Me Elton John

by Elton John

  I didn’t really care what they thought of me. I loved punk. I loved its energy, attitude and style, and I loved that my old friend Marc Bolan immediately claimed he’d invented it twenty years ago; that was just the most Marc response imaginable. I didn’t feel shocked by punk – I’d lived through the scandal and social upheaval that rock ‘n’ roll provoked in the fifties, so I was virtually immune to the idea of music causing outrage – and I didn’t feel threatened or rendered obsolete by it either. I couldn’t really imagine Elton John fans burning their copies of Captain Fantastic in order to go to the Vortex and spit at The Lurkers. And even if they did, that was out of my hands: it wasn’t a musical trend I was interested in chasing. But I thought The Clash and Buzzcocks and Siouxsie And The Banshees were fantastic. I thought Janet Street-Porter was fantastic too. The day after the show I got hold of her on the phone and invited her to lunch, and that was that: we’ve been lifelong friends ever since.

  Even if punk didn’t affect me directly, it felt like a sign that things were changing. Another sign that things were changing. There were a lot of them around. I’d stopped working with Dick James and DJM. My contract with them ran out just after Rock of the Westies was released. They were entitled to put out a live album called Here and There, which I hated – it wasn’t that the music on it was bad, but it was made up of old recordings from 1972 and 1974, and it seemed to exist only in order to make money. And that was it. I declined to sign another contract with them and moved to my own label, Rocket. John Reid was muttering darkly that Dick had been ripping us off for years. He thought the contracts Bernie and I had signed with Dick in the sixties were unfair; that the royalty rates we received were too low; that there was something fishy about the way our foreign royalties were worked out. By the time DJM, its administrators and foreign subsidiaries had taken their cut, Bernie and I were only getting fifteen quid each from every £100 we earned. It was just the standard music business practices of the day, but the standard music business practices of the day were wrong. It all ended up in a court case in the mid-eighties, which we won. I hated every minute of it, because I loved Dick; I never had a bad word to say about him personally. And yet I felt I had to: the industry had to change the way it treated artists. Dick had a fatal heart attack not long afterwards, and his son Steve blamed me for his death. It was really ugly, really sad. That wasn’t how the story of Dick and I was supposed to end at all.

  In addition to leaving DJM, Bernie and I had agreed to take a break from working together. There was no huge row, no big falling-out. It just seemed like the right thing to do. We had been tied to each other for ten years, and it was good to stop before our partnership felt like a rut we were stuck in. I didn’t want us to end up like Bacharach and David, who worked together until they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. The only thing Bernie had really done without me was make a solo album – he’d read some of his poetry over a musical backing provided by Caleb Quaye and Davey Johnstone. Dick James released it, then called a completely ludicrous meeting at which he kept insisting I should use Bernie as a support act on a forthcoming American tour: ‘He can read his poems! People will love it!’ I couldn’t imagine why Dick thought this was a good idea, unless he’d secretly taken out a life insurance policy on Bernie and was hoping to make a swift financial return by getting him killed onstage. American rock audiences in the early seventies were many things, but prepared to listen to a man read poems about his Lincolnshire boyhood for forty-five minutes wasn’t one of them, however wonderful said poems were. I pointed out that it was hard enough to get Bernie to come onstage and take a bow at the end of a show, let alone perform an experimental spoken-word support set, and the idea was mercifully dropped.

  Now, however, Bernie had really struck out on his own. He’d made an album with Alice Cooper, a big concept work about Alice’s alcoholism and recent stay in rehab. He got our old bass player Dee Murray involved, and Davey Johnstone on guitar. It was a good album. I was impressed. So why did I feel so odd when I looked at the songwriting credits and saw Alice Cooper’s name next to Bernie’s instead of mine? Actually, there was nothing odd about how I felt. It was very straightforward. I hated admitting it to myself, but I felt jealous.

  I put it out of my mind. After all, I had a new writing partner, Gary Osborne, who I’d first met when he wrote the English lyrics for ‘Amoureuse’, the French song that had finally given Kiki Dee a hit. It was the opposite of working with Bernie – Gary wanted me to write the music before he started the lyrics – but we came up with some really good songs together: ‘Blue Eyes’, ‘Little Jeannie’, a ballad called ‘Chloe’. And we became very close friends. So close that it was Gary and his wife Jenny that I called on Christmas Day in tears, when my then boyfriend mysteriously failed to fly in from LA as arranged. A catastrophic choice of partner even by my standards, this one had decided he wasn’t gay after all and had run off with an air stewardess who worked on the Starship. Not that he told me any of this. He just vanished. His plane arrived at Heathrow, he wasn’t on it, and I literally never heard from him again. Perhaps I should have seen it coming but, in fairness, he didn’t seem very straight when he was in bed with me. I was in a terrible state, sitting at home alone with only a load of unopened presents and an uncooked turkey for company: anticipating a quiet romantic Christmas, I’d given everyone who worked at Woodside the week off. Gary and Jenny changed their plans and drove down from London to stay with me. They were a lovely couple.

