George Harrison died on 29 November, 2001 after a four-year battle with cancer, aged 58. The 9/11 atrocities were only two months earlier but despite the continuous grim developments from the still-smouldering wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center and President George W Bush’s retaliatory “war on terror”, his passing leapt to the top of television news and into banner headlines.
Even at such a time, there were no complaints of trivialisation; the Beatles had long ago ceased to be just a pop group and become something like a worldwide religion. And, sombre though the TV or radio coverage was, it included generous helpings of music that, 30 years after their breakup, still had undiminished power to charm and comfort. Inevitably, it awoke memories of John Lennon’s murder in 1980 – but the two tragedies differed in more than their circumstances. That horrifically sudden obliteration of John seemed to have half the human race in tears at what felt like the loss of a wayward but still cherished old friend.
With George, struck down by a quieter killer, millions could mourn the musician, but there was much less to go on in mourning the man. For no more private person could ever have trodden a stage more mercilessly public. In later years, he’d taken to calling himself “the economy-class Beatle”, not quite joking about his subordinate status from the day he joined John and Paul McCartney in the Quarrymen skiffle group. Yet by dogged persistence, he made it into the first-class cabin with songs equalling the best if never the vast quantity of Lennon and McCartney’s: While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun, My Sweet Lord and his masterpiece, Something.
As a guitarist, he indisputably belonged in the 60s pantheon of six-string superheroes alongside Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, while never rating himself more than “an OK player”. Alone in that company, he had a serious turn of mind; the Beatles, then commercial pop as a whole, radically changed direction after his discovery of the sitar and espousal of Indian religion and philosophy. For a few twanging months, any band with hope of chart success had better throw in a mini-raga.
Amid the mayhem of Beatlemania, no one would have taken him for an underdog. In live shows, he was adored almost as frantically as Paul with his fine-boned face, beetling brows and hair so thick and pliant that – as a Liverpool schoolfriend enviously said – it was “like a fuckin’ te-erban”. But the fine-boned face could be noticeably economical with the carefree grin his fans expected at all times; indeed, it first planted the amazing thought that being a Beatle might not be undiluted heaven.
This was the endlessly self-contradictory “quiet one”, actually as verbally quick on the draw as John at press conferences; who accepted the workhorse-role of lead guitarist, poring dutifully over his fretboard while John and Paul competed for the spotlight, yet offstage was the most touchy and temperamental of the four; who railed against “the material world”, yet wrote the first pop song complaining about income tax; who spent years lovingly restoring Friar Park, his 30-room Gothic mansion, yet mortgaged it to finance his friends the Monty Python team’s Life of Brian film; who, contrarily, became more uptight and moody after learning to meditate; who could touch both the height of nobility with his historic charity Concert for Bangladesh and the nadir of sleaze in his casual seduction of Ringo’s first wife, Maureen.
His obituaries agreed his finest post-Beatles achievement to have been All Things Must Pass, the 1970 triple album largely consisting of songs that John and Paul had rejected for the band or that George hadn’t submitted, anticipating their indifference. Its defining track, My Sweet Lord, was an anthem for any creed a year before John’s Imagine, with a slide guitar motif like a tremulous human voice that would become a signature as personal and inimitable as Jerry Lee Lewis’s slashing piano arpeggios or Stevie Wonder’s harmonica. It far outsold Lennon’s and McCartney’s respective solo album debuts and has continued to do so ever since: an unextinguishable last laugh.
His second wife, Olivia – an inconspicuous presence until the night in 1999 when she saved him from becoming the second Beatle to be murdered – issued a statement on behalf of herself and their son, Dhani, urging his fans to try not to grieve too much. He’d have wanted them to be as positive as he was throughout his dreadful illness, Olivia said, for the Hindu precepts he lived by had banished all fear of death. “He gave his life to God a long time ago. George used to say you can’t just discover God when you’re dying… you have to practise. He went with what was happening to him.”
Still, across every culture and in every language, the same chilling thought will have occurred, often to somebody born after – in many cases, decades after – the Beatles broke up: “Only two of them left.”
