(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 9 April 2026 2:30, UK
There tends to be a lot of tension whenever talking about Paul McCartney and his relationship to the rest of The Beatles.
To him, his bandmates were like the brothers that he never had, but when you listen to the final years of the band’s life, it sounds like the rest of them wanted absolutely nothing to do with him once he decided to sue them, thanks to Allen Klein. Macca’s hand may have been forced in that situation, but even if his fallout with John Lennon was the stuff of legend, there was a lot more baggage whenever you talked about his relationship with George Harrison.
Harrison had famously been resentful of how McCartney treated him throughout their time together, and even when they started to mend the fences in the latter half of the 1970s, Harrison was always the one saying that he wouldn’t be in a band with McCartney again. But if you look at the way that they put together Anthology, old habits seemed to die hard every single time that McCartney started to dictate how he wanted the songs to go.
In all fairness, Harrison did have more of an advantage this time around, thanks to having Jeff Lynne on production duties, but the journey to making a song like ‘Free As A Bird’ was about a lot more than finding the right person behind the board. It needed to be a four-way Beatles recording, but McCartney thought that bringing in a Harrison slide solo might have been a little bit too much for the rest of the band to take.
The solo is among Harrison’s best of his latter career, but since he didn’t use slide terribly often during The Beatles years, McCartney thought that it might look a little too self-serving that he make that solo, saying, “I was worried because it was going to be George on slide. When Jeff suggested slide guitar I thought (dubiously), Oh, it’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ again, it’s George’s trademark. John might have vetoed that. But in fact he got a much more bluesy attitude, very cool, very minimal, and I think he plays a blinder.’”
Granted, it’s not like that ever stopped McCartney from playing whatever he thought the song needed as well. He was famous for telling Harrison to stop playing even when working on Let It Be, and since he was the one taking over and playing a lot of the guitar solos himself on records like ‘Taxman’, seeing him becoming the same old dictator might have looked a little too familiar when Harrison first started playing.
But if you take out either of Harrison’s guitar solos from the two Anthology songs, they lose a lot of their personality. Hearing him lead the band back into rock and roll history at the beginning of ‘Free As A Bird’ is one of the most satisfying moments on the record, and on his performance of ‘Real Love’, he created some of the most stunningly beautiful guitar passages that the band had ever had on one of their records.
So when Macca eventually rolled over and saw Harrison’s side on ‘Now and Then’, his slide solo was never meant to be a case of him showing up his bandmate. Harrison was no longer with us to provide something so beautiful, and while McCartney’s slide playing is serviceable as a tribute to his old friend, it was never going to replace the raw soul that Harrison had from years of making the guitar gently weep in the only way that he knew how.
Sure, Harrison had to take more than a few nasty barbs thanks to him being the little brother of the group, but that was no reason to think that he wasn’t going to be just as important on every one of their songs. His soul is what made those three-part harmonies congeal so well, and even years after he left this Earth, those slide licks are one of the best calling cards for what made him so special.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.