"Portrait of Leg End" ?

A LAST album of George Harrisons 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
Harrisons 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 Onos Double Fantasy
album, which sold millions of copies in the international outpouring of
grief that followed Lennons 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 Harrisons
interest in Far Eastern religions and philosophy and also to Dhanis
emergence as a gifted guitarist in his fathers 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 worlds 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
Georges music that doesnt 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 didnt
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.