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Sun 28 December 2025 16:51, UK
The final days of The Beatles weren’t exactly the happiest time to be a band member.
As the business dealings with their label Apple Corps began to dissolve, the Fab Four had to deal with various business meetings in between trying to write the songs for what would become their true swansong album, Abbey Road. Although most artists would want to crack under the pressure, George Harrison walked away with one of the best songs he would ever write for the group.
After playing hooky from one of the business meetings, Harrison ventured out to his buddy Eric Clapton’s house, where he started playing acoustic guitar in his garden as the sun rose. Strumming away, Harrison hit upon the melody for ‘Here Comes the Sun’, a beautiful track about the wonders of the sun finally rising.
Arguably the most famous of George Harrison’s compositions, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ is one of the most beautiful songs The Beatles ever produced. Recorded as part of Abbey Road, the song is a transcendent moment for anyone who hears those first iconic notes.
The track was written alongside Eric Clapton during a difficult moment for Harrison: “‘Here Comes the Sun’ was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that.’ Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it.
Ringo Starr and George Harrison back in the early days. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
“So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house,” he continued. “The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes the Sun’.”
Not bad for a casual jaunt around the garden, to come up with one of the most widely adored songs of all time. Although most of the album was dominated by songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ would become one of the most celebrated tracks the band ever made, with Harrison also contributing his ultimate love song, ‘Something’. Despite the album version sounding sublime, Ringo Starr didn’t necessarily have the best time trying to get the song down onto the tape.
Years after the recording, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick recalled the frustration Starr had trying to grab onto the timing of the track, telling MusicRadar, “Ringo’s tom fills really make the song, but funnily enough, he hated doing them because he could never remember what he did one take to the next.” Relying on his natural sense of timing, Starr couldn’t wrap his head around the drastic time changes after the chorus.
Starr further explained his misunderstanding of the timing in the Harrison documentary Living in the Material World, telling Martin Scorsese: “George had been to India again. And he said, ‘I’ve got this song. It’s in 7 ½ time’. I mean, he may as well have talked to me in Arabic. I can’t think of counting to seven for the beat. That’s just not my brain. So I had to find some way that I played it in a way every time so it came off on the right time.”
The usage of different odd time signatures most likely came from Harrison’s experiences working with Indian musicians. After being immersed in the music of people like Ravi Shankar, Harrison had inherited the region’s different melodic and rhythmic vocabulary, which often meant dealing with songs that aren’t necessarily in 4/4 timing for every beat.
Harrison’s masterpiece wasn’t the only song giving Starr trouble during the sessions. For most of the rest of the band, McCartney’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ became a chore to sift through, with some of the most elementary-sounding verses behind a fairly macabre story about a hammer-wielding killer.
Even after the hard work that went into the final record, Starr stood by the album as a whole, attributing the final medley of songs towards the end of the album as one of the best pieces that the group had ever put together. For as much stress as The Beatles were under during this phase of their career, Harrison was level-headed enough to make one last masterpiece with the group.
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