‘I’ve been grumpy at times because there were a lot of things we had to do collectively, as the Beatles, that didn’t grab me personally that deeply.’

Early in 1964, less than ten days after returning from their first American tour, the thing that was making George very unhappy was the movie A Hard Day’s Night. Rock’n’roll and the movies seemed to be going hand in hand, especially when it came to British rock stars such as Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. It was a way of maximising their often all-too-brief time on top and it was often a segue into an acting career once the hits stopped coming.

It was a safe bet that Brian Epstein had all those things in mind when, while in America to set up the Beatles’ first US tour, he struck a deal with United Artists to make a movie about and starring the Beatles. Originally titled Beatlemania, A Hard Day’s Night would ultimately become, in director Richard Lester’s hands, a slightly fictionalised documentary about the Beatles, complete with an even dozen of the Beatles’ greatest hits. That the Beatles were not trained actors and the script, at the moment the six-week shoot began on 2 March 1964, was in varying degrees of disarray, only seemed to work to the film’s largely improvisational strengths.

As tired as the group members were, the idea of making a movie did seem like a lark. Even George, whose mood could not have been more dark in the days following the tour, seemed amused by the idea of playing the fool in front of the camera. Unfortunately, while John, Paul and Ringo seemed quite comfortable and natural in front of the camera, George, for all his dynamism on stage, did not appear to project any spark or personality in front of the camera. Consequently his early scenes in A Hard Day’s Night are essentially walkthroughs with a look of boredom or disinterest on his face. Which is interesting because, years later, director Richard Lester, would proclaim that George was actually the best actor of the bunch.

In any case, George did not really care that much about what anyone thought of his acting talents. He was content to while away the endless hours on the set having a good laugh at what he felt was a boring and very undignified process for a musician to be going through. At the end of the day, George was too easily distracted.

Because by that time his mind was already fixed on something else.

Pattie Boyd was the epitome of swinging London in the 1960s. Her model-thin figure, long blonde hair, big blue eyes and outgoing personality, all wrapped up in a miniskirt. It was no wonder that, on that first day of filming on A Hard Day’s Night, George was immediately smitten. But, as Pattie would recall years later, the notoriously shy Beatle was reluctant to show it.

Pattie, a successful print and television commercial model who along with other young women was playing a small part in the film, had long been a fan of the Beatles and was in awe of being so close to them. During that first day of filming she plucked up her courage and introduced herself to them. Happily, she discovered them to be totally down-to-earth and friendly . . .

Except for George who, remembered Pattie, ‘hardly said hello’. She felt at that time that George was shy or a bit of a snob. Or perhaps just plain not interested. Of the latter, there was much to support that theory. Because with so many willing women on the set at all times, the making of A Hard Day’s Night was marked by instances when the women would sneak off to the trailers of John, Paul, George or Ringo for quick sexual encounters. George was getting his fair share of that kind of attention from the first day and so, she speculated, he was already having his needs met.

However, during that first day of filming, Pattie was constantly aware that George was looking at her. Part of her was embarrassed and uncomfortable at his gaze but part of her was also quite flattered. At the end of that first day, Pattie approached the Beatles for their autographs. When she asked George, he signed his name and, under her name, he put seven kisses. Pattie sensed at that point that George might indeed be interested in her.

That George would express anything other than a sexual interest in a woman was news. He fully enjoyed women, liked to be around them and engage them in small talk. But he had never before expressed interest in anything remotely approaching a romantic relationship. This is what George Harrison was experiencing that day. If it was not love at first sight, it was pretty close.

George made his move at the end of that first day of filming. He went to her dressing room and asked Pattie if she would go out with him that night. Pattie said thanks but no thanks.

The reason being that Pattie had been dating her steady boyfriend for two years and had no interest in being disloyal. George respected that and backed off but, during the ensuing week, Pattie’s resolve began to dissolve in the face of George’s good looks and quiet, sensitive demeanour. Sometime during that week, she went to her boyfriend and broke off their relationship. On the following Tuesday, George asked Pattie out again. She said yes.

George and Pattie were inseparable from that point on and the relationship moved at lightning speed. They became intimate almost immediately and quickly brought each other round to meet the other’s families. George remembered that first date as a comfortable time in which they ate dinner and drove around London for hours talking about everything and nothing.

‘I don’t know if you could actually call it love at first sight,’ said George at the memory. ‘But by the end of the first week, I had already met her mum and three weeks later we were looking at houses together. So I guess you could definitely call us a couple.’

And truth be known, George, at a relatively young age, had already sown enough wild oats to last a lifetime and was, at least on a subconscious level, ready to settle down. In Pattie he saw his ideal mate in terms of looks and intelligence.

