(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 16 August 2025 8:00, UK
Some band members aren’t meant to go the distance until the end of time. Everyone loves that ‘band of brothers’ mentality, but the simple truth is that a lot of fans’ perceptions of what their favourite stars are supposed to be like is only a small piece of the musicians’ respective stories. Not everyone is as buddy-buddy behind the scenes, even when it comes to The Beatles.
Yes, the band did a great job at playing up their image as rebellious kids half the time, but when the cameras were turned off, the reality would be a lot better and a lot worse than most people bargained for. John Lennon could get downright nasty about Paul McCartney during the final days of the group, but given how many stories Macca has of their early days, he knows that not everything that his old buddy said was true. But the real problem in the band was never between ‘The Nerk Twins’.
From day one, George Harrison was always being shafted in one way or another by his fellow bandmates. It was easy to blame it on the fact that he was a bit younger than everybody else, but compared to Lennon and McCartney’s knack for writing great songs, nothing came easy for Harrison, and that was often reflected in the studio as well. Whereas the two other frontmen were joined at the hip, Harrison always felt like the little brother who was tagging along for the ride half the time.
That’s not that far from reality, either. When Lennon was asked to help Harrison work out different parts of ‘Taxman’, he did so begrudgingly, but even he could tell that his younger bandmate had the potential to make something great. But for McCartney, things could get downright hostile behind the scenes as well.
If you look back at the Get Back documentary, most of the problems that Harrison had at the time were directed back to McCartney, including the now-infamous scene where he starts a brief argument with the bassist before the audio plays of him leaving the group for a few days. Any fan could look at that and chalk it up to Harrison being the diva, but it wasn’t that far off from what Macca was actually doing to him.
McCartney did love what his bandmate could do half the time, but looking through their run of classics, you can see the bassist start to talk down to Harrison a little too much. It was bad enough that he forced him to scale back his guitar solos during the final vamp at the end of ‘Hey Jude’, but even when working on Abbey Road, Harrison gave specific instructions to keep his bass part simple for the song ‘Something’, which McCartney elected to completely ignore.
Granted, that one did result in one of the tastiest bass grooves that McCartney ever did, but it didn’t stop the fact that Harrison felt he was shouting into the void. Everyone could shut up when he had a good song that he brought to the table, but by the time that everyone parted ways, he seemed much happier not having to worry about McCartney looking over his shoulder and wondering how he could shoehorn one of his ideas into Harrison’s tunes.
Even as late as The Beatles Anthology, some of that iciness was still there between Harrison and McCartney, albeit this time it was only a few jabs here and there. By that point, they had dropped any of that animosity towards each other, and when Harrison’s astral body left his Earthly one in 2001, McCartney remembered them officially becoming friends again and finally burying the hatchet with each other.
It was always nice to see the band on good terms with each other, but even if Harrison and McCartney weren’t fighting all the time, theirs seemed to be the one relationship that never fully recovered. They would lend a hand to each other’s records now and again, but the lovable musical brothers that had charmed everyone in A Hard Day’s Night simply didn’t exist by the start of the 1970s.
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