How many Beatles does it take to change a light bulb?

REVOLVER:JUST WHAT is it about The Beatles and the low-level feuds that are still being played out more than 40 years since they legally dissolved the unit?

Paul McCartney gets married on what would have been John Lennon’s 71st birthday. Meanwhile Yoko Ono (who wasn’t invited – what a surprise) pushes out a press release on the same day as the McCartney nuptials imploring us all “to take a moment to imagine a nourished and abundant world, where the world will live as one”, at precisely 1pm on November 1st.

Okay, it’s a daft idea even by Yoko’s standards, but what lifts this new “universal peace” initiative into hitherto unknown levels of crassness is the fact that the “official partner” of the event is the Hard Rock Cafe chain.

There is a pattern here: whenever one of the Beatles is involved some new product, it’s as if the other – or representatives thereof – suddenly start jumping up and down going “look at me, look at me” to somehow redress the media coverage.

Slipping quietly out during all of this is the most interesting Beatles artefact of the last few years. Martin Scorsese's masterful biopic Living In The Material Worldis a three-hour-plus exegesis of the "quiet Beatle". And the argument made here is that George Harrison was the most interesting Beatle who effectively kept Lennon and McCartney together long after they grew sick of each other.

While John was the smart one, Paul was the cute one and Ringo was the funny one, George struggled for his own space and wasn't truly recognised until his All Things Must Passtriple album came out in 1970. From their Hamburg days, Klaus Voormann talks about George "as the real catalyst in the band . . . bringing a peace between John and Paul".

Ironically, when things got really bad, the only thing John and Paul agreed on was that George’s solo songs were never going to threaten the band’s core song-writing axis.

A fair bit of Harrison's debut solo album was intended for later Beatles albums but turned down by John and Paul. Indeed, Harrison never forgave Lennon for not allowing Isn't It A Pityon to The White Album.

The real surprise in Scorsese’s film is the depiction of Harrison’s Catholic upbringing (a particularly grim one, in keeping with the times) prompting him to seek out the colourful “far-outness” of Indian mysticism. But he was never the “hippy Beatle”; when Harrison visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury expecting “all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic”, he was disgusted to find the area littered with middle-class LSD addicts. Deciding he could only ever do it for himself, he went for the meditation route.

What emerges here is a playful and archly humorous presence who once (before appearing at the Reading Rock Festival in 1973) went out to sweep the stage in front of thousands of people to settle a bet that no one would recognise him (no one did).

The film also includes the line of the year, from McCartney, who talks about the school he and George went to in Liverpool: “It was a real Dickensian building – in fact, Dickens had actually taught there.”

But what you get most from this terrific piece of work is how this often underestimated guitarist and songwriter, finding himself in the same group as two of the best ever songwriters who ever lived, with all the attritional ego wars that entailed, sacrificed himself to a degree to work as the ballast. But then George Harrison’s favourite light-bulb joke always was: “How many Beatles does it take to change a lightbulb? Four.”

See film clips and more at georgeharrison.com.

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