McCartney Times

Like many young Irish couples, my parents moved to England in the mid-1960s when its capital city just happened to be the coolest point on the planet. My father saw The Beatles in Liverpool’s Cavern (“rubbish”) and The Rolling Stones in Kentish Town (“brilliant”). The soundtrack of our Sunday lunchtimes when we, their children, entered the picture was a BBC radio programme that played the music of what my mother and father wistfully called “the good old days”. It might explain why I grew up feeling oddly nostalgic for a period of history that I never lived through.We had the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album in the house. I used to listen to it on my father’s Sharp three-in-one stereo, my clumsy little hands trying to slip the record from the sleeve without scratching it.Being young I had a sweet tooth and usually dropped the needle on With a Little Help from My Friends or When I’m Sixty-Four. I don’t remember the first time I listened to A Day in the Life. But the moment I heard John Lennon singing in a strangely disembodied voice about a lucky man who died in a horrific car crash was probably the moment I discovered music.

Source: Paul Howard: Why I wrote story of Guinness heir Tara Browne, the man immortalised in a Beatles song