The late Beatles singer and his then-fiancée (soon-to-be wife) Olivia Harrison welcomed their only child, Dhani, on Aug. 1, 1978. Harrison, who was a follower of the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism, named his son after the sixth and seventh notes on the Indian music scale, “dha” and “ni.”
Though The Beatles disbanded years before his birth, Dhani still grew up around music thanks to his dad’s solo career. “He’s lovely,” Harrison told PEOPLE in 1987 of his then-9-year-old son. “He’s good fun, good company. He can play ‘When We Was Fab’ on the piano.”
Harrison wrote several songs for Dhani over the years, including 1982’s “Unknown Delight.” “He was saying, ‘What should I write about? What should I write a song about?’ ” Olivia told NPR of her husband in a 2004 interview. “I said, ‘Write a song about Dhani.’ And he wrote this beautiful song which was very prescient, actually.”
Now 45, Dhani is following in Harrison’s footsteps as a musician while working to keep his dad’s legacy alive following his untimely death in November 2001
From working as an aerodynamicist to winning a Grammy Award, here’s everything to know about George Harrison’s son.
“My earliest memory of my dad is probably of him somewhere in a garden covered in dirt, somewhere hot, a tropical garden, in jeans, khakis covered in dirt, just continuously planting trees,” Dhani said in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World. “I think that’s what I thought he did for the first seven years of my life.”
As an act of teenage rebellion, Dhani enrolled at a military school to annoy his openly pacifistic dad.
Despite his global fame, Harrison didn’t tell Dhani that he was a member of The Beatles until he was in elementary school.
“I was completely unaware that he had anything to do with music,” Dhani said of his dad in the 2011 documentary about his dad. “I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing ‘Yellow Submarine,’ and I didn’t understand why. It just seemed surreal.”
“I did everything I could to not be a musician,” he told Billboard at the time. “It’s in the DNA, I guess.”
