Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you will have heard about and perhaps watched Peter Jackson’s 2021 fly-on-the-wall documentary The Beatles: Get Back. The project brought us closer to the Fab Four than ever before during the intimate and often fractious recording sessions for the band’s final album, Let It Be. During the sessions, particular heat seemed to be stirring between George Harrison and Paul McCartney.

This palpable heat within The Beatles began with John Lennon appearing more vacant, with Yoko Ono tapping off a portion of his focus. With this, McCartney stepped up to the mark as the band’s defacto leader and dominated proceedings, much to Harrison’s frustration. At one point in January 1969, Harrison stormed out of the studio, foreshadowing the imminent breakup despite his temporary return.

“At that point in time, Paul couldn’t see beyond himself,” Harrison told Guitar World in 2001. “He was on a roll, but… in his mind, everything that was going on around him was just there to accompany him. He wasn’t sensitive to stepping on other people’s egos or feelings.”

After the ultimate Beatles divorce in April 1970, the members went their separate ways to pursue solo careers. Over the ‘70s, the former Beatles proved to be less than the sum of their parts, but fortunately, any aggressive rivalry between the four was mainly a construct of the media. Early in the decade, Lennon invited Harrison to play on his second solo album, Imagine, and Ringo Starr’s 1973 album, Ringo, included collaborations from all of his former bandmates, just not at the same time.

It seemed that most of the cooling off required in the immediate post-Beatles years was between McCartney and his two non-drumming former bandmates. This tension seemed to have vanished by the close of the ‘70s, and in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1979, Harrison even commended one of McCartney’s solo endeavours as “sensational”.

When asked if he was less musically compatible with McCartney than the other Beatles, Harrison replied: “Yeah, well now we don’t have any problems whatsoever as far as being people is concerned, and it’s quite nice to see him, but I don’t know about being in a band with him, how that would work out.”

“It’s like, we all have our own tunes to do,” Harrison continued, discussing his woes of the late ‘60s. “And my problem was that it would always be very difficult to get in on the act, because Paul was very pushy in that respect. When he succumbed to playing on one of your tunes, he’d always do good.” Harrison noted that he’d have to play on 59 of McCartney’s songs before the bassist would even listen to one of his ideas.

Later, Harrison was asked for his opinion on McCartney’s new material. “I think it’s inoffensive,” Harrison reservedly offered. “I’ve always preferred Paul’s good melodies to his screaming rock ‘n’ roll tunes.”

Harrison then mentioned that he had a soft spot for one of McCartney’s songs on his 1978 Wings album London Town. “The tune I thought was sensational on the London Town album was ‘I’m Carrying’, but all the noisy, beaty things I’m not into at all,” he said. “But then that’s not only with Paul’s music, that goes right across the board. I’m not a fan of that sort of punky, heavy, tinny stuff. I like a nice melody.”

Listen to Paul McCartney and Wings’ “sensational” ‘I’m Carrying’ below.