Paul Howard visits the ancestral Wicklow home of Tara Browne to uncover the tragic story of an Irish dandy in swinging sixties London

ON a weekday afternoon in late autumn, the hills around Wicklow have a bleak, otherworldly feel to them. In the grounds of Luggala, the Guinness family's fairytale Gothic mansion, flocks of deer flounce in the russet-streaked fields, while the gentle tide of Lough Tay quietly snakelicks the private little beach. Other than that, the soundlessness is almost palpable.

It's as if the world is in suspension.

It's here that Tara Browne was laid to rest, under a simple slab that carries his name, the family crest and the two dates that bear out the tragedy of a life cut short. Born in 1945. Died in 1966.

Browne . . . a man of independent means, according to his death certificate, and heir to a million-pound fortune . . . was one of the Beautiful People who was drawn to the bright lights and endless possibilities of London just as the '60s were starting to swing.

His privileged background and easy charm earned him an access-all-areas view of the decade that changed the world. With his fair-haired mop-top and halogen-warm smile, he crossed trajectories with most of the artists who gave voice to the era, during his own breakneck journey through life.

He was a friend of the Rolling Stones, but especially Brian Jones. He accompanied Paul McCartney on his first LSD trip and sat O Revolver. He drank with Brendan Behan when he was in London, and, when he was in Paris, was part of the same social circle as Samuel Beckett, Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau.

By most accounts, he lived his life like a man who knew he hadn't much time. He married young . . . he had two sons . . . and separated young. And then he died young too.

On 18 December, 1966 . . . 40 years ago tomorrow . . . he crashed his Lotus Elan into the back of a parked van in Earls Court in London, an accident that inspired one of the Beatles' greatest songs.

A month later, John Lennon, who knew him socially, was sitting at his upright piano, with the Daily Mail propped up in front of him, seeking inspiration, as he often did, from the headlines of the day. The News In Brief column contained a report on the inquest into the death of the young socialite, above an item about how Blackburn had become the pothole capital of Britain.

Lennon wrote the first line of 'A Day In The Life' . . . "I read the news today, oh, boy, about a lucky man who made the grade" . . . the song that became the haunting denouement to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Singing in a strangely disembodied voice, Lennon places himself at the scene of the accident, as part of a crowd, gawping at the man who "blew his mind out in a car" and wondering about his celebrity.

The song is, in part, a commentary on how the media world distorts reality, trivialising death . . . the opening verse has Lennon laughing at the photograph of Browne's mangled white sports car . . . while celebrating trivia, such as the fact that there was one-sixteenth of a pothole for every person living in Blackburn.

"I can't remember how I felt the first time I heard the song, " says Garech Browne, Tara's older brother, who founded the Chieftains and is the driving force behind Claddagh Records, the traditional Irish music label. "Curious, I would say. I never met John Lennon, so the pity is I never got to talk to him about it. But I liked the song.

I still like it."

Garech is sitting in a large drawing room in Luggala, staring into the guttering flames of a big fire. It was here, in these very rooms, in the final months of his life, that Tara celebrated his 21st birthday with a party that had a guest list like that of a royal command performance. Mick Jagger was here.

So was John Paul Getty Junior. The band for the evening were the Lovin' Spoonful, who had top 10 UK hits that summer with 'Daydream' and 'Summer In The City'.

A couple of years ago, Garech received a call from Marianne Faithfull, who was writing her autobiography and wanted to mention that famous party. The problem was she couldn't recall a thing about it. As the cliche says, if you can remember the '60sf "As a matter of fact, I don't think she was here, " he says. "She was here later on, when she was with Mick and there's a wonderful photograph of them together, at the top of the hill up there. But that's the thing about looking back . . . you wonder sometimes do you really remember things or do you just think they happened because somebody told you they did?"

So it was with his younger brother's life.

In many ways Lennon's fictionalised account of the accident became bigger than the tragedy of his death and the facts of his life have become obscured by the accretion of myth.

His interests, though, were "all the things you already know about", Garech says with a roguish smile. "Food, drink, sex, clothes, speed. Yes, he loved motor racing. In fact he won a big race here in Ireland before he died . . . I think somewhere up around Drogheda . . . which people still talk to me about to this day."

Tara and Garech were the sons of Dominick Browne, a hereditary peer who sat in the House of Lords for a record 72 years until his eviction under the British government's reforms of 1999, and Oonagh Guinness, daughter of the brewer Edward Cecil Guinness. The couple divorced in 1950 when Garech was 11 and Tara five (a third son died in infancy) and the boys spent their years flitting between homes in Wicklow, London and Paris, where their mother went to live.

One of Garech's abiding memories of Tara is of him as a young boy running away from a boarding school in Dublin. "I always thought boarding schools were frightful institutions and I think Tara shared that view . . . if we were meant to be looked after like sheep, we'd have been born sheep. So he ran away and the gardai eventually picked him up in Bray."

