Credit: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 29 April 2026 16:30, UK
It tends to get a little bit complicated when talking about the relationship between George Harrison and Paul McCartney.
Both of them were boyhood friends who happened to be half of one of the biggest bands in the world, but even up until Harrison passed away, there was a slight coldness that came out every single time they tried to get on the same page. The lasting effects of their breakup had really done a number on both of them, but McCartney didn’t understand the depth that his old friend had in some respects until it was too late.
But by the time The Beatles were reuniting in the 1990s, no one needed to call each other’s legacies into question by any stretch. All of them had carved out the greatest examples of how one manages a solo career, and had one of them not been included in their reunion on ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, it would never have had the same magic as they did when those harmonies appeared all over again.
If you want to know about the real frostiness, you have to look at where both Harrison and McCartney started. Macca may have been the one to suggest that Harrison join the band, but even up until the end of their tenure together, he was still treating Harrison like the younger brother who had to be ostracised. It could have been completely unintentional, but all you need to do is see the footage in Get Back to realise that Harrison is being sidelined whenever McCartney and John Lennon start playing together.
It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s fault that they couldn’t communicate properly, but the real problem came when Harrison put out All Things Must Pass. No one could have realised that he had this many classics in storage for all of those years, and while McCartney was able to pop back into the studio with his old friend when working on songs like ‘All Those Years Ago’ as a tribute to Lennon, he did get a bit of a reality check when he showed up at the Concert for George after Harrison’s death.
The night featured McCartney paying tribute with a tender tribute to Harrison with ‘Something’, but everyone seemed to freeze when he didn’t know the song ‘All Things Must Pass’, with Eric Clapton recalling, “Paul had to admit that he didn’t know ‘All Things Must Pass’, and that was an awful thing to confront. It was huge humble-pie stuff for Paul to be among these people, who he may have thought had a better relationship with George than he did. But I believe Paul missed George as much as — if not more than — anybody.”
Given that Harrison had performed the song during the Get Back sessions, though, it’s shocking to think that McCartney wouldn’t have remembered. Granted, time plays funny tricks on everyone’s memory, but getting to hear the beauty of the song in his rendition sounds like it’s coming from someone who finally understands all the potential that he had ignored for so many years.
But even if McCartney knew what Harrison was capable of, maybe the title track of his debut LP was almost too perfect for the band’s breakup. None of them wanted to believe that it was the end of the road for all of them, but Harrison was the one facing down the whole thing with bravery and a willingness to be honest with his audience that most people would have been too afraid to confront at the time.
McCartney might still break out the ukulele every now and again and do his tribute to Harrison when he performs live, but ‘All Things Must Pass’ is a much better indication of what his old friend was all about as a songwriter. He gave The Beatles more than his fair share of delightful love songs, but there was a wise sage underneath that moptop that wanted to share his philosophies with the world.
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