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He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice 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 – The Beatles, ‘A Day in the Life’
HE’S BEST KNOWN for creating the quintessential Dublin 4 jock Ross O’Carroll Kelly – but for the last 10 years, author and former journalist Paul Howard has also been working on a book about an entirely different individual.
Howard has penned the biography of the fascinating Tara Browne, a young Irishman and Guinness heir whose death is explored in the Beatles song A Day in the Life.
Browne died aged just 21 in a car crash in London, when his Lotus Elan collided with a parked lorry after driving through a red light.
Son of Oonagh Guinness and Dominick Browne, Tara packed a lifetime into just over two decades. He was a socialite, friend to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, heir to the Guinness empire, father, husband, lover, business owner and swinging Londoner.
Howard told TheJournal.ie how he interviewed over 100 people in his quest to tell the real story of Browne’s life, moving past the online myths, and even the Beatles song itself, to uncover the young man’s essence.
“It took over my life, really, for 10 years in a nice way,” says Howard when we speak. He’s in the midst of promoting the book, but he clearly hasn’t tired of talking about Browne.
“It was a life’s work really, it’s just one of those books: when I look at it I feel like it’s a big accomplishment – and I don’t mean that in a big headed way.”
He put years of work into I Read the News Today, travelling to England to do hours-long interviews, tracking down friends and family of Browne, and gaining the trust of those closest to the young man.
In the end, he had 2.5 million words, which he had to whittle down to 110,000.
“I didn’t want to finish the work on the book until I was sure I could speak to everybody I could possibly get,” says Howard. He would work on it for a few months of the year, in between writing his Ross O’Carroll Kelly books and other work.
“It is a strange thing when somebody immortalises you in song as John Lennon did with Tara Browne – he made his name famous but somehow that shrank the story, it’s like he reduced Tara’s life to lines of a song, albeit one of the greatest songs ever written, but people know about Tara as the lucky man who made the grade and blew out his brains in the car,” says Howard.
When he describes Browne’s almost unbelievable life, it’s clear why Howard was fascinated with him.
His life transected with so many interesting people. He had all these wonderful people – he met Igor Stravinsky, met Humphrey Bogart and Truman Capote, Lucian Freud, he met Samuel Beckett… this was all before he was 12.
He was incredibly sophisticated because of who he had met and because of all the experiences he had. And because he had never gone to school.
According to Howard, the Beatles song didn’t just reduce Browne’s life down to a few lines – it also downplayed the role he played in sixties London.
“The song implies that he was a peripheral figure. In swinging London everybody knew who Tara Browne was, no one was in any doubt as to who he was,” assures Howard.
He was a friend of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and especially close to Paul McCartney. He ran a shop called Dandy Fashions, and could be seen driving around London in his ill-fated Lotus Elan.
He also came to prominence at a time when the 1960s were exploding in a technicolour riot in London. It was a time when “class was ceasing to matter – it didn’t matter if you were high born or so called low born, suddenly the world was a meritocracy and it was suddenly more about what you could say and what you could do”.
“It’s such a haunting piece of music”
Howard’s parents lived in London during the 60s and had a deep love for the band – his father even saw the Beatles when they played the famed Cavern venue.
They passed this love on to their child, with Howard – who grew up in England, later moving to Ireland as a schoolboy – having many memories of listening to his dad’s original copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its Peter Blake diorama on the front.
“I think the first time I ever heard A Day in the Life I was really spooked by it,” says Howard now. “It’s such a haunting piece of music, that intro.”
He always wondered about the veracity of the story behind the song, and a decade ago got to interview Tara Browne’s older brother, Garech de Bruin (a founding member of the Chieftains) on the 40th anniversary of Browne’s death.
Howard “came away from it thinking I hadn’t done a really good job, I hadn’t even scratched the surface”.
So he decided to set about and find the real story of Tara Browne’s life. “There are so many myths about Tara Browne and if you go on the internet you can find out hundreds of facts of his life that aren’t actually true,” he says. “So it was extracting the real person from the mythology – that was my job when I started to write the book.”
“It’s very invasive, to write a biography”
Howard was conscious that by talking to those closest to Browne, he was delving into a sad and painful time of their life.
“It’s very invasive to write a biography about somebody,” he says. “You are intruding into people’s lives and it’s even more sensitive when you are writing a biography of someone who is dead and someone who died at such a tender age.”
