(Credits: Far Out / Apple Corps LTD)
Wed 14 January 2026 6:00, UK
It’s all very well being a member of the most successful band of all time, but for The Beatles, is it possible that you can simply have it too good to the point where listening to the music of others becomes a chore?
This isn’t to say that the band didn’t know how to appreciate good music when they heard it, but because they were often regarded as having been such a cut above everyone else, there would undoubtedly have been times when it was a struggle to find inspiration from their peers, and where other popular music felt like a void of creativity.
Of course, there were also times when they were strong in their praise of certain other contemporaries of theirs, and it’s no secret that Paul McCartney has always been the sort of person to champion new artists, and regularly those operating in fields different from where he was best known.
However, the same can’t necessarily be said about the other three, and despite this not necessarily being the case during their time as a group, one member endured a period of struggling to find other artists who inspired him in the same fashion after they’d disbanded and gone their separate ways.
One could argue that George Harrison arguably had the broadest range of influences, but that came as a result of dissatisfaction with the general landscape of how popular music sounded during the years that immediately followed the end of The Beatles.
This is perhaps why he ended up turning towards the music he was hearing in India as one of his go-to ways of escaping the world of Western pop, and his unending support of musicians such as Ravi Shankar came in lieu of him being able to find something closer to home that he found a morsel of comfort in listening to.
However, despite the drought in inspiring pop from the Western world, there was one artist in particular who he chose to celebrate for just how good it made him feel in comparison to the rest of what he was hearing, which he divulged in a 1975 interview with New York radio station WNEW-FM.
“It’s a whole other train of thought that comes from the music,” Harrison argued. “In simpler terms, there’s people, I like people who just convey in their music some sort of sincerity. I’m a big fan of Smokey Robinson just because musically he is so sweet, he makes you feel nice, he makes me feel good, whereas a lot of music I listen to, which is popular music, just makes me uptight.”
There’s a lot to be said about how Motown artists were able to tap into this vibe with relative ease compared to the rest of the pop field, and while Robinson was certainly responsible for coming out with songs every now and then that were a little more downcast in nature, his general musical outlook was one of positivity. This obviously felt refreshing for Harrison, and for him, Robinson was a beacon of light in a mainstream that was becoming increasingly narrow.
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