The Fab Four's row

An outburst of anger from the most peaceable of the Beatles, one that could have had dramatic consequences for the history of the Liverpool band. The episode came to light in the pages of the book “The Beatles: Get Back”, put together by British music critic John Harris by transcribing the 120 hours of recordings that Peter Jackson unearthed in the Liverpool quartet's archives to make the eponymous series about the “Let It Be” sessions, broadcast on Disney+. The footage that emerged from the documentary shows, with unprecedented clarity, the atmosphere inside the Apple Studios during the January 1969 sessions, when the Beatles recorded the album they would go on to release on 8 May 1970, by which time the band had already announced its split. There's no shortage of lighthearted, cheerful moments among John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, who by then already had ten studio albums behind them and had just released the soundtrack to “Yellow Submarine”. But there are also glimpses of a tension that hints at how the group was by then undermined by an increasingly frayed set of internal relationships, with an ever more precarious balance of leadership, roles and recognition. The story of the Fab Four was, in short, drawing to a close.

Rehearsals begin at Twickenham Film Studios with a clear idea, championed above all by Paul McCartney: to go back to playing live, recovering a sense of directness after years of studio work. But the project immediately runs into internal resistance. George Harrison is the most skeptical, while John Lennon seems less invested than he once was. The footage shows growing friction, especially between Harrison and McCartney. The clash, also documented in the film, isn't purely musical: it's about the very way of being in the Beatles. Harrison feels sidelined, forced to execute rather than contribute. And his frustration explodes just a few days later.

On 10 January 1969, Harrison walks out of the studio. It isn't a theatrical gesture, but a decision that had been building amid repeated tensions: arguments with McCartney over the direction of the songs, friction with Lennon, and a sense that his own songwriting work wasn't being given due consideration.

It's at this point that the outrageous idea surfaces: firing the guitarist. Lennon is furious and openly floats the idea of a replacement, bringing in another six-string ace: “What George did,” he says, “is a festering wound. We let him go deep without even putting a bandage on it. If he doesn't come back by next week, we'll ask Eric Clapton to play on the record.”

The idea is less far-fetched than it might seem. Clapton, after all, was already orbiting the Beatles' world, having played on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, the very masterpiece written by his friend George Harrison and included on the White Album.

The proposal, however, doesn't find any support. McCartney and Ringo Starr are against it, a sign that, despite everything, the group's cohesion isn't yet completely broken. After a few days — about a week — Harrison returns. The sessions continue, moving to Apple Studios and finally taking on a more structured shape. They record hundreds of hours of music and improvisations, giving rise to dozens of songs, many of which will soon be used for “Abbey Road”. Harrison's return allows the record project to be completed — an album initially meant to be called “Get Back”, which will ultimately be titled “Let It Be”.

But the cracks won't fully disappear. The marginalization the guitarist felt during his final years in the Beatles — the dominance of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, the difficulty in getting his own compositions heard — will find an immediate answer after the split. Harrison stockpiles material for years and pours it, in 1970, into the monumental “All Things Must Pass”, a double album (plus a third disc of instrumentals) that relaunches his standing as a songwriter and solo artist. The record isn't just proof of his maturity, but also an implicit statement: it shows just how much creative space had been kept bottled up within the Beatles. Songs like “My Sweet Lord”, “Beware Of Darkness” and “What Is Life” make it clear that Harrison was no longer a peripheral figure, but a fully mature and inspired songwriter.

Following the breakup of the Beatles, the relationship between George Harrison and John Lennon would remain complicated. Bound by a deep friendship since their earliest days, the two had already experienced growing tensions from the late Sixties onward, heightened by LSD use and the band's internal wear and tear. The rift that erupted during the 1969 sessions flared up again in the early Seventies, despite collaborations such as Harrison's contribution to Lennon's “Imagine” LP. The break unfolds gradually. Lennon goes so far as to publicly downplay Harrison's role, while Harrison, in his autobiography “I, Me, Mine”, effectively leaves his friend out. A slight that Lennon takes as an affront. Lennon's death in December 1980 sadly rules out any chance of reconciliation. The following year, however, Harrison writes “All Those Years Ago”, also bringing in McCartney and Starr. A kind of belated collective reconciliation, a posthumous dialogue that restores, at least in part, the complexity of that bond. A shared history too strong and too important to be undone by the conflicts that ran through it.

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13/04/2026