Me Elton John

by Elton John

  Mum was never one of life’s tactile, nurturing, come-here-and-give-me-a-hug mothers, and there was a mean streak to her that went beyond just being prone to bad moods, or a victim of the Dwight Family Temper, into something else entirely, something I didn’t like to think about too deeply, because it frightened me. She seemed to actively enjoy picking fights, and not just with me: there wasn’t a member of the family she didn’t fall out badly with over the years. And yet there had been times when she was supportive, and there were times, at the start of my career, when she was really good fun. That’s how people who knew her in the early seventies remembered her to me after she died: oh, your mum was such a laugh.

  We held a private family funeral for her in the chapel at Woodside: I wanted to remember the good things, with just relations around me. I talked about her at the service and I cried. I missed the person I was describing terribly, but I’d started missing her decades before Mum died; she just seemed to vanish as quickly and unexpectedly as she turned up. At the end, her coffin was taken away in a hearse. We all stood there, what was left of the Dwights and the Harrises, watching it go down the long drive at Woodside in silence. It was broken by my uncle Reg, addressing his sister for the last time.

  ‘You can’t answer anyone back now, can you, Sheila?’ he muttered.

  seventeen

  I’ve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but I’ve never got bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had – when I was playing the cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was just exhausted – I obviously hadn’t. You could tell by the way I would grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later. Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasn’t, because that feeling is fucking great. It’s addictive. You might get sick of the travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that feeling will always keep you coming back for more. That, and the knowledge that even at the worst show – bad sound, dull audience, lousy venue – something amazing will always happen onstage: a spark, a flash of inspiration, a song you’ve played a thousand times that unexpectedly causes a long-forgotten memory to reappear in your mind.

  So the music will always surprise you, but after fifty years you do start to feel as if nothing else that happens at a gig can. It’s easy to think that you’ve done pretty much everything it’s possible to do onstage except keel over and die. I’ve performed sober, I’ve performed drunk and I have – to my shame – performed high as a kite. I’ve done gigs that made me feel as elated as it’s possible for a human being to feel, and struggled through shows in the pits of despair. I’ve played pianos, I’ve jumped on pianos, I’ve fallen off pianos and I’ve pushed a piano into the crowd, hit a member of the audience with it and spent the rest of the night frantically apologizing to them. I’ve played with my childhood heroes and some of the greatest artists in the history of music; I’ve played with people who were so hopeless they had no business being onstage and I’ve played with a group of male strippers dressed as Cub Scouts. I’ve done gigs dressed as a woman, a cat, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, a Ruritanian general, a musketeer, a pantomime dame and, very occasionally, I’ve played gigs dressed like a normal human being. I’ve had gigs that were disrupted by bomb scares, gigs disrupted by student protests against the war in Vietnam and gigs that were disrupted because I flounced offstage in a huff and then came scuttling back shortly afterwards, contrite about losing my temper. I’ve had hot dogs thrown at me in Paris; I’ve been knocked unconscious by a hash pipe while wearing a giant chicken outfit in North Carolina – my band thought I’d been shot – and I’ve run onstage in a gorilla costume in an attempt to surprise Iggy Pop. That wasn’t one of my better ideas. It was 1973 and I had been to see The Stooges the night before. It was just the greatest thing I’d ever seen – 180 degrees away from my music, but incredible, the energy of it, the sheer noise they made, Iggy climbing all over the place like Spider-Man. So the next night I went to see them again – they were playing a week of shows at a club called Richards in Atlanta. I thought it would be funny if I hired a gorilla costume and ran onstage during their set – you know, just adding to the general mayhem and anarchy. Instead, I was taught an important life lesson, which is this: if you’re planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check first to see whether or not the person you’re surprising has taken so much acid before the show that they’re unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and an actual gorilla. I discovered this when my appearance was greeted not with gales of laughter but the sight of Iggy Pop screaming and shrinking away from me in terror. This was quickly followed by the realization that I was no longer on the stage but flying through the air at high speed. Sensing the need for decisive action, another member of The Stooges had stopped playing, picked me up and thrown me into the crowd.

  You can see why I might occasionally think that I’ve covered the full panoply of live incidents, that there isn’t really anything left to do during a gig that I haven’t already done. But of course, when you do start thinking that, life has a habit of letting you know you’re wrong. Which brings us to the night in Las Vegas in 2017 when I found myself leaping up from the piano as the last chord of ‘Rocket Man’ died away and walking across the stage of the Colosseum, basking in the crowd’s applause, punching the air and pointing at fans who were going particularly wild. Nothing unusual in itself, save for the fact that, as I was walking across the stage, basking in the crowd’s applause and punching the air, I was also, unbeknown to the audience, copiously urinating into an adult nappy concealed beneath my suit. Pissing myself in front of an audience while wearing a giant nappy: this was definitely hitherto uncharted territory. There aren’t a huge number of positives about contracting prostate cancer, but at least it had enabled me to have an entirely new and unprecedented experience onstage.

