Me Elton John

by Elton John

  And I loved the club. Supporting Watford was something that ran through my whole life, while everything else had changed beyond recognition. Vicarage Road was five or six miles from where I was born. It connected me to my roots, reminded me that no matter how successful I was, or how famous, or how much money I made, I was still a working-class boy from a council house in Pinner.

  But there was something else, too. I loved being around the club, because everything about it was different from the music world I usually inhabited. There was no glamour, no luxury, no limousines, no Starship. You got on the train to Grimsby with the players, you watched the game, listened to the opposition supporters sing about your allegedly insatiable desire to stick your penis up the arse of anyone nearby, and then you got the train home, carrying a box of local fish the Grimsby directors had presented you with as a gift at the end of the match.

  There was no bullshit. Once you reach a certain level of success in the music business, you realize that a lot of people around you have started telling you what they think you want to hear, rather than what they actually think. No one wants to upset you, no one wants to rock the boat. But at Watford, it wasn’t like that. The staff and players were friendly, they were respectful, but they weren’t interested in massaging my ego. They would happily tell me if they didn’t think much of my new album – ‘Why don’t you do a song like “Daniel” again? I liked that one’ – or if they thought the coat I was wearing looked ridiculous. That I wasn’t getting any kid glove treatment because I was Elton John was brought home quite forcefully whenever I elected to join in a five-a-side game with them. I’d get the ball, see a Watford player on the opposite team coming in to tackle me and the next thing I knew, they’d have possession and I’d be flying through the air at high speed, backwards, as a prelude to landing flat on my arse.

  And there was no bad behaviour, no diva tantrums from me. I had to learn to be a good loser, to shake the hands of the opposition’s directors when they beat us. I couldn’t lose my temper, or sulk, nor could I get drunk or take drugs, because I wasn’t there as a huge star whose every whim had to be catered for, I was there as a representative of Watford Football Club. I broke the rules once. I turned up at a Boxing Day game hungover after a mammoth coke bender and started helping myself to the boardroom Scotch. The following day, I was given a real dressing down, the kind of telling-off no one ordinarily had the balls to deliver to me.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re letting yourself down and you’re letting the club down.’

  The man delivering the talking-to was Graham Taylor, the new manager I’d personally convinced to join Watford in April 1977. He was thirty-two years old when I met him – young for a football manager – and he reminded me of Bernie. Like Bernie, he came from Lincolnshire. Like Bernie, he took a chance on me. Graham was paid very well for a manager of a team as lowly as Watford, but taking the job was definitely a step down for him. He had already taken his last team, Lincoln City, out of the fourth division and was supposed to move on to somewhere much bigger, not go back to the bottom. But, like Bernie, I clicked with him immediately, and like Bernie, I didn’t interfere with what he did, I just let him get on with doing his job.

  And, like Bernie, when things took off for us, they took off in a way beyond anything we could have imagined. Graham was an incredible manager. He assembled a fantastic back-room team around him. Bertie Mee came from Arsenal to be his assistant, a veteran who’d been a player in the thirties and knew the game inside out. Eddie Plumley arrived from Coventry as chief executive. Graham bought new players and encouraged amazing young talent. He signed John Barnes, aged sixteen: one of the greatest players England’s ever seen, and Graham got him for the price of a new football kit. He turned club apprentices like Luther Blissett and Nigel Callaghan into star players. He made them all train harder than they’d ever trained before, and he got them to play exciting football – two big centre-forwards, two fast wingers, a great attack, lots of goals, which meant that people wanted to come and watch us. He got rid of the greyhound track and built new stands and a family enclosure, a place specifically designed for parents to bring their kids to watch the game in safety. Every team has one now, but Watford were the first.

