The World’s Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn’t Exist: The Making of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”

The World’s Greatest Song That Simply Shouldn’t Exist: The Making of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” Were we to take bets on the single most widely heard alarm clock, the one included on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” would surely be a popular choice. It comes, you’ll recall, at the beginning of the song’s middle section, when Paul takes over from John and sings about waking up, combing his hair, catching a bus, and having a smoke. Given the lyrics’ subject matter, its inclusion seems natural, and even like one of the most straightforwardly explicable choices in the entire recording. In fact, the alarm clock was never meant to stay in the mix: the band’s assistant Mal Evans set it off as a gag after doing a placeholder count of 24 measures in the middle of the sessions, but it just happened to work perfectly with the form the song eventually took. That’s just one of the fortuitous accidents music YouTuber David Hartley recounts in the video above, on the complete making of “

Added 22 Jul 2026