  * * *

  My life is never quiet, but the preceding few years had been even more tumultuous than usual. Some aspects of them had been really positive. I settled into fatherhood far more easily than I would ever have expected. I loved doing everyday stuff with the boys – taking them to the cinema on a Saturday; going to Legoland and to meet Father Christmas at Windsor Great Park. I loved taking them to see Watford. They’re football-mad. I can spend hours talking about it with them, answering their questions about its history: ‘Who was George Best, Dad?’ ‘Why was Pelé such a great player?’ They came to Vicarage Road for the opening of a stand named after me, something I’m incredibly proud about; there’s a stand there named after Graham Taylor, too. Since then, they’ve been mascots at matches and they go to games all the time.

  And I loved how having kids rooted me in the village nearest to Woodside. I’d lived there since the mid-seventies, without ever really getting to know anyone locally. But when the boys started nursery and school, they made friends, and their friends’ parents became our friends. They didn’t care about who I was. A harassed mum at the school gates is less interested in asking you how you wrote ‘Bennie And The Jets’, or what Princess Diana was really like than in talking about uniforms and packed lunches and the difficulty of assembling a costume for the nativity play at forty-eight hours’ notice – which was fine by me. We ended up with a whole new social circle we never would have had when David and I were just a famous, jet-setting gay couple.

  I had opened a new Vegas show, The Million Dollar Piano, in 2011. It was less controversial than its predecessor, but just as spectacular and successful. I brought Tony King in to act as creative director – he’d been working for The Rolling Stones for years, travelling around the world with them on their tours – and he did an incredible job. He’s been part of my organization ever since: his official job title is Eminence Grise, which just fits Tony perfectly. The following year, I made Good Morning to the Night, an album unlike anything I had done before, that went to Number O
ne. Or rather, I didn’t make Good Morning to the Night: I handed over the master tapes of my seventies albums to Pnau, an Australian electronic duo that I loved, and told them to do whatever they wanted with them. They remixed different elements from old songs into entirely new tracks, making me sound like Pink Floyd or Daft Punk in the process. I thought the results were fantastic, but I didn’t understand the process they used; there was an album with my name on it at Number One and I had no idea whatsoever how it had been made. We played together at a festival in Ibiza, which was fantastic. I always feel nervous before a gig – I think the day you stop feeling nervous is the day you start phoning it in – but this time, I was genuinely terrified. The crowd were so young; they could theoretically have been my grandkids, and the first part of the show was just me and a piano. And they loved it. There’s something incredibly gratifying about seeing an audience that’s completely different from the people who normally come to see you enjoying what you do.

  Pnau weren’t the only people I collaborated with. I worked with all sorts of different people: Queens of the Stone Age, A Tribe Called Quest, Jack White, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I love going into the studio with artists people wouldn’t ordinarily expect me to play with. It reminds me of being a session musician in the late sixties: that challenge of having to adapt your style and think on your feet musically is still really exciting to me.

  I was in the studio with Clean Bandit when I was called to the phone: apparently Vladimir Putin wanted to speak to me. There had been a lot of publicity about a couple of gigs I’d done in Russia, where I spoke out about LGBTQ rights onstage. I’d dedicated a show in Moscow to the memory of Vladislav Tornovoi, a young man who had been tortured and murdered in Volgograd for being gay, and in St Petersburg I’d talked about how ridiculous it was that a monument to Steve Jobs in the city had been taken down when his successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, came out. It turned out to be a prank call, by two guys who’d done the same thing to all sorts of public figures, including Mikhail Gorbachev. They recorded the whole thing and broadcast it on Russian TV, but, fuck it, I wasn’t embarrassed at all, because I hadn’t said anything stupid to them; I’d just said how grateful I was and how I’d love to meet face to face to discuss civil rights and provision for AIDS treatment. Besides, the real Vladimir Putin rang me at home a few weeks later to apologize and said he wanted to set up a meeting. The meeting hasn’t happened – I’ve been back to Russia since, but my invite to the Kremlin seems to have got lost in the post. But I live in hope.

  You don’t achieve anything by cutting people off. It’s like when I played at the wedding of the right-wing talk show DJ Rush Limbaugh in 2010. I was surprised to be asked – the first thing I said onstage was ‘I expect you’re wondering what the fuck I’m doing here’ – and I got really hauled over the coals in the media: he said some incredibly stupid things about AIDS, how can you possibly perform for him? But I’d rather try and build a bridge to someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall. And in any case, I donated my fee for the performance – and I assure you that, as a wedding singer, I don’t come cheap – to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. So I managed to turn a right-wing talk show DJ’s wedding into a fundraising benefit for AIDS.

  But a lot of awful things happened in those years, too. Bob Birch, who had played bass in my band for over twenty years, committed suicide. He had been unwell since a car accident in the mid-nineties – a truck had hit him in the street before a gig in Montreal, and he never really recovered from his injuries – but I don’t think I fully grasped how much pain he was in or the psychological toll it was taking on him. He seemed incredibly resilient – at first they told him he would never walk again, but he was back on tour within six months. His playing never faltered and he never complained, even when he had to perform sitting down. But then, during the summer break in our 2012 touring schedule, his injuries got worse until it must have become unbearable. I got the phone call from Davey at six o’clock in the morning in Nice, telling me Bob had shot himself outside his home in Los Angeles. I wished he’d reached out; I wished he’d said something. I don’t know what I could have done, but I couldn’t stop the thought haunting me after his death that he had suffered in silence.

