While my sitar gently weeps: How V&A broke Beatles’ gem
He WAS the Beatle whose reverence for Indian music and spirituality was legendary.
But that has not, alas, insulated one of George Harrison’s most prized possessions from suffering a shattering fate while in the care of one of Britain’s greatest museums.
For I can disclose that Harrison’s sitar was inadvertently dropped and smashed when entrusted to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
The accident, I’m told, was so severe that the gourd — the sitar’s bulbous ‘resonance chamber’ — came completely away from the rest of the instrument.
‘It was dropped by a member of staff,’ I’m told. ‘It hit the ground and the gourd bounced away.’
Harrison, whose Beatle works included While My Guitar Gently Weeps, became transfixed by the sitar after hearing the work of Indian maestro Ravi Shankar in 1965.
He mastered the sitar sufficiently well to play it on the Beatles’ song, Norwegian Wood, which was widely regarded as the first pop song to feature one. It led to what Shankar called ‘the Great Sitar explosion’ of 1966-7, with the Rolling Stones among those including the instrument in their music. The Norwegian Wood sitar sold at auction in Los Angeles in 2017 for £47,000.
The sitar loaned to the V& A was the one Harrison played when recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
I understand that the V&A was obliged to make ‘ an awkward telephone call’ to George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, who has lived an almost reclusive life since Harrison succumbed to lung cancer aged only 58 in 2001.
‘She just had to accept it was broken,’ I’m told.
The museum says only that the sitar has been returned to ‘its private lender’, adding that it ‘ has been restored to the highest possible standard’ and remains ‘recognisably the sitar it was’.