The Best of George Harrison (1976)
1. Something
2. If I Needed Someone
3. Here Comes the Sun
4. Taxman
5. Think For Yourself
6. For You Blue
7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
8. My Sweet Lord
9. Give Me Love (Give Me Peach on Earth)
10.You
11.Bangla Desh
12.Dark Horse
13.What is Life
A greatest hits compilation is rarely an artistic statement; more often, it is a contractual shrug. So it was in 1976, when George Harrison, midway through a tepid run of solo releases and on the cusp of switching labels, was ushered out of the EMI catalogue with The Best of George Harrison. If the title sounded generous, the contents revealed otherwise.
The album is split neatly in two. Side One is The Beatles—specifically, Harrison’s Beatles, a seven-track reminder that George was not always the quietest of the Fab Four. Something, Here Comes the Sun, and While My Guitar Gently Weeps form a trio of unimpeachable classics, rounded out with solid contributions like If I Needed Someone and Taxman. In isolation, this material is magnificent. But in context—pasted to the front end of a solo compilation—it begins to feel more like an editorial comment: a reminder of where the good stuff lived.
Side Two ventures into solo territory, and it is here that the cracks begin to show. With only four solo albums to his name at the time (two of which had been met with mixed to poor reception), the pickings were slim. My Sweet Lord is here, naturally, as is Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth). But after that, the barrel is visibly scraped: the wan Ding Dong, Ding Dong and the fairly decnet You are pressed into service, more for quota than quality.
It’s not so much that the material is bad—although some of it is—it’s that the presentation invites comparison, and Harrison’s solo work, particularly in this period, simply cannot bear the weight of the Beatles’ shadow. The juxtaposition is stark, perhaps unintentionally so, and rather than elevating the latter-day songs, it underlines how inconsistent Harrison had become.
From a commercial standpoint, it played well enough at the time. Listeners unfamiliar with Harrison’s deeper solo catalogue received a digestible sampler. But critically—and historically—it has aged awkwardly. The compilation feels rushed, incomplete, and ultimately transitional. Notably, Harrison himself had no involvement in curating the tracklist, and it shows.
Years later, the far superior Let It Roll: Songs by George Harrison would arrive posthumously, offering a more balanced and considered overview of Harrison’s solo journey. In that context, The Best of George Harrison now stands mostly as a relic—a stopgap solution from a label eager to cash out before the artist departed.
What it offers is not so much a celebration as a reminder: of potential fulfilled, squandered, and occasionally resurrected. It is less a monument and more a footnote.
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