Me Elton John
Page 29
In the end, it reached a point where I started feeling really uncomfortable with the charity single’s longevity. Its success meant there was footage of Diana’s funeral week after week on Top of the Pops – it felt as if people were somehow wallowing in her death, like the mourning for her had got out of hand and they were refusing to move on. It seemed unhealthy to me – morbid and unnatural. I really didn’t think it was what Diana would have wanted. I thought the media had gone from reflecting the public mood to deliberately stoking it, because it sold papers.
It was getting ridiculous, and I didn’t want to do anything to prolong it any further. So when Oprah Winfrey asked me onto her talk show in the US to discuss the funeral, I said no. I wouldn’t let them put the funeral version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ on a charity CD released to commemorate her life. It’s never appeared on any Greatest Hits album I’ve put out and it’s never been re-released. I even stopped singing the original version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ live for a few years: I just assumed people needed a rest from hearing it. When I went back on tour that autumn, I kept well away from it, and remembered Gianni and Diana by singing a song called ‘Sand And Water’, from an album by the singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman that was released the day Gianni was murdered. I’d played it over and over in Nice: ‘I will see you in the light of a thousand suns, I will hear you in the sound of the waves, I will know you when I come, as we all will come, through the doors beyond the grave’. I always tried to avoid the topic with journalists: the chart nerd in me loved the fact that I’d made the biggest-selling single since the charts began, but the circumstances around it were such that I didn’t want to dwell on it. When it was the twentieth anniversary of Diana’s death, I did one interview, about her AIDS work, because Prince Harry specifically asked me to.
Perhaps there was also something personal bound up in my feelings about the single. It had been such a strange, horrible summer. From the moment Gianni died, it had felt like the world had spun off its axis and gone mad: his murder, the memorial service, the reconciliation with Diana, the weeks in the house in France looking after his partner Antonio, Diana’s death, her funeral, the bedlam around ‘Candle In The Wind’. It wasn’t that I wanted to forget any of it – I just wanted life to return to some semblance of normality. So I got back to work. I went on tour. I sold off a load of my old clothes for the AIDS Foundation, in an event I called ‘Out of the Closet’. I recorded a song for the cartoon series South Park, which seemed about as far away from singing ‘Candle In The Wind’ at a state funeral as I could possibly get. I started discussing setting up a joint tour with Tina Turner, a nice idea that quickly turned into a disaster. While it was still at the planning stage, she rang me up at home, apparently with the express intention of telling me how awful I was and how I had to change before we could work together. She didn’t like my hair, she didn’t like the colour of my piano – which for some reason had to be white – and she didn’t like my clothes.
‘You wear too much Versace, and it makes you look fat – you have to wear Armani,’ she announced.
I could hear poor old Gianni turning in his grave at the very idea: the houses of Versace and Armani cordially hated each other. Armani said Versace made really vulgar clothes, and Gianni thought Armani was unbelievably beige and boring. I got off the phone and burst into tears: ‘She sounded like my fucking mother,’ I wailed at David. I like to think I’ve developed a thick skin over the years, but listening to one of the greatest performers of all time – an artist you’re meant to be collaborating with – explain in detail how much they hate everything about you is a very depressing experience.
It wasn’t the greatest start to our working relationship, but, incredibly, our working relationship got worse. I agreed to perform with her at a big event called VH1 Divas Live: we were going to do ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘The Bitch Is Back’. My band went to rehearsals a couple of days before me, to get a feel for working with a different singer. When I arrived, I was greeted not by the joyful sight of musicians bonding over the common language of music, but the news that if I went on tour with Tina Turner, none of my band was planning on coming with me, on the grounds that Tina Turner was ‘a fucking nightmare’. I asked what the problem was.
‘You’ll see,’ sighed Davey Johnstone ominously.
He was right. Tina wouldn’t address any of the musicians by name – she just pointed at them and bellowed ‘Hey, you!’ when she wanted to get their attention. We started playing ‘Proud Mary’. It sounded great. Tina stopped the song, unhappy.
‘It’s you,’ she shouted, pointing at my bass player, Bob Birch. ‘You’re doing it wrong.’
He assured her he wasn’t and we started the song again. Once more, Tina yelled for us to stop. This time it was supposed to be my drummer Curt’s fault. It went on like this for a while, stopping and starting every thirty seconds, every member of the band being accused of messing up in turn, until Tina finally discovered the real source of the problem. This time, her finger was pointed in my direction.
‘It’s you! You’re not playing it right!’
I begged her pardon.
‘You’re not playing it right,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t know how to play this song.’
