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
George Harrison 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.
Harrison viewed Wonderwall at Twickenham Film Studios with Massot and was intrigued by the storyline. The film's premise concerns a lonely professor (played by Irish actor Jack MacGowran) and his increasing obsession with his female neighbour, a fashion model named Penny Lane (played by Jane Birkin), 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. Having incorporated sitar, tanpura, swarmandal, dilruba and tabla in his work with the Beatles, Harrison sought to include less well-known Indian musical instruments. 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. 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 [the recording studio], make up a piece, record it." 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. 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.
Bombay, January 1968
The shehnai players were Sharad Kumar and Hanuman Jadev, while the tar shehnaist was Vinayak Vora. Shambhu Das and Indranil Bhattacharya were the sitarists, and Chandrashekhar Naringrekar played surbahar (a low-register version of the sitar). The tablist was Shankar Ghosh, played Indian harmonium and tabla tarang. Shivkumar Sharma contributed on santoor, and the bansuri (bamboo flute) was played by S.R. Kenkare. in Baker Street, London. Well known for his theme tune to BBC television's Dixon of Dock Green, Tommy Reilly played on the soundtrack after Harrison had asked Martin to suggest a good harmonica player.
At various stages while working on the project, Harrison returned to Twickenham to ensure that each musical piece married up with its scene in the film; he later recalled: "it always worked. It was always right." Final mixing began on 31 January, and a late overdubbing session took place on 11 February, when extra sound effects were added to "Dream Scene". Harrison mixed the recordings with Ken Scott,
Having been allocated a budget of £600, Harrison eventually spent £15,000 on recording the film soundtrack, paying the difference himself. One of the non-soundtrack pieces taped at the end of the Bombay sessions was "The Inner Light", which he completed at Abbey Road in early February. This song became the first Harrison composition to appear on a Beatles single when it was issued as the B-side to "Lady Madonna" in March 1968, a release that served to cover the band's absence in Rishikesh. The Remo Four song "In the First Place" was another product of the Wonderwall sessions, although the track remained unreleased until the late 1990s. In 1993, Harrison told Simpsons creator Matt Groening that Wonderwall Music had been his most enjoyable album to make. After consulting Barham in 2002 for his book While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Leng credited Harrison as a performing musician, and Spizer also recognised him in his track-by-track list, published in 2005. The performer credits in the 2014 reissue of Wonderwall Music rectified the situation, shehnai, one of several Indian musical instruments Harrison used on Wonderwall Music]]
The album opens with "Microbes", which consists of call-and-response shehnai parts and was partly based on the raga Darbari Kanada.|source= – Eric Clapton, discussing his involvement on the track "Ski-ing"|width=25%|align=left|style=padding:8px;
On "Ski-ing", Clapton plays a blues-based guitar riff treated with a fuzz-tone effect, over a rock rhythm and heavy tanpura drone. While Spizer and Everett credit all four electric guitar parts (two of which were taped backwards) to Clapton alone, he recalls that "we put down this thing [on tape] and George then put backwards guitar on it." The seagull-like sounds of the guitars segue into "Gat Kirwani", a fast-paced Indian piece with Aashish Khan on sarod, backed by sitar and Misra's tabla. The performance is based on the similarly named raga, which Harrison had suggested that Khan play. and singing. "On the Bed" opens with a piano riff from Harrison, which, in Leng's description, is complemented by "spacey steel guitar, and a fugue of flugelhorn countermelodies, added by Barham". The song includes backing from the Remo Four, and Big Jim Sullivan on bass. Harrison overdubbed the sitar-like steel guitar part. Starr and Birkin. Although Harrison declined, he later supplied incidental music for Little Malcolm (1974), a film he produced under the aegis of Apple Films, before going on to contribute to soundtracks for his HandMade Films productions in the 1980s, including Time Bandits and Shanghai Surprise.
Together with "The Inner Light", the Wonderwall project marked the end of Harrison's overtly Indian musical phase. He later cited the Bombay sessions for Wonderwall as the inspiration for his 1974 collaborations with Shankar – namely, the Music Festival from India and their subsequent North American tour. Both of these projects featured Indian musicians that Harrison first worked with in January 1968.