  Then Ingrid Sischy died. She’d had breast cancer before, in the late nineties: she’d called me up in tears in Nice, asking if I could help her get an appointment with a top oncologist called Larry Norton, the same doctor that had treated Linda McCartney. The cancer went into remission but, from that point, Ingrid was terrified of it returning. She was so paranoid about it, looking for signs that it had returned in the most bizarre places, that it became a running joke between us.

  ‘Elton, look, my hands are shaking, do you think I have cancer of the hand?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Ingrid, you’ve got cancer of the hand now. You’ve probably got cancer of the teeth and the hair as well.’

  It seemed funny at the time, because I couldn’t imagine her actually dying. I’d never met anyone with that much vitality; she was always doing something, a million projects on the go at once. And she was so present in my life: I would literally ring her every weekday, Monday to Friday, for a chat and gossip and to ask for her opinions, of which she had an apparently fathomless supply. When someone has that much life force inside them, when someone takes up so much space, it just seems impossible that life could be snuffed out.

  Until it was. The cancer returned in 2015 and she died very suddenly – so suddenly that I had to race from Britain to America to see her before she passed away. I just made it. I got to say goodbye, which hadn’t happened with a lot of my friends who had died. In a way, I was pleased it was so sudden: Ingrid was so scared of cancer, so scared of dying, and at least she didn’t have to spend weeks or months facing death. But it wasn’t really any consolation. I’d lost Gianni; now I’d lost another best friend, another almost-sibling. I never stop thinking about her: there are photos of her all over my houses, so she’s always there. I miss her advice, I miss that intelligence, I miss her passion, I miss the laughs. I miss her.

  And then there was David. I can’t say I hadn’t noticed he was drinking a lot more, maybe too much. He started coming to bed most nights with a glass of wine and would sip it while he was reading and chatting. Or he’d stay up much later than me, and the next morning, I’d see the empty bottle by the kitchen sink. Sometimes two. A couple of times when we were on holiday at the house in Nice, he didn’t come to bed at all. I’d find him in the morning, spark out in front of his computer, or on the sofa in the living room. But I honestly didn’t think he had any issues. Regardless of what had happened the previous evening, he would be up at seven and off to work. There were times when we were out, and he’d get drunk – after a joint birthday party I had with Sam Taylor-Wood, I remember having to grab his arm and guide him very firmly to the car, so he didn’t weave about in front of the paparazzi – but he never made a fool of himself. Given that, after a few vodka martinis, I had been capable of anything from verbal abuse to violence to displays of public nudity, you can understand how I failed to notice David had a serious problem.

  I didn’t realize he was propping himself up with booze. I always thought David had slipped into Elton John World with remarkable ease and confidence, but it turned out that a lot of things I was completely used to living with, that I just saw as a fact of life, made him anxious. He didn’t like being photographed all the time, or being under press scrutiny, or public speaking at AIDS Foundation events. He was always a nervous flyer, but, in my life, hardly a week goes by when you don’t set foot on a plane. He found it all easier to deal with after a few drinks. Plus, there was the fact that we were often apart – I was away all the time doing gigs, and he was back at home. I don’t want to make him sound like a kind of rock and roll touring widow – he had plenty going on in his life – but after a while, he got lonely and bored, and one way of feeling less lonely and bored is cracking open a bottle of nice wine or knocking back a few vodkas. And on to
p of everything else, there were the kids. As any new parent will tell you, however much you love it, there are moments when you feel shaken by the responsibility of it all. David wouldn’t have been the first parent in history to race to the fridge after bedtime, in urgent need of a glass of something cold, alcoholic and relaxing. Obviously, we had help, but it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got the best nannies in the universe: every new parent who cares about their children has points where they feel overwhelmed by the idea of bringing new humans into the world and ensuring their lives are as good as they can be.

  If you treat your anxieties with booze, it usually works, at least while you’re drinking: it’s the next morning that you find yourself feeling more anxious than ever. And that’s what happened to David. It all came to a head in Los Angeles in 2014, two days before I was due to start a US tour. I was leaving that night for Atlanta: Tony King was flying in, and I was looking forward to catching up before the tour began. David was feeling low and wanted me to stay the extra night with him. I said no. We had a huge row. I went anyway. The next morning, David called and we had a row that made the previous day’s row look like a light-hearted disagreement over what to have for lunch: the kind of argument where you come off the phone teary and reeling, where things are said that make you wonder whether the next time you communicate, it’ll be through lawyers. In fact, the next time I heard from David, he had checked himself into a rehab clinic in Malibu. He told me that after he had come off the phone, he had lain in bed. He could hear Elijah and Zachary playing just down the hall, but he was too depressed and anxious to get up and see them. That was it: he contacted the doctor, told her he had had enough, that he needed help.