George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
Behind The Locked Door is Graeme Thomson’s rich, insightful account of George Harrison’s extraordinary life and career.
This Omnibus Enhanced digital edition an interactive Digital Timeline leads you through a collage of music, videos and images, displaying live performances, interviews, memorabilia and more.
As a Beatle, Harrison underwent a bewilderingly compressed early adulthood, buffeted by unprecedented levels of fame and success, from schoolboy to global superstar. "Beatlemania" offered remarkable experiences and opportunities, and yet dissatisfaction still gnawed within. His life became a quest for meaning and truth which travelled far beyond the parameters of his former band and his former self. This elegant, in-depth biography tracks these changes and conflicts, marking the struggle of walking a spiritual path lined with temptation.
Drawing on scores of interviews with close friends and collaborators, rigorous research and critical insight, Behind The Locked Door is a fascinating account of an often misunderstood man. As well as an intimate character study, it offers a full analysis of Harrison’s music, from his earliest songs for the Beatles to his landmark solo album All Things Must Pass, his work with The Traveling Wilburys and the posthumous Brainwashed. Behind The Locked Door provides the definitive account of a compelling, contradictory and enlightening life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on many new interviews with Harrison's close friends and musical collaborators, music journalist Thomson (Kate Bush: Under the Ivy) challenges the image of George Harrison as "the quiet Beatle," portraying the guitarist as a complex person trying to navigate a middle course between materiality and spirituality, and fame and reclusivity. In tedious and tiresome fashion, Thomson chronicles Harrison's life from his rather run-of-the mill childhood and his early days of making music with The Quarrymen to the beginnings of The Beatles, their rapid ascent to fame and their just as speedy descent. He explores Harrison's embrace of Eastern philosophy, his retirement to his Friar Park estate in England, and with meticulous detail, traces the making of each of Harrison's solo albums. Thomson shows that "Harrison didn't grow up wanting to be a pop star, or a singer, or a songwriter. He just wanted to play guitar." As Thomson observes, many of his friends and many music critics point out that in 1971, with the release of All Things Must Pass, Harrison was already at the top of the musical mountain and his career would move downhill from there. In the end, Thomson reveals very little new information about Harrison, but he succeeds in showing that the guitarist's greatest accomplishment was finding fulfillment every day in the simple joys of being "somewhere" in his life.
