This is Love: The George Harrison Club for Fiendish Thingies | Page 17 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The Times published an interview with Olivia on the 24th that is behind a paywall. The Friar Park Soul Club tumblr posted excerpts:

Part 1:

However, this project [the Apple Years Box set], masterminded by their son Dhani, now a 36 year old musician, forced her to listen afresh, making her wish she had told her husband more frequently how beautiful his songs are. “I hope I told him enough”

When they met did she consider him a Beatle? “I never did, it’s the strangest thing. When I was a teenager and he was a Beatle, yes of course, but when I met him it was completely different experience. He always went directly to the person he was with and that somehow made you bypass the concept of who he was. Even within that intense fane you wouldn’t feel :’I’m sitting in front of a Beatle.’ George always said being a Beatle was ‘just like a suit I wore for a while.”

They were both from close working class families and shared a dignified attitude to wealth and fame. Extra Texture , the first album Harrison made after they fell in love, wasn’t rapturous but introspective. Olivia is described as his way out of the darkness of the drug-addled Hollywood celebrity scene. “The songs that he wrote when I first met him, they’re very personal, ” she says. “About a particular night, I can still see the night, the room, the person in the room.”

Part 2:

They decamped from Los Angeles to Friar park, a Gothic mansion in Oxfordshire where Olivia has lived ever since, figuratively saving his life from its previous course, Thee she gave him a much longed for child . ([Pattie] Boyd, his previous wife, suffered from infertility). It’s hard, I say, given his level of fame, to imagine him in such fatherly domesticity.

“You mean doing the school run? He did. He used to be there handing out oranges at half-time. Being a dad was something he loved. He just loved that time. Don’t forget, from the age of 17 they were in Hamburg. All night long they hammered the stage. He always said, ‘We worked the hardest.’ Nobody else did an album, then a tour, then another album, then made a movie, another album, another tour, it was nonstop. it was like a huge wave of energy that at some point here just sort of rolled in and was time to enjoy life that was less frenetic.”

Making his own breakfast? “Well, he’d have to if he wanted to eat.” She laughs. It’s comments like this that make you realise she wasn’t a long suffering wife. As slight as she still is, she had strength for them both. I tell her I’m surprised at her calm authority. I assumed she didn’t have the fame of Yoko or Linda out of shyness. “Don’t forget, they were in the limelight, at its height. I met George 4 years ago next month. We both had a normal life and a really rich life. If we had met four years earlier it would have been a whole other story. I’m glad he had time and we had time to for him to sit down and play music with people he loved and not be in the thick of that mania.”

Part 3:

Did she chose isolation too? “Well I never imagined isolation, but he [George] always wanted to be in beautiful places, with nature. That’s not to say we were alone. He had so many friends. We always had a great gang of people and family too.”

Would she ever move put of Friar Park? “I sort of feel like it’s too late to move now. There’s too much stuff : what would I do? She laughs. Included in the “stuff” are so many boxes of his tapes that no one has yet gone through them all. “And there’s the beautiful garden we worked on, that would be a wrench.”

Does she go there to feel closer to him? “No. I don’t go anywhere to feel close to him. If you love someone it never changes. The physical experience changes, and not to say it’s easy. I wish he was sitting right here and talking to you instead of me. I certainly wouldn’t be doing this and you and him would be having such a great time. But he wanted his music out. George was just embarking on that retrospective of his musical life – he never called it a career, he said that was the wrong word for him- but time ran out and he died.

“Dhani wanted to do it and felt a tremendous responsibility to do it. There’s a huge archive of material that needs working on. You can’t just let tapes degrade and never be heard again.” In the sleeve notes to The Apple Years,Dhani writes that in working with these songs , “I have learnt more about my father that he ever dared tell me.”

“Yes, I thought that was funny too,” she says. “I though George shared a lot with him, much more. Maybe it was a prescient thought of, ‘I’m not going to hold anything back.’ He really did give him a lot of instruction on everything in life. So I don’t know what Dhani’s thinking about there. Maybe he’s just curious. He did express a lot in his music that he didn’t express in life. He wouldn’t want to talk about things, but he would write a song that would have more personal revelations in it than I would ever want to say. I would think, ‘How could you say that? It’s so intimate,’ but that was his way of expressing himself. Thank goodness he did.”

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Examiner article on the George Fest, with reactions from fans.

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Article on George at Pitchfork: Notes You Never Hear: The Metaphysical Loneliness of George Harrison

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Rolling Stone interview with Dhani about George’s archives.

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WogBlog post on Olivia’s guest spot on BBC Radio, during which she played a minute of a demo of George’s “Fear of Flying .”

Here’s a YouTube video of the demo.

[x-posted to the news]

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Olivia and Dhani at the 2014 LACMA Art + Film Gala honoring Barbara Kruger and Quentin Tarantino (Picture credit: Rich Polk)

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