  All of this cost money, which meant more moaning from John Reid. I didn’t care. I wasn’t a businessman, pouring cash into the club as a financial investment. Watford were in my blood. I was obsessed to the point that I became superstitious – if we were on a winning streak, I wouldn’t change my clothes or empty my pockets – and so insanely enthusiastic, I could literally talk people into becoming Watford fans. I converted my old friend Muff Winwood from a West Brom supporter to a member of the Watford board. I went to local council meetings and tried in vain to convince them to let us build a new stadium on the outskirts of the town. After matches, I’d go to the Supporters’ Club, a little building up on the main stand, meet with Watford fans and listen to what they had to say. I wanted them to know that I really cared about the club, that we weren’t taking them for granted, that without the supporters Watford was nothing. I threw huge parties for the players and staff and their families at Woodside, with five-a-side games and egg and spoon races. I bought an Aston Martin, had it painted in Watford’s colours – yellow, with a red and black stripe down the middle – and drove to away games in it; I called it the Chairman’s Car. I didn’t realize how much attention it had attracted until I was introduced to Prince Philip. We were making polite conversation, when he suddenly changed the subject.

  ‘You live near Windsor Castle, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen the bloody idiot who drives around that area in his ghastly car? It’s bright yellow with a ridiculous stripe on it. Do you know him?’

  ‘Yes, Your Highness. It’s actually me.’

  ‘Really?’ He didn’t appear particularly taken aback by this news at all. In fact, he seemed quite pleased to have found the idiot in question, so that he could give him the benefit of his advice. ‘What the hell are you thinking? Ridiculous. Makes you look like a bloody fool. Get rid of it.’

  If the Chairman’s Car couldn’t get me to the game on time, I’d charter a helicopter. If I couldn’t make it because I was abroad, I would phone the club and they would plug my call into the local hospital radio broadcast of the match: backstage somewhere in America, the band would listen to me in my dressing room, alone, screaming my head off because we’d beaten Southampton in a cup tie. If it was the middle of the night in New Zealand, I’d get up to listen. If it clashed with the start of a gig, I’d delay the start of the gig. I loved it: the excitement of the games, the feeling of camaraderie, of being part of a team where it felt like everyone was working towards the same end, from the players to the tea ladies. I couldn’t have bought the personal happiness that Watford brought me at any price.

  Besides, I wasn’t throwing money into a bottomless pit. I could see the results of my spending. Watford started winning and kept winning. After one season, we were into the Third Division. After two, we were in the Second. In 1981, Watford were promoted to the First Division for the first time in their history. The next year we were runners-up, the second most successful football team in Britain. It meant we would be playing in the UEFA Cup, against the biggest teams in Europe: Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan. That was what I’d told Graham I’d wanted the club to achieve at our first meeting. He had looked at me like I was out of my mind and started telling me how we’d be lucky to stay in the Fourth Division with the team we had – ‘you’ve got a fucking giraffe for a centre-forward’ – before realizing I was deadly serious and prepared to put my money where my mouth was. We decided it would probably take ten years. Watford had done it in five.

  And then, in 1984, we made the FA Cup Final. It’s the oldest and most prestigious football competition in Britain: Wembley stadium, 100,000 fans. I was used to Watford doing well by now – it’s funny how easily you become accustomed to success after decades of failure – but just
before the match started, it suddenly hit me how far we had come, from a hopeless little club that no one went to watch, that people laughed at, to this. The brass band struck up with ‘Abide With Me’, the traditional FA Cup hymn, and that was it: I burst into tears in full view of the BBC’s cameras. As it turned out, that was the highlight of the day. We were beaten 2–0 by Everton. It should have been a much closer game – one of their goals should have been disallowed – but ultimately they played better than we did. I was distraught, but we still threw a party for the team: it was a fantastic achievement.

  Looking out at the crowd at Wembley before the game began, I’d felt like I had onstage at Dodger Stadium. And, like the Dodger Stadium gigs, I think I knew that this was a sort of pinnacle, that it didn’t get any better than this. I was right. A couple of years later, Graham left to become manager at Aston Villa. I appointed a manager called Dave Bassett as his replacement, but it didn’t work out; the chemistry wasn’t right, he didn’t gel with the team. I started thinking that I should have left Watford when Graham did. I still loved the club, but there had been a serendipity, a magic, about the two of us together, and I couldn’t conjure up that same magic without him.

