by Elton John
I didn’t have too much time to ruminate on how my life had changed. I was working too hard. We spent 1971 touring: backwards and forwards between America and Britain, then down to Japan, New Zealand and Australia. We were headlining now, but we still followed Howard Rose’s advice and played venues that were slightly smaller than we could fill, or one night in a city when we could have sold out two. We did the same thing in Britain – we kept playing the universities and rock clubs long after we could have filled theatres. It’s a really smart thing to do: don’t be greedy, build your career up gradually, and it was typical Howard. He was so bright and full of good advice: he’s still my agent today. I was really lucky with the people I worked with when I was just starting out in America. Young British artists could easily fall in with a bunch of sharks over there, but I got people who went out of their way to make me feel part of a family: not just Howard, but my publisher David Rosner and his wife Margo.
If I wasn’t onstage, I was in the studio. I released four albums in America in 1971: Tumbleweed Connection didn’t come out there until January; the soundtrack to a movie called Friends in March – which was only a minor hit, but still did better than the film, a complete flop – a live album we’d recorded the previous year, 11-17-70, in May; and Madman Across the Water in November. We recorded Madman in four days. It was supposed to be five, but we lost a day because of Paul Buckmaster. He stayed up the night before the sessions began to finish the arrangements – I suspect with a certain amount of chemical assistance – then managed to knock a bottle of ink all over the only score, ruining it. I was furious. It was an expensive mistake to make, and we stopped working together for decades afterwards. But I was also quietly impressed when he wrote the whole score again, in twenty-four hours. Even when Paul screwed up, he screwed up in a way that reminded you he was a genius.
And I love Madman Across the Water. At the time, it was a much bigger hit in America than in Britain: Top Ten over there, but only number 41 at home. It’s not particularly commercial; there were no huge smash singles, and the songs were much longer and more complex than I’d written before. Some of Bernie’s lyrics were like a diary of the last year. One song, ‘All The Nasties’, was about me, wondering aloud what would happen if I came out publicly: ‘If it came to pass that they should ask – what would I tell them? Would they criticize behind my back? Maybe I should let them’. Not a single person seemed to notice what I was singing about.
One other thing happened during the Madman sessions. Gus Dudgeon hired a guitarist called Davey Johnstone to play acoustic guitar and mandolin on a couple of tracks. I really liked him – he was Scottish, lanky and very forthright, and he had really good taste in music. I took Gus aside and asked what he thought about Davey joining the band. I’d been thinking about expanding the trio to include a guitarist for a while. Gus thought it was a bad idea. Davey was a wonderful guitarist, but he only played acoustic: as far as Gus knew, he’d never even played an electric guitar. He was in a band called Magna Carta, who specialized in bucolic folk, and there wasn’t a lot of that in the Elton John repertoire.
It was a very persuasive argument. I ignored it and offered Davey the job anyway. If I’d learned anything over the last few years, it was that sometimes a gut feeling is the most important thing. You can work as hard as you like, and plan as carefully as you want, but there are moments when it’s just about a hunch, about trusting your instincts, or about fate. What if I’d never responded to the Liberty advert? What if I’d passed the audition and they hadn’t given me Bernie’s lyrics? What if Steve Brown hadn’t showed up at DJM? What if Dick hadn’t been so certain I should go to America, when it seemed like such a stupid idea?
So when we went to France to record the next album at the Château d’Hérouville, Davey was with us. I’d changed things around a lot – it was the first time I’d tried to record an album with my touring band rather than crack session musicians; the first time that Davey had picked up an electric guitar; the first time we’d had the money to record abroad, in a residential studio – but I was in a really confident mood. Just before we left for France I’d legally changed my name to Elton John. Elton Hercules John. I’d always thought middle names were slightly ridiculous, so I did the most ridiculous thing I could think of and took mine from the rag and bone man’s horse in the sitcom Steptoe and Son. Basically, I had got sick of the fuss in shops when the cashier recognized me but not the name on my chequebook. But it really seemed more symbolic than practical – like I was finally, conclusively, legally leaving Reg Dwight behind, fully becoming the person I was supposed to be. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, but in that moment, it felt good.
I loved the idea of working at the Château, even though it came with a reputation attached. It was supposed to be haunted, and the locals had apparently become wary of the studio’s clientele after The Grateful Dead had stayed there, offered to play a free concert for the villagers, then taken it upon themselves to expand the minds of rural France by spiking their audience’s drinks with LSD. But it was a beautiful building, an eighteenth-century mansion – we ended up naming the album after it: Honky Château – and I was excited about the idea of having to write songs on the spot.
