Listening to the post Beatles interviews with George, it is a fair assessment to say that he was the most reluctant Beatle.

Existing and surviving in a band can be tough, there is talent and with talent comes egos, and George had to deal with two of the biggest in both those categories.

That is not to say that the egos are not justified, in fact I can only have admiration for John and Paul, and to that end Ringo and George, for not allowing Beatlemania to go right to their heads and see them go off the deep end of fame, like so many have done before and after.

What George was often quite quick to highlight, however, is that he could struggle at times to be heard and I think that is fair, but he should have credited himself with the moments he did break through because there were game changing.

It was George who pursued their interest in Eastern culture and plugged that right into their output. It was George who took them to Bangor then India in pursuit of the Maharishi and enlightenment and in doing so gave them the space needed to clock up the post pepper White album and begin to process the death of Brian…and it was George who invited in Billy Preston to breathe life into the flagging Get Back sessions, and to get the band to behave a bit better too.

For all that, and notwithstanding his humming lead guitar, George can take a bow. He was as vital as McCartney for keeping the momentum but certainly not as well recognised for it in the history books.

It is surprising then that George was often so keen to distance himself from being a Beatle. Talking about it in the third person, more like it was something that happened to someone who looked and sounded a lot like him, but was not the post sixties man that lay before us.

By the end of the sixties John was making more noise about leaving the Beatles but George was the one doing all the planning. With a bulging catalogue of songs, much of which had failed to make the cut and onto Beatle long players and a growing frustration at playing second fiddle to the McLennon bromance, it is no wonder that George wanted to break free.

With the first class ticket in hand afforded him by his decade of success, it seems he could not have worked harder to leave it behind. For sure John would later talk about the early Beatle years with some embarrassment, something that always irked me as he sure looked in his element at the time, but George was perhaps the most critical of the Beatle dynamic.

In one interview George compared the Beatles to a football team, with Lennin and McCartney getting the glory and headlines as the strikers and himself and Ringo the dependable defender and Goal keeper. It is an interesting analogy, and speaks volumes about how George viewed his place in the band. Being able to come out from behind all that and play further forward with his own solo career must have been very freeing.

One thing is for sure, George was a contradiction. As much as George was happy to distance himself from those years, he was also keen to seek his own little slice of Beatlemania afterwards and would be frustrated when success was not forthcoming.

The irony perhaps is that his biggest post Beatle success since All Things Must Pass would come with an album like Cloud Nine, easily his most commercial and Beatle esque collection of his solo years.

Even if George was content to cast aside Beatle George, it was sadly his biggest and easiest path to success to mirror them in his music.

For me, I love both sides of George and he can always lay claim to being one of only four people who could choose to be a reluctant Beatle.