‘We’re The Beatles, we’ve got the grooves and you two are just watching’: how George Harrison refused to be kept down by Lennon and McCartney

A major new biography of the revolutionary guitarist and self-professed ‘economy-class Beatle’ delves deep into the seven years of seething acquiescence George Harrison endured as his songs were crushed by the Lennon-McCartney juggernaut, writes Mark Beaumont. In the end, the break-up of the band was his saving – and their loss

Think for yourself: the book documents Harrison’s creative struggles during his Beatles career (Shutterstock/PA/Getty)

It was arguably rock’n’roll’s most brutal and historic piece of passive aggression. Midway through The Beatles’ umpteenth rehearsal attempt to nail down “Two of Us”, the song destined to open 1970’s Let It Be album, George Harrison grew frustrated at Paul McCartney’s overbearing direction, and subtly cracked. “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,” Harrison placidly intoned, steely and faux-subservient. “Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

Seething behind those seemingly innocuous words – captured on film as part of the Let It Be project, in which the fracturing Beatles attempted to write an album on camera – lurked seven years of resentment on the part of the most underrated Beatle. Seven years of having his songcraft crushed beneath the wheels of Lennon and McCartney’s hit-making juggernaut. Of exclusion from the band’s creative hierarchy, borderline insulting publishing splits and fighting to the point of exhaustion for his songs to be heard, let alone recorded. A resentment that would soon play a significant role in tearing the world’s greatest band apart.

“George would not be kept down,” says author Philip Norman, author of a new Harrison biography George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle. It adroitly traces the sidelining of this self-proclaimed “economy-class Beatle” right up to the fracture point where, as Harrison himself explained, “We’d have to record maybe eight of their [songs] before they’d listen to mine.” The insecurity and lack of confidence Harrison displays when presenting songs as strong as “Something” to the band in The Beatles: Get Back was the result of a deep-rooted underappreciation. As late as one of the band’s last ever meetings, in September 1969, McCartney confessed that, until Abbey Road, he felt Harrison’s songs – “Taxman”, “If I Needed Someone”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, remember – simply “weren’t that good”.