Browne was taken from his brother just as they were getting very close, and also from his sons Julian and Dorian before they even had a chance to get to know their father.
“I knew there was going to be a lot of stuff that I was going to be bringing up that would be difficult for them,” says Howard.
One of the people he aso had to win over was Nicky, Browne’s estranged widow. She passed away four years ago but before her death she and Howard got to speak about her late husband.
The couple had two young children and married while they were just teens. When Browne died, they were in the process of getting divorced.
Once Howard had the imprimatur of the four key people in Tara Browne’s family, it became much easier to write the book.
Two essential figures Howard got to interview were Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, who both had key roles in the Swinging London scene.
“It was not just a case of phoning her up and saying ‘I’ll chat to you next week’,” says Howard of Faithful. “I had to win her trust.” Pallenberg, meanwhile, took years to contact – it took letters, knocks on her door, and finally a phone call from Garech’s house ( Lugalla in the Wicklow Mountains) after two glasses for Dutch courage.
“She was so sweet,” says Howard of Pallenberg, who was the former partner of Brian Jones and Keith Richards. “She said ‘the only reason I didn’t reply to your letters was I didn’t know if you had Garech’s approval’.”
Howard was on the plane to meet her the following day – and proved to himself that, despite his fears, she was indeed a real person. ”To finally meet her was amazing – she was everything thing I thought she would be,” he recalls. “She was such a sophisticated lady, so smart. She has done so much living.”
To sit down with a woman who was witness to so much of the 60s was one of the highlights of Howard’s journalistic career.
Youthquake in London
Howard was born in 1971, but the 60s are a period he has long been fascinated with.
“The music in our house growing up, it was always 60s music. When we lived in England, Sunday lunch was always accompanied by the soundtrack of 60s music. It was what my parents used to call music from the good old days. In a strange way I grew up feeling nostalgic about an era I never ever lived through, and everything about the era excites me.”
His mother and father would talk about the 60s being a very happy, optimistic time. “It was an ideal,” says Howard now. “They had a sense they could change things.”
There were several reasons why the 60s were so unique, says Howard – from the UK bands taking US music and selling it back to the Americans, to the advent of the mini skirt, the appearance of the Pill, and Britain re-establishing itself post-empire.
“[After WWII] London was still bomb scarred. A lot of people were still living on rationed food and suddenly the children of the Blitz – you could say a lot of these kids would have been conceived in air raid shelters – suddenly were coming-of-age teens in the early 60s.”
These teens, unlike their parents or grandparents, didn’t have to fight a war, and conscription was gone.
“They can suddenly see the future and define themselves in their own ways. Like our Celtic Tiger there was an economic boom – it was young people who had the money,” explains Howard. These kids with money were the taste-makers of their generation – if they said the Beatles were the next big thing, they became the next big thing, says Howard.
You had all this fusty grey establishment being pushed to one side and this absolute youthquake appearing in London.
The time was ripe for a figure like Tara Browne to make his mark.
“It was an extraordinary time… when I read about it I get goosebumps, because I wish I was there. I think it is one of the great golden eras,” says Howard.
Is there a lesson in Tara Browne’s story? “I don’t know if there is a lesson from it,” muses Howard.
“Probably if there is a lesson, it’s that these eras come and go like the tides and eventually all the optimism dies and that’s the sad thing.
“Tara died just on the cusp of when people realised that all this optimism they had for the world, about making the world a better place, it was optimism. And so Tara still represents to them the world when it was bright and happy, and people really did think they could for instance bring an end to Vietnam [War].”
The process of writing the book has also had a personal lesson for Howard – it taught him the discipline of journalism again after years of writing fiction. “My stuff comes from my own sick imagination,” he laughs. “This was different – this was phone calls, detective work, and I loved that. I’d probably forgotten when I stopped being a journalist.”
Now that he’s finished this decade-long labour of love, is Howard thinking about his next project? “I don’t know if I’d find another subject I’d consider worthy of 10 years,” he says.
There is another Ross O’Carroll Kelly book due to be finished before Christmas, but Howard admits:
“I’m sure in the new year I will be itching to get stuck into something. I loved doing the research for this. The 60s is something else.”
Just like the story of Tara Browne, something else indeed.
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy is out now.
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The public are ahead of government in all aspects of society? Daily we live through the problems, staring at them for generations, they seem oblivious.
Yet another example where capitalism fails miserably to better our society.
Public services should never be privitised or be for profit. It just doesn’t work. Capitalism works great when making iPhones, but is awful when making an effective public service.
