George Harrison

The youngest of the Fab Four, George Harrison rose to fame as the lead guitarist of The Beatles. Dubbed initially as ‘The Quiet Beatle’, he gained more and more confidence as the years went by, eventually making a name for himself as one of the group’s most inventive songwriters, ending John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s dominance over the group’s output with songs like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’.

Harrison was the youngest of four children. His father worked as a steward in the Merchant Navy before becoming a bus conductor, while his mother worked as a clerk in local greengrocers. Harrison started playing the guitar in secondary school, the same Paul McCartney attended. Paul would later invite George to play the guitar for The Quarrymen, a band he’d formed with a local ne’er-do-well named John Lennon.

In the early days of The Beatles’ success, Lennon and McCartney wrote and sang almost all of the group’s songs. However, by 1963, Harrison had also started contributing original tracks. McCartney and Lennon weren’t hugely impressed with his first offering, ‘Don’t Bother Me’, but the songs kept on getting better. In 1965, Harrison started studying Sitar under the tutelage of Ravi Shanker. He showcased his newfound skill on the ‘Rubber Soul’ cut ‘Norwegian Wood’.

The musician’s interest in Indian culture grew from there. This fascination eventually led to The Beatles travelling to India to study transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The trip was an essential influence on subsequent Beatles material and marked the beginning of a new chapter in Harrison’s songwriting book. Following promising tracks like ‘Taxman’ and ‘Blue Jay Way’, he rose to new heights with 1967’s ‘Within You, Without You’, 1968’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, and 1969’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’.

Harrison also released his first solo material in 1968 after being asked to compose the score for ‘Wonderwall’. Following The Beatles split in 1970, he released a series of successful triple albums, including 1970’s ‘All Things Must Pass’, which featured his hit ‘My Sweet Lord’.

In 1971, he launched the Concert for Bangladesh and, in 1979, stepped into the world of film production, setting up Handmade Films, which brought to life such films as ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’, 1981’s ‘Time Bandits’ and 1987’s ‘Withnail and I’. He also performed as part of The Traveling Wilburys for a time before entering a more private chapter in the 1990s. Harrison passed away in 2001 at the age of 58.