George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door [Graeme Thomson] | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Um this is a bit of a rant I’m afraid. Beatles biographies need to get better than this.

This is a lazy music journalist’s book, and it shows. He doesn’t know who he’s writing for and I’m not sure he knows who he’s writing about. He leans a lot on verbatim quotes from sources, and while some like Olivia and Patti are genuinely insightful and generous, he tends to phone in whole sections this way, sometimes repeating slabs of quotes later on in the book. Thompson is endlessly cynical about his subject, and just as endlessly concerned about the music matching the times. Only music journalists care about this sort of thing but usually its over with in a magazine article. Thompson flogs this particular dead horse all the way through the book and it’s as grating as it is shallow.

For me this was a wasted opportunity. There are many examples throughout that demonstrate that Thompson is content to lean on previous criticism and conventional wisdom about George’s outlook and talent as compared to his peers. And this is simply lazy if not unfair when you’re supposedly writing from a singular biographical point of view. I’m tempted to think he wanted to write a Beatle book because it would get attention and George is conveniently dead.

Here’s just one inexcusable example:

It also exposed his unwillingness, or inability, to write what McCartney called “fantasy songs”. There are precious few whimsical flights of fancy, shifting perspectives or fictional characters in Harrison’s oeuvre. His work tends to be anchored much closer to home. “I remember George once said to me, ‘I could never write songs like that’,” said McCartney. “‘You just make ‘em up, they don’t mean anything to you’.” The irony is that a story-song such as McCartney and Lennon’s ‘She’s Leaving Home’ carries a weight of humanity and empathy which is almost entirely absent from Harrison’s work.

At this point, we’re at the Sgt Peppers era, and George wasn’t into it and his contributions were sparse and those that were, like Only A Northern Song were disliked by Lennon, McCartney and Martin. That is fair reporting, but Thompson agrees with them. You cannot write a biography like this, its the kind of lazy character assassination we got from Ian MacDonald as already pointed out. In one sentence, he dismisses Harrison as an artist, well before he even gets to the solo work. He then does a 180 degree turn and praises Within You, Without You as brilliant, George’s first solo recording. The tone is so inconsistent and careless, that it cannot have been carefully proof-read or even edited. And indeed in the copy I have there are many typographical and grammatical errors. Otherwise, Thompson sticks so firmly to a narrative of inevitable musical decline over the 70’s into the 80’s that he may as well have imported Rolling Stones reviews and be done with it.

One telling fault is that George’s love for the ukulele as an instrument and his passion for passing it on is only brought up in the context of quotes from Joe Brown. On the one hand, the 90’s were a period where George rediscovered his love of George Formby, but on the other, that love was never mentioned to begin with. 

Time and again Thompson harps on the disconnectedness of George’s musical journey to the musical tastes and events of the time, as some kind of failing. I think by now most people recognise that music isn’t the cultural touchstone it used to be, and when I was younger I would have agreed with Thompson. Now I recognise the worth of George’s work without needing context, but I still think there is a context to portray here and Thompson does a pretty shoddy job of it. To sum up, this is a slight and disappointing overview of a biography, done with such fake objectivity and contempt for the generosity of its sources that is breathtaking. You read the list of books consulted and you wonder how he could cite Doggett for example with a straight face.

Having said all this, there’s enough base material here for a good biographer to start from. But it had better happen soon because most of the sources aren’t getting any younger. We, and George, deserve much better.