(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 24 January 2026 17:30, UK
When The Beatles finally came to an end, George Harrison wasn’t about to spend the rest of his life moping.
The whole reason why he wanted out was to break free from the shackles of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and when listening to what he had cooked up on albums like All Things Must Pass, he had turned into the kind of songwriter that could easily rival anything that his fellow bandmates were putting out. Letting tracks like these fall by the wayside would have been a tragedy, but Harrison also never wanted the baggage that came with being a solo artist, either.
As much as people love the idea of fame when they are starting out, Harrison fell out of love with being one of the biggest celebrities in the world pretty quickly. Even before the Fab Four split, he was trying to downplay his ego as much as possible, and yet when he put on the Concert for Bangladesh, he was the one sitting at the lip of the stage in a white suit, telling everyone what to do and what to play.
It was a role that suited him fine, but Harrison was never comfortable being the person out front. He always wanted to be a team player from the moment he started, which probably explains why he had the most fun working with people like the Traveling Wilburys later on. But when you have a solo career that’s that successful, the label is going to come calling for the next major smash.
That said, it’s not like Harrison couldn’t come up with the goods when he wanted to. While his records did have an ebb and flow in terms of quality, he seemed to be content with making music with his friends during the late 1970s. He got all the excesses out of his system, and tunes like ‘Blow Away’ or ‘Crackerbox Palace’ made him sound like he finally found peace in his solo years.
So with everything going that well, that only means one thing: the label’s about to mess it up. Making any record was a massive effort for Harrison, but whereas 33 and ⅓ and his 1979 self-titled record were great musical departures, Somewhere in England is the kind of record that sticks out like a sore thumb. ‘The Quiet One’ seemed to be on autopilot throughout most of the record, and when listening to him talk about it, that’s not exactly an unfair assessment when looking at what was happening behind the scenes.
Harrison had a version of the album that he was happy with, but after handing it into his label, he was forced to make the kind of record that he felt was too commercial for his standards, saying, “It was like the program planners for the radio stations seemed to be having more control, the disc jockeys were just mouthpieces. Somebody said to me on a survey, ‘How do you get a hit record…?’ That kind of thing got me a bit pissed off.”
While that resulted in him writing songs like ‘Blood From a Clone’ as a ‘fuck you’ back at his label, him acquiescing to their demands in the real tragedy here. Songs like ‘Flying Hour’ and ‘Sad Singing’ are far from the best songs that he ever put out, but when you see that they were left off the record in favour of something as laughably dated as ‘Teardrops’, you can see why Harrison eventually checked out of making records for a little while and worked his way through Gone Troppo kicking and screaming.
Somewhere in England is still far from a poor record from front to back, but it serves more as a lesson for what not to do when you have a songwriter like Harrison on your label. They are the ones that know their music better than anyone else, so it’s better for them to make whatever the hell they want than making sell-out pop rock.
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