GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD
BY OLIVIA HARRISON
ABRAMS
On the shelf beneath the desk on which I’m writing are 54 Beatles books. In my study are a further 43 coffee-table books, and on my coffee table itself is a limited edition of Paul McCartney photographs that I bought in Japan.
I collect Beatles books. I’m not a completist, but a year doesn’t go by without the publication of one that’s worth buying. Strangely, only three of my books are devoted to George Harrison, perhaps the most enigmatic of the Fab Four. Having been shell-shocked by fame, he tried to conduct post-Beatles life on his own terms instead of the media’s. This often meant simply disappearing.
This lavishly illustrated book is published to coincide with Martin Scorsese’s documentary of the same name (he wrote the foreword) and has been carefully compiled by Harrison’s widow, Olivia. I can’t see how any serious Beatles fan could be disappointed.
On an initial skim-through, I thought it looked skimpy, with many extraordinary unseen photographs and memor-abilia, but too little text. Some of it seemed so anodyne I wondered why the editing hadn’t been more stringent.
But then I sat in bed one night poring over the pages, and a complex portrait began to emerge. No, there is little here about his artistic decline (not many of his records after the mid-Seventies warrant much attention), little about his apparent infidelities, or his fractious relationship with the other Beatles before or after the split.
What you do get is an affectionate, occasionally fascinating portrait of a man for whom life was a series of happy accidents followed by a 30-year search for some kind of enlightenment. Sure, he had the time and money to indulge this quest, but you always got the sense Ð underscored by this book - that he wasn’t entirely happy with what he found.
The day I received the book, I took my youngest daughter to the Beatles shop in Baker Street, London, where they sell T-shirts, key rings, books, posters, cups and anything else with a flat surface that can be covered with a picture of the band. She was doing a project on The Beatles at school. Having already borrowed my Beatles wig (still in its wrapper), plus various books and records, she was keen to see more. As soon as we entered the shop - which was surrounded by about 60 Japanese tourists - I saw that she had completely underestimated the level of the band’s popularity.
These young men once ruled the world. As Eric Clapton says in the book: “In the early days, what was good about being George’s friend was that it was kind of like basking in the sunshine of this immense creativity. Whenever we were together in public, for all the amount of weight that I thought I carried, I would turn into nobody. If we were going into a restaurant or a club, the way people would behave around The Beatles’ aura was beyond belief.”
That fame allowed Harrison to walk into any world he chose, be it film-making (funding Monty Python’s Life Of Brian when EMI pulled out after finally reading the script), motor racing (he was a Formula 1 obsessive), and, obviously, music, finding solace with fellow travellers such as Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan.
Olivia Harrison shows her husband as a man emancipated by fame and riches, but whose life was largely spent trying to contextualise it. Her book does not challenge the idea of Harrison as a benign spirit, and it certainly isn’t the warts-and-all biography Harrison warrants (and which I hope someone like Philip Norman is working on), yet it goes some way to showing how he lived his life, and how his battle with the extremes of that life drove him.
“I don’t go discothequeing and things like that where people hang out with their cameras,” Harrison said. “So they presumed I was Howard Hughes. But I wasn’t like that at all. I go out a lot of the time, see friends, have dinner, go to parties. I’m even more normal than, you know, normal people.”
There are those who like to say that Harrison was a deeply troubled soul, and at times I’m sure he was. This book goes some way to suggesting that there was a lot more light in his life than we may have thought.
Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ - Daily Mail