The Rolling Stones released the live album Live at Leeds as a digital download on November 12, 2012. Recorded at Roundhay Park in Leeds, England, on July 25, 1982, it captured the final concert of their European tour supporting Tattoo You. It also preserved their last show with founding pianist Ian Stewart, alongside a keyboard player whose Stones touring career was just beginning.
Chuck Leavell had joined the touring band for that European run. In a 2022 interview with Classic Rock, he recalled that Stewart had contacted him about an audition in 1981. Leavell thought he’d landed the job, but the band initially stayed with its existing keyboard lineup. Stewart kept the connection alive, inviting him to sit in when the Stones reached Atlanta. By the end of the year, he called again with the offer to join them in Europe.
The two players divided the work according to their musical preferences. Leavell told Performing Songwriter in 2008 that he’d asked Stewart why the Stones needed another pianist. Stewart preferred the boogie material and chose to avoid slow songs and minor chords, leaving room for another player to handle those parts of the repertoire. “I learned a lot from Stu,” Leavell said. After Stewart’s death in 1985, Leavell also took on songs his colleague had previously played. The Leeds recording catches their partnership before that change.
The repertoire gave them plenty to work with. Tattoo You, released in 1981, supplied five songs, including “Neighbours,” “Black Limousine” and “Start Me Up.” The last of those appeared deep in the concert, between “Brown Sugar” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Across more than two hours, the set moved from its opening “Under My Thumb” to the closing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” with room along the way for “Angie.”
Seven years separated that European tour from the band’s return to the road in 1989. Leavell accompanied the Stones again for the Steel Wheels tour, having also worked with them in the studio during the intervening years. For the keyboard partnership heard at Leeds, Stewart’s death had made the end of the 1982 tour a permanent dividing point.
The Leeds download arrived through Google Music as part of the Stones Archive series. Earlier in 2012, the band had released Hampton Coliseum (Live 1981), documenting the preceding American tour. The two albums share much of their repertoire, but Leeds includes “Angie,” while Hampton contains “Waiting on a Friend” and “Let It Bleed,” neither of which appears on the Leeds release. Together, the recordings preserve changes in the set between the American and European runs.
The concert received a further archival release in November 2015 as From the Vault – Live in Leeds 1982. That edition paired restored concert footage with sound mixed by Bob Clearmountain and appeared in video and CD packages. The performance that had first reached listeners as an official download could also be watched as a complete concert film.
