A Song For You

A celebration of one of rock’s most storied careers. Uncut remembers Leon Russell with a previously unpublished interview in which he looks back at his extraordinary life with Phil Spector, The Byrds, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra. “My songs are tributes, a lot of the time, to things that are important in my life.”

- Andy Gill

Leon Russell leant back in his chair, fondling the head of his walking cane, and cast his mind back to the sessions he played for Phil Spector. “There wasn’t much reading,” he recalled, “but there was a lot of hanging around. They could go on for 12-14 hours, the same song over and over again.” He smiled wryly at the memory. “Very tedious. Union sessions were three hours, so that would be 11 hours of overtime. A strenuous deal. But it paid good.”

We were chatting sometime in the late ’90s, with Leon – who died on November 13, 2016, aged 74 – ensconced in an anonymous hotel suite in Knightsbridge. Although it had been some time since he was heard on the radio, he still struck an imposing figure: with a huge mane of silver-white hair matched by a long, bushy beard, and mirror sunglasses beneath a curvy white Stetson, his presence seemed to shrink the room, as if it was too small to house his charisma. But then, Leon always was a showman, certainly back in the early ’70s when, top-hatted and saturnine of countenance, he rubbed shoulders with the rock’n’roll elite, with Beatles and Stones queuing up to play on his debut album, and his own showcase slot at the Concert For Bangladesh, where he also joined George and Ringo as Dylan’s pick-up band.