It has taken me a good few years to get around to writing a biography of George, and some people, I know, will be wishing I hadn’t. For, alas, his obituarists in 2001 included myself. At that point, almost everything I knew about George had gone into my 1981 Beatles biography, Shout!, which ended with the band’s breakup and barely mentioned their respective solo careers. Having to write 3,000-plus words on a deadline left no time for further research or reflection; I therefore judged him solely on his years spent with Ringo in an obvious second division from which he so often signalled impatience and discontent.
My intention was to counteract the gush that other writers and fellow celebrities were pouring into print, often mixed with a measure of amnesia. “He was really just my baby brother,” said Sir Paul McCartney, though even royal brothers could hardly have matched the sniping they did at each other in the post-Beatle years. “His life was magical and we all felt we had shared a little bit of it by knowing him,” said Yoko Ono Lennon, to whom George had once been so horrible that John physically attacked him.
However, I went much too far in the opposite direction, at one point describing him as “a miserable git” and giving great offence to colleagues whose opinions I respected, never mind untold numbers of his distraught fans.
I would need to write the separate biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, then of his best friend, Eric Clapton, to understand the paradox of being George: the constant sidelining and downgrading he had to endure, restricted to only a couple of his own songs per Beatles album, his self-confidence eroded by McCartney especially, all the while outwardly one of the 20th century’s four most blessed beings.
Researching The Reluctant Beatle, I found “the quiet one” had more sides to him than most of his public ever realised; the other Beatles seemed one-dimensional by comparison. There was the philanthropist who donated tens of million to charity, both in cash and song-copyrights, yet received no public honour beyond the MBE doled out to each Beatle in 1965 for shaking their hair and going “Oo!”
There was the perfectionist record producer, the talent-spotter and label boss, the movie magnate who helped bring about the renaissance of British cinema in the 1980s with HandMade Films, the Formula One fan and passionate horticulturist who hoped to be remembered as a gardener rather than as a musician.
On the debit side were the acid tongue and monumental tactlessness that often undermined his bandmates’ perfect pitch, and the sexual buccaneering that coexisted with his mantras and prayer-wheels. During one long-haul flight while he was chanting under his breath, a cabin attendant innocently asked if he was ready for lunch. “Fuck off,” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m meditating?”
The sheer variety of his activities and interests, in fact, had helped keep him in the shadows. For while there were numerous books about specific ones – his guitar-playing, his spiritual quest, his garden – none satisfyingly evaluated nor tried to explain the elusive whole man. It was this that decided me to biographise my third Beatle, albeit resigned in advance to a major handicap.
I’d hoped that my sympathetic treatment of George in the Lennon, McCartney and Clapton books might persuade Olivia Harrison and their son, Dhani, to co-operate in it. However, the sample of my work drawn to her attention – by a previously friendly executive at the Beatles’ Apple company – was that ill-judged 2001 obituary, given seeming eternal life on the internet along with numerous posts from fans virtually endowing me with horns and a tail. Now there clearly was no possibility of access to Olivia or Dhani. “And it’ll probably put the kibosh on your talking to anyone else,” the Apple man said, meaning the word would go out to all those who’d ever been close to George to shun me.
Yet it didn’t happen, even when I subsequently wrote a newspaper piece saying that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s elephantine documentary about the Get Back album, which claimed they had been “warm and jovial” with one another while recording it, was “the Pollyanna view” of the project.
One of George’s closest friends, Sir Michael Palin, took time off from globetrotting to express bemusement over that “quiet one” moniker, “because as far as I remember, he never stopped talking”. His longsuffering PA, Chris O’Dell, recalled how instantly George could switch from Hindu piety to “wanting to drink, take coke and party” and just as instantly back again. His childhood friend and first roadie, Tony Bramwell, recalled going to early Beatles gigs in Liverpool together on the bus driven by George’s dad, Harold.