I’m not a musician who walks around with melodies in his head all the time. I don’t rush to the piano in the middle of the night when inspiration strikes. I don’t even think about songwriting when I’m not actually doing it. Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and something else takes over, something comes through my fingers. The muse, God, luck: you can give it a name if you want, but I’ve no idea what it is. I just know straight away where the melody’s going to go. Sometimes a song only takes as long to write as it does to listen to. ‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’ was like that – I sat down, read the lyric and played it, pretty much the same as you hear on the record. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. If I don’t like what I’ve done after about forty minutes, I give up and move on to something else. There are words that Bernie’s written that I’ve never managed to come up with music for. He wrote a great lyric called ‘The Day That Bobby Went Electric’, about hearing Dylan sing ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for the first time, and I just couldn’t get a tune I thought was right; I tried four or five times. But I’ve never had writer’s block, I’ve never sat down with one of Bernie’s lyrics and nothing has come out. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it and I don’t want to explain it. Actually, I love that I can’t explain it. It’s the spontaneity of it that’s beautiful.
So Bernie brought his typewriter to the Château, and we set up some instruments in the dining room as well as the studio. Bernie would bash out his lyrics and leave them for me on the piano. I’d wake up early, go to the dining room, see what he’d come up with and write songs while I was having breakfast. The first morning we were there, I had three done by the time the band drifted downstairs looking for something to eat: ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’, ‘Amy’ and ‘Rocket Man’.
Once Davey had been convinced that this wasn’t an elaborate prank at the expense of the new boy, that I really had written three songs while he was having a lie-in, he picked up his guitar and asked me to play ‘Rocket Man’ again. He didn’t add a solo or do anything that a regular lead guitar player might do. He used a slide and played odd, lonely notes that drifted around and away from the melody. It was great. Like I said, sometimes a gut feeling is the most important thing; sometimes you have to trust fate.
The rest of the band were so used to playing together that there was something almost telepathic between us: they just intuitively knew what to do with a song without being told. It felt fantastic, sitting together in the Château’s dining room, hearing a song take shape around us, trying ideas and knowing straight away they were the right ideas. There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. I was twenty-four, successful, sett
led and in love. What’s more, tomorrow we had a day off and I was going to Paris, with every intention of absolutely looting the Yves Saint-Laurent store.
five
In 1972, John and I moved out of London to Virginia Water in Surrey, swapping the one-bedroom flat for something a little more grand: we bought a three-bedroom bungalow, with its own swimming pool, and a games room built in what had been the loft. I called it Hercules, to match my middle name. Bernie and Maxine, who had married in 1971, had a house nearby; Mum and Derf, who’d finally got married too, moved just down the road and kept an eye on the bungalow when we were away. They call that area of England the stockbroker belt, which makes it sound boring and suburban, but it wasn’t at all. For one thing, Keith Moon lived ten minutes away from me, which obviously lent daily life a certain unpredictability. Keith was fabulous, but his diet of chemicals seemed to have left him without any understanding of the concept of time. He’d turn up unannounced at two thirty in the morning, completely out of his mind – usually with Ringo Starr, another local resident, in tow – and seem genuinely surprised that he’d got you out of bed. Or he’d materialize without warning in your driveway at 7 a.m. on Christmas Day, in a Rolls-Royce convertible with the top down and The Shadows’ Greatest Hits playing at deafening volume. ‘Dear boy! Look at the new car! Come for a spin! No, now! No need to change out of your dressing gown!’
But the most interesting person I knew in Virginia Water had nothing to do with the music business. I met Bryan Forbes when I walked into the bookshop he owned in the town, looking for something to read. He came over and introduced himself and said that he thought he recognized me. That didn’t seem unlikely – by now, my onstage flamboyance had seeped into my everyday wardrobe, so my idea of dressing down for an afternoon’s shopping in a Surrey commuter town involved wearing a bright orange fur coat and a pair of eight-inch platform boots. But it turned out that he didn’t recognize me at all: as the conversation progressed, it became increasingly apparent that he thought I was one of The Bee Gees.
Once we’d established that I wasn’t a Gibb brother, we got on very well. Bryan was fascinating. He’d been an actor, and was now a screenwriter, a novelist and a director, and he would go on to become a studio boss. He was married to the actress Nanette Newman and the two of them seemed to know everybody personally: Hollywood legends, writers, TV stars. If you were in America and expressed a long-held desire to meet David Niven or Groucho Marx, Bryan could arrange it, which is how I ended up with a Marx Brothers film poster signed ‘to John Elton from Marx Groucho’: he couldn’t understand why my name was, as he put it, ‘the wrong way round’. It’s funny, I thought of Groucho years later at Buckingham Palace, when I got my knighthood, because that’s how the Lord Chamberlain announced me to the Queen: ‘Sir John Elton’.
One summer Sunday afternoon, John and I were sitting outside the bungalow having a snack, when we noticed a sixty-something lady who looked a little like Katharine Hepburn cycling up our drive. It was Katharine Hepburn: ‘I’m staying with Bryan Forbes – he said it would be OK if I used your pool.’ John and I just nodded, dumbstruck. Five minutes later, she reappeared in a swimsuit, complaining that there was a dead frog in the pool. When I dithered about how to get it out – I’m a bit squeamish about things like that – she just jumped in and grabbed it with her hand. I asked her how she could bear to touch it.
‘Character, young man,’ she nodded sternly.
