What did John Lennon want to sound 'like the end of the world'?

Many of the best Beatles songs start and/or finish with a bang: the opening chord or A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, for example. The opening of A DAY IN THE LIFE is unusually muted in this respect, perhaps indicating shift into more subtle musical territory.

Where A DAY IN THE LIFE delivers its knockout blow is in its finale. Originally recorded as a modest hummed E Major vocal chord, it evolved into what Jonathan Gould describes as:

"a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all".^[66]

ByTom Swain www.tomswain.com CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11750716

This was achieved using absurdly primitive technology in today's term. Lennon, McCartney, Evans and Martin played the chord on three pianos. Each was then multi-tracked four times.

For the final chord of A DAY IN THE LIFE Lennon had asked George Martin for a 'a sound like the end of the world'.

He came pretty close