The man Elton John called his “piano idol”
It didn’t take much to pull Elton John away from his roots in classical music. The legendary rock and roller always harboured a love for blues and R&B, especially as those two genres were exploding in Britain during the mid-1960s. But John himself was stuck at the Royal Academy of Music, going over endless lines of Bach and Handel.
Throughout the 1960s, John took his love of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis to the next level by kickstarting his own singing career. At first, John was navigating through the trends of the day, which included psychedelic rock and baroque influences. But when John got the opportunity to travel to America, he connected with roots rock pioneer Leon Russell.
“When I first saw him, it was with Delaney and Bonnie, and then I saw him in Mad Dogs & Englishmen from Joe Cocker,” John recalled on the BBC’s ‘Tracks of My Years’ programme. “Then, when I first went to America, he was in the audience of the second night of the Troubadour, and I saw him, I’ve looked at this mane of silver hair, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s Leon Russell!’ and I temporarily froze for about a nanosecond.”
“He came back afterwards and was so sweet,” John recalled. “He was beginning to become famous before me, and he had written a song that I was just crazy about.”
“So he was my piano player idol at that time and probably still is,” John added. “He asked me to come on tour with him, and I thought that was an incredibly sweet thing to do, considering that I was a piano player as well. We fell out of touch after a while, and then we got together when I made the Union album.”
By 2020, Russell had largely fallen out of the mainstream spotlight. Apart from occasional tributes and stage appearances with younger artists, Russell was content recording albums and living at his own pace. Then John returned to his life looking to create a collaborative album, The Union.
“I wanted to make an album with him because he’d been forgotten, and I wanted to put his name back in the spotlight, I wanted him to be a member of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and Songwriters Hall Of Fame,” John openly admitted. “I wanted him to get his recognition back, and he did. There is plenty of songs that I wish have written, but this song is up there.”
For his part, Russell wanted to return the favour by crafting the album’s final track around his gratitude to John. “I wanted to give Elton something. But what do you give a guy who has six fully stocked houses?” Russell told The New York Times in 2015. “So I thought the only thing I could give him is a song. ‘In the Hands of Angels’, retelling the story of the album, thanks Mr. John (‘the guv’ner’ in the lyrics), who knew all the places I needed to go and made me feel the love down deep inside.”
