Music - Richard Cook dusts down the old tunes of The Other Beatle

The Beatles will never go away. With their 1 compilation outselling every other group on the planet over the Christmas period, you would think they were some new multiplatinum sensation overpowering youth culture, not a band of fiftysomethings who split up 30 years ago. John Lennon used to complain that their huge success in the Sixties spoiled the group, because it stopped them from touring and from becoming better players and writers. When you listen to what they have done as individuals since, you start to think that he was right: the inflated corpus of solo records that they have inflicted on us, with their mass of mundanities, isn't the glittering display one might have hoped for from the most celebrated performers in pop.

With Ringo doing better as a voice-over artist and John dead, it has been left to Paul and George to carry on twanging. As Sir Paul marches inexorably towards his first billion, he has become the benign paterfamilias he probably always wanted to be (if the mooncalf sweetness of ancient songs such as "Michelle" was ever anything to go by) - the lordly good guy that the lonesome Sir Cliff can't quite become, perhaps. But McCartney was always the prolific Beatle; and with the lorryload of silly love songs that have clogged up his past three decades, songwriter-hackdom does rather become him, as a comfortable mantle at least. George Harrison (CBE, and that's probably all he'll ever get) has made no music for close on 15 years, although a new record is claimed to be in the works somewhere. Only ever "allowed" a couple of songs on a typical group album, Harrison was always going to be The Other Beatle. Yet when the band did actually call it a day, collectively, he was the first one to put out his own record - and it was a three-LP boxed set.

All Things Must Pass (Parlophone) has mouldered on vinyl shelves ever since, probably rarely played, and assuredly unheard on radio or unraided by back-catalogue compilers. The only song to secure status as a nostalgic ready-made is "My Sweet Lord", which was, in any case, tarnished by its, er, likeness to The Chiffons' "He's So Fine". In its new, double-CD incar-nation, the original music is abetted by five extra tracks, and Jon Astley's remastering cleans off 30 years of predigital dust. Next to McCartney's populous inventory, it might not seem like all that much. But this is Harrison's great testament - and it has come up, surprisingly, shining.

It is hardly fair to lampoon Harrison for his reputation as a simple soul. Just because they were The Beatles, it didn't mean they had to be our culture's great thinkers. Like the royal family, their eminence papered over their short- comings. Lennon, always a better singer than writer, left one of the most overrated and sentimental oeuvres in rock as a solo artist, and McCartney's idea of deep creativity has been a series of misguided stabs at high art, be they musicals or orchestral doodles. All Harrison ever thought he could do was write songs and make rockish records, yet he came to be seen as the bumpkin mystic of his circle, just because the Veil of Maya had always intrigued him. Where a born-again atheist such as Lennon was seen as robustly full of soul and spirit, Harrison's pacific persuasion mostly won him ridicule.

Yoked to the sublime tune "My Sweet Lord" is my kind of pop spirituality - a prayer hidden in the folds of a chartbound hook. The rest of All Things Must Pass never quite reaches that peak, but it unreels with an easygoing grace that is curiously unaffected. Although almost anything an ex-Beatle did was going to be subject to the mannerisms and nonsense that fame bestowed upon the quartet, the atmosphere of these tracks approaches a kind of humility. Harrison's unprepossessing voice and modest guitar are often at a respectful distance in the mix. He co-produced the record with that monarch of overkill Phil Spector, and in his amiable new sleevenote, he expresses regret that much of it sounds "a bit over the top with the reverb in the wall of sound". Actually, most of the tracks sound beguilingly cluttered, and Harrison's best melodies - the ones he wasn't allowed to put on the Beatles records - keep poking through. "Run of the Mill", the previously rejected "I Live For You", "Apple Scruffs" and several others would have been perfectly plausible elements in the follow-up to "Let It Be" that never happened.

Today, The Other Beatle has grown remote from the limelight occupied by his colleagues. Attacked in his own home and neglected by his peers, he seems to be a recluse frightened by how all things came to pass. We don't need to spare him the price of a cup of tea, but a few minutes with some of this music wouldn't hurt.

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