Another day, another Beatles auction. Sometimes we wonder if anything belonging to John Lennon hasn’t been hawked for cash. The latest offering is Lennon’s hand-written lyrics to A Day In The Life.
Bonhams is auctioning John Lennon’s original draft of lyrics to Beatles song A Day In The Life – and expects bidding to reach around $2 million, making it potentially the most valuable musical manuscript to be composed in the 20th century. Which confuses us – we were fairly sure the original draft of lyrics to Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh! would have topped that particular list.
If John Lennon (CDs) were still alive, he’d be able to make a fortune selling all his old stuff at auction – just like William Shatner and his
kidney stone. But, since Lennon is dead, all of his belongings can get
flogged by all kinds of other people.
Last year, the suit that John Lennon wore for the cover of Abbey Road was sold for $118,000 and – although the handwritten Lennon lyrics to I’m Only Sleeping failed to sell, John Lennon’s popularity is still so enormous that people last year actually queued up to see an exhibition of replica Lennon teeth. None of these facts, however, can compare to the auction of Lennon’s original A Day In The Life lyrics.
In 1992, the lyrics were auctioned by the estate of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager, to an unknown buyer for $100,000. Now the lyrics are thought to be worth 20 times that amount, and are being sold through Bonhams in a sealed-bid auction ending on March 7th.
A Day In The Life is often called the best song that The Beatles ever wrote, and was even named Best British Song Ever in a survey last year. All kinds of hyperbolic fluff has been written about A Day In The Life, comparing it to T.S Eliot‘s The Wasteland and Picasso‘s Guernica.
Even better, though, the version of A Day In The Life lyrics up for auction don’t include that rubbish plinky plonky bit that Paul McCartney bunged in the middle of song.
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[story by Stuart Heritage]