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Thu 13 November 2025 16:30, UK
Of all the Beatles, George Harrison seemed to be the one member who could take or leave the idea of fortune and fame.
Whereas all of them were looking to be famous on the same level as Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, Harrison was happy to stand at the back and be proficient on his instrument half the time. He had no plans to be a massive star, but he knew when people were making the wrong decisions along the way as well.
Granted, there’s really no reason to be jerking someone like Harrison around when working on his own masterpieces. By the time he left the Fab Four, there was no reason to think that he needed any help throughout his solo career, but when going through all of his greatest tunes, the fact that someone had the gall to say that an album like Somewhere in England needed some work deserved Harrison dragging them through the mud on tracks like ‘Blood From a Clone’.
But that was no big surprise to Harrison, either. Before he even left The Beatles, getting shafted by John Lennon and Paul McCartney was never going to feel good, especially when he had masterpieces like ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ in his catalogue. If you look back at where the band were going, though, the fact that they made as much music as they did is a miracle considering where they started.
When they first started auditioning for George Martin, Brian Epstein had already felt that he had hit rock bottom. Every other record label had rejected them before, and since Parlophone was set up as a comedy label, getting a deal with someone that specialised in working on soundtracks for Peter Sellers movies didn’t exactly imply that they were going to be the greatest recording artists of their generation.
Although the band have made light of their infamous Decca rejection, Harrison had no problem taking a little pride in how much the label had dropped the ball by not signing them, saying, “They hired Brian Poole and the Tremoloes. That’s the story. Someone said to Brian Epstein, ‘Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein’. And that was probably the biggest error in music history.”
And it’s not like Harrison doesn’t have a small point. It might seem a bit pretentious to say such a thing about your own band, but when you look at how many times people have been on the wrong side of history, this is up there with the time that Prince was booed at a Rolling Stones concert because the audience was insanely racist.
Although The Rolling Stones did give Decca a bit of vindication, the Fab Four have always been a bit more omnipresent in people’s lives in the long term. There are plenty of Stones tracks that deserve every ounce of praise that’s showered on them, but there’s something about hearing everything from ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ to ‘Hey Jude’ to ‘Something’ that’s so seminal that they seemed to be baked into society half the time.
So while Harrison may have been talking about a very specific sore spot of the band’s career, there is more than enough vitriol there that’s worth being frustrated over. Because when looking at how far the band went in so short a period of time, there’s a good chance that whichever A&R person Epstein was talking to at the time was read the riot act by their higher-ups for making that kind of snide comment.
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