If you were invited to the Forbes house for lunch you’d find yourself sitting between Peter Sellers and Dame Edith Evans, drinking in their stories, or you’d turn up to discover that the other guests included the Queen Mother. Bryan knew the Royal Family: he was president of the National Youth Theatre, and Princess Margaret was a patron. It turned out that Princess Margaret loved music and the company of musicians. She ended up inviting me and the band back to Kensington Palace for supper after a gig at the Royal Festival Hall, which turned out to be incredibly awkward. Not because of Princess Margaret – she was really sweet and friendly to everybody – but because of her husband, Lord Snowdon. Everyone knew the marriage was in trouble – there were always rumours in the press about one or the other having an affair – but even so, nothing could have prepared us for his arrival. He stormed in midway through the meal and literally snarled ‘Where’s my fucking dinner?’ at her. They had a huge row, and she fled the room in tears. Me and the band were just sitting there, aghast, not really knowing what to do. You know, how bizarre can life in the Elton John Band get? Other musicians relax after a gig by smoking a joint or seducing groupies or trashing hotel rooms; we end up watching Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon screaming at each other.
But it wasn’t just who Bryan knew, it was what he knew, and the fact that he was a born teacher: patient and generous with his time, sophisticated in his tastes but completely unsnobbish, eager for others to love the things he loved. He taught me about art, and I started collecting under his influence. First it was art nouveau and art deco posters, which were very fashionable in the early seventies – Rod Stewart collected them too – then surrealist painters like Paul Wunderlich. I began buying Tiffany lamps and Bugatti furniture. Bryan got me interested in theatre, and recommended books to me. We became very close, and started going on holiday together: me and John, Bryan, Nanette and their daughters Emma and Sarah. We would hire a house in California for a month, and friends would come over and visit.
Nanette turned out to be a great accomplice when it came to shopping, something I’d become extremely fond of since I started making a bit of money. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I’ve always loved shopping, since I was a kid. When I think of growing up in Pinner, I think of the shops: the different-coloured cotton reels in the wool shop where my gran used to get her knitting supplies; the smell of fresh peanuts as you walked into Woolworths; the sawdust on the floor of Sainsbury’s, where Auntie Win worked on the butter counter. I don’t know why, but something about those places fascinated me. I’ve always loved collecting things, and I’ve always loved buying people presents, more than I love receiving them. When I was a boy, my favourite thing about Christmas was working out what I was going to buy my family: some aftershave for my dad, a rain hat for my gran, maybe a little vase for my mum from the kiosk near Baker Street station that I used to pass on my way to the Royal Academy of Music.
Of course, becoming successful enabled me to pursue this passion on a slightly different scale. We’d come back from LA with so much stuff that the excess baggage charge would be as much as the ticket home. I’d hear that my auntie Win was feeling down in the dumps so I’d call a dealership and get them to send her a new car to cheer her up. Over the years, I’ve had therapists tell me that it’s obsessive, addictive behaviour, or that I’m trying to buy people’s affection by giving them gifts. With the greatest of respect to the members of the psychiatric profession who have said that sort of thing to me, I think that’s a load of old shit. I’m not interested in buying people’s affection. I just get a lot of pleasure out of making people feel included or letting them know I’m thinking about them. I love seeing people’s faces when you treat them to something.
I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that material possessions aren’t a replacement for love or personal happiness. I’ve spent enough miserable, lonely nights in houses filled with beautiful things to have worked that out for myself a long time ago. And I really don’t recommend going shopping in the depressing aftermath of a three-day cocaine binge, unless you want to wake up the next day confronted by bags and bags filled with absolute crap you don’t actually remember buying. Or, in my case, you wake up the next morning to a phone call informing you that you’ve bought a tram. Not a model tram. An actual tram. A Melbourne W2 class drop-centre combination tram, that the voice at the end of the phone is now informing you has to be shipped from Australia to Britain, where it can only be delivered to your house by hanging it from two Chinook helicopters.
So I’d be the first person to adm
it that I’ve made some fairly rash decisions with a credit card in my hand. I probably could have struggled through life somehow without a tram in my garden, or indeed the full-scale fibreglass model of a Tyrannosaurus rex that I offered to take off Ringo Starr’s hands at the end of a very long night. Ringo was trying to sell his house at the time, and the presence of a full-scale fibreglass Tyrannosaurus rex in the garden was apparently proving to be a bit of a sticking point with potential buyers. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve always found collecting things oddly comforting, and I’ve always enjoyed learning about things by collecting them, whether that’s records or photographs or clothes or art. And that’s never changed, regardless of what has been going on in my personal life. I’ve found it comforting and enjoyable when I’ve felt lonely and adrift, and I’ve found it comforting and enjoyable when I’ve felt loved and contented and settled. Lots of people feel that way: the world’s full of model railway enthusiasts and stamp collectors and vinyl buffs. I’m just lucky enough to have the money to pursue my passions further than most people. I earned that money by working hard, and if people think the way I spend it is excessive or ridiculous, then I’m afraid that’s their problem. I don’t feel guilty about it at all. If it’s an addiction, well, I’ve been addicted to far more damaging things over the years than buying tableware and photographs. It makes me happy. You know, I’ve got 1,000 candles in a closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I’ll tell you what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.
