How Many Times Had He Been Here Before - Blog Posts

Oh George. 🥹❤️

George Harrison - 1987 (taken shortly before Dent-Robinson interview)

[…] A tubby studio worker interrupts for the inevitable autograph. He asks with a reverence unusual for those ‘in the business’. Harrison’s reaction is both genuine and remarkable. He listens carefully as the man unfolds a long-winded and nervous story of how, as a lad, he had seen the Beatles in concert in Plymouth and Exeter. Harrison smiles slowly. He signs. “God bless you!” says the stranger to him. “No, God bless you,” replies Harrison, softly, earnestly but with humour – adding with a gentle smile, “God is within you, you know? Remember that.” Then, with a wink at me, Harrison takes back the scrap of paper and says, “Hold on, we can do better than this.” And he adds the signatures of Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr to his own. “I used to be the one who had to do this all the time in the Fabs,” he remarks, the Fabs being an abbreviated form of the ‘Fab Four’ tag used by Beatles aficionados. Then, after adding the regulation starry flourish under Ringo’s signature which marks it out as ‘genuine’, Harrison says, “We will see that one in Sothebys next year, won’t we, mate?” The studio worker responds fervently, “No way, you can count on that, no way at all!” He then leaves, looking down at the piece of paper before shaking his head and muttering, “My missus will never believe this.” 

A senior studio manager standing nearby remarked to me at this point, “George still makes groupies out of all of them, you know. Don’t ever say that Beatle power is dead.” George’s reaction to this comment is one of seriousness. “I’ve gone through stages of thinking it crazy or sick, but of course I realise now it isn’t. I have thought this kind of adulation is real and unreal, good, bad. In all honesty, I just don’t know. What I can say though is that it has less to do with us as individuals than with the time, the era that ‘Beatles’ is shorthand for. People really are kind of worshipping their own past - and there’s nothing wrong with that so long as they don’t get it out of perspective. But you’re not going to get me to say that we were or weren’t gods; it’s more than twenty years since John Lennon got tripped up over that and he was badly misunderstood. We’re all much wiser now – those of us who are left.”

[…] “I hope [grown-up Beatles fans] also have a space somewhere in their hearts for us. Take that big guy just now who asked for the autograph. He looked like a huge, rough, tough truck driver but he was really very gentle. You know that does please me and perhaps it is idealistic, but I would like to think that the Beatles fans have mostly grown up that way. That somehow they did gain from the Beatles experience, as indeed we did, and that ultimately they all appreciate that love is always better than war. Okay, it sounds a very sixties sentiment, but as far as I am concerned there really is still a lot in it, and I have seen nothing in any of the cultural changes since which convinces me that message, although perhaps it was rather naively expressed by us all back then, is not actually a better message than most.”

- Interview with Nick Dent-Robinson (1987)