Credit: Far Out / Bradford Timeline
Sun 10 May 2026 18:00, UK
Of all The Beatles, George Harrison was the last person who seemed to care about whether he was becoming one of the biggest stars in the world.
Everyone of the Fab Four achieved success much greater than anything they had ever dreamed of, but by the time that they reached the late 1960s, Harrison was grateful enough to realise that achieving all of the material goals wasn’t going to make him happy in the long run. He wanted the chance to find some spiritual peace, but he did at least have the foresight to realise that he could do better than what was on the radio.
While I love all of The Beatles equally, there’s no doubt that Harrison could be more than a little bit of a curmudgeon whenever talking about other forms of music. No one wanted to hear him complain about how all music sucks these days like your average grandpa, but Harrison wasn’t going to be dishonest to his fans. He understood that he wasn’t going to like everything, and if nothing else, that gave him a sense of drive to make the kind of tunes that would blow away any other rock and roll star.
That being said, he knew his limits. He wasn’t planning to reach the same heights that The Beatles did during his solo career, and a lot of the best music that he made usually came from when he was forgetting about the typical rock and roll standards. He didn’t have to be strictly rock and roll to be good, but he knew that the old guard of rock and roll needed a good kick in the ass when he saw Cliff Richard.
Richard was already one of the biggest names in England when The Beatles were first storming the charts, but Harrison didn’t see the same kind of appeal in him like everyone else did. Sure, he may have kicked down the door for rock and rollers that could come from the other side of the pond, but there was no point in people going nuts over him if all he had to offer was lacklustre songs.
Harrison figured that The Beatles didn’t have the best shot at the big time growing up in Liverpool, but he knew that it was better than whatever Richard was cooking up, saying, “I remember being a kid of about twelve, dreaming of big motorboats and tropical islands and things which had nothing to do with Liverpool, which was dark and cold. I remember going to see Cliff Richard and thinking, f*** it — I could do better than that.”
The Shadows definitely had a lot more going for them than Richard, but when looking through a lot of his solo work, it’s like night and day comparing their work to Lennon and McCartney’s songs. Richard was still someone that was adopting the same showbiz model as every other rock and roll star, but you could feel that the Fab genuinely wanted to make music that would make people feel good.
Further reading: From The Vault
And once Harrison was able to retire from music, he seemed to have much less tolerance for the showbiz types whenever he found himself back in the spotlight. He was going to call things as he saw them, and even when he was receiving massive awards, Harrison’s go-to response when his wife, Olivia, told him to accept the awards was usually “Tell them to find some other monkey.”
Because that’s what Harrison saw the music business as after one too many times at the top. He knew that the music business was full of people like Richard, and he would rather spend his time trying to communicate with God than sit through whatever drivel that the next flavour of the month had been cooking up.
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