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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Gui­tar Solo by George Har­ri­son

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Mov­ing­ly Flash­mobbed in Spain

Copen­hagen Phil­har­mon­ic Plays Ravel’s Bolero at Train Sta­tion

Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Clas­sic Bea­t­les Song, ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)