The Quiet Beatle Played on Our Record
Owen Fegan
I moved to Amsterdam from New York City in November 2019. By that point I would have described myself as someone who had done his time on the road, closed that chapter, and moved on. Rubyhorse was a part of my distant past. Other things were the present. Amsterdam was going to be the future.
Then Covid hit.
Just months after I arrived in the Netherlands, the world locked down. Getting assimilated in a new city, in a new country, with a five-year-old suddenly attending school on a laptop at the kitchen table — while trying to figure out what "remote work" even meant — was an exercise in controlled psychological collapse. The strange gift of it, though, was time. Too much time. Time to sit with things you'd filed away.
I stumbled on Crowded House performing "Don't Dream It's Over" from their separate living rooms on YouTube. It was simple, a little rough, but somehow the most emotionally resonant thing I'd watched in months. Seeing them each isolated in their own four walls — intimate and dispersed at once — woke something in me.
I hadn't played with Rubyhorse in seventeen years.
Dave, Joe, Decky, and Gordon had been quietly active — they'd put out four new singles in 2018 and 2019, the first new material since Goodbye To All That — but the full original lineup hadn't been in the same room, let alone the same recording session, since 2003. I'd played my last show with the band at the World Peace Music Awards in Bali that June, got on a plane back to America, and moved to New York.
So I reached out. And almost immediately we started talking about "Punchdrunk."
In 1998, while we were in Los Angeles recording our major label debut for Interscope at A&M Studios — a record that, despite its enormous budget and Paul Fox producing, was never released — George Harrison recorded his slide guitar part for "Punchdrunk" at his Friar Park studio in Henley-on-Thames. We were six thousand miles away in LA. The track crossed the Atlantic on tape, and just like that, the quiet Beatle was on our record. But the Los Angeles sessions had never captured what the band actually sounded like.
A Fax message (dated January 3rd, 1998) from George Harrison detailing his guitar contributions and plans for dessert.
George's speculation regarding what Rubyhorse might look like.
We went to Nashville to salvage the project and recorded what would become How Far Have You Come with producer Jay Joyce, rebuilding "Punchdrunk" around George's guitar part. By the time we delivered this record to the label, the A&R team that had signed us were gone, and Tom Whalley, the head of Interscope at the time, allowed us to leave with a budget to release the record ourselves. So we put out How Far Have You Come independently — selling only a few hundred copies of a record with a fucking Beatle on it — on merch tables across America as we toured with Flickerstick, Culture Club, and Def Leppard.
Then we signed with Island Records and made Rise. We recorded "Punchdrunk" again, keeping George Harrison's guitar part — recorded not long before his death, and now carrying a weight it hadn't before. The label wanted to lead with "Sparkle," which peaked at #17 on the Billboard charts and ended up on everything from Sidewalks of New York to Smallville. We did Letterman. We did Conan. We toured with R.E.M., INXS, and Def Leppard. By every visible metric, things were working.
We released "Any Day Now" next. It didn't find its footing, and not long after we parted ways with Island. And again, "Punchdrunk" was never released.
While planning for the follow-up record — Goodbye To All That — I realized I'd had enough of all of it. I left the band in August 2003. Time passed.
In the spring of 2020, five people who grew up together in Cork, who had built something genuinely extraordinary in America and then watched it dissolve — now scattered across Ireland, the US, and the Netherlands — had nowhere to be and nothing but time.
We were going to finish what we'd started in 1998.
The full original lineup recorded "Punchdrunk" from our kitchens and living rooms: Dave, Joe and Decky in Ireland, Gordon in Rhode Island, me in Amsterdam. And woven through it all, a slide guitar part recorded at Friar Park twenty-two years earlier by a Beatle who'd been gone for almost two decades.
It struck me that George had understood this long before any of us did. He'd walked into his home studio in 1998, recorded his part alone, and sent it across the world on tape — trusting that the music would find its way without him needing to be in the room. That's exactly what the whole world had been forced to learn in 2020. He already knew.
Olivia and Dhani Harrison gave us their blessing, and for the first time, we were able to let it go.
Punchdrunk Featuring George Harrison was finally released as a single on July 2, 2020. Twenty-two years after George played his part.
Some things take a while to find their moment.
Owen Fegan
Amsterdam, Netherlands, February 27th, 2026.
Dave Farrell: vocals
Decky Lucey: acoustic guitar, Moog Taurus, backing vocals
Joe Philpott: acoustic guitar, backing vocals
Gordon Ashe: drums
Owen Fegan: keyboards, backing vocals
George Harrison: slide guitar
Produced by Rubyhorse
Recorded by Dave Farrell, Decky Lucey, Joe Philpott (Cork, Ireland), Gordon Ashe (Newport, Rhode Island, USA), Owen Fegan (EIO Studio Amsterdam, Netherlands), and George Harrison (Friar Park Studio, Henley-on-Thames, England)
May 2020 & January 1998
Mixed and mastered by Owen Fegan
EIO Studio — Amsterdam, Netherlands