Wonderwall Music
Wonderwall Music is the debut solo studio album by the English musician George Harrison and the soundtrack to the 1968 film Wonderwall, directed by Joe Massot. Released in November 1968, it was the first solo album by a member of the Beatles, and the first album issued on the band's Apple record label. The tracks are mostly instrumental pieces, with some featuring non-English language vocals and one track with English lyrics, mostly short musical vignettes. Following his Indian-styled songs for the Beatles since 1966, he used the film score to further promote Indian classical music by introducing rock audiences to instruments that were relatively little-known in the West – including shehnai, sarod, tar shehnai, tanpura and santoor. The Indian pieces are contrasted by Western musical selections, in the psychedelic rock, experimental, country and ragtime styles.
Harrison recorded the album between November 1967 and February 1968, with sessions taking place in London and Bombay. One of his collaborators on the project was classical pianist and orchestral arranger John Barham, while other contributors include Indian classical musicians Aashish Khan, Shivkumar Sharma, Shankar Ghosh and Mahapurush Misra. The Western music features contributions from Tony Ashton and his band the Remo Four, as well as guest appearances by Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. Harrison recorded many other pieces that appeared in Wonderwall but not on the soundtrack album, and the Beatles' 1968 B-side "The Inner Light" also originated from his time in Bombay. Although the Wonderwall project marked the end of Harrison's direct involvement with Indian music as a musician and songwriter, it inspired his later collaborations with Ravi Shankar, including the 1974 Music Festival from India.
The album cover consists of a painting by American artist Bob Gill in which, as in Massot's film, two contrasting worlds are separated by a wall, with only a small gap allowing visual access between them. Harrison omitted his own name from the list of performing musicians, leading to an assumption that he had merely produced and arranged the music. The 2014 reissue of Wonderwall Music recognises his contributions on keyboards and guitar. The album was first remastered for CD release in 1992, for which former Apple executive Derek Taylor supplied a liner-note essay.
While viewed as a curiosity by some rock music critics, Wonderwall Music is recognised for its inventiveness in fusing Western and Eastern sounds, and as being a precursor to the 1980s world music trend. The album's title inspired that of Oasis' 1995 hit song "Wonderwall". Harrison's full soundtrack for the film was made available on DVD in early 2014, as part of the two-disc Wonderwall Collector's Edition. In September that year, the album was reissued in remastered form as part of Harrison's Apple Years 1968–75 box set, with the addition of three bonus tracks.
Background
first met Joe Massot while the Beatles were filming Help! in early 1965. He agreed to write the musical score for Massot's film Wonderwall in October 1967, after the Bee Gees had become unavailable. It was Harrison's first formal music project outside the Beatles and coincided with his continued immersion in Indian classical music. Since 1966, this association with India had given Harrison a distinct musical identity beside the band's primary songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. While he had minimal interest in the Beatles' main projects during 1967 – the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and their television film Magical Mystery Tour – Harrison led the group in terms of their shared philosophical direction, as his bandmates followed him in embracing Transcendental Meditation under the guidance of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.Steve Rabey, , The Huffington Post, 9 October 2011.Harrison viewed Wonderwall at Twickenham Film Studios with Massot and was intrigued by the storyline. The film's premise concerns a lonely professor and his increasing obsession with his female neighbour, a fashion model named Penny Lane, whom he spies on via a hole in the wall separating their apartments. In the context of 1960s Swinging London, the contrast between their existences symbolised the division between traditional norms and the younger generation's progressive thinking. In his soundtrack for the film, Harrison conveyed this contrast further in terms of the duality between psychedelia and his Hindu-aligned spiritual convictions. According to author Simon Leng: "The lack of dialogue left acres of room for music to speak, and a soupçon of cosmic apotheosis also helped... Wonderwall touched on themes that would come to preoccupy George Harrison – critically, the objectification of celebrities and the shallowness of fame."