  Eventually I sold Watford to Jack Petchey, a multimillionaire who’d made his money in cars. Seven years later, I bought back a load of shares in the club and became chairman again – a businessman rather than someone who put his heart into the club, I felt Jack was making a terrible mess of things, and Watford had slipped back into the Second Division. I only did it because Graham agreed to come back as manager. The team did well, but it wasn’t the same as the first time around; there wasn’t that incredible challenge of rising from the bottom. Finally, Graham left again, and this time, so did I. I resigned as chairman for good in 2002. In a weird way, our partnership quietly continued. Right up until he died in 2017, I still rang Graham all the time to talk about the team: how they were playing, what we thought of the latest manager. Whatever else Graham Taylor achieved in football, nothing took his heart away from Watford.

  I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together, but I owe Watford far more than Watford owe me. I was chairman throughout the worst period of my life: years of addiction and unhappiness, failed relationships, bad business deals, court cases, unending turmoil. Through all of that, Watford were a constant source of happiness to me. When I didn’t feel I had any love in my personal life, I knew I had love from the club and the supporters. It gave me something else to concentrate on, a passion that could take my mind away from everything that was going wrong. For obvious reasons, there are chunks of the eighties I have no recollection of – I struggled to remember what had happened the next day, let alone thirty years later – but every Watford game I saw is permanently etched on my memory. The night we knocked Manchester United out of the League Cup at Old Trafford, when we were still a Third Division side: two goals by Blissett, both headers, the newspapers that never normally bothered writing about Watford calling them Elton John’s Rocket Men the next morning. The night in November 1982 when we were away to Nottingham Forest in the Milk Cup. They beat us 7–3, but I thought it was one of the greatest games of football I’d ever seen in my life and Forest’s legendary manager Brian Clough agreed with me, before turning to Graham and telling him he would never allow his chairman to sit on the bloody touchline the way I did. If I hadn’t had the football club then God knows what would have happened to me. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think Watford might have saved my life.

  eight

  Back at home in the autumn of 1976, and theoretically retired from live performance, I set about getting Woodside renovated. There has been a house on the same site in Old Windsor since the eleventh century – it was originally built for William the Conqueror’s physician – but it kept burning down; the latest version was built in 1947 for Michael Sobell, who made a fortune manufacturing radios and televisions. It was built in a mock-Georgian style, but when doing it up, I decided to eschew Regency or Palladian decoration in favour of a style known among interior design specialists as Mid-70s Pop Star On Drugs Goes Berserk. There were pinball machines, jukeboxes, brass palm trees, memorabilia everywhere. There were Tiffany lamps next to the pair of four-foot-high Doc Marten boots I’d worn while singing ‘Pinball Wizard’ in The Who’s film Tommy. On the walls, Rembrandt etchings jostled for space with gold discs and stuff fans had sent me. I had a five-a-side football pitch installed in the grounds and a fully equipped disco built just off the living room, complete with lights, mirrorball and DJ booth, and a pair of enormous speakers. One room housed a replica of Tutankhamun’s state throne. I had speakers rigged up outside the house, linked to the stereo in my bedroom. When I woke up, I’d play a fanfare through the speakers, to let everyone in the house know I was coming. I thought this was hilarious, a camp joke, but for some reason, visitors who weren’t prepared for the fanfare tended to react to it with a thoughtful expression, as if considering the possibility that success might have gone to my head.

  In the grounds there was an orangery that had been converted into a separate flat with its own garden, which I moved my grandmother into. Her second husband Horace had died and I didn’t like the thought of her living on her own in her seventies. She spent the rest of her life there until she passed away in 1995. I thought there was a beautiful circularity about that. I was born in her house, she died in mine, although her life there was very self-contained. She was always an independent woman, and I didn’t want to take that away from her. She was behind the gates of Woodside, so I knew she was safe, but she lived her own life, had her own friends. I could drop in to see her whenever I wanted, but I could also keep the madness of my life away from her, protect her from all the excess and stupidity. And she seemed really happy there, pottering around in the garden. She was weeding her borders when the Queen Mother came to Woodside for lunch – we’d got on well when I met her at Bryan Forbes’s house, and I’d been invited to the Royal Lodge in Windsor for dinner. She was really good fun. After the meal, she’d insisted that we dance to her favourite record, which turned out to be an old Irish drinking song called ‘Slattery’s Mounted Fut’: I think Val Doonican recorded a version of it.

