H – is for George Harrison – Living in the Material World

Monday 5th October

Everyone thinks the Beatles were John and Paul, and to begin with they were – except George was always there too (Ringo came along later).   John was a complicated man, and Paul had his contradictions too; but George was always the hardest to fathom.  The quiet one, that was how the Media of the day portrayed him, but even at the various Press Conferences George was the one who came up with the best lines.  At first he hardly wrote anything, but slowly he began, and then suddenly he bloomed into at least an equal to John and Paul.  On Abbey Road possibly the best two songs were by George ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’.

And although George was very conscious of living in the material world (he wrote Taxman after all) he was fast developing a spiritual side.  When the Beatles broke up, he became a somewhat reluctant Superstar.  He made a handful of brilliant albums and then a couple of poorer ones and was persuaded to tour America (a bit of a disaster as it happened).  But he seemed happiest either in the Recording Studio or in his garden, and he slowly disengaged himself from the Fame he had known since his youth.  One of his albums was indeed called ‘Living In The Material World’, it was maybe his best too.  But I never really understood the significance of the title.  Was it just a clever phrase, or a confession, an apology maybe?  George sought Spiritual Enlightenment for years (it was he who persuaded the others to visit the Maharishi at Rishikesh) and I like to think that he almost found it.

So, we are all of us living in the material world, despite our possibly Socialist credentials (just why is Jeremy Corbyn criticized for having an Islington home worth hundreds of thousands, when he would have been a fool not to have bought, like most of us, back in the eighties?). We have to almost live two lives; one with a central core of our beliefs, our philosophy, our principles; while at the same time living here and now in this imperfect material world where we are daily forced to compromise our beliefs to varying degrees.  And maybe that was just what George was trying to tell us, that all the trappings of Wealth are just deceptions and that a better life awaits us.  And don’t worry, I have no illusions about an afterlife; I believe we must all strive to make life better for everyone, right here and now while we are living in the material world itself.