  And there were definitely other advantages to not working with Bernie. I could experiment with music in ways I never had before. I flew to Seattle to record a few songs for an EP with producer Thom Bell, the man who had made the Philadelphia soul records that had inspired ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. He made me sing lower than I previously had and wrapped the songs in luxurious strings. Twenty-seven years later, one of the tracks we recorded, ‘Are You Ready For Love’, went to Number One in Britain, which tells you something about how timeless Thom Bell’s sound is. After that I wrote some great songs with the new wave singer Tom Robinson. One was called ‘Sartorial Eloquence’, a title that my US record company decided Americans were too stupid to understand: they insisted on renaming it ‘Don’t Ya Wanna Play This Game No More’, which really didn’t have the same poetic quality to it. Another of Thom’s tracks, ‘Elton’s Song’, was very different from anything Bernie would have done, a melancholy depiction of a gay schoolboy with a crush on one of his friends. I wrote with Tim Rice, who had spent the seventies breaking records and winning awards with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, musicals he had written with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only one song we wrote was released at the time – ‘Legal Boys’, which came out in 1982 on my album Jump Up! – but decades later, it ended up being one of the most important musical partnerships of my career.

  And, just occasionally, I wrote completely alone for the first time. One Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, I wrote an instrumental that fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: ‘Life isn’t everything’. The next morning I found out that a boy called Guy Burchett who worked for Rocket had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy’. It was like nothing I’d ever done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a single – I was furious – but it became a colossal hit in Europe. Years later, when I first met Gianni Versace, he told me it was his favourite song of mine. He kept saying how wonderfully brave he thought it was. I thought that was a bit over-the-top; it was certainly different, but I wouldn’t have described it as brave. After a while it became apparent that Gianni thought it was wonderfully brave because he’d misheard the title and was under the impression I’d called it ‘Song For A Gay’.

  Some of my experiments, however, should probably have stayed in the laboratory. Pop videos were still a new thing in early 1978, and I decided to jump in feet first. Of course I did: I was going to make the most incredible, expensive, lavish pop v
ideo of all time, for a song called ‘Ego’. We spent a fortune on it, hiring the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It was shot like a movie. There were dozens of actors involved, stage sets, flaming torches, murder scenes, flashbacks shot in sepia. Such was my commitment to the project, I even agreed to take my hat off onscreen at one point. We hired a West End cinema for a premiere, overlooking the fact that if people turn out for a film premiere they expect the film to last longer than three and a half minutes. As it ended, there was some hesitant applause and an unmistakable air of ‘is that it?’ filled the room, as if I’d invited the audience to a black-tie dinner and then given them a Twix. So I made them show the whole thing twice, which succeeded in changing the atmosphere quite dramatically: ‘is that it?’ was swiftly replaced by the equally unmistakable air of ‘not this again’. Better yet, no one would show the bloody thing – this was years before MTV started, and there weren’t really the outlets for a video on TV shows – so the single flopped. If nothing else, this gave John Reid the opportunity to go on one of his celebrated rampages through the office personnel, firing people for their incompetence, then having to hire them again shortly afterwards. I’ve hated making videos ever since.

  And then there was the disco album, an idea I think was partly inspired by the amount of time I was spending at Studio 54. I went there every time I visited New York. It was astonishing, different from any club I’d been to before. The guy who ran it, Steve Rubell, was blessed with the ability to create an amazing environment, full of gorgeous waiters in tiny shorts and other extraordinary characters. I don’t mean the celebrities, although there were plenty of them. I mean people like Disco Sally, who looked about seventy and always seemed to be having a whale of a time, and Rollereena, a guy who dressed up like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and went around the dance floor on roller skates. More impressive still, Steve Rubell could create this incredible environment while seemingly permanently out of his mind on Quaaludes. You got the feeling that Studio 54 was a magical space in which anything could happen and sometimes did. Rocket once threw a party there, and at one point, I spotted Lou Reed and Lou’s transgender lover Rachel locked in conversation with, of all people, Cliff Richard. While it was nice to see people with what you might tactfully describe as having differing outlooks on life getting along so famously, the mind did boggle a little at what on earth they were actually talking about.

  There was a basement downstairs where celebrities could go and snort coke off a pinball machine. It was certainly an experience going down there – one night I was interrupted by a visibly zonked Liza Minnelli, who wanted to know if I would marry her – but the thing that really attracted me to the club was the thing that no one ever mentions about Studio 54: the music. Well, the music and the waiters, but the waiters were a dead loss. I’d try and chat them up, but they didn’t get off work until 7 a.m. Of course, I’d happily hang around until 7 a.m., but by that point, the evening’s excesses had usually taken their toll on me and nothing would come of it. It’s hard to conjure up a seductive mood when your eyeballs are pointing in different directions and it takes you three attempts to successfully navigate your way through the exit.

