![\"George](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/cc00109f9f18532740fb4b7558285a7c7e80bbe3\/0_78_4113_2467\/master\/4113.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=3ad037d9de5aa919ca614e381a69a23a\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nLet\u2019s call it the Riddle of the Dark Horse: what do you get if you cross a Monkee, two Beatles, the man they called God, Paul McCartney\u2019s banjo, India\u2019s musical elite and a film about a mad professor spying on a Biba girl called Penny Lane?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer is Wonderwall Music<\/a>. Released on 1 November 1968, three weeks before the White Album<\/a>, George Harrison\u2019s heartfelt, happily eccentric film soundtrack was the first solo record by a Beatle, the first album on the Apple label and a world music crossover before such a notion even existed. That it later lent its name to a Britpop anthem<\/a> is easily the least interesting thing about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Newly rereleased in a boxset of Harrison\u2019s solo work, Wonderwall Music encompasses tambura drones, Vedic chants, skiffle, ragtime, clip-clopping country, wah-wah squalls, woozy Mellotron, experimental sonic collage and, on Ski-ing, 100 seconds of Eric Clapton at his most raggedly explosive. The sound of Harrison\u2019s musical curiosity taking flight, it is also an implicit expression of his disaffection within the Beatles, perhaps even an intimation of the beginning of the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Beatles ceased touring in August 1966, Harrison spent six weeks in India with Ravi Shankar<\/a>, an immersion that led to a chain reaction of musical and spiritual epiphanies. On his return, his contribution to Sgt Pepper was the quietly assertive Within You Without You; much of the album left him cold. He was scarcely more enthusiastic about Magical Mystery Tour. While McCartney worked on the title track in the studio, Harrison produced coloured crayons from his painted sheepskin jacket and started drawing pictures. \u201cMy problem, basically, was that I was in another world,\u201d he later said. \u201cI didn\u2019t really belong; I was just an appendage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Little wonder he jumped at an invitation, from American director Joe Massot, to compose music for Wonderwall, a film starring Jane Birkin as the objectified model who sends her oddball neighbour, Mr Collins (Jack MacGowran), into a voyeuristic frenzy. With its pop-art palette, psychedelic sex scenes, dingy domesticity and an uncredited Anita Pallenberg, Wonderwall is a curious period piece, less Blow-Up<\/a> than Come Down. \u201cIt\u2019s aged badly,\u201d Birkin says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t very interesting! I was disappointed, but there are rather wonderful decors. And George was lovely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Massot, who died in 2002, sought original instrumental music for the film\u2019s many dialogue-free scenes, and promised Harrison a free hand. \u201cGeorge took advantage of this by including a lot of Indian music in his score,\u201d says John Barham, who worked on the project as arranger, player and a kind of conceptual interlocutor. Having studied at the feet \u2013 literally \u2013 of Shankar, Harrison\u2019s understanding of Indian music had deepened beyond the naive sitar burr heard three years previously on the Beatles\u2019 Norwegian Wood. He viewed Wonderwall Music as \u201cpartly an excuse for a musical anthology to help spread the word\u201d, he said. \u201cI used all these instruments that weren\u2019t as familiar to western people as they are now, like shehnais, santoor, sarod, surbahars, tabla tarangs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heavily spiced with Indian flavours it may be, but the album is a beguiling mixture of competing passions. Visiting Twickenham film studios, Harrison \u201cspotted\u201d each scene, marking where the music would be inserted, then working up basic themes at his home in Esher in Surrey. Initial recordings were made at Abbey Road on 22 and 23 November 1967, with harmonica maestro Tommy Reilly, session mainstay Jim Sullivan<\/a>, and the Remo Four, a Liverpool quartet from Brian Epstein\u2019s Nems stable. The Beatles\u2019 manager had been dead only three months; Harrison may have felt the need to maintain a connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe recorded backing tracks to accompany certain points in the film,\u201d says Remo Four drummer Roy Dyke. \u201cGeorge had timed it all with a stopwatch: \u2018We need one minute and 35 seconds with a country and western feel.\u2019 Or, \u2018We need a rock thing for exactly two minutes.\u2019 Nothing was really written. We\u2019d talk over ideas he wanted, play something, and he\u2019d say, \u2018That\u2019s good, keep that. I like the piano there.\u2019 It was very experimental. The idea was to set an atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of the results are lovely: the stately piano waltz of Red Lady Too<\/a>; the richly cinematic Wonderwall to Be Here<\/a>, on which Tony Ashton\u2019s rippling piano melody is framed by Barham\u2019s strings. The exotically funky On the Bed was inspired by a visit Harrison had made the previous year to BBC Television Centre, where Barham and Shankar were working on the music for Jonathan Miller\u2019s production of Alice in Wonderland<\/a>. \u201cWe were recording a scene where Ravi soloed and I played an accompanying Indian jhala [a rapid climactic flourish] texture on piano,\u201d Barham says. \u201cGeorge was fascinated by the combination of sitar and piano. Back at Abbey Road, I played flugelhorn over George\u2019s jhala. Later that day, Big Jim Sullivan, who was recording with Tom Jones, happened to drop in and played bass on the same track. It was a free atmosphere on those sessions. They were very creative and enjoyable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"George](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/62f6971655f17df044d0dadad7d1aa99f0036f74\/0_0_4767_6464\/master\/4767.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=2304df5411dac7917fdf2bc16b8016e4\")
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