Credit: Far Out / Bradford Timeline
Sun 9 August 2026 17:30, UK
There are many reasons why a tour may be embarked on, be it a need to stuff the wallet with extra cash, a chance to test new material, or simply to keep the live band sharp and performing well. In George Harrison’s case, it was his need to conquer the tab.
“Curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get!” John Lennon bemoaned on ‘I’m So Tired’. Harrison knew all too well the effects of the 16th-century explorer’s import of tobacco, having become a regular smoker as early as 12 years old. He wouldn’t stop for decades, only attempting a partial break from cigarettes and rollies as late as the 1980s.
Famously, smoking can often rear its head through the need for idle hands to simply pass the time in life’s downtime, so hitting the road is as good a distraction as any. As fans know, Harrison was never particularly enamoured with the whole touring gig. He’d more than earned his live stripes back in The Beatles, playing a punishing club circuit back in the band’s Hamburg and Cavern infancy, then whisked around the world’s arenas and stadiums during Beatlemania’s pop frenzy.
It was Harrison who pushed the hardest for The Beatles to carry on as a purely studio project once they played their final commercial gig in August 1966. From then on, Harrison only played a smattering of shows, famously performing on the Apple HQ rooftop in London as The Beatles neared their end, then as a solo artist organising the Concert for Bangladesh and playing 45 dates in North America for the Dark Horse Tour with Ravi Shankar in 1974.
But otherwise, fans had to wait years to ever see Harrison on stage, as late as 1991 when committing to a 12-date tour in Japan with old pal and second husband to his former wife, Eric Clapton.
“I had to get myself out of a rut,” Harrison confessed to CNN’s Showbiz Today at the time. ”I was just smoking, I’ve been smoking all my life…Eric suggested it ‘cause he wasn’t working this year and think he liked the idea of doing something because he’d committed himself to a year off. I think, especially after the accident that happened earlier in the year, that he really wanted to work, get his mind into some work, and I needed something just to get myself out of a rut…”
The “accident” was the tragic death of Clapton’s four-year-old son, Conor, who fell from a 53rd-floor window in New York. Eager to keep himself busy through his grief, Clapton offered a weary Harrison the full backing of his well-rehearsed band to take the pressure off.
Further reading: From The Vault
Combined with the need to plug a major financial hole after his HandMade Films venture collapsed, as well as Japan’s compact size for easy travel, Harrison saw the Japan gigs as both a chance to kick the ciggies into touch plus dip his toe in the live show gig after nearly 20 years away.
It didn’t quite work, taking a tumorous lump in the neck in 1997 to finally quit the habit for good. Four years later, Harrison would pass away from lung cancer after his years of smoking caught up with him. Speaking at his funeral in California’s Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, Monty Python member Eric Idle audaciously quipped to the mourners, “I’d like to thank Marlboro, without whom you wouldn’t be here this morning.”
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