He was always known as the shy one. But as this landmark biography reveals, George
On a transatlantic flight in the late 1960s, George Harrison – the 'Quiet Beatle' – was sitting in first class with his eyes closed, chanting in an undertone. A cabin attendant asked him if he wanted anything. 'F*** off!' George snapped. 'Can't you see I'm meditating?'
After the Beatles discovered mysticism and India, George took to obsessive chanting and spinning a prayer-wheel. But far from bringing the promised inner peace, it seemed only to make him moody and irritable.
'He wanted so much to be a spiritual being but could never reach the level he wanted to,' his wife Pattie said. Ringo Starr remarked his friend had 'two bags – the bag of beads and the bag of cocaine'.
Harrison recognised this, telling one of his spiritual advisers: 'Maybe it's something to do with me being Pisces, one fish going this way, the other that way. There are periods when I can't stop chanting, and other periods when I turn into a demon again.'
Source: Philip Norman Beatles Biographer/dailymail.co.uk
