Lyrics
Discussion
"More nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced." (MacDonald, 2008, p.228)
The Fall's cover of "A Day in the Life" appeared on Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father (released February 1988), a compilation cassette/LP put together by New Musical Express in aid of the charity Childline. The album consisted of bands covering songs from The Beatles' album Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which had reached its 21st anniversary.
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| Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father (1988) - LP cover |
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| Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father (1988) - LP back cover |
Wet Wet Wet's cover of "With a Little Help From My Friends" (see Wikipedia), which appeared on the album, was released as a double-A side single with Billy Bragg and Cara Tivey's version of "She's Leaving Home", in May 1988. It spent eleven weeks in the UK charts, four of them at Number One (see Official Charts).
Not bad for a "song about perception" - reality having been "revealed by LSD to be largely in the eye of the beholder." (MacDonald, 2008, p.228).
A song not of disillusionment with life itself but of disenchantment with the limits of mundane perception, A DAY IN THE LIFE depicts the 'real' world as an unenlightened construct that reduces, depresses, and ultimately destroys. (MacDonald, 2008, p.229).
It's perhaps not too far-fetched to say that similar concerns can be found in a number of songs by The Fall.
As recorded in the annotations, The Beatles' lyric refers to a couple of newspaper reports (inspiring the first and last verses) and the 1967 film How I Won The War, in which Lennon appeared. Here are images of the relevant Daily Mail articles - note that Ian MacDonald got the details wrong.
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| "Guinness heir babies stay with grandmother". Daily Mail, 17 January 1967, p.3. |
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| "Far & Near: The holes in our roads". Daily Mail, 17 January 1967, p.7. |
With one of their most controlled and convincing lyrics, its musical expression is breathtaking, its structure at once utterly original and completely natural. (MacDonald, 2008, p.231).
For The Fall to cover The Beatles at all, let alone for a charity album, seems incongruous.
For a start, Mark E. Smith had never admitted to being a fan of The Beatles. In Renegade, he says,
Everybody goes on about The Beatles, but The Searchers were the main Merseybeat band for me. (Smith, 2008, p.179)
Hilariously, The Fall's albums Bend Sinister (1986) and The Frenz Experiment (1988) were recorded in part at Abbey Road Studios (where The Beatles recorded Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band). But it was too expensive for the NME to fund the recording of "A Day in the Life" there.
Steve Hanley, in The Big Midweek, explains:
[Simon Rogers] has to put his classically-trained ear to good use and decode Paul McCartney's bass line in 'A Day In The Life', then teach it to me. Mark being an NME darling, when they asked him if we'd like to be on their Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father charity cover album, even though he's never been a Beatles fan and he's had severe reservations about Live Aid-type stuff, he readily agreed to us joining the likes of Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry, Sonic Youth and Billy Bragg... NME are paying for us to go in a studio for the day but, ironically, even though we're already at Abbey Road, they can only afford Grant's studio in Brixton for our Beatles cover. (Hanley and Piekarski, 2014, pp.260-261)
Remarkably, The Fall's cover sticks quite closely to the original, even down to mimicking the cacophonous orchestral crescendo. There are only two lyrical changes.
Simon Wolstencroft ("I'm not even a massive Beatles fan") considered the cover to be "pretty true to the original", and commented that it was "the best cover we did while I was on board." (Wolstencroft, 2014, p.95)
Interviewed by the fanzine House of Dolls in 1988, Mark E. Smith expressed mixed feelings about The Fall's involvement with the project.
The Fall's recent contribution of a track to NME's Sgt Pepper compilation is bound to raise a few hackles. Surprisingly, Smith can see the inconsistencies himself:
"The whole thing is suspect. People build their careers around charity. We did it also because it was the NME and I thought it would be a decent album. It isn't. I've always hated Sgt Pepper but the track we did was one I liked." (Morris, 1988, p.23).
A little later, MES reflected on the experience in an interview with the NME's James Brown:
What was it like working on a song like The Beatles' 'Day In The Life' that you did for the NME's Sgt Pepper LP?
"What? Apart from the spastics producing it, I really enjoyed it, I've never been a big fan of theirs (The Beatles) but I do like that song."
(Brown, 1989)
Sources and Further Reading
- Brown, James (1989). "Rebellious Juke-Box", in New Musical Express, 29 July 1989, p.15.
- Campbell, Colin and Murphy, Allan (1980). Things We Said Today: The Complete Lyrics and a Concordance to The Beatles' Songs, 1962-1970. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press.
- Hanley, Steve and Piekarski, Olivia (2014). The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall. Pontefract: Route.
- MacDonald, Ian (2008). "A Day In The Life", in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties. London: Vintage. pp.227-232. (This paperback edition is confusingly described as the "third revised edition" on the cover, and the "second revised edition" on the title page).
- Morris, Steve (1988). "Things That Go Bump In The Night", in House of Dolls, pp.20-23.
- Smith, Mark E. (2008). Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith. London: Penguin.
- The Track Record: A Day In The Life
- Wikipedia: "A Day in the Life"
- Wikipedia: "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father"
- Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can't Hide. London: Strata Books.
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