Concept and composition
Given full artistic control by Massot, Harrison approached the project as an opportunity to further educate rock and pop audiences in aspects of Indian music.George Harrison, in The Beatles, p. 280. Having incorporated sitar, tanpura, swarmandal, dilruba and tabla in his work with the Beatles, Harrison sought to include less well-known Indian musical instruments.Timothy White, "George Harrison – Reconsidered", Musician, November 1987, p. 56. Among these, the oboe-like shehnai, traditionally used in religious ceremonies, was an instrument that Harrison had enthused about after seeing Bismillah Khan perform at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1967. Also prominent on the soundtrack is the tar shehnai, a bow-played string instrument that is similar to an esraj. Other instrumentation introduced on Wonderwall Music includes the sarod, similar to a lute, and the santoor, a type of hammered dulcimer with up to 100 strings. Having used personnel from the Asian Music Circle in north London on his Beatles songs "Love You To" and "Within You Without You", in addition to his own sitar playing, Harrison decided to record part of the soundtrack in Bombay, the centre of India's film industry, in order to work with some of the country's best musicians.The Wonderwall score was Harrison's first opportunity to compose extensively for a single project. He later described how he went about preparing the music: "I had a regular wind-up stopwatch and I watched the film to 'spot-in' the music with the watch. I wrote the timings down in my book, then I'd go to , make up a piece, record it." As with his songs for the Beatles over this period, including "Within You Without You" and "Blue Jay Way", he composed mainly on keyboard instruments such as piano or organ, rather than guitar. In addition to the Indian pieces, Harrison wrote and arranged selections in Western musical styles. In some cases, these pieces were outlined to the musicians at the recording session by Harrison, on guitar, and they then improvised on his ideas. With other selections, he first made a demo, which the musicians followed.
Harrison collaborated on much of the project with John Barham,Mat Snow, "George Harrison: Quiet Storm", Mojo, November 2014, p. 69. who had studied composition under Harrison's sitar teacher, Ravi Shankar. A classically trained pianist and musical arranger, Barham notated some of the melodies that Harrison sang to him and transcribed them onto staves. Leng describes Barham as Harrison's "fellow traveler", due to the two musicians' shared appreciation of Indian classical music. He adds that their musical compatibility made Barham a natural choice over George Martin, the Beatles' producer and orchestral arranger.
Recording
London, November 1967 – January 1968
The first session for the Wonderwall soundtrack took place on 22 November 1967 at EMI Studios in London. That day, Harrison recorded with a tabla player and flautists Richard Adeney and Jack Ellory, taping the pieces "Swordfencing", "India", "Backwards Tabla" and "Backwards Tones". On 23 November, he carried out further work on some of these selections, with two oboe players, a trumpeter and two flautists. Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter state that some of these recordings may have been used as musical cues in the film but excluded from the soundtrack album, while "Swordfencing" was a piece that Harrison incorporated into "Dream Scene" on the album. Over this period, Harrison also worked at a second London location, De Lane Lea Studios. According to a contemporary issue of Beatles Monthly magazine, the sessions continued at Abbey Road on 11, 20 and 31 December.The contributing musicians included Indian sarodya Aashish Khan and tablist Mahapurush Misra, the last of whom was the regular accompanist to Khan's father, Ali Akbar Khan. Aashish Khan and Misra's contributions were recorded at Abbey Road, rather than later in India, since the pair were performing in London in December 1967. Barham attended this session and also contributed to some of the Western recordings for Wonderwall, playing piano, harmonium and flugelhorn, and providing orchestral arrangements for flutes, oboes and trumpet. Another session with some unnamed Indian musicians took place on 5 January 1968.
The main participants on the Western pieces were the Remo Four, whose first session with Harrison was on 22 December. The band were an instrumental group from Liverpool that had toured with the Beatles in 1964 and comprised Colin Manley, Tony Ashton, Phillip Rogers and Roy Dyke. Ashton contributed on tack piano and organ, and played the majority of the Mellotron parts that are prominent on the album.
Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton joined Harrison to record "Ski-ing" on 2–3 January. Credited only on the US release, under the pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", Clapton's appearance marked the first of several collaborations between him and Harrison over 1968–71. Peter Tork of the Monkees played banjo, although his contribution, recorded in December 1967, was to a track that only appeared in the film.Graeme Thomson, , The Guardian, 24 March 2017.