  So, having enjoyed the surreal experience of dancing with the Queen Mum to an Irish drinking song, there seemed no harm in inviting her to lunch. She told me she had been friends with the family who had lived at Woodside before the war, and I thought she might want to see the house again. When she accepted, I decided it would be hilarious not to tell my grandmother in advance who was coming. I just called her over: ‘Come here, Gran, there’s someone who wants to meet you.’ Unfortunately, my grandmother didn’t see the funny side of it. All hell broke loose when the Queen Mother left.

  ‘How could you do that to me? Standing there talking to the Queen Mum in my bleedin’ wellies and gardening gloves! I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life! Don’t ever do that to me again!’

  I employed some staff to look after Woodside. A guy called Bob Halley was my chauffeur at first, and his wife Pearl was the housekeeper: a lovely woman, but, as it turned out, useless at cooking. There were a couple of cleaners and a PA called Andy Hill. He was the son of the landlord of the Northwood Hills, the pub where I’d played the piano as a kid, and I’d employed him largely because I had a crush on him; when that wore off, I realized he wasn’t right for the job. There was a lesson in there somewhere. Eventually I gave Bob Halley the PA role.

  I got my mum to come and manage the house, which turned out to be a dreadful mistake. She was very good at the accounts, but she ruled the place with a rod of iron. I’d noticed a change in the way she was behaving. She was still happy with Derf, but somehow seemed to be slipping back into the way she had been before she met him: moody and difficult and argumentative, nothing ever good enough. I thought getting her to work with me might bring us closer together again, like we had been in Frome Court when Bernie and I were starting out. But no. It was as if the pleasure she had taken in my earl
y success had worn off. She seemed to hate everything I did. There was a constant drizzle of pissy criticism from her – about what I wore, about my friends, about the music I made. And there were a lot of arguments about money. I suppose she’d lived through the war and rationing and had that frugal, waste-not-want-not outlook ingrained in her. But, as I think we’ve established quite thoroughly by now, that’s not really my attitude to spending. I got sick of having my every purchase queried, having to have a row with her every time I bought someone else a gift. It felt like there was no escape from her, no privacy. You get up in the morning after you’ve slept with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: ‘Why have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?’ It’s just weird. It really takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss. Worse, she had a habit of being absolutely foul to the rest of the staff at the house, treating them like shit, like she was the lady of the manor and they were her servants. I was always having to patch things up after she’d lost her temper and screamed at someone. Eventually the situation just became too claustrophobic and tense. She and Derf moved down to the south coast, which frankly came as a relief.

  I was in bed alone at Woodside one Sunday morning, half watching television, when a guy with bright orange hair suddenly appeared on the screen and called Rod Stewart a useless old fucker. I hadn’t really been paying attention, but now I was suddenly riveted: someone slagging Rod off was clearly too good to miss. His name was Johnny Rotten, he was wearing the most amazing clothes and I thought he was hilarious – like a cross between an angry young man and a bitchy old queen, really acidic and witty. He was being interviewed about the burgeoning punk scene in London by a woman called Janet Street-Porter. I liked her, too; she was gobby and bold. In absolute fairness to Rod, Johnny Rotten appeared to hate everything – I was fairly certain he thought I too was a useless old fucker. Nevertheless, I made a mental note to ring Rod later, just to make sure he knew all about it. ‘Hello, Phyllis, did you see the TV this morning? This new band were on called the Sex Pistols and, you’ll never believe this, they said you were a useless old fucker. Those were their exact words: Rod Stewart is a useless old fucker. Isn’t that terrible? You’re only thirty-two. How awful for you.’