{"id":708445,"date":"2026-07-24T07:31:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T07:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/708445\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T07:31:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T07:31:14","slug":"the-1970-george-harrison-song-that-proved-he-was-among-the-greats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/708445\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1970 George Harrison song that proved he was among the greats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"George<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Bradford Timeline<\/p>\n

Thu 23 July 2026 18:00, UK <\/p>\n

If George Harrison<\/a> was such a good songwriter, then why didn\u2019t he write so many songs for The Beatles? You\u2019ve all heard this argument before, but what were the real reasons for his considerably less sizable contribution to the band? <\/p>\n

You can make a case for the fact that even though he only contributed around two dozen tracks to their discography compared to the three-figure counts of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney\u2019s respective outputs, the songs that he did conjure up were just as good, if not better and more consistent. Harrison didn\u2019t feel the need to be as self-indulgent and embittered as Lennon did, and he didn\u2019t feel the need to resort to kitschy gimmicks like McCartney; he was simply gifted at songwriting without falling back on either of these things, but just not recognised for it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

First of all, Harrison was not the face of the band to quite the same degree as the other two. He was always a lot shyer, and therefore, as the one who spoke less in the press, it was probably better that the majority of the limelight was left to be hogged by the two more prominent figures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It would have been unusual to have had Lennon and McCartney handling so much of the talking in public situations, but to have Harrison serve as the spokesperson for all of their activities. Harrison enjoyed being in the background to a degree, but it came at a cost.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also an element of arrogance about both Lennon and McCartney that they couldn\u2019t let go of, and so in order to get the majority of the attention, they used to wrongly limit the amount of contributions from Harrison to a couple per album. They did this to Ringo Starr as well, albeit with much more justification, but there were evidently way more up Harrison\u2019s sleeve that he was waiting to unveil to the world at some point.<\/p>\n

His first album after the breakup of the band was 1970\u2019s All Things Must Pass, a phenomenal triple album that shows off just how much Harrison had prepared on the side<\/a>, and had the others been prepared to listen to him, perhaps these could all have existed as Beatles songs rather than his own.<\/p>\n

An album like this only goes to show the depth of his songwriting ability, and while many people use this as an example to argue that he\u2019s as good as, if not better than his bandmates as a songwriter, acclaimed British songwriter and humourist Neil Innes, best known for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, once proclaimed that one song from the album shows he\u2019s even above some of the greatest songwriters to have ever walked the planet.<\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

\u201cGeorge\u2019s stuff didn\u2019t always grab you the way the other two\u2019s did,\u201d Innes argued, \u201cbut if you listen to something like \u2018Beware Of Darkness\u2019 \u2013 the chords in that \u2013 I mean, he\u2019s up there with Brian Wilson, he\u2019s up there with Debussy. More people should cover his songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

More people should cover his songs, and more should realise that quantity does not necessarily always equate to quality, with Harrison\u2019s slender offerings to the Beatles\u2019 catalogue just as sturdy as the weightier contributions from his bandmates. What Harrison did in only a small percentage of The Beatles\u2019 work was immense, but what he showed himself to be capable of in his career after that rightfully cements his status as one of the all-time greats.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> The Far Out Beatles Newsletter<\/p>\n

All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Bradford Timeline Thu 23 July 2026 18:00, UK If George Harrison was such a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[186792,42201,29764,58176,96,26940,128,146667,10447,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-708445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-186792","tag-1970s","tag-brian-wilson","tag-classic-rock","tag-entertainment","tag-george-harrison","tag-music","tag-singer-songwriter","tag-the-beatles","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}