The World's Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn't Exist: The Making of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life"

Were we to take bets on the sin­gle most wide­ly heard alarm clock, the one includ­ed on the Bea­t­les’ “A Day in the Life” would sure­ly be a pop­u­lar choice. It comes, you’ll recall, at the begin­ning of the song’s mid­dle sec­tion, when Paul takes over from John and sings about wak­ing up, comb­ing his hair, catch­ing a bus, and hav­ing a smoke. Giv­en the lyrics’ sub­ject mat­ter, its inclu­sion seems nat­ur­al, and even like one of the most straight­for­ward­ly explic­a­ble choic­es in the entire record­ing. In fact, the alarm clock was nev­er meant to stay in the mix: the band’s assis­tant Mal Evans set it off as a gag after doing a place­hold­er count of 24 mea­sures in the mid­dle of the ses­sions, but it just hap­pened to work per­fect­ly with the form the song even­tu­al­ly took.

That’s just one of the for­tu­itous acci­dents music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley recounts in the video above, on the com­plete mak­ing of “A Day in the Life.” As most Bea­t­les fans know, John real­ly did take his ini­tial inspi­ra­tion from the news­pa­per, and in par­tic­u­lar a cou­ple of arti­cles about a Guin­ness heir’s fatal car crash and 4,000 holes in Black­burn, Lan­cashire.

But after he wrote his vers­es, he found him­self at a loss as to how to devel­op the song from there. Paul offered the bit he’d already writ­ten about falling out of bed and drag­ging a comb across his head. It was­n’t long before the Bea­t­les began record­ing — and doing so for the first time, Hart­ley notes, before hav­ing fin­ished writ­ing the song. They had dis­parate pieces of music to join togeth­er, but no idea, yet, of how they’d do it.

Source: openculture.com/Colin Marshall

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