(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 22 January 2026 19:00, UK
You hear a lot of women talking about a mother’s instinct, which controls their gut. Well, George Harrison didn’t know anything about that, but he did feel a guitarist’s instinct deep in his bones.
After all, the guitar was far more than just a mere instrument to him, used to strum gentle melodies and melt away into the background of a track. Under Harrison’s hand, he guided the guitar to the forceful front and centre of the musical world, both with The Beatles and in his own fair right.
It was ironic, in this sense, that he garnered a reputation for being quiet, given that the more you look back on things, you realise his impact was anything but. Yet for this very reason, it was clear that Harrison gained quite a few friends along the way, who all could bond over that shared beauty of six strings and wood. One of them just so happened to be Keith Richards.
Before we go any further, let’s just get one thing straight: Harrison thought Richards was a great guitarist. One of the very best, in fact. But in terms of comparing him to those who were classic, virtuosos, geniuses of the craft… well, he thought there was more to be desired, to put it in the kindest possible way.
“I’m not playing it down. I’m just not playing it up! I think Keith [Richards] is one of the best rock ’n’ roll rhythm guitar players. I don’t think he’s very good at lead,” Harrison once admitted in a 1990 interview, almost as if you could see the handcuffs already tightening around his wrists. It was going to be difficult for him to muscle out of this one.
“But this is what I feel about myself too,” he tried to wager. “What we do is make records, and the records have some good guitar parts on them. I like Keith enormously, I think he’s great, but he’s not Albert or BB King.” The backhanded shots are flying everywhere here, aren’t they? But essentially, there was one subtle difference that Harrison was trying to explain, although it would only be understood by those with that guttural instinct.
If you took someone like BB King, for example, it was plain to see that the guitar playing was the absolute razor-sharp focus of every record he made, and there was no room for error: every note was cut with precision, and the songs had to make their way to the stage in exactly the same condition as they sounded in the recording booth.
By comparison, it was also extremely clear that, as much as their guitarists fizzed with talent, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles were far more interested in zooming out and capturing the larger picture of rock and roll, rather than its most intricate details, and teturning to his assessment of Richards, “the main thing about him is that he has the confidence, so even if it’s not perfect, he doesn’t care.”
Although he was pointing the focus to Richards, it was clear that Harrison included himself in that analogy, too, and sure, it might have been a bit of a heavy-handed way of pinning everything on his friend, but there was actually a shred of humility in what he was saying, believe it or not, at the end of the day, both of them knew their place, and there were just certain people they would never catch up to.
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