(Credits: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys)
Sun 8 March 2026 13:00, UK
There’s a good chance that George Harrison could have released anything after The Beatles, and it would have still sold.
Even if everyone was heartbroken about the band breaking up, their names were practically a license to print money, and it helped when All Things Must Pass came out sounding like one of the greatest albums that any of the Fab Four had made in a long time. But even for the fantastic start that Harrison had to kick off his career, there were bound to be a few bumps in the road once he started to come back down to Earth in the mid-1970s.
Because, really, there was no way that anyone was going to match All Things Must Pass. Harrison had years upon years of stockpiling songs to use for his debut, and even though he could still make fantastic tunes on Living in the Material World, it was becoming clear that he was starting to wear on a few people. It was bad enough to bring up all of the lawsuits that the band members were going through on songs like ‘Sue Me Sue You Blues’, but given that the rest of his bandmates were taking swipes at each other, it wasn’t any fun watching musical brothers fight amongst themselves.
But Harrison seemed to be the one person taking the high road. Ringo Starr wanted nothing more than The Beatles to get back together, but Harrison knew that there was a lot more magic to be found if he kept making the best songs he could on his own. He was going to do everything he could to sing his heart out to the world, but after a few years of pushing himself as hard as he possibly could, there came a point where the wheels were bound to fall off just a little bit.
It didn’t help that Harrison told his wife that they needed to split up shortly before Dark Horse, but even if the record itself is full of Harrison’s marital woes, the biggest hurdle of the record is his voice. He had been planning this massive tour to kick off his new era, but after spending years working on songs for other artists and making a colossal triple album, his voice just gave out by the time he walked into the studio.
Granted, ‘Hari’s On Tour’ does at least set things up nicely with an instrumental, but the rest of the album does take a bit of a downgrade thanks to his bout with laryngitis. You can hear the makings of great songs on the title track and ‘So Sad’, but even by the standards of the Fab Four’s pop songs, ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’ is one of the more mindless tunes that Harrison ever created.
Kudos for him to try and capitalise on the New Year’s Eve holiday craze, but the fact that he wanted millions of people to be chanting this song just looks all the more tragic when the tune flopped, eventually telling one of his associates, “It’s one of them repetitious numbers which is gonna have 20 million people, with the Phil Spector nymphomaniacs, all doing backing vocals by the end of the day, and it’s gonna be wonderful. But I’d appreciate it if you don’t let anybody steal it, ’cause I want the hit myself.”
Those scores of people singing the song would have certainly helped, but the song itself is probably the worst offender when it comes to Harrison’s singing. He had been trying his best to push through the problems throughout the album, but there are certain portions of the song that almost give you secondhand soreness when you hear him try to go for those high notes only for his voice to give out.
While the New Year’s tradition of ‘out with the old and in with the new’ is a great sentiment for a song, it’s not like it was ever going to replace any of the holiday favourites that John Lennon or Paul McCartney were doing. This was Harrison finally falling back down to Earth, but considering how well records like 33 and ⅓ or his self-titled were received, all he seemed to need was a little bit of rest for his luck to start turning around.