What is the final sustained chord in ‘A Day in the Life’ by The Beatles?
Following the abandonment of their relentless touring schedule in 1966, The Beatles were finally able to shake off the last vestiges of Beatlemania and pour all their creative energy into realising their increasingly ambitious recording projects. Embracing the studio’s vast sonic possibilities without concern for live reinterpretation, a rested and rejuvenated band entered the EMI Studios in November of that year for their first session since gigging to cut the first take of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’s nostalgic, psychedelic odyssey.
With the extra clout and budget that worldwide fame had afforded the former Merseybeat outfit, the demos being fleshed out for the upcoming landmark Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was seriously keeping producer and engineer George Martin and Geoff Emerick on their toes with The Beatles’ ‘far out’, sophisticated ideas and compositions. Among a musical treasure chest of kaleidoscopic pop ingenuity, the album’s heady and celestial finale ‘A Day in the Life’ stands as the group’s greatest achievement.
In keeping with their songwriting tradition, John Lennon had already sketched out its spectral verses taken from the news stories of the day: Guinness heir and swinging socialite Tara Browne’s fatal car crash at 21 years old and a Daily Mail news segment of Blackburn’s pothole problem both having a hand in shaping Lennon’s surrealist reportage. Indulging in his typically wistful end of psych, Paul McCartney gifted the piece with its middle-eight bridge, imbued with his colourful affection for the music hall of yesteryear as brightly realised on ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
Beginning to lay down tracks in January 1967, it became apparent that there were opportunities for transitional breaks. As a scratch, the gaps were temporarily filled with a repeated piano chord and studio assistant Mal Evans’ counting of the bars, making it to the final master of ‘A Day in the Life’. Originally intending to scrub the alarm clock from the recording, a means to mark Evans’ counts to 24, the happy accident of its happenstance compliment to McCartney’s “woke up, fell out of bed” line also stayed put in the mix.
Immersed in the work of avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, Lennon requested an apocalyptic crescendo of noise that swelled from nothing to an engulfing climax of aural power. Conducting a 40-piece orchestra in EMI’s Studio One, Martin gave the bemused classical ensemble a loose score and framework to flex their improvisational muscles. “What I did there was to write … the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note,” Martin revealed in the All You Need Is Ears memoir. “Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar … Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”
The groundbreaking sessions were not lost on The Beatles. Keen to cast a festive spell over the gleefully chaotic din, they turned the recording into a quintessential ‘60s happening. Half of The Rolling Stones, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull, and George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, were all in attendance. The orchestra was asked to wear formal dress while raiding a fancy dress box, donning gorilla paws, fake noses, and cartoon eyes. The surreal scene was filmed by Brian Epstein associate Tony Bramwell for a TV spot that ultimately went unrealised.
So, what was the final sustained chord?
Arguably its most famous moment, ‘A Day in the Life’s final thundering key drop was captured in Studio Two in February. Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Evans all shared three pianos with Martin on harmonium and played an E-major chord simultaneously; the chord altered to ring out over 40 seconds by increasing the sound levels as the vibration faded out. Allegedly, the rumble that reverberated around the EMI Studio was so great that the office papers began rustling from the sessions’ roaring thump.
Taking 34 hours to craft their psychedelic opus, from debut album Please Please Me recorded in 15, ‘A Day in the Life’ marked a seismic step forward in The Beatles’ creative scope and strive to push the pop medium to bold new frontiers. Stirring, electric, and truly transportive, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s lofty closer saw The Beatles bottle life’s terrible and passionate emotional traversal in a mere five minutes.
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