‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’ is the instrumental opening track on George Harrison’s fifth solo album Dark Horse.
It is the only instrumental Harrison released in his lifetime. The only other on his albums is ‘Marwa Blues’ on his 2002 posthumous album Brainwashed.
Recorded at Friar Park in April 1974, the track was seemingly designed to signify a break from the stately grandiloquence of the previous year’s Living In The Material World. Harrison was content to share the spotlight with his band of tight session players, and ‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’ raised the curtain on a set of songs on which he was just as likely to sing of earthly delights and broken relationships as his now-familiar devotional offerings.
Harrison worked on part of the album with members of LA Express, whom he had seen backing Joni Mitchell in London on 22 April 1974. The band lent their name to the instrumental.
We all went back to the hotel and, the next day, the band and Joni went out to Henley-on-Thames to hang out. That night Joni went back to London and the band stayed and recorded with George until all hours of the morning. We cut those two tracks on Dark Horse: ‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’ and ‘Simply Shady’.
Behind The Locked Door, Graeme Thomson
On 28 February 1975, ‘Dark Horse’ was released as a single in the UK, with ‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’ on the b-side. It did not chart – Harrison’s first single not to do so.
‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’ was the opening song throughout Harrison’s 1974 tour of North America.
The 1992 Genesis Publications book Songs By George Harrison 2 was published in 1992 in a limited edition of 2,500. Each came with a vinyl or compact disc EP containing four exclusive songs: ‘Life Itself’ (demo), ‘Hottest Gong In Town’, ‘Tears Of The World’, and a live version of ‘Hari’s On Tour (Express)’.
The latter recording is likely to have been a composite from Harrison’s concerts in Toronto on 6 December and Washington, DC on 13 December 1974, and has been unavailable since 1992.
