Obituary: George Harrison

By the time the Beatles released their first No 1 hit, Please Please Me, in February 1963 - and made their first appearance on ITV's Thank Your Lucky Stars - it was apparent that three members of the group had clearly defined personalities. John Lennon was the most acerbic, Ringo Starr was the joker in the pack, and Paul McCartney, smoothing ruffled feathers, was the public relations man.

Perhaps because of the way he had joined the group, George Harrison, who has died of cancer aged 58, was always the quietest Beatle, and the least easy to pigeonhole - although he would occasionally surprise journalists with a sudden, pithy, off-the-wall remark. He was, however, unquestionably the best looking, and certainly the most dapper, with those little collarless jackets, á la Pierre Cardin, sitting comfortably on his shoulders, not a button under pressure.

Harrison's isolation was most noticeable on stage. The Beatles gravitated from church halls and Hamburg's red light district to a global fame greater than any British performers since Charlie Chaplin, but it was Lennon and McCartney who dominated. The early line-up saw McCartney, Lennon and Harrison strung out stage front, with Starr flailing his drumkit at the back. That style superseded the daft foot movements of the Shadows, and became de rigeur for British 60s groups, but it started to fracture as the Beatles grew more successful.

From 1963, McCartney and Lennon wrote more of the songs, and it became more usual to see their two heads crowding round a single mike, providing lead vocal and back-up or chorus. Harrison, even when he was adding his voice to the mix, seemed stranded at the far side of the stage, even if he was the best musician and the motor of the band.

For the Beatles, he designed breaks and riffs. But for himself, he lacked - or rarely took - the opportunity to cut loose in the rockabilly style of his American hero, Carl Perkins. And with, and without, the Beatles, he was also an underrated songwriter. Something (1969) was a great song - even the Beatles's antithesis, Frank Sinatra, picked up on it - and My Sweet Lord (1970), while unconsciously plagiarised from Lonnie Mack's He's So Fine, justifiably sold in its millions.

In 1971 came his New York concert for Bangladesh. That new country had been devastated by war and floods, and the event launched the vogue for celebrity rock fund-raising. It also resulted in a three-volume album, featuring Harrison with Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ravi Shankar, and put the stamp on Harrison's relationship with the Indian sub-continent that had begun when he effectively introduced the sitar to the Beatles in the mid-1960s.

The formula with the Beatles was that Harrison got to sing at least one number on each album, beginning with the Lennon and McCartney song Do You Want To Know A Secret? on the group's debut album, Please Please Me. Gradually, his own work began to feature. There was Within You Without You, on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Here Comes The Sun and Something, on Abbey Road (1969), and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, on The White Album (1968).

The youngest Beatle, Harrison was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, eight months after McCartney, two years after Lennon and three years after Starr. He experienced his rock 'n' roll epiphany in 1956, when, on the verge of his teens, he cycled past an open window out of which was wafting Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel.

The son of a bus driver, he was educated at Dovedale primary school, where the young Lennon had gone, and, after passing the 11-plus, was awarded a place at the Liverpool Institute, one of the city's leading grammar schools. He met McCartney - also at the institute - on the bus to school. The pair became close friends. When, in 1957, McCartney linked up with Lennon in the Quarrymen skiffle group, he tried to persuade them to invite Harrison along. At first, Lennon resisted - he didn't want a 14-year-old in the band - but then relented after hearing Harrison play Bill Justis's rock instrumental, Raunchy.

Lennon realised that having someone who could play guitar solos - and Harrison was already a more competent musician than McCartney or himself - would expand the group's ability to handle rock 'n' roll. The disapproval with which Lennon's guardian, his Auntie Mimi, greeted the new boy's teddy-boy style and thick Scouse accent may also have helped to change his mind.

Harrison's absorption into music took its toll on his school career, and he left the Liverpool Institute in 1959 with only one O-level, in art. By then, the Quarrymen had metamorphosed into the Silver Beatles. The following year, and by now the Beatles, they were booked to play for four months in a club on Hamburg's Reeperbahn. The trip was cut short when the 17-year-old Harrison was discovered to be under age, but the quintet (as it then was, with Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on guitar) had gelled into an arresting, idiosyncratic unit.

By 1962, and now managed by Brian Epstein, the Beatles had signed their recording contract with EMI. In those simple times, when the group was almost a proto-teeny bop band, fan sheets listed Harrison's pet likes as "hamburgers, the colour purple and friendly girls". When their record producer George Martin asked if there was anything they were unhappy with, Harrison managed: "Yes, I don't like your tie".

