“See you ’round the clubs”: The moment George Harrison walked out of The Beatles
Perhaps the strangest thing about the breakup of The Beatles, history’s most powerful and influential band, is that it was relatively undramatic. There was no big on-stage brawl, no huge bust-ups, no one explosive argument that ended it all. Instead, it was a year-long battle fought with passive aggression as the main weapon. It was fought in sly comments, pointed lyrics, petty walkouts and then the occasional bigger moment, like this one – January 10th, 1969, when George Harrison walked out.
The matter-of-fact retelling in Harrison’s diary perfectly summarises the ending of The Beatles. “Got up, went to Twickenham, rehearsed until lunch time – left the Beatles – went home,” he wrote. He seemed to handle it so nonchalantly that he even added other details, just sprinkling this news in with what he had for dinner as he added, “and in the evening did King of Fuh at Trident Studio — had chips later at Klaus and Christines went home.”
Maybe it’s the Liverpudlian way. Perhaps it’s a very boyish way – refusing to truly handle the emotional gravitas of a situation, so landing on indifference instead. But even in the moment when Harrison delivered the news, he was calm and seemingly unaffected. It was captured on tape. During the Get Back sessions, when the band were trying to write an album quickly to perform it, planning to make a movie of the process, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had essentially bugged the whole studio. He was hoping to capture something interesting and dramatic. In some ways, he did because he captured Harrison quitting, but mostly he didn’t, because all that was said was:
Harrison: “I’m leaving the band now.”
John Lennon: “When?”
Harrison: “Now.”
However, that wasn’t all that was said. In the entire history of the band’s split, despite the prevailing disinterest in each other’s faces while the true feelings would later be revealed in song, Harrison got the one good line in. As he grabbed his coat and guitar and walked out, evading the lingering mics, he reportedly turned to his old friends, the friends he’d been working with since his teenage years and the friends he’d changed the world with, and said, “See you ’round the clubs.”
It’s a mic drop moment. It’s also a line that holds so much weight. Sure, it’s an incredibly cool final remark that drips with a sense of decisiveness and even some superiority, as if Harrison had just made the ultimate break. But it also had a degree of humour to it, as if the guitarist himself wanted to leave the door open. It’s melodramatic, which in some way makes it not dramatic at all. This isn’t a cutting and savage goodbye. This isn’t a burning of a bridge. If anything, Harrison is leaving the door open. He’s leaving the band, but you know, he’ll see them around.
But we can’t know for sure, mostly because Lindsay-Hogg’s attempt to spy on these moments completely failed. Whatever happened between the recording of the band rehearsing the final take of ‘Two Of Us’ a few hours before, and then this walkout is lost under the sound of cutlery hitting plates. He’d bugged the band’s dining room where the preceding conversation went down before Harrison’s exit, but all the mics picked up was the sound of them eating, drowning out the actual conversation and ridding history of the one recording that would have cleared up a lot of rumours.
All those rumours are well-known and have been unpacked over and over again in people’s obsessive need to understand why The Beatles broke up. People have poured over the arguments about McCartney’s growing dominance, Harrison’s affair with Starr’s wife, Lennon’s drug use, Yoko Ono’s mere presence, the band’s money situation, Harrison’s unhappiness in the group and so on. But at the end of the day, we’ll never know.
We’ll never know what really happened on January 10th beyond a short audio clip and the story of Harrison’s strong exit line. We’ll never know what eventually brought him back to finish the album and do the historic rooftop gig. We’ll also never truly know what was the final nail in the coffin. But isn’t it better that way? Does that keep the myth and magic of the group alive?
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