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November 11th, 2026 · 1:00pm GMT
The bond between all the Beatles wasn’t lost on Paul McCartney once they broke up.
Even though he was being painted as the one stuck in the mud who didn’t want to go along with his bandmates at the start of the 1970s, he was always the one who was willing to keep the band going whenever he wanted to. He loved the music they were making more than anyone in the world, but even though his friendship with John Lennon got a little bit strained, a lot of people forget that his relationship with George Harrison was almost beyond repair when they first started playing on their own.
Harrison was already blossoming into a great songwriter, and the last thing he wanted to do was keep taking orders for what his bandmate wanted all the time. There were so many opportunities for them to work off each other whenever they jammed, but when the guitarist kept being told to keep things quiet, it’s not like he was going to sit on his hands with all of these legendary songs sitting in his back pocket.
So when All Things Must Pass did change the course of his career, it was almost like vindication. He had grown into the kind of songwriter that could be just as good as Lennon or McCartney, and when you listen to the end of ‘Isn’t It a Pity’, it is pretty funny listening to him add in his own ‘na na na’ chorus just like Macca had done when working on ‘Hey Jude’ just a couple of years before.
McCartney didn’t mean to cast out Harrison all the time, but there was so much more baggage that came with their relationship most of the time. The guitarist always wanted to be his own musician without having his hand held through everything, but McCartney was always going to treat him as the little brother that he never had, which even extended to when they reformed in the 1990s for The Beatles Anthology.
But for all of the great moments that they had together, McCartney didn’t expect his friend to be taken so soon. Harrison was already at peace with his cancer diagnosis for a few years by the time that he passed away, and while McCartney did admit that he was torn up over the loss of his bandmate, he did end up channelling some of that grief into some of the songs he was working on for Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.
His 2005 album is one of the biggest highlights of his later career, and when working on deep cuts like ‘Friends to Go’, McCartney admitted that Harrison was still helping him every step of the way through that song, saying, “The funny thing about it was I felt I was almost George Harrison during the writing of that song. I just got this feeling, this is George. I was like George – writing one of his songs. So I just wrote it; it just wrote itself very easily cause it wasn’t even me writing it.”
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And while McCartney can’t avoid being his usual jovial self half the time, the song does capture a lot of the Harrisonian tendencies that he had throughout his later career. The guitarist was never afraid to be a little bit more agitated and put that in his songs, and when listening to Macca sing about waiting around for the hangers-on to leave, it’s easy to picture the same thing coming out of Harrison when he was talking about the more superficial sides of the music business.
Because as much as Harrison was spiritually at peace throughout his career, he didn’t usually have time for the more manufactured side of music, and this is the kind of song that he could have written in his sleep. It’s not easy riding the waves of the industry and coming out unscathed, but Harrison was still capable of making great art from the other side, even if it was through one of his bandmates.
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