When author Philip Norman turned his attention to George Harrison for a 2023 biography, he had already written extensively about The Beatles, penning bestselling books on John Lennon and Paul McCartney, as well as Eric Clapton.
But writing about Harrison – the so-called “quiet Beatle” – proved more difficult, not just because of the man’s complexity, but because of Norman’s own troubled history with him.
Back in 2001, shortly after Harrison’s death, Norman wrote an obituary that sparked backlash. In it, he highlighted some of the guitarist’s less flattering traits, which many felt were inappropriate to air so soon after his passing. Looking back, Norman acknowledges the piece was poorly timed – but he doesn’t believe it was inaccurate.
“I wasn’t totally wrong in saying that he could be, as we say in this country, a bit of a miserable git and that he was a serial philanderer,” Norman later told The New York Times. “He was both of those things.”
That obituary lingered like a shadow over his later attempts to write about Harrison. When Norman began research for the 2023 biography, he hoped Harrison’s widow, Olivia, and son, Dhani, might contribute to the project. But the answer was a firm no.
“I didn’t realise this thing I’d written in 2001, when I didn’t know enough about George really to write an obituary of him, was still there,” Norman said. “It was undead. It was like a vampiric obituary.”
Norman insists he tried to make amends over the years, casting Harrison in a more sympathetic light in his Lennon and McCartney books. But the damage had already been done – and it didn’t help that Harrison himself had taken issue with Norman’s earlier work.
In particular, he disliked Norman’s 1981 book Shout! which he felt oversimplified the Fab Four. “That Philip Norman wrote that book because he was desperate to have an identity is probably closer to the truth,” Harrison told Q Magazine. “All these people who think they know everything… they don’t know anything.”
Despite the friction, Norman found Harrison to be a fascinating and often contradictory figure. On one hand, Harrison embraced Eastern philosophy, rejected the trappings of fame, and staged the Concert for Bangladesh, one of the first major music events for charity.
On the other, he was fiercely private, known for holding grudges, and famously wrote “Taxman” – a scathing take on the British tax system. “George, in his sort of hippie mode, railed against the material world,” Norman observed, “and yet he was the first pop star to complain about income tax.”
The contradictions extended into his personal life as well, including a well-documented affair with Maureen Starkey, the wife of his bandmate Ringo Starr – a move that broke the unspoken rule among the Beatles not to interfere in each other’s marriages.
For Norman, Harrison’s complexity is what ultimately made him such a compelling subject. “He could be difficult. He could be distant. But he could also be deeply noble,” he said. “That’s what makes George so human – and so worth writing about.”