  So the lure really was the music. I loved disco as much as I had when I first heard it in LA’s gay clubs. That was the whole reason I’d had a disco built at Woodside: so I could DJ when people came to stay, impress them with my extensive collection of 12-inch singles. But, I was forced to admit, the DJs at Studio 54 had a better collection than me, and a sound system at their disposal that made the speakers I’d had brought in specially from Trident Studios in London sound like a transistor radio with its battery running out. They could make anyone dance, even Rod Stewart, which was quite a feat – for some reason, Rod used to carry on as if dancing was against his religion. He always needed a little encouragement to actually get on the floor, which is where the bottles of amyl nitrate I used to bring along came in handy. Poppers had become a big thing in gay clubs in the seventies: you sniffed it and it gave you a brief, legal, euphoric high. The brand I had was called, I regret to inform you, Cum, and it seemed to have a particularly transformative effect on Rod. I offered some to him, and suddenly – after hours of refusing to budge from his seat – he was up and dancing for the rest of the night. The only time he stopped was when he was after another sniff: ‘’Ere, you got any more of that Cum, Sharon?’

  One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs for it – I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort. Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible – if the title track had come on at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it – but making an album in bad faith like that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.

  * * *

  As I suspected the moment I’d announced it onstage at Madison Square Garden, retiring from live performance wasn’t a plan I could stick to. Or at least, sometimes I couldn’t. I was unable to decide whether it was the smartest move I’d ever made, or the stupidest. My opinion changed all the time, depending on my mood, with predictably demented results. One day, I would be perfectly happy at home, telling anyone who’d listen about how wonderful it was not being shackled to the old cycle of touring, delighting in the free time that allowed me to concentrate on being chairman of Watford FC. The next, I’d be on the phone to Stiff Records, a small independent label that was home to Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, offering my services as a keyboard player on their upcoming package tour, which they accepted. My sudden urge to get in front of an audience again was bolstered by the fact that I had a crush on one of their artists, Wreckless Eric – sadly, he was nowhere near wreckless enough to get involved with me.

  Then I assembled a fresh set of backing musicians, based around China, the band Davey Johnstone had formed when I said I wouldn’t tour anymore. We spent three weeks frantically rehearsing for a fundraising concert at Wembley that I had committed to because I was involved with the charity behind it, Goaldiggers. During the rehearsals, I started making vague noises about going back on the road with them. Then I decided on the night that the whole idea was a terrible mistake and announced my retirement onstage again, this time without telling anyone first. John Reid was furious. The full and frank discussion between us that took place backstage after the gig could apparently be heard not just throughout Wembley but most of north London.

  Eventually, I realized that if I was going to play live again, it had to be different, a challenge. I decided to tour with Ray Cooper, who I’d known since before I was famous. He’d played in a band called Blue Mink, who were part of the scene around DJM – their singer Roger Cook was also a songwriter signed to Dick James’s publishing company, and virtually every member of Blue Mink had ended up helping out on my early albums. Ray had been the percussionist in my band on and off for years; but these shows would be just me and him, playing theatres rather than stadiums. We had done a few shows like that before, a couple of charity concerts at the Rainbow in London, the first of which had been enlivened by the presence of the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra. She had sat politely through the performa
nce, then come backstage, and got the conversation off to a flying start by smiling sweetly and asking, ‘How do you have so much energy onstage? Do you take a lot of cocaine?’

  It was one of those moments where time appears to stand still while your brain tries to work out what the hell’s going on. Was she incredibly naive, and didn’t really understand what she’d just said? Or, worse, did she realize exactly what she’d just said? Jesus, did she know? Had news of my gargantuan appetite for coke – already quite the hot topic around the music business – actually reached Buckingham Palace? Were they all discussing it over dinner? ‘I hear you had lunch at Elton John’s house and met his nan, Mother – have you heard he’s an absolute fiend for the old blow?’ I managed to collect myself enough to mumble a shaky denial.

  Still, the Rainbow shows had been really exhilarating, unexpected enquiries from members of the Royal Family about my drug habits notwithstanding. They were terrifying in the best possible way – if it’s only you and a percussionist onstage, you can’t switch off for a moment and let the band take the strain. You have to concentrate every second, and your playing has to be razor-sharp. And when we went on tour, it really worked. The gigs got fabulous reviews and, every night, I felt that perfect cocktail of apprehension and excitement, exactly how a performer should feel before they go onstage. It was freeing and challenging and fulfilling, because it was completely different from anything I’d done before: the songs we performed, the way it was presented, even the places we played. I was keen to go to countries I hadn’t previously visited, even if I wasn’t that well known there: Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Israel. And that’s how I ended up flying out of Heathrow, flat on my back with my legs in the air, heading for Moscow.