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Sun 16 February 2025 15:00, UK
George Harrison was never one to stick with straight-ahead rock and roll. He had his own set of musical tastes, and it wasn’t out of the question for him to spend most of his time making mellow versions of pop tunes than trying to match what Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen were doing in their prime. He always saw his lead playing from a songwriter’s perspective, but as he went for his comeback in the late 1980s, he knew that the new kids on the scene were going to force him to come correct.
Granted, there’s a good chance that anyone would have settled for a Harrison album that was some degree of quality at that point. After all, he had spent the last few years sounding like he’d rather be anywhere but in the recording studio, and when listening to what turned up on Gone Troppo, all of that spiritual wisdom that came from his early years was either gone or had grown completely cynical over the years.
But when Harrison hooked up with Jeff Lynne, he was never going to get anywhere back peddling. His self-titled album may have been a fun soft-rock experience, but for Cloud Nine, Lynne helped the former Beatle get back in touch with what made him so beloved to begin with, usually coating the record in as many BEatles touches as he could on tracks like ‘When We Was Fab.’
This is still a Harrison album, though, and that meant him taking shots where he saw fit. The young man who had thrown a few punches at his higher-ups on ‘Taxman’ had only had a few grey hairs pop up in the meantime, and when listening to a song like ‘Devil’s Radio,’ he seems to be going after various corporations that try to clog up everyone’s televisions with meaningless schlock that will only make us more confused and paranoid.
This kind of tune may not have felt out of place on any of his earlier records, but the guitar tone is much more in line with rock than what turned on tracks like ‘Circles’ years before. Since this also preceded the Traveling Wilburys by one year, Harrison felt that the main inspiration for him getting back into music was seeing what people like Dave Stewart had been doing in the meantime.
While everyone knows Stewart as the beard behind Eurythmics, Harrison knew he needed to get back into rock when watching him perform, saying, “I sort of spent a bit of time with Dave Stewart, checking out his live show on what was that tour called? Revenge. The Revenge Tour was coming around England, and I went to a couple of shows and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can write these.’ So I wrote a couple of rockers.”
It’s still George Harrison, which means the term “rock” is used very loosely, but it’s still nice to hear some genuine energy in his tracks. Even some of his best albums could get stuck in a holding pattern of having too many ballads, but this was a return to the kind of energetic fun that made tracks like ‘Let It Down’ feel so massive and gave ‘Wah-Wah’ that rush of energy when All Things Must Pass came out.
And for a song with this kind of subject matter, Harrison needed to find at least a little bit of fire in his belly to stick it to those who come on TV and take pleasure in making people more confused about scared about the world by overtly lying and exaggerating all of their problems. Since every subsequent generation has yet to learn that lesson, though, it’s probably for the best to keep Harrison’s lessons in mind.
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