"A Day in the Life" Question

[absyntheNsugar]

Has anyone ever decrypted this song???

I love it, one of my favorite Beatles songs...but what is it about?

Six Thousand Holes in Blackburn Lankshire....How many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall...

Holes come up quite often on that album in other place..."Fixing a Hole" for one...

What is your interpretation of this song?

[MuseRider]

1. No idea

never tried, just love it. "Fixing A Hole" is another great one but I am partial to "For The Benefit of Mr. Kite". Ahh, they are all great. One my favorite albums.

[absyntheNsugar]

2. Mr Kite is actually about foreign relations

Mr K is a subtle ref to Nikita Khruschev - not sure who the other characters are...

Other than that, most of the album is cryptic

[phaseolus]

3. The story I heard about Mr. Kite

is that it's a near verbatim setting of the text of an antique circus poster that one of the Beatles had in his collection.

I've always assumed "day in the life" was simply a bunch of items culled from a daily newspaper, but was about artistic vision. On the surface you can see how Lennon turned a couple random clippings into something cool and enjoyably trippy, but there's a hint at some sort of underlying connection that he was hip to. "I'd love to turn you on"...

[roughsatori]

7. You're right Mr Kite was a "found" lyric

verbatim from a poster. I read an interview with John Lennon where he talked about that. It was also discussed in another interview where it was pointed out that John's using the poster verbatim was similar to the avant-garde practices of Yoko Ono in her art...

I once heard a taped interview where John Lennon explained the "holes" but I forget what he said they were.

[CanuckAmok]

9. George Martin says:

The Mr. Kite song is copied nearly verbatim from a Victorian circus handbill which hung in Abbey Road Studios. I saw him talking about it on a documentary, and he even had it framed, beside where he was being interviewed.

Kruschev my eye. They were tripping and dug the colours, baby!

[Skittles]

4. that song reminds me of my beloved English grandfather

"made the bus in seconds flat.....found my way upstairs and had a smoke" - as a child in England I loved riding upstairs in doubledecker buses but when I was with my grandmother she wouldn't let me - she said there were only "ruffians" up there. (HELLO). But when I was with my grandfather - he smoked and you had to go upstairs to smoke. So we'd go upstairs and he would sit in the back and smoke while I, of course, rode in the front.

They've been gone a long time now. *sniff*

[OneBlueSky]

5. well, this may provide some clues

can't vouch for its accuracy, but it makes of an interesting read . . .

http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com/excerpt.cgi/1401400299

(snip)

"In the case of "A Day In The Life," it was Paul who made John's composition whole. Lennon had the melody and story line -- the verses about a man who "blew his mind out in a car," the English Army that "had just won the war," the "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" -- but the song needed something more. Lennon didn't like laboring over songs, preferring instead the Zen purity of inspiration, so when he got stuck after completing the main verses he set the song aside. "I needed a middle-eight for it , but that would have been forcing it," he later explained. "All the rest had come out smooth, flowing, no trouble, and to write a middle eight would have been to write a middle eight, but instead Paul already had one there."

"Paul did indeed have the fragment "Woke up, fell out of bed..." lying around. The two partners agreed that its peppy portrait of the alienating hustle of modern urban life -- based on Paul's memories of rushing to school in the morning -- made the ideal counterpoint to John's gently ominous, dreamlike commentary on the hollow absurdity of status, order, and worldly attachments. The initial idea for the song had come, as it so often did with Lennon, from an item in the mass media. "I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories," he recalled. "One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled. Paul's contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, 'I'd love to turn you on,' that he'd had floating around in his head and couldn't use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work."

"The Guinness heir, whom the Beatles had happened to know, was born to a life of fantastic privilege. By conventional standards he was "a lucky man who made the grade." He had everything money could buy, but found himself no more immune to death's arbitrary, dispassionate arrival than the lowliest proletarian. A momentary, all too human lapse -- "he didn't notice that the lights had changed" -- and he was gone. In the moment of death, all delusion is shattered, everyone is equal. Lennon clinches the point with the wistful, mocking epitaph "Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords." The gathered crowd knows they've "seen his face before" but they can't place it; in the broad scheme of things, he is barely a bit player. The wealth and position that seemed so important, to the heir and the larger society, is revealed as trivial and fleeting. Equally blinded by a different kind of triviality are the bureaucrats of the final verse, who insist on tabulating the precise number of holes in the roads of Blackburn, Lancashire, even "though the holes were rather small." No wonder the singer would "love to turn you on." To see his fellow human beings sleepwalking so numbly through the glorious richness that life offers is heartbreaking."

- much more . . .

http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com/excerpt.cgi/1401400299

[dbt]

6. I sawr a film today, oh boy

"The English Army had just won the war:" A reference to Lennon's role as Private Gripweed in the Richard Lester film, (wait for it) How I Won The War.

"A crowd of people turned away:" Yeah, boy. Box office poison!

:evilgrin:
dbt

[dolgoruky]

8. Riddle Solved

It's about drug addiction. John Lennon read a newspaper report about increased drug abuse in Blackburn, Lancashire (the north of England for our American friends), hence "holes", as in hypodermics.

Glad to be of help.

[trackfan]

10. I think John saw a newspaper headline

about 4000 holes, of unknown origin, being found, and it struck him as weird and funny, so he put it in a song. I've always assumed - but never actually have read anything to confirm this - that the line "now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall" probably came from some dumb-ass size comparison in the newspaper article.