Credit: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys
Wed 14 October 2026 8:26, UK
The 1980s were a mixed bag for George Harrison. On the one hand, his domestic life was bliss, and he’d found contentment, but creatively, he spent several years in the wilderness.
After growing disillusioned with the music industry in the ’70s, unfairly finding himself accused and out of pocket thanks to a vengeful subconscious plagiarism claim, Harrison was tired. Over the next few years, this deep-seated resentment crept in further, and he went a whole half a decade without releasing music.
He didn’t need to release music to make money; he was a Beatle and had the finances to do whatever the hell he wanted to with his life.
Following the lacklustre reaction to 1982’s Gone Troppo, Harrison questioned why he was putting himself through the ordeal, admitting to the LA Times in 1987, “I did get a bit fed up with the way everything was going back at that time.”
He honestly added, “I’ve never been that good at being a promoter of myself, doing TV interviews or whatever. Consequently, I tended to just put my records out – give it to the record company, and that’s it.”
Credit: Far Out / Alamy
However, as much as Harrison hated the industry, he had a compulsion to write songs, which was always going to get the best of him eventually, even if he was kicking and screaming.
Thankfully, he made an important friend during this period in Dave Stewart from Eurythmics. In addition to being a fan of his band, he and Harrison also sang from the same playbook in life, too, which made them grow to be close associates.
As Stewart was from the generation below Harrison, he was raised on The Beatles, and it was an honour for him to get to know the person behind some of his favourite songs. He once told Forbes, “I became really great friends with George Harrison in the ’80s and all the way through until he got very ill.”
Stewart continued: “In the Martin Scorsese film, you see a lot of interviews with George, that’s me interviewing him. Some of it’s my footage of him. But George was a really big influence on me, not musically, although he was an absolute genius musically and I’d have this amazing time sitting around in the kitchen with him playing and going on holiday with him and his family, Olivia and little Dhani.”
Likewise, Stewart had an impact on Harrison, but in this sense, it was musical, helping him craft the sound that formed a large proportion of his comeback album, Cloud Nine.
‘Devil’s Radio’ was particularly written with the Eurythmics in mind, although the title came from elsewhere. Harrison once revealed: “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.”
The guitarist added of his friendship with Stewart: “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.”
After witnessing the tour first-hand, Harrison recalled, “I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can write these.’ So I wrote a couple of rockers.”
Back then, Harrison had largely checked out from the popular musical trends, and it was unusual for him to be inspired by contemporary artists. Yet, there was something different about the Eurythmics which captured his imagination. From there, he was at the races, and work was well underway on his comeback record.
In the years that followed, Stewart continued to be a vital presence in his musical life, and his home in Los Angeles was adopted as the base for the Traveling Wilburys while they made their debut album. With that record, Harrison had returned to form, and Stewart deserves his thanks for the encouragement he gave him to find his voice again.
