Having any member of The Beatles on an artist roster should be a record label’s dream. The Fab Four had practically invented the idea of massive viability for the record business, and surely any one of them could create some of that magic again, no matter what decade they were in. Even after paying tribute to some of the people he’d been in business with, George Harrison was still not given any leeway when working on Somewhere in England, his first album of the 1980s.
For the past few years, Harrison had been riding high off the strength of more laid-back material on albums like George Harrison and Thirty-Three and ⅓, so the next album was expected to be something much bigger than before. Instead of letting Harrison get by on his spiritual hymns to a higher power, his label had a slightly different angle to work with.
As the times started to change, Harrison’s label was looking for the mathematical equation for making the perfect single for the pop market. Harrison recalled being told the specific song the label was looking for, telling Creem, “Other people were saying, ‘Now, look, radio stations are having all these polls done in the street to find out what constitutes a hit single, and they’ve decided a hit single is a song of love gained or lost directed at 14-to-20-year-olds.’ And I said, ‘Shit, what chance does that give me?’”.
After making an entire album of new material, Harrison was told to go back to the drawing board to muster up something with hit potential. Dropping some of his greatest songs from this era, like ‘Flying Hour’, Harrison went off to work with a song that his label might have wanted, writing ‘Blood From A Clone’ for the opening track.
Though the song does have a more uptempo groove than most of the other songs on the record, the lyrics are incredibly biting, as Harrison tears into his label for making him record something like this in the first place. With every verse, Harrison is channelling the same snide energy that he had in Beatles songs like ‘Taxman’ and ‘Think For Yourself’, as he seethes with anger about being unable to write the songs he wants.
The first verse is borderline uncomfortable, as Harrison sings about his record company not wanting anything sounding like new wave, instead insisting on the bottom line. Although Harrison should be praised for sticking to his guns, it took massive guts to make the opening track to the revised version a glorified middle finger at the suits who asked him to do this.
Even with the massive overhaul, Harrison would only get one hit out of the deal, with ‘All Those Years Ago’ becoming a major hit on the charts following the death of fellow ex-Beatle John Lennon. Across the rest of the album, Harrison proved himself to show his age in more ways than one, including the song ‘Unconsciousness Rules’ criticising the younger generation for going to discotheques every night.
The decade would turn around for Harrison, stepping back to work on various film projects before returning to the fold as a member of Traveling Wilburys and having another smash hit of his own on ‘Got My Mind Set On You’. Moral of the story: labels should just let people like George Harrison do whatever the hell he wants. Otherwise, the new album might end up sounding like this.
