Even on their days off, seemingly innocuous events in the Beatles’ lives could have unexpected repercussions.
Take, for example, Paul McCartney’s trip to visit his family at Christmas 1965. When he and a pal popped out to visit Paul’s cousin, their journey of a few short miles set into motion a chain of events that would alter global fashion, and inspire one of the most bizarre episodes in Beatles history.
This would be The Beatles’ first Christmas break since well before they were famous. Their final engagements of 1965 had been two shows at the Capitol Cinema in Cardiff on 12 December, bringing to a close their latest UK tour – which, although nobody knew it at the time, would be their last tour in Britain. They weren’t due back to work until 5 January – one of the longest breaks they’d had since they were teenagers.
‘Quite spacey’
Paul kicked off the Christmas break by taking LSD for the first time, an experience he later described as ‘quite spacey’. Having turned down the invitation to take the drug with the other Beatles in August, he finally caved in to peer pressure while on a night out with his friend, Tara Browne. Paul was very fond of Tara, an amiable 20-year-old Irish aristocrat. Tara, an heir to the Guinness fortune, had no need to earn a living, with a £1 million inheritance coming his way on his 25th birthday.
With the curtain falling on another year of non-stop mania, Paul took advantage of the time off to visit his father, Jim, staying at the house Paul had bought him the previous year. Jim’s new home was a mock-Tudor house named Rembrandt in well-heeled Heswall, a town on the Wirral, ‘across the water’ from Liverpool. Jim lived there with Paul’s younger brother Mike, as well as his recent bride Angela (some 28 years his junior), and her four-year-old daughter Ruth.
Looking at the moon
Tara joined Paul at Rembrandt, and, on the evening of Boxing Day 1965, the two decided to take Paul’s new mopeds for a spin. It was a cold but crisp evening when Paul and Tara set out from Jim’s to drop in on his cousin Bett, a few short miles away. But as the two rode towards Liverpool, Paul’s bike hit a stone, throwing its rider. His face hit the pavement with such force that his front tooth punctured his upper lip.
As he told the New Musical Express in 1966, ‘It was quite a serious accident at the time. It probably sounds daft, having a serious accident on a motorized bicycle, but I came off it hard and I got knocked about a bit. My head and lip were cut and I broke the tooth. I was only doing about 30 at the time, but it was dark and I hit a stone and went flyin’ through the air. It was my fault... it was a nice night and I was looking at the moon.’
The young men picked themselves up and, despite being somewhat shaken, continued on their way. When they got to Bett’s, Paul’s face was a bloody state, a cut above his left eye adding to the mess the tooth had made of his lip. Paul didn’t want to make a bad scene even worse by being recognised, so Bett called a doctor friend, who stitched up his lip there and then.
Paul grew self-conscious
‘He came round on the spot, took a needle out and, after great difficulty threading it, put it in the first half of the wound,’ Paul recalled. ‘He was shaking a bit, but got it all the way through, and then he said, “Oh, the thread’s just come out – I’ll have to do it again!” No anaesthetic. I was standing there while he rethreaded it and pulled it through again!’
Although the scars soon healed, Paul took some time before getting his chipped front tooth capped. The damage is still clearly visible in the promotional clips for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’, filmed in May 1966. But as the year rolled on, Paul became increasingly self-conscious about the small scar on his upper lip, and would later admit that this was why, once the Beatles had quit touring in August 1966, he grew a moustache, in the hope of masking the imperfection.
The Beatles being as tight as they were, if one of them did something the others liked, they quickly all followed suit. So, when they resumed public life as a group in December 1966, all four of them were interviewed arriving at Abbey Road studios sporting hair on their upper lips.
The moped and the myth
In England at least, moustaches hadn’t been popular among young men since wartime, but with military mode very much on the way in, the Fab Four’s facial adornments soon caught on, and by early 1967, most hip young men around the world sported moustaches – all because Paul had happened to be looking at the moon one Boxing Day evening.
But this wasn’t the only consequence of Paul’s festive celestial distraction. Fast forward three years and perhaps the most bizarre news story of 1969 was that Paul McCartney had died some years earlier and been replaced by an imposter. The 1965 moped accident was given as one of the possible causes of death, with Paul’s subsequent changing appearance attributed to an attempt to cover up the switch.
Paul would be forced out of self-imposed seclusion on his Scottish farm to deny the rumours in November 1969, declaring it ‘all bloody stupid’. And yet to this day, there are corners of the internet where evidence continues to be gathered to show how ‘Faul’ (fake Paul) was drafted in to save face.
A day in the life?
As for Tara Browne, Paul’s amiable companion the night of his accident, he himself wouldn’t see another Christmas. On 18 December 1966, Tara and his girlfriend, the English model Suki Potier, were on their way to visit a painter friend when Tara crashed his Lotus Elan while driving through South Kensington in London at over 100mph.
Tara is believed to have deliberately – and gallantly – swerved so that when his car collided with the parked truck he knew he couldn’t avoid, he would take the brunt of the impact, and not Suki. He died of his injuries the next day; Suki walked away unharmed (she would herself die in a car crash in 1981).
Tara is immortalised in Beatles folklore as being the ‘lucky man’ who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ in Sgt. Pepper’s epic closer ‘A Day In The Life’ (the reference that ‘nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords’ supposedly alluding to the fact that Tara’s father did indeed sit in the Upper House).
Although John repeatedly cited the accident as the inspiration for the line – and the timing of Tara’s death and the writing of the song would certainly corroborate this claim – Paul remains unconvinced. In his mind, that lyric was simply a suggestive line about a politician taking drugs in his car. For him, Tara is just another one on a long list of family and friends taken from him too soon, but with whom he made the most of the time they had together.
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