Tara's old bedroom at Luggala is a shrine to his memory, right down to the flowered wallpaper, which is vintage '60s. On the wall above a small fireplace, there's a portrait of him at 14, with the generous smile that was his trademark. Beside that, there's a photograph of him sitting beside Queen Elizebath, looking as comfortable as you might sitting next to your grandmother.

They moved in distinguished circles.

Garech has happy memories of what he calls "our Paris life", when they were on first-name terms with Beckett, Cocteau and Dali.

"There was a little place opposite where my mother lived that sold the most wonderful caviar, " he remembers. "We didn't always have money but occasionally we'd save up and then splurge. We'd sit outside, eating it."

Six years was a big age differential but the brothers found common ground in their love of, not only finest sturgeon roe, but music.

"We enjoyed all the theatre operas and one of the great joys we shared was buying recordings of Baroque music, early Vivaldi, etcetera. There was a shop in Venice where we used to go and, as a matter of fact, the proprietor took what is my favourite photograph of Tara, wearing a gondolier shirt."

Several accounts of Tara's life have him attending Eton and, later, Oxford, but he attended neither. He was part of a different aristocracy . . . the counter-culture that built up around the art and music scene in a city in the throes of massive social and cultural change.

Garech can't recall how his brother got friendly with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It might have been through his two businesses, his Lotus dealership or his King's Road clothes shop, Dandy Fashions, though it's more likely their paths first crossed in the Bag O'Nails, the trendy Soho nightclub where they occasionally hung out.

Garech is loath to include drugs in his brother's interests. "I'd seen him smoke marijuana mixed with brandy in a hubblebubble, which he kindly offered to me. I could just about smoke it but my problem was I couldn't inhale. So I didn't enjoy the '60s in the same way as others did. But I wouldn't have said that Tara had a drug life as such."

There's no doubt that Tara used them, though. Paul McCartney, in his authorised biography, Many Years From Now, recalled that it was in his Belgravia mews home that he first took LSD, at his friend's suggestion.

Tara was also a central figure in one of the most bizarre episodes in the story of the Beatles. On St Stephen's Day, 1965, he was celebrating Christmas in McCartney's father's house in Liverpool, when McCartney suggested they ride to his aunt's house on a couple of mopeds they'd rented.

According to McCartney, the pair were riding along, marvelling at the size of the moon . . . they'd smoked marijuana, according to several accounts . . . when McCartney crashed, chipping his tooth and cutting his lip. It was this accident that gave rise to the Paul Is Dead conspiracy theory that spread like a contagion in the late 1960s, with fans claiming to find clues as to McCartney's demise in subsequent Beatles album covers and lyrics.

One crackpot theory suggested that McCartney had been buried in secret and his features transposed onto a body double . . .

Tara Browne.

But by that time Browne had himself been killed in a real road accident. Suki Potier, his girlfriend, who was travelling in the passenger seat, escaped with bruises and shock.

"He was coming to Ireland that day, " Garech remembers. "He was coming for lunch. His children [Dorian and Julian] were here at Luggala with my mother. I was in Dublin and I was going to drive down to meet him. Instead, I had to phone my father at seven o'clock in the morning to tell him his son was dead."

The news devastated his father, who had already lost both his mother and father in a car crash.

It was not only Lennon who was moved to verse by the tragedy. Sean O'Riada, the Irish composer and bandleader, wrote a song called 'In Memorium Tara Browne', while the Pretty Things . . . guitarist Dick Taylor lived in Redcliffe Gardens, just yards from where the crash took place . . . wrote 'Death of a Socialite', which contained the line, "People, they see you and love you without knowing what your name is. It might be one day or two days but never for alwaysf" His death was also one of the primers for an explosive year that almost blew the Stones apart. Brian Jones was already deep in a sinkhole of depression and self-doubt when he heard about his friend's death. The following summer, to escape a number of scandals that had strafed the band, including a drug bust, the Stones headed for Morocco, where Keith Richards famously 'stole' his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg.

"They took my music, they took my band, now they even took my love, " said Jones, who was already pirouetting towards his own death in 1969.

"Whatever was going on in his life, he kept in touch with my mother right until the end, " Garech says.

As a further sad postscript to the story, in 1976, Richards and Pallenberg had a son, whom they named Tara, in memory of their late friend, but who . . . as if determined by some terrible karma . . . died from health complications shortly after his birth.

Looking back across the span of those 40 years, the biggest tragedy for Garech is that he lost his brother at a time when the age difference between them was beginning to matter less and less.

"We did have a lot in common and I suspect that would have increased as we got older. As the older brother, I was very protective of him. But in a strange way, later on, he was very protective of me too. I remember him taking me around the bits of London that I didn't know.

"So that's what's most upsetting to me. I had one brother who I thought I could always talk to, who would be my relative and pal for life."