The subsequent debate about whether or not I knew how to play ‘Proud Mary’ became quite heated quite quickly, before I brought it to a conclusion by telling Tina Turner to stick her fucking song up her arse and storming off. I sat in the dressing room alternately fuming and wondering what her problem was. I’ve thrown plenty of tantrums in my time, but there are limits: there’s an unspoken rule that musicians don’t treat their fellow musicians like shit. Maybe it was insecurity on her part. She’d been treated appallingly earlier in her career, suffered years and years of being ripped off, beaten up and pushed around. Maybe that had an effect on how she behaved towards people. I went to her dressing room and apologized.
She told me that the problem was that I was improvising too much – adding in little fills and runs on the piano. That’s how I’ve always performed, ever since the early days of the Elton John Band, when we would shift and change songs around onstage as the mood took us. It’s part of what I love about playing live – the music is always a little fluid, not carved in stone; there’s always room for manoeuvre, the musicians rub off each other and it keeps things fresh. There’s nothing better onstage than hearing someone in your band do something you’re not expecting that sounds fantastic in that moment. You catch their eye and nod and laugh – that’s what it’s all about. But Tina didn’t think that way. Everything had to be exactly the same every time; it was all rehearsed down to the slightest movement. That made it obvious the tour wasn’t going to work, although we made up later: she came for dinner in Nice, and left a big Tina Turner lipstick kiss in the visitors’ book.
Instead, I arranged another series of live dates with Billy Joel. We’d been touring together since the early nineties: both of us onstage at the same time, playing each other’s songs. I thought it was a fantastic idea. We were both pianists, there was a similarity in our approach to music, although Billy is a very American, East Coast kind of writer, like Lou Reed or Paul Simon. They’re all very different, but you could tell they were from New York even if you knew nothing about them. We played together for years, although it ended badly, because Billy had a lot of personal problems at the time, and the biggest one was alcohol. He would wash medication for a chest infection down with booze in his dressing room, then fall asleep onstage in the middle of singing ‘Piano Man’. Then he would rouse himself, take a bow and immediately head back to the hotel bar and stay there until 5 a.m. Eventually, I suggested that he needed the kind of help that I had got, which didn’t make me very popular. He said I was being judgemental, but I genuinely wasn’t. I just couldn’t stand to watch a nice guy do that to himself any longer. But that was in the future. At first the tours with Billy were great: they were different, fun to play, audiences loved them, they were really successful.
And then, as if a load of Italians carrying on like I was the angel of death wasn’t crazy enough, something really insane happened. I was in Australia, where I’d just started touring with Billy in March 1998, when I got a phone call from David. He was at home at Woodside. He said that the girls who did the flower arrangements at the house each week had called round to tell him that they couldn’t work for us anymore because they hadn’t been paid for over a year and a half. He had rung up John Reid’s office to find out what was going on and was told that the florists hadn’t been paid because there wasn’t any money to pay them. Apparently, I was going broke.
* * *
It didn’t make any sense to me. The official position of John Reid and his office was that I’d spent it all, and more besides. Don’t get me wrong, I know exactly what I’m like, and clearly no one would call me the living embodiment of frugality and thrifty housekeeping – well, with the possible exception of Gianni. I spent a lot of money – I had four houses, staff, cars, I bought art and porcelain and designer clothes – and occasionally, I’d get a stern accountants’ letter telling me to cut back, which I would of course ignore. But I still didn’t understand how I could be spending more than I earned. I never stopped working. I played live all the time, long tours, a hundred or a hundred and fifty shows in the biggest venues you could play, and the shows always sold out. My recent albums had all gone platinum around the world, and there was a constant stream of compilations coming out, that sold so well I wondered who could possibly be buying them. It seemed inconceivable that anyone who liked ‘Your Song’ or ‘Bennie And The Jets’ didn’t already own it. The Lion King soundtrack had sold sixteen million copies, the film had grossed nearly a billion dollars, the musical was breaking box office records on Broadway.
I felt something wasn’t right, but I had no idea what it might be. I honestly wasn’t that interested in money. I’ve been extremely lucky and I’ve earned a lot, but earning a lot was never my motivation. Obviously, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the fruits of my success, but the mechanics of how money was made didn’t interest me at all: if they had, I’d have applied to accountancy school instead of joining Bluesology. I just wanted to play and make records. I was competitive; I would always ask how many albums or gig tickets I’d sold, and I’d watch my chart placings like a hawk, but I never asked how much money I’d earned, never really wanted to examine the contracts and the royalty cheques. I’ve never been a tax exile: I’m British and I want to live primarily in Britain. I’m not judging anyone who does it, but I don’t see the point. You might save money, but I don’t think that’s going to be a great deal of comfort when you look back on your life and realize you’ve spent half of it sitting around feeling sorry for yourself in Switzerland, surrounded by other tax exiles who don’t really want to be there either. And creatively, I want to be where things are happening in music, and that’s not Monaco. I’m sure the principality has many things to recommend it, but when did you last hear of an amazing new band from Monte Carlo?
