George Harrison didn’t want a Beatles reunion – and it was fans’ fault

After The Beatles broke up in 1970, things were very turbulent between the band members. They had argued, disagreed about music, and endured legal battles. So, naturally, when they each started working on their own music separately, they got comfortable composing alone. But that didn’t stop fans from wanting the Fab Four to reunite. George Harrison was dead against this idea.

In 1986, Harrison appeared on an Australian TV news show, where he was quizzed about the possibility of a reunion between the three stars (at this time, John Lennon had been murdered six years prior).

He explained: “It’s best left as it was. With all those nice memories and the records are there. You know, you don’t want to see three old men hobbling around the stage pretending to be the Fab Four.”

The Quiet Beatle expressed the same opinion back in 1974 when he was asked about the thought of getting back together, just four years after the initial split.

And during this outburst, he placed the blame solely on The Beatles’ fans: “I can understand that the Beatles did nice things and it’s appreciated that people still like them. The problem comes when they want to live in the past, when they want to hold on to something. People are afraid of change.”

“People used us as an excuse to trip out,” Harrison said. “And we were the victims of that. That’s why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can all get silly again. But they don’t have consideration for our well-being when they say, ‘Let’s have the Fab Four again.’”

Things got even more stressful for Harrison in 1987 when he was invited to perform at the Prince’s Trust Concert.

He wasn’t aware at the time that Ringo Starr had also been enlisted for the event.

“I felt straightaway, somebody’s trying to set this up again,” Harrison said. “You know, it’s one thing going on as me. But if I’m going on as the Beatles, I want to be able to have some sort of control over it.”

There was kind of a Beatles reunion a decade later, however. In 1994, Harrison, Starr and Paul McCartney met up to film some new footage for their upcoming project The Beatles Anthology.

Together, they sat around and chatted about old times before playing a few songs together.

“It was just two acoustic guitars and me on brushes,” Starr said. He also confirmed the band played chunks of the songs Raunchy, Thinking of Linking and Blue Moon of Kentucky.

SOURCE