Although Harrison was a fine lead guitarist - and his understated work was influential on many later players - his most important influence on the Beatles was always concerned with the new sound textures he introduced. Chief among these was the sitar.

He had first heard the instrument during the filming of Help! (1965), the second Beatles movie. He was intrigued, and the instrument was to feature on the Rubber Soul album, being recorded at the Abbey Road studios. A string had broken on Harrison's sitar, and the Indian embassy had put him on to the Hampstead-based Asian Music Circle, where the Beatles were introduced to Ravi Shankar at the home of the circle's co-founder Patricia Angadi (obituary, July 17 2001). Harrison briefly studied with Shankar in order to use the sitar in Beatle music. The two remained close friends, touring the United States together in 1974, and Shankar's recordings appeared on Dark Horse, the record label Harrison started in 1976.

Between 1967 and 1968, Harrison's interest in Indian music led to the group's entanglement with trans-cendental meditation, via the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When they headed east, Harrison was with his then wife Patti Boyd - whom he had met on the set of the first Beatles film A Hard Day's Night (1964), and married in 1966, with Paul McCartney as best man. But the Indian trip was not a success, and, although Lennon and Yoko Ono used chanting Hare Krishna followers on their recording of Give Peace A Chance, it was Harrison alone who remained faithful to the Vedic tradition. He observed that one of his greatest thrills was seeing members of the London Hare Krishna Temple on Top Of The Pops, chanting the record he had produced with them.

He donated a Hertfordshire mansion - renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor - for use as a Hindu centre, and played concerts in support of that curious political manifestation, the Natural Law Party. He did, however, turn down the Maharishi's request that he, McCartney and Starr should stand in Liverpool in the 1992 general election.

By 1968, the Beatles were on a downward path. McCartney and Lennon were drifting apart, and both had antagonised Harrison, who walked off the set of their documentary, Let It Be (relased in 1970), after an argument with McCartney. In March 1969, during a Fleet Street and police media blitz on drugs, youth, politics and rock stars, Harrison and Boyd were fined for possessing cannabis.That August, the group were in the recording studios for the last time together, to complete tracks for Abbey Road.

Harrison was the first Beatle to succeed as a solo artist. He had made two instrumental albums - Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound (both 1969), while the group was still together. Then, in 1970, he co-produced the double album, All Things Must Pass. It sold 3m copies, and was his most commercially successful record, although a plagiarism suit over the song My Sweet Lord cost him almost $600,000 in the American courts.

He continued to write and record at a fast pace for the next few years, releasing the hit, Give Me Love: Give Me Peace On Earth (1973), and the albums, Living In The Material World (1973) and Extra Texture(1975). By the end of the 1970s, the Beatles partnership had been officially dissolved. Harrison's spiritual soft rock, meanwhile, had gone out of fashion and, for much of the next decade, he concentrated on a new career as a producer with Handmade Films, the company he had formed in 1979 with Dennis O'Brien.

Their first success was Monty Python's The Life Of Brian (1979), which they took on after EMI decided it might incur charges of blasphemy. In 1980, there was The Long Good Friday, followed by Time Bandits (1981), A Private Function (1985), Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail And I (1987). The failure of the appalling Madonna-Sean Penn vehicle, Shanghai Surprise (1986), heralded a downturn in the company's fortunes, and it was eventually wound up in acrimony, with Harrison winning a $11m lawsuit against his former partner.

After John Lennon's murder in 1980, Harrison composed a tribute song of his own, All Those Years Ago, but his own recording career was not effectively rekindled until 1987. Then, he and Jeff Lynne, of the Electric Light Orchestra, co-produced the album Cloud Nine, which included two singles, Got My Mind Set On You and When We Was Fab.

With Lynne, he also formed the Traveling Wilburys, with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty. In 1992, the success of two of the group's albums encouraged Harrison to undertake his first international tour for 18 years.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he appeared in public infrequently, usually on Beatle-related occasions. He lived quietly in his restored 19th century mansion at Friars Park, Henley on-Thames, with his second wife, Olivia, whom he married in 1978, and their son, Dhani, an idyllic life shaken only when a schizophrenic Beatles fan, Michael Abram, broke in in December 1999, and badly injured Harrison. He is survived by Olivia and Dhani.

· George Harrison, guitarist, singer, songwriter, born February 25 1943; died November 29 2001.