THE CLASSIC SONG GEORGE HARRISON WROTE IN 1969

In 1969, George Harrison would write one of the Beatles greatest songs.
These days, by around 1969, being a member of the Fab Four was a gruelling task with legal disputes, business issues and a general sense of impending pressure.

After a particularly gruelling time, George wrote one of his most beloved songs, Abbey Road’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’. He headed to Clapton’s house in Ewhurst in Surrey. In The Beatles’ Anthology, George picks up the story, “‘Here Comes The Sun’ was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘Sign that’.”

“Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever; by the time spring comes you really deserve it,” he added. “So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go and see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes The Sun’.”

Speaking at the time, George also suggests the song has a kindred soul in ‘If I Needed Someone’ and The Byrds song ‘Bells of Rhymeney’: “It was written on a nice sunny day this early summer, in Eric Clapton’s garden. We’d been through hell with business, and on that day I just felt as though I was sagging off, like from school, it was like that. I just didn’t come in one day. And just the release of being in the sun and it was just a really nice day. And that song just came. It’s a bit like If I Needed Someone, you know, like that basic sort of riff going through it is the same as all those ‘Bells Of Rhymney’ sort of Byrd-type things.”

The poetry of the moment is captured in George’s songwriting and sees the guitarist expertly contain the joy of spring and sunshine.

In the studio, the song would use a then-recent invention from Robert Moog—the synthesiser. Speaking in Anthology, George said of the choice: “I first heard about the Moog synthesiser in America. I had to have mine made specially because Mr Moog had only just invented it. It was enormous, with hundreds of jackplugs and two keyboards.”

“But it was one thing having one, and another trying to make it work,” he continued. “There wasn’t an instruction manual, and even if there had been it would probably have been a couple of thousand pages long. I don’t think even Mr Moog knew how to get music out of it; it was more of a technical thing. When you listen to the sounds on songs like ‘Here Comes The Sun’, it does do some good things, but they’re all very kind of infant sounds.”