George Harrison shares ‘real hell’ that inspired Here Comes the Sun for The Beatles’ Abbey Road

A “real hell” inspired the Abbey Road track, Here Comes the Sun, according to its writer, George Harrison.

The Beatles included Here Comes the Sun as the first song on the B-side of Abbey Road. Harrison would go on record as saying the song came from a “very heavy” place, with Eric Clapton’s influence on the song noted by Harrison in an interview with Rolling Stone UK. The Beatles member behind hit tracks like While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Something confirmed it was while in Clapton’s garden that he came up with Here Comes the Sun. The song is widely considered one of the best Beatles compositions.

Commenting on most of the songs featured on Abbey Road a short while before its release, Harrison suggested the song is “very simple”. He said: “Here Comes the Sun, the first cut on side two, is the other song I wrote for the album.

“It was written on a very nice sunny day in Eric Clapton’s garden. We’d been through real hell with business and it was all very heavy. Being in Eric’s garden felt like playing hooky from school. I found some sort of release and the song just came.

“It’s a bit like If I Needed Someone with that basic riff running through it. But it is very simple really.” Harrison’s comparison between Here Comes the Sun and If I Needed Someone, the song he wrote for Rubber Soul, delighted fans who had shared the newspaper excerpt online.

A post to the r/Beatles subreddit saw people suggest there may be a deeper connection with the themes present on both Rubber Soul and Abbey Road. One user wrote: “The Here Comes the Sun / If I Needed Somone and Abbey Road / Revolver insights are amazing.”

Though Harrison spoke of the “real hell” which went into making Here Comes the Sun, he was less positive about other songs which featured on the album. He noted Paul McCartney’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer as a song the band “spent a hell of a lot of time on”.

He also suggested Oh, Darling! was a song primarily made up of “Paul shouting”. Harrison did have plenty of praise for Ringo Starr’s Octopus’s Garden, though, adding it was “a really great song.”

He said: “I find very deep meaning in the lyrics which Ringo probably doesn’t even know about. It makes me realise that when you get deep into your consciousness, it’s very peaceful. So Ringo writes his cosmic songs without knowing it.”