George Harrison
All Things Must Pass 50th Anniversary
Timely revisit of Harrison’s post-Beatle masterpiece
When The Beatles called it a day at the dawn of the 1970s, fans were still in a state of shock as George (aka ‘The Quiet One’) released a triple album boxset of his own just a few months later. These tracks had been previously turned down from his former band’s LPs, but now it was like the cork shooting from a bottle of Champagne – where had all these songs been hiding?
Extra discs in the special edition of Abbey Road and audio from the Let It Be sessions revealed that some of the songs here were in fact rehearsed by The Beatles years beforehand, but they didn’t see the light of day until All Things Must Pass was released in November 1970.
George’s son Dhani takes the executive producer’s chair for this remix of the original, which is available in various packages with multifarious extras in some of the more deluxe versions. Dhani is on record as saying he wanted to make his father’s work sound more contemporary and generally give it a dust off and polish, and that’s exactly what we find here.
Sensibly, Dhani hasn’t changed too much – the vocals on Isn’t It A Pity, for example, sound more plaintive to our ears during an A/B with the original mix – but there’s nothing here that detracts from the brilliance of the original. The whole album merely sounds cleaner and crisper and it’s a pure joy to listen to these recordings once again.
Standout track: Beware Of Darkness
For fans of: John, Paul, George and Ringo