In 1968, George Harrison began flexing his muscles as a songwriter worthy of comparison to the main axis of original Beatles music at the time, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He contributed four songs to the band’s self-titled White Album, each of a markedly different character.
The most famous and celebrated of these compositions is undoubtedly ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but arguably the most “Beatlesy” is the often-overlooked ‘Savoy Truffle’. First off, the track is a vibrant blend of some of the ingredients we find throughout the band’s back catalogue, from a double-tracked lead vocal to an inspired drum part from Ringo Starr, brimming with loose fills and his characteristic swing. And the electric piano part sounds like it’s something McCartney pulled from his repertoire of Ray Charles and Fats Domino pastiches from around the same period, although it was actually played by EMI session musician Chris Thomas.
Then there’s the self-referential element of the song, as it joins ‘Glass Onion’ and ‘Wild Honey Pie’ among the White Album numbers to namecheck other Beatles tracks. It does so with a less-than-complimentary nod to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, a McCartney tune from the same record that the group’s other members, including Harrison, didn’t particularly care for. In fact, the lyrics address a heated argument the four of them had about McCartney’s song, which, for Harrison, epitomised how the internal dynamics within the band at the time had become “so sour”.
Still, ‘Savoy Truffle’ isn’t all about infighting, which had nothing to do with its title. The track sounds like it could be named after an Italian delicacy served at the world-renowned Savoy Hotel in London, which has a long tradition of hosting some of the biggest names in art and entertainment, including Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The Beatles themselves stayed there, too.
So, is this actually the Savoy in the title?
Yet the name of the song actually refers to a far less gourmet treat native to Halifax in northern England. Harrison was writing about his friend Eric Clapton’s weakness for Good News chocolate boxes, produced by Mackintosh’s confectioners in Yorkshire. “He always had toothache, but he ate a lot of chocolates,” Harrison recalled later when writing about Clapton in his autobiography. “Once he saw a box he had to eat them all.”
Indeed, including its titular truffle, the song lists no fewer than eight different varieties of chocolate contained within a box of Good News, with “Creme Tangerine”, “Ginger Sling”, “Coffee Dessert”, and “Montelimart”, which was named after a French town, the four others named directly. Savoy Truffles themselves were named after the region of France, where chocolate truffles were originally invented in 1895.
Ironically, Mackintosh’s disappeared a few months after the release of the White Album, having been bought out by the larger UK confectioner Rowntree’s. It’s Quality Street, Rolo, and Toffee Crisp brands still survive today, but Good News chocolates were discontinued after the buyout, adding to the sense of mystery around the meaning of Harrison’s song. What better homage to the historic chocolatier could there be, though, than a musical eulogy recorded by another British institution belonging to the same era?