@Caoimhin O’Connor: IPhones are made in China who are communist
@Caoimhin O’Connor: privatisation has worked well for this country, as promised we have excellent water and electrical infrastructure and lower priced electricity, a waste management service that’s vastly improved, a private health service that out performs the public one. Imagine these were once included in your taxes and actually worked well. Now your taxes remain the same but now we pay for these services on top, if like health care you can afford it.
@Spanner: privitisation has not worked well in anything you’ve stated
thankfully to the water protesters water has not been privitised.
we have the highest electricity costs in Europe (& the people who had supply out for 3 weeks would disagree it’s a great infrastructure) so that’s completely wrong.
We have terrible waste management services – why don’t you walk Dublin,cork or Limerick inner city and see what privitisation has done for litter and rural areas for fly tipping. It was way cleaner when the councils took charge of waste.
@Caoimhin O’Connor: Capitalism is the most moral and most successful economic system ever because it allocates the resources effectively to those who deserve it the most. In a free market, no one can demand that you work for them, provide them with goods, or surrender your wealth. Every interaction, whether employment, trade or charity, is voluntary. The failures of childcare in this country come from Socialist intervention from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Price controls, heavy regulation, and subsidies distort the market, making childcare more expensive, less available and lower in quality. That’s just basic economics, you’d do well to realise that. Every failure in Ireland can’t be directly linked back to leftist economics. Public service should be the job of the government to begin with.
@William Jennings: Shouldn’t be the job of government to begin with. The only role of government should be to provide a court system, a police and fire service and a standing army for national defence. Everything else should be left to the private sector to handle.
@Joe Willis: Yes, but the profit goes to Cupertino. Apple use China as a low cost manufacturing facility. They don’t make iPhones in the US because it costs too much and shareholders returns would be diminished. Capitalism will always move to where manufacturing costs are lowest so to make higher profits.
No mention on how much taxpayer money will be needed to implement these recommendations. Of course parents want better services for their children at a cheaper price than they are currently paying, however someone will need to pay so lets get some figures on what this will cost and then see what taxes need to increase to pay for it all.
@The next small thing: we have €15bn in a rainy day fund.
If parents didn’t have to spend a second mortgage on creche fees they could spend more in the local economy.
We badly need to increase the birth rate
@Frances Byrne,
Creches are not places of education, they are early learning centers.
Children in creches don’t have to do exams.
Some creches are just dumping grounds for children of lazy parents who can’t be bothered to look after their own children.
@Thomas O’Brien: Since when is learning not education?. My children went to a pre school crèche and there they learned the alphabet and how to count, and read a little. So clearly there is education happening at some of them at least.
@Thomas O’Brien: they are staffed with graduates of early childhood education degrees. Children in primary school don’t have to do exams either, they are still places of education.
@Ger Whelan:
Did they pass all their exams.
@Jane Gunnigan:
They are not staffed with graduates.
They are staffed by child care assistants.
Primary school children get this thing called homework which is a form of exam.
@Thomas O’Brien: or alternately, have to work to feed and clothe them, and also pay for the creche.
@Thomas O’Brien: my niece is a first class honours graduate of the early childhood education degree from DCU. It is a full-time 4 year, level 8 degree. She works in a creche, and most of her colleagues hold the same qualification.
The type of homework given to children in junior and senior infants in primary school is no way comparable to an exam.
@Jane Gunnigan:
No wonder child care is so expensive, with all the college degrees the child care assistants have. Speaking of homework, when the homework is not done the children are told off and get stressed out, just like doing exams.
@Setanta O’Toole:
Not all parents who work, send their children to creches.
@Thomas O’Brien: five year olds are told off and stressed out? Seriously? I’d be having a word with the teacher…
@Thomas O’Brien: pawn them off to a childminder or the grandparents so. How is that any less ‘lazy’ then sending them to a creche?
@Thomas O’Brien: what school are you in that are doing that? My son is in senior infants. Not once has he been given out to for not having homework done. The school even gave us the guideline of homework only taking 15 mins in junior & 20 mins in senior infants. If it’s going on longer, & the child isn’t engaged, the advice from the school is to leave it. And that’s not just for the infant years, they have an approx time and same approach for all years in the primary school. Oh & the minimum by law that someone in a childcare setting has to have is a Level 5 certificate in Early Learning & Care. Minimum if they’re in an ECCE room (which has a set curriculum btw) is a Level 6. That’s just the min. Most places will want people who have higher.
