In 2023, biographer Philip Norman published a book about George Harrison. Norman has previously released biographies about Harrison’s bandmates, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but he had an odd relationship with Harrison. The Beatle spoke negatively about one of Norman’s books, and Norman wrote a controversial obituary for Harrison. Norman said that in learning more about Harrison for the biography, he found that he was full of contradictions.
George Harrison’s biographer said the musician was full of contradictions
After Harrison’s death in 2001, Norman wrote an obituary in which he pointed out some of the musician’s less flattering traits. He said that while he has some regrets about that, he wasn’t wrong in the way he characterized the Beatle.
“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 told The New York Times. “He was both of those things.”
Norman said that Harrison was a paradox in most spheres of his life.
“George, in his sort of hippie mode, railed against the material world,” he said. “And yet he was the first person — the first pop star, certainly — to write a song complaining about income tax. He could rise to the height of nobility, which he did with the Concert for Bangladesh, which was the first of those major demonstrations of conscience in the rock community. And yet he also broke the first law of the Beatles, which is you don’t sleep with another Beatle’s wife, which was with his big friend in the band, Ringo.”
Philip Norman has regrets about the obituary he wrote about the Beatle
Though Norman thought he was correct in his depiction of Harrison, he admitted it was “very badly timed.” Because of it, Harrison’s wife, Olivia, and son, Dhani, refused to speak to him for the book.
“I had thought I’d be making amends all these years for that very ill-advised obituary by very sympathetically considering him in the Lennon and McCartney books, and then in the [Eric] Clapton book,” he said. “But then I didn’t realize this thing that I’d written in 2001, when I didn’t know enough about George, really, to write an obituary of him, was still there. It was undead. It was like a vampiric obituary. And I realized there was no real point in asking them because they couldn’t possibly say yes.”
George Harrison didn’t hold a favorable opinion of his future biographer
Harrison, of course, never saw the obituary, but he still did not hold a high opinion of Norman. He had problems with Norman’s book Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation because he thought Norman placed the four Beatles into overly neat categories.
“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. What it makes me realize is that there’s so much that they’ve written about The Beatles that is wrong.”
