I just had to write a blog post about this, because I think it’s so cool. I was listening to Chris Hardwick’s podcast ID10T recently and his guest was Peter Serafinowicz. I tend to only listen to episodes with guests that I’m interested in, but I’ve been a fan of Peter’s work for many years so I definitely wanted to check this episode out.

Peter is an extremely talented screen actor, comedy actor, voice actor and impressionist who has starred in movies such as Shaun of the Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy and obviously as the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. He’s also currently starring as The Tick. But I think I had forgotten about his musical abilities.

Towards the end of the podcast episode he happened to mention a little project he had worked on, just for fun, where he had revisited the famous Beatles song ‘A Day In The Life’. He said he had always enjoyed the bit that Paul McCartney sings at around 2:15 in the song, and he imagined what had happened in the rest of the day of that character. For many, this would just be an amusing little daydream or ‘what if’, but Peter actually managed to make it happen. He recreated that section of the song himself, wrote new lines and recorded it. To help him do this he managed to get instrumental sound files from The Beatles version of the game Rock Band, and then he recorded his vocals on top. He was just curious as to what this character in the song got up to, and so he wrote it, and his new version lasts about 13 minutes! I just love that level of commitment, imagination and desire to flesh out a part of a little micro universe.

At first I didn’t think it was him singing. The voice sounds so good and so similar to Paul in its style. But I tweeted Peter and he confirmed that the vocals are all him. Just listen to the original and then listen to some of the intonations of Peter’s version. It’s brilliant how accurate he is with the vocal style.

The track is called ‘A Full Day In The Life’ and it’s fantastic. I could listen to it all day. And when I do listen to it I’m humming it all day. The writing is hilarious too and I love the rhyming patter, which is taken from the original song. I just love audio mashups or rehashes like this. Last year I did the three-way mix of the classic song ‘Thunder In Your Heart’ from the movie Rad, and I love doing little audio mixes like that, but this is obviously on a whole other level, particularly as it includes great writing and also singing that he actually recorded himself. Here are some ways you can enjoy it…

A Full Day In The Life
ID10T podcast episode – It appears right at the very end of this episode at about 01:01:07, but also check out the section of the podcast at 54:10 when Peter mentions it.

Peter tweeted the file here – The Soundcloud file has now been removed unfortunately but if you Google ‘A Full Day In The Life’ you can see a Reddit link to another file that has been uploaded, about two entries down. But I’m not going to link directly to it, just in case I’m not meant to.

Now go and enjoy browsing through Peter’s hilarious back catalogue of video sketches and mashups on both of his YouTube channels.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PeterSerafinowicz/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi38HMIvRpGgMJ0Tlm1WYdw

And check out the Peter Serafinowicz website too.