@Susan Walsh:
I finished school a long time ago.
So your son doesn’t do his homework.
A level 5 or level 6 certificate is not a degree in child care.
@Setanta O’Toole:
So the child care assistants are not childminders then. The grandparents are family. I have seen children being dumped at creches and collected whenever the parents are ready and the childminder/carer has to stay there after their shifts until they turn up.
@Jane Gunnigan:
I think you should.
@Thomas O’Brien: you now what i meant pedantic Tom. Someone they pay privately to mind their child only. I’ve seen far more parents take advantage of their own parents then Creche workers, and the majority of them grandparents aren’t getting paid for it either. You haven’t explained how one is somehow ‘lazier’ than the other either.
@Setanta O’Toole:
Both are lazy.
Why do the work when you can get someone to do it for you.
@Thomas O’Brien: I meant that as what school are your children in that you are hearing that from? And where did I say my son didn’t do his homework? I said the school has told us that homework is not essential to their development and if it’s not working that day, to leave it as all forcing them to do it at 5/6 years old will do is cause problems. My son actually enjoys his homework & I think in 2 years there’s been maybe 4 times in total it hasn’t been done. No I didn’t say it was a degree – I said they were the minimum legally. Whereas most places will want more than the minimum needed. Or will encourage their staff to upskill. Personally I would like the people looking after my child to be well qualified.
@Susan Walsh:
I am hearing it from the people who work in the creches. Some parents just leave their children at the creche and go back home to bed. Not all parents work and some of the ones that do have no time for their children, leaving them at the creche until they are good and ready to collect them.
@Thomas O’Brien: Em I said nothing about that at all. I mean it’s nothing to do with me what people are doing if they’re putting their children into childcare. And some might be – but you don’t know if they’re shift workers or what. And then there is ECCE which is for every child for 3 hours a day. I doubt there’s many just leaving them in for a full day when they’re not working considering the massive cost. It’s literally a second mortgage to have a child in full time childcare so I don’t know anyone who is affording that while not doing anything. Oh & my point was more about where you were trying to claim homework was like exams even for primary school children. Which it is not.
@Susan Walsh:
Have you seen some of the homework some children get, it’s like another few hours in class.
@Thomas O’Brien: yes I have. Not only from my child but also nieces & nephews. None that I’ve seen in *primary school* are getting masses of homework that would take hours. Also you ignored the other part about how people are affording the second mortgage cost of childcare if all they’re doing is going home to sleep? You’re very able to pick & choose what bits to reply to that suit yourself.
There are virtually no creche places available in Dublin. It’s an emergency. What is the Minister for Children doing about it?!!
@Pat Redmond: private business.
@Panti Bliss: if the children are in creche, parents are paying for their place, therefore also paying taxes. So not ‘useless’
@Pat Redmond: give them credit they talk about it a fair bit so as mehole would say they stand in solidarity with transparency that’s about the size of it.
Married mothers should be given a Married Mother Allowance.
@thomas molloy: Married fathers should be given a married fathers allowance.
@Willie Marty: Hell, why not throw in a Grandparents allowance while we are at it !
@Willie Marty: Why? Because they do the same level of parenting as mothers! Pigs flying low over ireland…..I await the bullets.
@Clare Power: All mothers do the serious heavy lifting in most cases, it’s a reality.
Everyone wants free stuff but no one wants to pay for it. It’s left-wing government intervention from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil that has caused the childcare shortage here in Ireland. Instead of allowing competition to bring prices down naturally, the price controls reduce incentives to open new childcare facilities, leading to shortages. It forces providers to cut services to meet artificial price limits. This creates waiting lists, making it harder for parents to find childcare at all. Instead of helping families, subsidies drive costs up by artificially increasing demand. Parents can “afford” to pay more because the government covers some costs. Childcare providers raise prices to capture the subsidy money. The result? Prices keep rising, making childcare even more unaffordable.
@William Jennings: Well, I suppose if you reduce childcare to the equivalent of a sandwich making enterprise, then market forces should prevail. Consumers can choose the cheap ALDI or the expensive M&S type. Similarly with wages, if you’re going to insist that the staff are professionally qualified you’re going to pay more, or you can avail of the services of a non-qualified childminder. So, the choice is between the no market interference by public authorities option or a regulated service that looks after children’s best interests. Children are not sandwiches.
It’s basically common sense coming from a bunch of fools
have your say