Pattie had experienced a small measure of celebrity as a model, but nothing could prepare her for the total intrusion into every aspect of her life that went along with being with a Beatle. Shortly after they became a couple, George and Pattie jetted off with John and his wife Cynthia for a quiet weekend in Ireland. She was shocked to find literally hundreds of reporters and photographers camped out in front of their hotel when they arrived.

It was all downhill for Pattie from there. During what was supposed to be a romantic weekend, Pattie discovered that their phones were tapped, they were constantly followed by the press when they tried to leave the hotel and, finally, Pattie and Cynthia had to be smuggled out of the hotel in a laundry basket and driven back to the airport in a laundry van. Pattie quickly learned from the other Beatle women – Cynthia, Ringo’s girlfriend (and soon-to-be wife) Maureen and Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher – that being a Beatle wife or girlfriend meant an end to privacy. What she would never get used to was the letters that came as a consequence of her being with George.

‘The letters upset me a lot. They were really nasty and said awful things. They always said they were really George’s girlfriend and that I’d better leave him alone or they’d get me.’

Pattie’s discomfort only served to fuel George’s own anger at his not having a moment’s peace. To him it was all one big nuisance. ‘The fans, all shapes, all matter of humanity, were everywhere. We couldn’t get in or out.’

At the time he met Pattie, George had been sharing a flat in Mayfair with Ringo but, when they could not get the lease renewed because of the constant presence of fans around the building, George and Pattie moved into Whaddon House, Belgravia. But the fans and press quickly sniffed out their new home and the intrusions continued.

George finally found the home of his dreams and in July 1964 Pattie and George moved into a sprawling bungalow in Clairmont Road on the Fair Mile Estate near Esher. Although still near-manic in his obsession for privacy, George, perhaps naively, felt that the rows of trees and tall hedges surrounding the property would effectively shield him from prying eyes. But the rabid Beatles fans soon discovered his new residence and the problems with fans once again resurfaced.

On several occasions, George would return home from an arduous recording session, only to discover young girls looking through his windows. Once some zealous girls actually got into the house and stole a pair of his pyjamas as a memento. But the worst incident, and one that finally pushed George to drastic measures, came the night George woke up to find two girls giggling under his bed. George had had enough. He installed electronically controlled gates, built up high walls around his residence and took off the sign that identified this as the Harrison residence.

Although on the surface George and Pattie’s relationship appeared headed for happily-ever-after, to those in the couple’s inner circle, there were some obvious differences that had the potential for creating discord. Pattie was all wide-eyed and outgoing, eager to be a part of any scene and, once she got over the lack of privacy, happy to go along for the very public life that was the Beatles’ universe. George, on the other hand, valued his privacy, was not the inveterate partygoer and was often happiest when shut up in his home studio with his music. He was beginning to show occasional glimpses of his somewhat puritanical, somewhat chauvinist demeanour. George was brought up in a traditional family where the father worked and the mother stayed home, kept the house and raised the children. While he did not come flat-out and demand that Pattie be barefoot and pregnant, there were early signs of manipulation in their relationship.

A prime example being the sudden increase in Pattie’s modelling work shortly after the couple got together. George would not too subtly, and often indelicately, suggest to Pattie that she was only getting the offers because she was with him and that she should reject them out of hand. Pattie stubbornly refused to give up her work and, although in hindsight George was probably right about the reason she was getting a lot of work, it seemed obvious that he had an ulterior motive.

George’s endless hours in his recording studio and music room had produced a number of songs that he felt would finally crack the stranglehold of songwriting held by John and Paul. But as the recording sessions on new Beatles singles and albums came and went, George’s frustration continued as the often heated and combative song selection process saw his ideas and songs rejected in favour of the admittedly Midas commercial touch Lennon and McCartney, singularly and collectively, held.

John Lennon once gave a reason why George could not break through the songwriting wall in those early days. ‘He had been left out because he had not really been a songwriter until that point.’

Consequently, while happy and somewhat settled in his personal life, George Harrison was not a happy camper by the time the Beatles began a European tour in June 1964 that would take them through to September. In the midst of that tour, A Hard Day’s Night opened in July to rave reviews in London.

While a by now almost choreographed backdrop of Beatlemania continued to put the Beatles on the map as they blitzed Denmark, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, the phenomenon of fame was becoming an increasingly tiresome and ultimately meaningless cross to bear. George felt particularly betrayed by the price celebrity had exacted on their ability as musicians.

‘I was disappointed that we got so famous, because as musicians, we were a really good band in the early days,’ he once explained. ‘The more fame that we got, the more the audience screamed and the more that we did just twenty- or thirty-minute sets of our latest singles, the musicianship kind of went out the window. We pigeonholed ourselves by the mania that was going on and the inability to perform for longer periods of time, because of the way it was.’

