DCC Archive New George Harrison Album

From the Sunday Times, London...
SUNDAY DECEMBER 02 2001
Harrison recorded a secret last album
MAURICE CHITTENDEN
A LAST album of George Harrison’s music was being finished in secrecy in the months before his death. He played tracks from the CD to his family and friends in his private room at a Los Angeles hospital last Sunday, four days before he died.
His wife Olivia and son Dhani seem certain to release the CD as a tribute to Harrison’s courage in the face of the cancer that killed him at the age of 58. It could repeat the success of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album, which sold millions of copies in the international outpouring of grief that followed Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
Harrison had given the album the working title of Portrait of a Leg End, a pun on his celebrity. Unlike his last song, Horse to Water, recorded in Switzerland for a new Jools Holland CD and released with a poignant publishing credit to Rip Ltd, the songs on his own CD do not allude to his illness.
One of the tracks, Rising Son, is an ambiguous reference to Harrison’s interest in Far Eastern religions and philosophy and also to Dhani’s emergence as a gifted guitarist in his father’s footsteps.
Harrison was completing work on 25 unreleased tracks in a studio at his Friar Park mansion at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. A few tracks date to the 1980s and others are new. Some allude to traumatic personal events, including the attempt on his life by an intruder who broke into the mansion in December 1999 and stabbed him.
The tracks were part of a concerted effort by Harrison in his final months to put his musical legacy in order: he remastered and re-released All Things Must Pass, his 1970 hit album, earlier this year and was planning to reissue other albums as well as to complete his new music.
Jim Keltner, the world’s most in-demand session drummer, who has recorded with Harrison, Lennon, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan, flew from his home in California to Friar Park to add drums to the tracks that Harrison and other musicians, believed to include Eric Clapton, had recorded.
Keltner, who last played with Harrison in the Traveling Wilburys supergroup in the 1980s but still saw him regularly as a friend, said this weekend: “It was fantastic to be in the studio with him again. Some of the new songs are very poignant concerning his life in the past few years. It will be obvious when you hear them what they are about.
“The CD is very close to finishing. There is a certain soulfulness about George’s music that doesn’t need a lot once he has put that voice on.
“There will be people who argue that it is underproduced and maybe there should be more on it. Knowing George, I have a feeling he would rather it be as simple and as direct as possible.”
He added: “I last saw him on Sunday night. It was a great gift to us that he was so beautiful. He looked fantastic. He looked like a prince. He didn’t look like a person suffering from cancer. His skin was shining and he was smiling.”
Keith Badman, a Beatles authority whose latest book on the group, The Dream is Over, was published last month, said: “The recording of the new album was shrouded in secrecy, but George had planned to bring it out this October before he fell ill again.”
Harrison was cremated in Los Angeles within a few hours of his death on Thursday and before the news was released. Friends expect his ashes to be spread on the Ganges or another holy river in India.
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