As 1999 was rolling to a close, George Harrison should have been ringing in the new year with his family at his Friar Park Estate in Henley-on-Thames, England.
Instead, the former Beatle was lying in a hospital with 40 stab wounds after an intruder broke into his home on December 30 and left him fighting for his life.
British comedian Eric Idle recalls the incident on the latest episode of the Adam Buxton Podcast. A founding member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Idle was both Harrison's friend and associate. Harrison appeared in Idles' satirical Beatles take-off All You Need Is Cash and even re-mortgaged his home to help finance Monty Python's 1979 film Life of Brian.
The attacker was Michael Abram, a 34-year-old suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. After breaking in, Abram encountered Harrison, leading to a prolonged fight in which the guitarist suffered a punctured lung and multiple head injuries.
As Idle tells Buxton, the incident shook Harrison to his core.
“He was very disturbed,” he says. “I have never, ever seen him more disturbed. It was really shocking, because they fought for 20 minutes.”
Idle adds that he had been attacked “with a butcher's knife,” and was “bleeding to death.”
He describes Abram as “a crazed guy, off his meds." Abram's was initially looking to kill Paul McCartney but decided to make Harrison his target. "He couldn't find Paul, so it's easier to find Henley," Idle says.
“He came over the wall, smashed in the window, and George, I think, came out because George was the bold one, who told the Hell's Angels to fuck off."
Idle is referring to Harrison throwing Hells Angels members out of the Beatles Apple Corps in the 1960s, after they became disruptive: "He was always the one who came and said, 'No, you've got to fuck off.'"
When it came to dealing with his intruder, “I think he did the same thing," Idle says. "He went at the top of the stairs and told him to fuck off. And then he yelled 'Hare Krishna!' and the guy came at him up the stairs with a knife. It would have been wiser, perhaps, to lock the door and call the police.”
Over the next 20 minutes, Harrison and Abram fought. Harrison's wife, Olivia, hit Abram with a fireplace poker but was unable to subdue him.
“Liv, in the end, bashed him over the head with a Tiffany lamp, and they were all passed out when the police arrived, and blood everywhere," Idle says. "It was like a scene from a horror film.”
Recalling the attack afterward, Harrison recalled, “I felt exhausted and could feel the strength draining from me,” he said. “I vividly remember a deliberate thrust to my chest. I could hear my lung exhaling and had blood in my mouth. I believed I had been fatally stabbed.”
Once he was well enough to return home, Harrison led a puja, a Hindu ceremony sometimes used for healing after trauma to help process emotions and find meaning. Idle was among those present for it .
“We went round and went through the attack, bit by bit, up the stairs, and still blood on the walls and things,” he remembers. “It was, like, really awful and shocking, and kind of therapeutic.”
Although Harrison survived his injuries, they may have contributed to his death from lung cancer two years later. Following the attack, part of his punctured lung had to be removed, which made an operation to remove cancer on his lungs soon after far more risky.
Abram was ultimately judged not guilty by reason of insanity. He avoided jail time and was instead sentenced to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital. In 2002, just eight months after Harrison’s passing, he was discharged.
Harrison's friendship with Idle was long and enduring. As he once explained, he saw similarities between the Beatles and Monty Python in their shared efforts to change the status quo. Idle was by his bedside when Harrison died in 2001, alongside Olivia, their son, Dhani, and Ravi Shankar, his wife and their daughter.