A return 26-date tour to the United States was a faceless blur of mammoth crowds, huge paydays and a demoralising series of huge baseball stadiums, endless limo rides, faceless hotels and the increasingly annoying press. And, to George’s recollection, individual incidents of that tour showed what happened when pop stardom collided with the dark side of real life.

A situation was discovered midway through the tour in which a mother had instructed her underage daughter to sneak into the hotel room of one of the Beatles, get in bed with him and then claim rape so that the band would be forced to pay a huge amount of money to keep this fabricated incident out of the press and the courts. There were also the occasional death threats, reportedly made by jealous boys whose girlfriends had thrown them over for the Beatles.

‘Those tours of the United States were crazy. That first big American trip, when we arrived in San Francisco in 1965, they wanted to give us a ticker-tape parade and all I could think of was the Kennedy assassination and I remember saying no, no, no. In Chicago they drove us through the ghettos in limos right after the black riots. In Montreal, they burned the British flag and Ringo received a death threat. In Los Angeles, some jealous boyfriends of some girls we met shot at our plane as we were leaving Los Angeles.’

Beatle records were selling in the millions. Concerts were selling out in minutes. Financially each member of the group was set for life. But as celebrity and fame continued to shove them forwards at lightning speed, George Harrison was slowly spiralling down into boredom and numbness.

Nineteen sixty-five was shaping up as more of the same as the Beatles, perhaps feeling the inevitable paranoia that their time was running out, were playing the total mercenaries. They said yes to every offer, which meant more albums, non-stop touring in America, the United Kingdom and Europe. But amid the chaos, George was finding 1965 a breakthrough year on a number of fronts.

In February 1965, the Beatles began work on their second film, Help!, according to the Beatles, much inferior to A Hard Day’s Night – a cartoonish romp replete with the requisite amount of mugging and music. Among the madness of Help! was a sequence in which a group of Indian musicians attempt to pick out Beatles songs on their instruments, which featured the sitar.

George was fascinated with the outrageous shape of the sitar and the haunting, other-worldly sound it made. So much so that he sent an assistant to a nearby shop to buy him one. When the instrument arrived, George sat down with the bemused group of musicians and attempted to play along with them. It would be the beginning of a lifelong infatuation with all things Indian.

George’s life experience would take a giant leap that year when he took LSD for the first time. To that point, George had indulged in soft drugs, marijuana and hashish, along with a rather consistent drinking habit. The group’s first experience with the psychedelic drug had all the makings of a bad trip that included frightening moments of being chased around London by a friend, who insisted on controlling every aspect of their first LSD experience; stopping off at a couple of clubs where the group got a surreal rush that produced the expected colours and melting scenery; and, by the end of the night, pure enlightenment for George.

‘For me it was like a flash,’ he once said of that experience. ‘It just opened up something inside of me, and I realised a lot of heavy things. From that moment on, I wanted to have that depth and clarity of perception all the time.’

George’s persistence in presenting his songs to the band finally began to gather some substantial victories. On the Help! soundtrack, George contributed the songs ‘I Need You’ and ‘You Like Me Too Much’. On the 1965 album Rubber Soul, he managed to get ‘Think for Yourself’ and the very mature (by George’s songwriting standards) ‘If I Needed Someone’ on the record. Nineteen sixty-five’s Revolver contained the George Harrison compositions ‘Taxman’, ‘Love You Too’ and ‘I Want to Tell You’.

Revolver was also the album in which George made his first strides in Indian music by contributing the haunting sitar lines to the song ‘Norwegian Wood’. The band was in the studio and, as the story goes, everybody was waiting for George to add the expected lead guitar lines to the piece. But George insisted that the nature of the song made it perfect for an alternative instrument and insisted that the sitar would be something new. John and Paul had to agree that it would make for a different Beatles sound and so gave George the go-ahead.

Following his introduction to the instrument in the film Help!, George had begun to dabble in the instrument, taking a few lessons in which he learned little more than how to hold the sitar and a few of the basics of playing. George knew enough, however, to add a lilting and primitively distinctive backing to the song.

George’s arrival as a contributing songwriter at any level could be laid at the feet of several theories. The obvious one was that he had matured as a songwriter to a point where John and Paul had to take his contributions seriously. Another had it that Lennon and McCartney were so burned-out that they were more willing to listen to George’s songs. The reality, according to John Lennon, was most likely a mixture of loyalty and a willingness to help George along.

