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Showing the strain


30/11/2001

In 1987, Harrison was again the most critically-acclaimed Beatle with his Cloud Nine album, followed by his part in the Travelling Wilburys supergroup alongside Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan.

In other ways he was still a curious, woolly figure, embracing fringe causes such as the Natural Law Party, which wanted a ''disease-free,

crime-free, pollution-free society''.

The nineties saw not just another wave of nostalgia for the Beatles, but a new generation of rockers such as Oasis singing their praises.

But Harrison was having intimations of mortality. At the end of 1999, he was attacked and stabbed in his Henley-on-Thames home by paranoid

schizophrenic Michael Abram, a 34-year-old former heroin addict with delusions that Harrison was a witch.

Olivia came to his aid and battered the intruder with a poker. Abram was found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of Harrison and his wife.

Harrison had already been treated for throat cancer in 1997, then lung cancer and, this year, for a brain tumour.

He blamed his health problems on the smoking habit which began with those truanting days at Liverpool Institute.

Even the new millennium brought another wave of Beatle love. All the Beatles' number one hits were released on the album 1, outselling the latest Oasis album Standing On The Shoulder of Giants four to one.

George may ruefully have noted that, of the 27 tracks, only one, Something, had been written by him. But then, as George himself once said: ''My part in the Beatles was I never wanted to be at the front.''


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