George Harrison’s wife Olivia being interviewed by Martin Scorsese. From the documentary film Living In The Material World
“Sometimes people say: what’s the secret of a long marrage? It’s like: you don’t get divorced.” For everyone I’ve spoken to, these 53 seconds were the highpoint of the whole three-and-a-half hour documentary.
That said, the way she managed to halt the murderous knife attack on her husband in 1999 by Michael Abram (below, after she’d finished with him) was also pretty impressive.
For me George’s most interesting music came in the late 80s when Jeff Lynne from ELO produced his platinum-selling album Cloud Nine. Equally good was their collaboration on the first Travelling Wilburys album with Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and the late Roy Orbison – a fine swansong for the Big O and still a landmark record.
Watching Scorsese’s film, Harrison was obviously a complex and private man. A huge charitable donor who loathed paying taxes, a peace-loving mystic who wasn’t above punching police and reporters.
If I Needed Someone and My Sweet Lord are all very well, but this is the song that still does it for me every time: the Quiet Beatle still at the height of his powers looking back to a “long time ago when we was fab”. It’s deft, funny, yearning and elegaic – with a lightness of touch that never takes itself too seriously.
This is where I came in… Please Please Me had been good, while From Me To You topped the charts while I was still twelve. But when She Loves You burst into our lives in August 1963 the Fab Four really, truly became a national phenomenon: even my dad had heard of them. My (older) brother went to see them live in Cambridge that year, but said he couldn’t hear a thing because of all the screaming. I first heard the quip about “not a dry seat in the house” around the time of Beatlemania, tho Wikipedia dates it from Frank Sinatra.
It does look and sound as if they’re actually playing live in this clip. Except none of today’s artsts would get a sound as tight and polished as that without close miking the drums and singing right into the vocal mics ? This is the Beatles at their iconic early best – still strictly under Brian Epstein’s orders with the neat suits, well-cut fringes and bowing politely at the end of the song. But tight as fuck and ferociously ambitious. Anyone who remembers them looking and sounding like this will definitely be feeling their age.
Incidentally at a press conference in the first year of the Fabs’ early fame, some smart aleck journo asked why all their hits up until then had included the word ‘you’ or ‘your’ in the title. “So what should it be?” Lennon shot back “She Loves Them – or I Want To Hold Its Hand??”