‘I remember the day he [George] called to ask me for help on “Taxman”, one of his bigger songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along because that’s what he asked for. He came to me because he couldn’t go to Paul because Paul wouldn’t have helped him at that period. I didn’t really want to help him. I thought, ‘Oh no, don’t tell me I have to work on George’s stuff.’ But because I loved him and didn’t want to hurt him, when he called, I just sort of held my tongue and said OK.’

The Beatles, singularly and collectively, were beginning to crumble psychologically in the face of non-stop activity. The tours and the expected mania had become predictable and only rewarding on a financial level. George’s worst fears, that the band was becoming a parody of themselves and that their musical ambitions were being blunted by the fame, were becoming an increasing reality. George would insist that the band, musically, had much more to offer but not necessarily in a pure pop arena. Essentially the others agreed but they also all agreed that it was hard to get off the ride at its highest peak.

His relationship with Pattie continued to be his refuge of peace and legitimate feeling in a professional life that had become increasingly tumultuous. Typical of his quiet, matter-of-fact personality, George proposed to Pattie in the car on the way to a Christmas party being given by Brian Epstein. Pattie related that they were driving along, listening to the radio when George calmly turned to her, said he loved her very much and said he wanted to get married.

‘I think I just said yes or something like that. But inside, I was doing cartwheels.’

George and Pattie were married in a small civil ceremony in London on 21 January 1966. The couple honeymooned in Barbados, spending their time swimming, water-skiing and deep-sea fishing. Notoriously press-shy in his private life, George did an unexpected turnabout and willingly posed with his new bride for photographers who had tracked down the happy couple.

George and Pattie returned to London and got right back into the Beatles’ wild ride. What would turn out to be the band’s very last British concert was performed on 1 May 1966, in Wembley Stadium. Their latest single, ‘Paperback Writer’, was high in the charts and, as they were preparing for their next US tour, John was getting the band in all kinds of trouble by proclaiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The reponse was instantaneous in America. There were public record-burnings, public denouncements from several quarters and the kind of advance publicity the Beatles felt they did not need.

However, George gave those concerns only cursory interest. Because, mentally and emotionally, it appeared he was already on to what he felt were more important things. Whether it was because of his post-marriage settled nature, his increased use of LSD or a combination of both, George had evolved into a more forthcoming and giving person who was now more trusting to new experiences and new people. And so it was in a more mellow state that George, during a party in June 1966, met legendary sitar master Ravi Shankar. From the moment they met, Shankar found George to be ‘a straightforward, sweet young man’ with an intense curiosity.

‘From the moment we met, George was asking questions and I felt he was genuinely interested in Indian music and religion,’ revealed Shankar. ‘Then George expressed his desire to learn the sitar from me. I asked him if he could give time and total energy to work hard on it. He said he would do his best.’

Shankar was impressed with his sincerity and the fact that he did not come across as the typical arrogant rock star. And so, in the next week, Shankar came to George’s home.

‘He showed me the basics,’ recalled George. ‘How to hold the sitar, how to sit in the correct position, how to wear the pick on your finger and how to begin playing.’

At the end of the second lesson, Shankar suggested that, when his schedule permitted, George should come to India for a couple of months so that he could teach him in greater depths. George was looking forward to it.

Before they went to the States for the third time, the Beatles would do a swing through Japan and the Philippines. The usual parade of Beatlemania was balanced out by some unexpected thrills and chills that the group had not been prepared for. Prior to their appearances in Tokyo, an extremist student political group who felt rock’n’roll shows should not be staged in Japan made numerous assassination threats against the Beatles which in turn led to a level of security that even the jaded band was not used to. Armed guards were present everywhere the Beatles went. Elevators would not stop on the floor of the hotel the Beatles were staying at unless a key was inserted by an armed guard.

Things only got worse in the Philippines when a purported snub by the group of a luncheon with President Ferdinand Marcos’s wife, Imelda, resulted in more threats and government-organised street protests against the group.

Putting an ironic postscript on their Far East ordeal, George laughingly stated, ‘We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.’

The Beatles arrived in Chicago, Illinois, on 11 August 1966 for the beginning of their fourteen-city tour. At a press conference before the first concert at the Chicago International Amphitheater, John apologised for his Jesus remarks. The tour itself was yet another exercise in shallow expectations, with the band playing a faceless series of outdoor sports stadiums in front of predictably riotous fans and through questionable sound systems.

‘We got in a rut,’ said George of that last US tour. ‘There was no satisfaction at all.’

No one was happier than George when the Beatles finished the final date of the tour in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966. Physically and emotionally spent, George settled into his seat of the group’s chartered jet as it taxied down the San Francisco International Airport runway and into the skies, bound for London and home.

George sighed deeply as the plane headed across the pond. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘I’m not a Beatle any more.’