The Beatles song George Harrison couldn’t stomach: “I don’t think it’s particularly good”
Songwriting didn’t come naturally to George Harrison, unlike his bandmates Paul McCartney and John Lennon. It was a craft that took years for him to perfect, and he inched closer to his intended destination with each attempt.
Considering the quality of the output provided by his bandmates, the easier route for Harrison would have been to stick to the guitar and never dare pick up the pen. However, first and foremost, he was an artist rather than a guitarist, fuelled by a creative desire to push himself, which meant learning to become a songwriter.
Very few songwriters strike gold with their first attempt, and it can often take hundreds of failings before it finally clicks. Harrison, though, had the luxury of taking his time before offering a contribution because The Beatles weren’t suffering from a shortage of songs due to the prolific Lennon-McCartney partnership.
At the start of their journey, Harrison was in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney from a songwriting perspective. Furthermore, Harrison didn’t write a single track for their debut, Please, Please Me, despite supplying lead vocals on two efforts. In fact, it took several words of encouragement from friends for Harrison to start writing songs. He was initially reluctant to do so, perhaps due to a fear of failure. Ultimately, he accepted that he would only know if he was cut out for songwriting if he gave it a go and found out the hard way.
It took an illness to give Harrison ample time to experiment, and as boredom kicked in, there were no other ways to occupy his mind. This event took place during The Beatles’ residency in Bournemouth in 1963 when a bed-bound Harrison decided to flex his songwriting muscles after many months of deliberation.
With his first song, Harrison wasn’t expecting to write a chart-topping single that would define The Beatles’ career. Instead, he was merely interested to discover whether he had the chutzpah for the skill.
At that stage, Harrison was still finding his identity within the band beyond being “the quiet Beatle” and lead guitarist. Lennon and McCartney already operated with the confidence of seasoned writers, bouncing ideas off each other at an astonishing pace, whereas Harrison approached songwriting far more cautiously.
That hesitation is partly what makes ‘Don’t Bother Me’ so fascinating in retrospect because it captures the first glimpse of a writer who would eventually become one of the most emotionally perceptive voices in popular music.
There are also small traces of the introspective qualities that would later define Harrison’s greatest work. Even if the song itself is relatively slight compared to what would come later, its moodier tone already separated him from the more upbeat sensibilities of early Beatles material. Long before he embraced Indian spirituality or penned reflective masterpieces like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, Harrison seemed instinctively drawn towards more inward-looking songwriting.
Harrison wrote ‘Don’t Bother Me’ from his Bournemouth hotel room, which appeared on their sophomore album, With The Beatles. The song marked a step forward for Harrison’s prominence within the group as he emerged as a wordsmith. Admittedly, the material isn’t more than an album filler, but importantly, it showed Harrison was willing to dip his toes into the realm of songwriting.
While Harrison never believed that ‘Don’t Bother Me’ was a masterpiece or even liked the song, he still saw the positives from the creation. “I don’t think it’s a particularly good song; it mightn’t be a song at all,” Harrison later admitted in his autobiography. “But at least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good.”
The guitarist continued: “I still feel now: I wish I could write something good. It’s relativity. It did, however, provide me with an occupation.”
As part of the Anthology, McCartney explained the importance of ‘Don’t Bother Me’ to the Fab Four, revealing that it forced him and Lennon to consider integrating Harrison into their songwriting team. He recalled: “I remember walking up past Woolton Church with John one morning and going over the question: ‘Without wanting to be too mean to George, should three of us write or would it be better to keep it simple?’ We decided we’d just keep to two of us.”
They may have chosen against bringing Harrison into their partnership, but it still gave the duo food for thought and made them take him seriously as a songwriter. Therefore, although it’s not one of their best efforts, ‘Don’t Bother Me’ gave Harrison a sense of self-belief, and from that moment, he made it his mission to become a more critical voice on their albums in the future.
However, his evolution as a lyricist took time and effort. It wasn’t until Help! in 1965 that Harrison once again chipped into the writing process. Nevertheless, towards the end of the Fab Four’s reign, he had more than proved his worth after providing stonewall classics such as ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes To The Sun‘. These songs led to him outshining his bandmates, which would never have occurred without Harrison writing ‘Don’t Bother Me’.
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