Picture Book: George Harrison's Kinfauns

George Harrison bought Kinfauns in 1964, the year after the Beatles became the biggest band in the world. It was a bungalow in Esher, Surrey, a commuter-belt town twenty miles southwest of London. He painted it lilac purple. He installed a recording setup in the basement. He lived there until 1970.

The name of the house came before Harrison. He kept it.

The recording

In May 1968, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr convened at Kinfauns with acoustic guitars, a four-track Ampex machine, and a rough set of songs. They recorded somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-seven demos across two or three sessions. These were working recordings, made for internal use, to help organise the songs before formal studio work began.

The formal studio work became the White Album. Released that November across four sides of vinyl, it was the record that the Beatles made in the year that their coherence as a group began to visibly fragment. The Kinfauns demos are the sound that existed before the fragmentation made it into the recording.

The demos were not officially released until 2018, when The Beatles (White Album) super-deluxe edition included them as Esher Tapes. For the preceding fifty years, the recordings circulated among collectors. They were, and remain, some of the most extensively bootlegged material in rock history.

What Kinfauns looked like

Photographs of the house from the 1960s show a modest suburban bungalow with an overgrown garden and a painted exterior that sat somewhere between psychedelic and eccentric. Harrison's decorating choices ran toward the vivid. There were painted murals. There were objects from India, which he had first visited in 1966 and which would become a permanent reference point in his creative life.

The basement studio was not a professional environment. It was the home recording space of a wealthy musician who wanted the capacity to capture ideas outside the formal studio context. The equipment was good but not elaborate by the standards of what Abbey Road contained.

The Recording Academy's archive on George Harrison documents his Grammy recognition and provides additional biographical context for his creative period through the late 1960s and into his solo career.

Harrison's songs on the demos

Harrison brought four songs to the Kinfauns sessions: While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Piggies, Circles, and Not Guilty. Of these, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Piggies made it onto the finished White Album. Not Guilty was recorded extensively in formal studio sessions but cut from the album; it appeared on Harrison's 1979 self-titled album instead. Circles remained unreleased until the Gone Troppo sessions in 1982.

The demo of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is one of the most discussed passages in the full Kinfauns set. It is a solo acoustic performance, Harrison's voice and one guitar, without the string arrangement or Eric Clapton lead guitar that the finished version would carry. It is a quieter and more private version of a song that became one of Harrison's most recognised recordings.

The house as a listening room

Kinfauns functioned as a place to work and a place to listen. Harrison's taste ranged widely. He had been paying close attention to Indian classical music since meeting Ravi Shankar in 1966. He was listening to contemporary American music. He was interested in the spiritual and contemplative dimensions of music in a way that his bandmates were not, or not in the same register.

The basement recordings reflect that breadth. The demos from the 1968 sessions are primarily acoustic, stripped of the production intentions that the formal studio recordings would develop. In that stripped state, the songs reveal their harmonic thinking more plainly.

After Kinfauns

Harrison left the house in 1970 and moved to Friar Park, a Victorian Gothic estate in Henley-on-Thames that became his home for the rest of his life. Friar Park had more space for the more elaborate home studio setup that he would develop through the 1970s.

Kinfauns was subsequently sold and has remained a private residence. It is not open to the public and has no heritage designation. The house where the Beatles recorded thirty-something acoustic demos in the spring of 1968 is, from the outside, indistinguishable from the rest of Esher.

For more on Harrison at this site: Snapshot: George Harrison and Paul Simon, George Harrison Goes Twang, and Snapshot: Bob Dylan and George Harrison playing tennis.

The full Picture Book index: Picture Book.