Here Comes the Sun – The Beatles
While we are heading into winter and can anticipate fewer sunny days, we are looking forward to an end to the social distancing and quarantining that has so changed our daily lives. This would be the sunshine we seek in the future, a release from confinement and bans on human contact. George Harrison too was seeking to escape the tedious business affairs of Apple that had consumed the Fab Four after the death of Brian Epstein, he had also recently been busted for possession of marijuana and was rapidly becoming part of menage a trois between himself, his wife Pattie Boyd, and Eric Clapton. He wrote Here Comes the Sun in Clapton’s garden at Hurtwood Edge, Surrey, in April 1969, for George it had been a long cold winter, the companionship he had enjoyed with his band mates was dissipating, and he sought the sunshine of a successful solo career, and the intimacy of a loving relationship. Here Comes the Sun reflects all the warmth and accessabiity of a George Harrison song, but it was also one of the most cleverly orchestrated tracks on the Beatles Abbey Road album, featuring violas, cellos, double bass, piccolos, flutes, clarinets, a moog synthesiser, and acoustic and electric guitars, it became a Beatles classic, and Rolling Stone magazine described it thus “ a graceful anthem of hope amid difficult realities” – how appropriate right now.
In the video George is accompanied by the late Peter Ham, guitarist with the band Badfinger, can you imagine what the Fab Four on the Abbey Road crosswalk would look like if they were socially distanced:
4The Record 