(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 29 January 2026 22:19, UK
By the time The Beatles broke up, no one would have been happier than George Harrison.
It did sting knowing that the band of brothers was going to be going their separate ways and working on their own music, but having been kept down for so long, Harrison finally wanted the chance to have his voice be heard on All Things Must Pass. ‘The Quiet One’ had been itching to break his silence for so long, but he knew that once the fallout of everything, he was never going to get the same bug to return to being Fab for much longer.
Then again, Harrison wasn’t the kind of person who hit the ground running at the same time that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were composing their first tunes. He certainly had a handle on what being a songwriter meant when he started to work up ‘Don’t Bother Me’ for the band’s second record, but since his bandmates already had hundreds of songs under their belt, he clearly had his work cut out for him before he landed on a great song.
But for a while, Harrison’s songs would always be considered the undiscovered gems on many of the mid-period Beatles records. ‘I Need You’ is still one of the finest ballads of that period of their career, and for an album that went in as many directions as Rubber Soul did, ‘If I Needed Someone’ is one of the more perfect jangle pop songs to come out of the post-Byrds era of rock and roll.
Revolver might have been the first time when Harrison’s songs started to match his bandmates, but it was always going to be an uphill battle to get any of them on a record. Not everyone was as interested in using Indian textures as he was, and even when working on The White Album, it took bringing in Eric Clapton for everyone to be on their best behaviour when working on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
If there was one person who kept him at bay for so long, though, it was McCartney. The bassist may not have been outwardly hostile towards Harrison in any capacity, but the passive-aggressive nature in the studio wasn’t going to be ignored, either. He tried as hard as he could to be the boss of certain sessions, so if he was playing his own lead guitar on his songs and telling Harrison what to play, it’s not like the guitarist was going to be leaving on the best of terms with his old friend.
He was more than happy to contribute to Ringo Starr’s records and even play a bit of guitar on Lennon’s Imagine album, but after being able to kiss and make up with his old mate, Harrison thought that working with Macca again was out of the question, saying, “Well, now we don’t have any problems whatsoever as far as being people is concerned, and it’s quite nice to see him. But I don’t know about being in a band with him, how that would work out. It’s like, we all have our own tunes to do. And my problem was that it would always be very difficult to get in on the act.”
They could still put on a happy face when making The Beatles Anthology, but there might have been a bit of a power move to get someone like Jeff Lynne in the studio to produce the two new songs they were working on. Lynne had been Harrison’s longtime friend for years, so having him be able to break up some of the tension whenever McCartney became too pushy would have been a lot easier than having George Martin looking over their shoulders.
McCartney was never out to make Harrison look inferior by any stretch, but when you have someone that is that particular on how they want their songs to go, it’s not like they’re going to make for the best collaborator 100% of the time. Macca was bound to have many more successful collaborations later down the line, but let’s just say he probably wasn’t Wilbury material.
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