Death brought George Harrison and Paul McCartney closer together, says David Cavanagh in Uncut. The two ex-Beatles were childhood friends who famously fell out during the recording of the album Let It Be. They eventually reconciled, but it wasn’t until Harrison was diagnosed with inoperable cancer that the bond deepened. As Harrison lay dying, McCartney was at his bedside. “We held hands,” McCartney says. “It’s funny, even at the height of our friendship—as guys—you would never hold hands. It just wasn’t a Liverpool thing.” McCartney says he shuddered when he saw how much his old friend had deteriorated. “He was about 10 days away from his death, as I recall. He was doing very poorly. But it was lovely, really lovely, and the years just stripped back. We joked about things. I remember him saying at one point that he’d been moved from, like, Switzerland to a clinic in New York, and then somewhere else, because you sort of follow the treatment. He said, ‘Can’t we just stop in one place?’ And I was going, ‘Yeah! Let’s go to Speke Hall!’”—a popular tourist attraction in their hometown. “And he’s going, ‘Oh, that’d be great.’ Just amusing, nutty stuff. It was good. It was like we were dreaming.”
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