Flashmob Performs The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ in Madrid Unemployment Office

One of my favorite songs comes from the Quiet Beatle, George Harrison. A tune that can rival anything from the Lennon/McCartney songbook, Here Comes the Sun was written in 1969, during a fairly bleak time. Harrison sets the scene is his 1980 book, I, Me, Mine. He recalls:

“Here Comes the Sun” was written at the time when Apple [the Beatles’ record label] was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that’. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”

It’s a song about getting through the darkness — personal, professional, seasonal, etc. And it’s simply a perfect pick for the flashmob performance you’ll witness above. Unlike so many other feel-good flashmob performances staged in Europe (see below), this one takes place in a dreary unemployment office in Spain (Madrid, to be precise) where unemployment hovers around 26% and homelessness is on the rise. It doesn’t try to sugarcoat life in Spain. It just provides a little ray of hope.

This video was shot back in January. According to a recent IMF report, conditions will remain difficult in Spain for years to come, but some new data hints that the worst may be over. Or so we hope.

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