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Gone Troppo is the tenth studio album by the English rock musician George Harrison, released on 5 November 1982 by Dark Horse Records. It includes "Wake Up My Love", issued as a single, and "Dream Away", which was the theme song for the 1981 HandMade Films production Time Bandits. Harrison produced the album with Ray Cooper and former The Beatles engineer Phil McDonald.
With Harrison uninterested in the contemporary music scene and unwilling to promote the release, Gone Troppo failed to chart in the United Kingdom, and it was his only post-Beatles studio album not to chart inside the top 20 in the United States.Simon Leng, While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison, Hal Leonard (Milwaukee, WI, 2006; ), p. 321fn. For the next five years, he largely took an extended hiatus from his music career, with only the occasional soundtrack recording surfacing.
"Wake Up My Love" and "That's the Way It Goes" were included on Harrison's compilation album Best of Dark Horse 1976–1989, and the title track also appeared on the compact disc version of that album. No tracks from Gone Troppo were included on the 2009 career-spanning collection . "That's the Way It Goes" was covered by Joe Brown and other musicians at the Concert for George in November 2002.
In 2004, Gone Troppo was remastered and reissued, both separately from and as part of the deluxe box set The Dark Horse Years 1976–1992. The reissue added a demo version of "Mystical One" as its sole bonus track.
Less impressed, Steve Pond of Rolling Stone said that, of late, Harrison had "made a much better movie financier than musician", and he found the album "So offhand and breezy as to be utterly insubstantial", with "Wake Up My Love" the only song of note. Writing for Musician, Roy Trakin considered that, in the wake of Lennon's assassination two years before, Harrison's "tortured honesty … dooms this record's attempt to heal those psychic wounds with calm, offhanded music". Trakin admired some of the guitar playing on the album but concluded: "It's too bad the public won't forget George Harrison was a Beatle. His musical output will undoubtedly suffer by comparison until we do."Roy Trakin, "George Harrison: Gone Troppo", Musician, January 1983; available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
Reviewing more recently for AllMusic, critic William Ruhlmann writes of Gone Troppo: "Clearly, Harrison could no longer treat his musical career as a part-time stepchild to his interests in car racing and movie producing if he wanted to maintain it. As it turned out, he didn't; this was his last album for five years." Writing in the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Mac Randall opined: "The dynamic, synth-driven 'Wake Up My Love' opens Gone Troppo and the spooky 'Circles' (yet another lost Beatles song) closes it, but there ain't much in between."Nathan Brackett & Christian Hoard (eds), The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th edn), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY, 2004; ), p. 368.
John Harris of Mojo likens Gone Troppo to Harrison's final album for EMI/Capitol Records, Extra Texture (1975), and dismisses it as "Another contract-finisher, this time with Warner Brothers, recorded super-quick, and issued with barely any promotion." Music Box editor John Metzger also holds it in low regard, writing: " Gone Troppo was undoubtedly the worst of George Harrison's solo albums … A few tunes, such as That's the Way It Goes and Unknown Delight, might have worked better if given different arrangements, but as a whole, Gone Troppo was a largely forgettable and sometimes embarrassing affair that appealed only to complete-ists and fanatics."
More impressed, Dave Thompson wrote in Goldmine magazine of its standing as the release that preceded Harrison's temporary retirement from music: "to accuse the album itself of hastening that demise is grossly unfair." While conceding that it was a far from essential Harrison album, Thompson considered it to be "no worse than much of [Paul McCartney]]'s period output" and opined that "Dream Away" and "Circles" "stand alongside any number of Harrison's minor classics".Dave Thompson, "The Music of George Harrison: An album-by-album guide", Goldmine, 25 January 2002, p. 53.
Kit Aiken of Uncut describes Gone Troppo as "a return to form of sorts" after Somewhere in England and a collection of "amiable, light-hearted music made by a bunch of mates with nothing to prove". In another favourable 2004 assessment, for Rolling Stone, Parke Puterbaugh wrote: " Gone Troppo might just be Harrison's most underrated album … It captures Harrison at his most relaxed and playful on songs such as the title track."Parke Puterbaugh, "By George", Rolling Stone, 3 April 2004, p. 68.
Side one
Side two
Bonus track Gone Troppo was remastered and reissued in 2004 with the bonus track:
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