Ha ha ha! You just made my day! Thanks. 
Damn you. Now I have to buy more music.
Well, it’s sort of palindromic, if you call the song “A Day in the Llif.”…
But, when writing lyrics, it’s common to replace the missing syllable with the word “fill.” So JL asked around for the right word to fit into “Now they know how many holes it takes to [fill] the Albert Hall.” And one of their assistants, Mal Evans or Peter Brown or somebody said “That is the word.” The holes fill the Albert Hall. A sort of pun, if you’re in on the argot.
I always thought the news was about a man who shot himself in the head while waiting at a red light. Interesting thread.
As one of my favorite songs of all time I never bothered to look into what most of the lyrics mean. Thanks all.
I will say I always thought the ‘holes it takes to fill Albert’s Hall’ lyric was an allusion to bullet holes for some reason—WWII or something.
Maybe the cost of pothole repair had something to do with Albert Hall at the time? Did they renovate then, sidelining the hole repair? Or Tara Browne dying in car accident = potholes = (more car accidents?) = news article = this song = Beatles performance.
Most likely, it’s probably just an absurd non-sequitur.
The Albert Hall is a large concert hall in London, named after Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert.
Yes, it is an absurdist non-sequitur.
First of all, the song had nothing to do with Tara Browne: that’s just a modern-day reporter speculating in a vacuum.
According to all reports on the song, the first two verses were inspired by news articles Lennon saw. The first was about someone who committed suicide by shooting himself in a car while driving. The second was an odd article that talked about a bunch of holes found in Blackburn. In both cases, Lennon was just reporting what he read in the news: I read the news today.
The bridge section is a leftover song by McCartney spliced in, of course.
Lennon liked wordplay. Here he was playing with the actual news articles he saw. Tara Browne was never mentioned in any accounts on how the song was written.
You may be right that the Tara Browne connection is just journalistic speculation, but it isn’t “modern day” speculation. I can remember reading about it a very long time ago, I think back in the '60s, not very long after Sgt Pepper was first released.
Maybe the number of potholes corresponds to the number of seats in the Albert Hall?
Actually, this one book I’ve got on Beatles songs (published as Here, There, and Everywhere, reissued as The 100 Best Beatles Songs) pointed out one of the absurdities in this–a hole is full of nothing, so by counting the holes, the editorial writer was literally counting nothing. In other words, people didn’t make a big deal over the death of a human being, turned away in disgust from a film about war, but literally “made a big deal over nothing.”
Am I the only one who thought that it’s a song about a drug trip?
Like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
LSD was the big thing for the media to rant and rave about in 1967. And the phrase to “blow your mind” was popular,-originally meaning drug-induced, and later adapted to mean just “wow, that’s great”.
Since the lyrics to “day in the Life” are mostly nonsense, I thought “he blew his mind out” in a car meant he was doing drugs.
Or, more likely, John Lennon was doing drugs when he wrote it.
But I was a pre-teenager at the time.
Yep, that I knew.
Had the Beatles ever performed there?
Basically, I was wondering if the cost to repair the holes was somehow compared to the cost of building or renovating Albert Hall (mundane budgetary politics and all that) perhaps mentioned in the same article Lennon read?
Here’s the article:
No, they hadn’t.
The song isn’t about any one thing. But Lennon said drugs are in there, too. I mean, it’s hard to ignore that reading of “I’d love to turn you on.”