I was able to draw on past conversations with his two great allies in the Beatles’ highly politicised inner circle, both now deceased: their irreplaceable press officer, Derek Taylor, and their roadie, Neil Aspinall, breaking an otherwise implacable “no comment” rule. Their nonpareil record producer, Sir George Martin, to whom I spoke shortly before his own death, was still remorseful for having been “rather beastly to George” in the studio before realising his true worth. Most important, I had the generous help of his first wife, Pattie Boyd, a woman as free from bitterness as she is full of humour about their years together. Pattie’s account of finding George in flagrante with Ringo’s wife, Maureen (“She’s feeling a bit tired so she’s having a lie-down,” he explained) is a miniature comic masterpiece.
This, my 10th and probably last rock biography, leaves me wondering as never before whether they’ve been any job for a grownup. For popular music has more utter bilge written about it, by men mostly, than any other subject except food. It’s generally viewed as a soft option and a licence for self-indulgence, launching even normally decent writers into flights of prattish nostalgia seldom omitting that barnacled cliche, “the soundtrack of my life”.
But producing a real biography of one of its great names – that is, aimed at a readership beyond the uncritical fan market – is hellishly hard work bordering on masochism. One must walk a fine line between passion and objectivity, rightful praise and laughable hyperbole. One must try to convey what music actually sounds like, which both my favourite writers, EM Forster and F Scott Fitzgerald, failed to do with Beethoven and jazz respectively. One must get in all the dross about sales and chart placings, ever seeking new and interesting ways of saying things like “the album went to No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100”.
Rock biography is a legitimate form of history and its luminaries must be related to contemporaneous events without sounding like a Rock ’n’ Roll Years audio tape I once heard on a BA flight: “It was 1961. In East Berlin they were building a wall – but it didn’t stop Bobby Vee having a hit with Take Good Care of My Baby.”
The usual tone of British rock biography is flippant, in America it is heavy and humourless. Its two most celebrated exponents, Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick, are so alike in this respect that their surnames should be run together in a verb, “to Greilnick”, meaning to turn out immensely long, leaden paragraphs, bulging with show-off facts but lacking any of the vitality of the musicians or music under scrutiny.
Writing about the Beatles brings pressures of its own in a world increasingly crowded with self-appointed experts on the subject. It’s as if they’re all breathing down your neck, poised to gloat over the smallest error.
My previous books have taught me there’s such a thing as biographer’s luck and, latterly, even to trust to it. With George it arrived rather late, but more than atoned for the misfortune of that undead obit.
The ordeal of his last years didn’t stop at his cancer nor his being almost murdered at Friar Park by the crazed midnight intruder fought off by Olivia. He also had to bear the financial burden of HandMade Films, the company he set up in 1978 with his American business manager, Denis O’Brien. Initially a vehicle to produce Life of Brian, HandMade went on to revive the British film industry with a run of quirky, critical successes including The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits, Mona Lisa, A Private Function and Withnail and I.
During the early 1980s, O’Brien’s young in-house accountant, Steve Abbott, discovered that O’Brien had parked George’s money in dodgy offshore bank accounts and companies all over the world in the name of thwarting the hated Taxman, keeping George short of ready cash while himself owning a private island and a yacht. But Abbott left O’Brien’s employ before being able to blow the whistle conclusively on him.
Not until several years later did a second accountant, John Reiss (ironically, also working for O’Brien), pick up the investigation and uncover malpractice on a widescreen scale. Each time HandMade took a bank loan to finance a new production, both the company’s partners were supposed to have guaranteed it in writing. But, unbeknown to George, O’Brien hadn’t co-signed a single guarantee, meaning that productions which had failed at the box office left him alone liable for debts of around $32m. George sued O’Brien in America for mishandling his money and was awarded $11m. When O’Brien declared bankruptcy, George sought to block the declaration, ultimately unsuccessfully. The proceedings lasted years and multiplied his torments at the end of his life.
I was easily able to contact Steve Abbott through a friend in the film business, but Abbott had never met the louder whistleblower, John Reiss, and had no idea where to find him. The morning after our interview, Abbott was having coffee outside a north London cafe when a friend stopped by his table to say hello, accompanied by a man he didn’t know. It was John Reiss.
I could thus tell the full story of perhaps the cruellest fraud ever perpetrated on an unworldly rock star and the litigation against the man George now called “Lying O’Brien”.
That part, at least, may have been a job for a grownup. But please don’t ask when I’m going to move on to Ringo.
The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
