Archive on Four: All Things Must Pass at 50
BBC Radio 4

How relentlessly the Beatles anniversaries pile up. It seems only the other day that we were celebrating the half-century of The White Album (2018). Since then, commemorations of Abbey Road (1969), the band’s final collapse and the posthumous Let It Be (both 1970) have been and gone. Now comes the fiftieth anniversary of by far the most commercially successful of the post-split cache of solo records: George Harrison’s sprawling triple album, All Things Must Pass.

When, in the mid 1970s, Lennon and McCartney’s less conspicuous sidekick briefly oversaw his own label he made a point of christening it Dark Horse Records. For Harrison, as Michael Palin recalled, was the darkest of dark horses – “the silent Beatle” in press mythologising, but avid to talk once the yoke of Fab Four-dom had fallen away. He “felt stifled”, Palin argued, while Harrison himself had been pulled from the vault to note that the record’s gargantuan size was simply the result of lack of space for his own compositions on Beatles discs.