Why ‘Taxman’ embittered George Harrison
Seeing as he was considered to be ‘The Quiet Beatle’, it might have seemed surprising when George Harrison started writing more and more songs for The Beatles. It would have been even more surprising when Harrison came up with something as scathing and aggressive as ‘Taxman’.
The opener of 1966’s Revolver, ‘Taxman’ is a heavy, propulsive rocker with a caustic lyric written in protest and in response to the higher level of progressive tax imposed in the United Kingdom by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
A financial report from their accountancy firm Bryce, Hammer, Isherwood & Co, which was delivered earlier in the year, had first drawn The Beatles’ attention to their deteriorating financial predicament and warned that two of the group were on the brink of bankruptcy. Seemingly unthinkable considering the group’s success, the Fab Four were not taking home anywhere near as much as they were making, or as much as they thought they were making, thanks to a staggering 95% supertax imposed on the country’s top earners by Wilson’s government. In discussing the 95% tax rate with Maureen Cleave in The Evening Standard, Harrison compared Harold Wilson to Robin Hood’s archenemy, The Sheriff of Nottingham.
Much later, writing in his 1980 autobiography I, Me, Mine, Harrison said that “‘Taxman’ was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes; it was and still is typical”. To further embitter Harrison, he was very much aware that so much of his tax money was going into the funding and manufacturing of military weapons, which he was completely against.
When writing the song, he appealed to his fellow pacifist and anti-war campaigner John Lennon for some help with the words, though Lennon, who was suffering from a short stint of writer’s block himself at the time, was less than excited by the prospect of writing together. “I remember the day he called to ask for help on ‘Taxman’, one of his first songs,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980, “I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that’s what he asked for. He came to me because he couldn’t go to Paul, because Paul wouldn’t have helped him at that period.”
But, don’t be fooled by Lennon’s apparent altruism, “I didn’t want to do it,” he confessed, “I thought, ‘Oh, no, don’t tell me I have to work on George’s stuff.’ It’s enough doing my own and Paul’s. But because I loved him and I didn’t want to hurt him when he called that afternoon and said, ‘Will you help me with this song?’ I just sort of bit my tongue and said OK. It had been John and Paul for so long, he’d been left out because he hadn’t been a songwriter up until then.”
In fact, for the song, half of The Beatles performed something of a role reversal. While Harrison temporarily took on the McCartney role in the Lennon/McCartney double act, he couldn’t quite come up with a guitar solo for the song. McCartney, playing the role that would ordinarily have been left to Harrison himself, took up the mantle and played the lead part on the take that made it to the album.
The Beatles weren’t the only band that was unhappy with their tax bill, and the Labour government wasn’t the only one to enforce such heavy fiscal rules. In 1971, the new Conservative government dropped the top tax rate on earned income down to 75%, but a 15% surcharge on unearned investment income still kept the top rate at 90%. Finding themselves in the top bracket, The Rolling Stones decided to cut their losses and left the country, relocating to the south of France where, as tax-exiles, they recorded their seminal album Exile on Main Street.
