The roots of the album’s biggest hit, ‘Got My Mind Set On You’, also date back to The Beatles’ earliest days. The single featured artwork by Revolver artist Klaus Voormann, and the video included cameos from Jeff Lynne, Elton John, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon, Ray Cooper, and a figure in a walrus costume falsely rumoured to be Paul McCartney.

‘When We Was Fab’ was a playful look back at the Sixties, with a suitably psychedelic sound including sitar, cello, ‘I Am The Walrus’-style backing vocals, and backwards effects. Harrison was not often prone to nostalgia, but Cloud Nine found him embracing his Beatles past. I was so thrilled with all the little puns and innuendos. We wrote it on one piano, George at the low end, me at the high end. We went back to this guy’s house at night he had a shooting gallery with a grand piano in there, and that’s where we wrote ‘When We Was Fab’. We landed at the Grand Prix in Adelaide, in the middle of the track in the helicopter, and went around all the pits and had a coffee with all the drivers. I got to the giant portcullis at the front and Olivia said, ‘George is down by the lake, I’ll take you there.’ He took me into the tunnels and said, ‘Don’t put your hands outside of the boat, just grip with your bum.’ I thought, ‘I like this guy!’ We got talking about what we liked, we had a nice day hanging out, then he said, ‘Do you want to go on holiday?’ OK then! We went to his house in Hawaii, then on to Australia. At the end, as we walked down the street to our cars, he shouted back to me, ‘By the way, I forgot to mention, George Harrison asked me to ask you if you wanted to work on his next album.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, by the way!?’ He took me around to George’s the next day. I went to dinner one night with Dave Edmunds, in Marlow. The go-between was singer-songwriter Dave Edmunds. Harrison appeared during the encore to lead an all-star cast through Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’.Īfterwards Harrison let it be known that he would like to collaborate with Lynne.

Their first collaboration was on stage at the post-Live Aid charity event Heart Beat ’86 at Birmingham’s NEC. It also yielded the hit singles ‘When We Was Fab’ and ‘This Is Love’.Ĭloud Nine was produced by Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra frontman who made no secret of his love for The Beatles. The album was a critical and commercial success, and Harrison topped the charts with the international smash ‘Got My Mind Set On You’. It was also the first after a five-year break from releasing music, following 1982’s Gone Troppo. “I’m hoping that after this lyric vid, the next thing that we’d post to the page is the album’s launch date.‘Cloud 9’ ‘That’s What It Takes’ ‘Fish On The Sand’ ‘Just For Today’ ‘This Is Love’ ‘When We Was Fab’ ‘Devil’s Radio’ ‘Someplace Else’ ‘Wreck Of The Hesperus’ ‘Breath Away From Heaven’ ‘Got My Mind Set On You’Ĭloud Nine was George Harrison’s eleventh solo studio album, and the last to be released in his lifetime. “The process has gotten embarrassingly slow, but with the songs fully mastered, all we’re waiting for are the artwork design and the actual mass production of physical copies,” he shared. Azcona said they’re looking to deliver it soon. Maude have yet to reveal the name and a new release date for their upcoming record, which was originally set for the first quarter of the year. “V’s day feels like it should be about celebration,” Azcona said, “and not about negative emotions, but I’m most likely wrong.”

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