Paul McCartney Gave George Harrison a ‘Ridiculous’ Disguise to Make Him Look Older

When Paul McCartney introduced John Lennon to George Harrison, Lennon thought Harrison was too young. McCartney was already younger than Lennon, and the age gap between Lennon and Harrison felt too big. It didn’t help that Harrison looked younger than his years. McCartney once even had to put a disguise on his bandmate to make him look older.

Paul McCartney knew George Harrison looked young

McCartney joined The Quarry Men, Lennon’s band, and brought Harrison in. Lennon was two years older than McCartney and three years older than Harrison. At the time, this gap felt huge.

“I was fifteen, John was almost seventeen. It seemed an awful lot at the time,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “If we wanted to do anything grown-up we worried about George looking young. We thought, ‘He doesn’t shave … can’t we get him to look like a grown-up?'”

Once, McCartney and Harrison wanted to see a movie but knew they were both too young to get in. McCartney could barely pass for old enough, but Harrison could not. As a result, they decided to disguise him.

“I could just about scrape through the sixteen barrier,” he said. “Even though I was baby-faced, I was just able to bluff it in the grown-up world; but George couldn’t. He had all the attitude, but he really was young-looking. I remember going out into his back garden and getting a bit of soil and putting it on his lip as a mustache. It was ridiculous, but I thought, ‘He looks the part — we’ll get in.’ And we did.”

Paul McCartney and George Harrison had a falling out in The Beatles because of their ages

Harrison and McCartney met on the bus to school. They grew close, and McCartney began to think of him as his younger brother. He could never shake this image, which ultimately damaged their friendship.

“[I] tended to talk down to him, because he was a year younger. (I know now that that was a failing I had all the way through the Beatle years),” McCartney said. “If you’ve known a guy when he’s thirteen and you’re fourteen, it’s hard to think of him as grown-up. I still think of George as a young kid.”

Harrison disliked the way that Lennon and McCartney ignored his songwriting in The Beatles, but he had more resentment toward McCartney. They were behaving similarly, but McCartney’s attitude likely held a note of condescension. He considered himself the older brother and talked down to Harrison as a result. Lennon also met a baby-faced Harrison, but he didn’t look at him as a younger brother, which helped their relationship. 

By the time the band broke up, Harrison said he would never work with McCartney again. 

Were Paul McCartney and George Harrison friends later in life?

McCartney and Harrison bickered in the studio in The Beatles’ final days. When the band broke up, Harrison screamed at McCartney whenever he tried to get in contact with him. Over the years, though, his resentment toward his former bandmate softened. 

“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,” Harrison told Rolling Stone in 1979. “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.”

While he said he wouldn’t work with him, they collaborated on Harrison’s 1981 album Somewhere in England. Luckily, they had fully reestablished a friendly relationship before Harrison died in 2001.