamous dog whistle at the end. Don't try it on Fido at home.

There is a school of thought which suggests that A Day in the Life, because of its ambition, its showcasing of the talents of both Lennon and McCartney and because it marks both the end and the culmination of The Beatles' most revered album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Bandstands as the band's finest song, though there is no shortage of contenders or opinions.

While A Day in the Lifestands as an unwitting tribute to the memory of Browne, a more personal one will be held next weekend in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

'A Day In the Life' festival, in memory of Tara Browne, features the German techno pioneers Kraftwerk in their only European gig this year. It was due to be staged at Luggala, which is the current home of Tara's brother Garech, but that concert had to be relocated because of the fearsome flooding of recent weeks.

More is the pity because the location, with its heart-stopping views of the Fancy Mountain and Luggala itself, would have out-shone any performer. Promoter John Reynolds, who has developed an eye for new venues with his inspired staging of the Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Co Laois, and the Royal Hospital for the unforgettable series of concerts by Leonard Cohen during the summer, is hoping to resurrect Luggala as a venue next year.

In death, as in life, Tara Browne remains surrounded by music.