The guitarist George Harrison wanted to join The Beatles
It wouldn’t be the first time George Harrison tried to bring an outsider to The Beatles’ inner circle.
Famously, the Fab Four were a tight-knit creative unit, rarely handling production duties to anyone other than EMI bigwig George Martin and maintaining a select engineering team in the studio. Artists never got much of a look-in. Beyond the orchestras or string players that would find their way on their more ambitious numbers, the only real figures featuring on a Beatles cut were an uncredited Eric Clapton laying down ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ scorching solo, and keyboard whizz Billy Preston to lend his organ magic on Abbey Road and Let It Be.
Both Clapton and Preston’s pull into The Beatles’ fold were at Harrison’s behest, respectively eager to boost his song submissions to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s lofty approval, and later to keep the fracturing band on their best behaviour during the fraught Get Back sessions. Could it be, however, that the ‘Quiet Beatle’ sought to also invite one of the leading forces of hard rock into the Fab Four’s selective camp?
Standing alongside Jimmy Page’s heavy riffs and behind Tony Iommi’s downtuned blues attack for Black Sabbath, Ritchie Blackmore can count himself as one of the three essential guitarists who helped forge the emerging heavy metal across the early 1970s. Lending his lightning melodies and classical flourish to Deep Purple and Rainbow, Blackmore’s former band’s leaden blend of guitar arrest and Jon Lord’s heavy organ skulk would prove just as elemental to the incipient new wave of British heavy metal awaiting around the corner by the decade’s end.
But an almost member of The Beatles? Not likely. Throughout the 1960s, Blackmore was cutting his teeth as a session player and floating around in various backing bands, including a brief time as part of high-camp horror misfit Screaming Lord Sutch’s live ensemble. It was during this nebulous era that Blackmore crossed paths with Lord, soaking up the surrounding psychedelia while pressing for a harder, more engulfing sound during Deep Purple’s Mk I genesis by the decade’s close.
Such a claim of nearly becoming ‘Fab’ was said with full mirth. Speaking on his official YouTube channel in 2025, Blackmore cast his mind back to Harrison’s live cameo with Deep Purple in 1984, when the classic Machine Head line-up kicked off a reunion tour in Australia.
“I did play with George Harrison; he wanted me to join The Beatles,” he wryly quipped. “I’d never heard of them, and I knew they were going nowhere. So I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ But the truth is, he was friends with Jon Lord and Ian Paice. He lived just down the road in Henley, I think it was.”
As it happened, Harrison was indeed neighbours with Lord and Paice, all living in the same area by the former Beatle’s Friar Park mansion in Henley-on-Thames, Lord even recruited at Harrison’s private studio to contribute synths on Gone Troppo’s ‘Circles’ only a few years earlier. However, as Deep Purple were gearing up to play the last of three shows at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in December, the hard rock pioneers knew Harrison was in town and thought to invite him on stage for a live cameo.
“I never knew their music, but I’d heard this one thing, about ‘Smoke on the Water’ or something like that,” Harrison confessed. “But I’d never actually seen them… I’d heard they were in the Guinness Book of Records for being the loudest group in the world.”
Earplugs in, Harrison watched the set from the side for half the show before being handed a guitar and whisked on stage for Deep Purple’s encore. “What’s your name?” frontman Ian Gillan joked as Harrison arrived. “This is your audition.”
“Arnold Grove from Liverpool,” Harrison retorted, a nod to the street he grew up on.
Despite later admitting to playing the wrong key, Harrison and Deep Purple jumped into an eight-minute version of Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ there and then, a loose and slightly sloppy performance owing to the lack of rehearsal but Blackmore didn’t care, all amateur footage floating around of the surprise rendition clearly capturing a giddy Blackmore just happy to be on stage with his Beatle hero.
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