Besides, I didn’t need to keep a close eye on my finances. As far as I was concerned, that was what John Reid did for me. It was the basis of a new management deal we’d done in St-Tropez in the eighties. I paid him 20 per cent of my gross earnings – an enormous amount by most artists’ standards – on the understanding he would look after absolutely everything. I think the phrase used for this arrangement was ‘Rolls-Royce service’. I could live a blissful life of creativity and pleasure, unencumbered by trifling irritations like examining tax returns, or looking at bank statements, or reading through the small print on contracts. It made sense to me because I trusted John implicitly. We’d been together for what seemed like forever, in one way or another. It was a relationship founded on something more than a business arrangement: however close other artists claimed to be to their managers, I doubted any of them had lost their virginity to them. I trusted him, even though there were occasionally moments when I wondered if his Rolls-Royce service might not be in need of an MOT. There was the time a tabloid newspaper managed to get hold of a load of my financial details, including one of the letters from the accountants warning me to curb my spending. I was convinced they had been leaked, but it turned out a guy called Benjamin Pell had found them by going through the rubbish bins outside John Reid’s office. They’d just dumped confidential information on the street without shredding it, which didn’t say a great deal for the firm’s security or how they were looking after my interests: it certainly seemed their procedures for dealing with personal data could use a revamp.
And then there was the plan John came up with to sell my master recordings. It meant that I would get a huge lump sum, and whoever bought them would get a royalty every time one of my records sold or a song of mine was played on the radio. It was an enormous deal, because it encompassed not just everything I’d recorded in the past but all the songs I would record in the future. John brought in lawyers and music industry figures who told me what a great idea it was, and I agreed. But the lump sum turned out to be far less than I’d anticipated and what I thought my master recordings would be worth. It seemed like everyone had been focusing on the gross figure rather than the net. After John had taken his commission and the lawyers and tax had been paid, the money left over really didn’t look like enough to justify signing away every song I’d ever recorded and ever would record. But I put it out of my mind. It had still been enough to buy the house in Nice, fill it with art and furniture and make sure everyone around me benefited. John got his commission, I decided to pay off the mortgages of a lot of people who worked for me: my PA Bob Halley, Robert Key, my driver Derek, Bob Stacey, who’d been my roadie and looked after my wardrobe for decades. And besides, I didn’t want a big confrontation with John about it.
But now, I felt something clearly wasn’t right. David and I decided to get some professional advice, from a lawyer called Frank Presland who had worked for me before. He agreed that something seemed amiss and said I should have John Reid Enterprises independently audited. I told John, and to be fair he said he thought it was a good idea and would help in any way he could.
I was in Australia when the auditors went in, and I started dreading David’s phone calls, with his daily report from his meetings with Frank Presland and the accountants. One night he rang, sounding audibly rattled: Benjamin Pell, the same guy who’d been snooping through the rubbish outside John Reid’s office, had contacted him, saying that David was being watched and our phone lines were tapped, and that he should be careful what he said. That sort of activity was rife in the UK press at the time. How much worse could this get?
In the end the auditors raised a number of issues with the way various financial matters had been handled. I was avoiding John’s calls and left it to Frank Presland to set out what we were disputing. To cut a long and extremely painful story short, John agreed to settle the potential dispute and, taking into account his financial situation at the time, he agreed to pay me $5 million.
I couldn’t tell you how I really felt, because how I really felt changed every minute. I was heartbroken. I felt betrayed – whatever the legal rights and wrongs, I believed John would put my interests first and warn me if there was anything I should be concerned about. I was furious, with myself as much as John. I felt like a fucking idiot, because I’d been so eager to wriggle out of getting involved with my own business affairs. I felt embarrassed. But most of all, I felt like a coward. It was crazy: I was
still terrified of confronting him about the situation and of rocking the boat. We’d been together so long that I couldn’t imagine my world without John in it. From the moment he’d turned up in the lobby of the Miyako Hotel, our lives had been completely entwined. We’d been lovers, friends, partners, a team that had survived everything: fame, drugs, punch-ups, all the stupidity, all the extremes that came with me becoming Elton John. You name it, it had happened, and we’d stuck together: Sharon and Beryl. Whenever someone told me he was aggressive, or complained about his temper, I thought of the line Don Henley used about The Eagles’ manager, Irving Azoff: ‘he may be Satan, but he’s our Satan’. And now it was over.