Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Wed 12 August 2026 17:00, UK
After everything George Harrison had achieved in music, I don’t think he would have expected one of his finest moments to happen in Dave Stewart’s kitchen.
There Harrison was, in 1988, surrounded by bandmates he had once admired, writing one of the most DIY songs in rock and roll history. Despite the Traveling Wilburys being made up of the who’s who of rock and roll fame, with Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison, they somehow ended up in the kitchen of the Eurythmics musician, using every pot and pan he had to write their next rock and roll song ‘Rattler’.
It was a moment where Harrison had realised this bizarre fever dream of a project was going to work. The egos of these five individual stars meant nothing once working together under the umbrella of the Traveling Wilburys, and so in the late stages of the ‘80s, it seemed like there was space for them in the music industry still.
It was crucial because that decade was one of wild change; take Dylan, Orbison and Harrison in particular, who were all at the very peak of their careers in the ‘60s, which by the time the first Wilburys album rolled around was already two decades in the past. This new rock and roll landscape that put commercialism over artistry felt entirely alien to them, and without the right career direction, it felt as if they could fade into obscurity.
But the Wilburys saved them to a degree, and that felt no more palpable than in Stewart’s kitchen. But while it may have seemed like a bizarre recording spot for most of the band, for Harrison, it was a poetic twist of fate, for it was indeed the sound of Eurythmics that had revitalised his career at that time.
One year earlier, he had written a solo track called ‘Devil’s Radio’ which sparked a creative renaissance that could all be traced back to Stewart. At that point, Harrison was living on his sprawling estate in Henley-On-Thames, practising a relatively domestic life when inspiration struck him.
“I have to go past this little church to take my boy to school, and they have a little billboard, just a little board outside the church, saying, ‘Gossip: The Devil’s Radio… Don’t Be A Broadcaster’. That’s all. So I thought, that’s good, that’s a song, and I wrote it going to one of the Eurythmics concerts,” Harrison explained.
Further reading: From The Vault
He added, “I sort of spent a bit of time with Dave Stewart, checking out his live show on…what was that tour called?…Revenge. The Revenge Tour was coming around England, and I went to a couple of shows, and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can write these’. So I wrote a couple of rockers.”
Stewart inspired a new lease of life in Harrison, who, while settled in his rural English life, was perhaps staring down the barrel of obscurity, never to really make any meaningful music again, and that helped h him forge a new path that would ultimately end up in the former’s Californian kitchen, writing with some of the best musicians to ever do it and creating an album that serves as one of his very best.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.