(Credits: Far Out / Bradford Timeline)
Mon 20 October 2025 5:00, UK
For all of the praise George Harrison got for his solo career, that was never the plan when he got started.
He liked the idea of playing in a group, and even if he needed to get all of his ideas out once The Beatles split up, there was no sense in him trying to play up his angle as an all-star frontman. He was known as the ‘Quiet One’ for a reason, and that didn’t always lend itself to making the most commercial music in the world every time he walked into the studio.
If anything, getting him to make more “commercial” music was normally the kiss of death whenever a label head asked him to change things up. Somewhere in England is at least impressively bad for giving the world songs like ‘Teardrops’, but when listening to Gone Troppo, it’s clear that he would rather be anywhere else but in the studio. If he was making the tunes terrible on purpose, it’d be a pretty respectable middle finger, but for the fans, it only feels cheap to hear him go through the motions.
Which is strange because Harrison never used to run into that kind of problem. None of his albums in the 1970s necessarily went along the same path that genres like punk or disco were going in by any stretch, but the ones where the songs shined the most was when Harrison seemed to be having a good time playing with his friends like on ‘Blow Away’ or ‘Crackerbox Palace’.
And once he got the Traveling Wilburys together, he finally seemed to rediscover his love for making music again. Everyone was happy to be in each other’s company, and even if not every song was a hit on the charts by any stretch, it was better to have all of them amusing each other than trying to go the way of whatever 1980s corporate rock band that their labels were forcing on everyone.
In fact, Harrison’s lack of giving-a-fuck actually seemed to turn up in the new generation as well. There were still the usual rock and roll bands that followed trends, but Prince was the opposite of the mainstream in many regards. He could make the same kind of album over and over again whenever he wanted, but judging by how many times the tone shifts on Sign o’ the Times, he was following Harrison’s lead of making music for himself.
That’s respectable enough, but Harrison thought that ‘The Purple One’ had become too commercial after a while, saying, “I used real drummers and real pianists on my album cause I’m sick of hearing all that electronic music. Even Prince, whom I like, is beginning to sound like all those TV commercials, because everyone can use those drum machines and boxes of tricks. So now all you hear are the great grooves, but no real songs.’”
But it’s hard to really pin the problem on electronics. Despite The Beatles being lukewarm on stereo when it was first introduced halfway through their career, it’s not like it left a stain on rock and roll or anything. It was simply about pushing the music forward, and were it for those same electronics, perhaps we would have never seen the band bring the Anthology songs to life in the 1990s.
If Harrison wanted to feel something in music, though, it wasn’t going to be from a drum machine or a squelchy synthesiser. Those could add a nice musical colour, but if there wasn’t a song to get out of any of the instruments, what was the point in even adding them on to begin with?
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