In advance of a new collaborative project with Brandi Carlile, I look out of my lounge window for inspiration
Last week I hymned Paul Gambaccini, who turns 76 a week from now (April 2). Gambo’s friend Elton John, who is two years, a week and a day older than him, is still singing and releasing music. In fact, he celebrates his 78th birthday tonight at the London Palladium, but I don’t have to go anywhere to see him; I just need to turn my chair around.
To mark Elton’s final shows at Vicarage Road back in 2022, a massive mural was done of him on the side of Watford Library: glasses, sparkles, ebullience in an image. If you look out of my lounge window, Elton stares back, like the demon eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, or Sauron.
Next Friday (April 4), Elton releases his album Who Believes In Angels, a duets project with Brandi Carlile, who is fast becoming my generation’s Joni Mitchell or, indeed, our Elton. Working with the great Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt, who has already ticked off the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam as he tries to collect the set of Rock’n’Roll Stars, the pair of them have recorded a set of songs that build on their life’s work: comforting people, including gay and marginalised ones, with their music.
The album ends with When This Old World Is Done With Me, the type of song David Bowie and Leonard Cohen were singing in their seventies; Rock Star Stares Death in the Face a whole genre in itself, led by My Way, sung by a fiftysomething Sinatra. Elton’s take on the genre ends with a brass band, and after he played it through for the first time, Brandi recalls he wept and ‘his whole body crumpled over the piano’. ‘Is it too Lion King?’ said the man who wrote the songs for The Lion King, which will help Disney+ gain subscribers for decades to come.
As we learned from his memoir, a biopic and a documentary, this is the legacy of a shy pianist who, between the demise of The Beatles and the moonwalking rise of Michael Jackson, was the world’s most popular entertainer. He headlined Wembley by himself! He topped the US singles charts multiple times!! He was camp and flamboyant in an era of three-day weeks and economic decline!!!
We will soon see Elton in the forthcoming Spinal Tap sequel, which is not his first foray into acting; indeed, he has played ‘Elton John’ most of his life. He made a cameo in sitcom Ab Fab (‘I’ve always had hair, BITCH!’) and, in the best scene of Tommy, he mimed Pinball Wizard with stadium-rock gusto wearing oversized glasses and shoes.
As the book Watford Forever makes clear, Elton replaced drugs with Watford Football Club, whose Sir Elton John Stand I sat in just the other week to watch an FA Youth Cup tie. (Can I mention I wrote a book, From Kids to Champions, about the competition?) With £1m of Elton’s money, and the expert management of Graham Taylor, Watford cantered up the Football League and finished the 1982/83 season as the second best team in England; the 1983/84 season began with games in European competition and ended at Wembley, where Elton was filmed with tears in his eyes during the FA Cup final anthem Abide With Me.
Then came the score to the movie about meerkats, warthogs and lion cubs, as well as sundry soundtracks for stage musicals that played on Broadway and in the West End: Aida, Billy Elliott, Tammy Faye and The Devil Wears Prada, the last of these currently running in the Dominion Theatre where We Will Rock You used to live. Elton’s memoir Me, in which he revealed that Bob Dylan was useless at charades, made it clear that his career is motivated by the fractured relationship between young Reginald and dad Stanley, who was played in the movie Rocketman by the same actor who had been in the Underworld movies.
When Elton topped the UK album charts with his Diamonds collection, 18 months after putting a bow on his career with a Glastonbury headline slot, it reminded people just how many hits he had had: Bennie and the Jets, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Philadelphia Freedom, Are You Ready For Love, Tiny Dancer, Crocodile Rock and, of course, I’m Still Standing, Your Song and set closer Rocket Man. The biggest selling song of all (and until the end of) time is Candle in the Wind, written in honour of Marilyn Monroe and reset to commemorate the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose younger son Elton is godfather to.
Then there’s the philanthropic work with his AIDS Foundation, established in 1992. He is also in the exclusive club of 65 Companions of Honour, alongside fellow melodist Paul McCartney, fellow national treasure David Attenborough and fellow gay icon Ian McKellen. Above all, though, he is father of two boys, respectively an aspiring footballer and a wannabe musician. Paul Gambaccini and I agreed that their dad had done his job correctly.
I came to Elton in the 1990s, so my first exposure to him was probably Circle of Life. Not wanting to spend £100 on a ticket to see him and his crack band play Watford’s football stadium, I took my partner and walked down to sit on a bench outside the hospital beside the ground and listen to the second half of the set. It sounded like rock’n’roll music, but there was also opera, orchestral and pop music, a combination only Elton could have brought together; this was a kid who attended the Royal Academy of Music to learn piano but loved the pre-rock chart-topper Winifred Atwell.
I do not know why he doesn’t join forces with Gambo and launch a podcast called The Rest Is Pop. Elton has hosted over 400 episodes of his Rocket Hour for Apple Music showcasing his deep love for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, pop music. He has been known to buy multiple copies of CDs for both friends and his multiple homes dotted around the world: in Windsor, Venice, Nice and, in the USA, both Atlanta and LA. All that Lion King money has been used sensibly.
Although he is no longer jetting around the world to fulfil concert dates, Elton is looking after his legacy just as Jimmy Page is shepherding the Led Zeppelin remasters and as McCartney and Ringo Starr are still talking about their band, which broke up 55 years ago. Among Elton’s greatest achievements is that along with Led Zep and the Fabs, he is in the tiny rank of popular entertainers who gained huge success in the USA. They have since been joined by the Bee Gees, Sting, Phil Collins, Coldplay, Adele and Elton’s good friend Ed Sheeran, who have all written top tunes and sold out stadiums.
Elton is also very good at selling his material, always game for an interview; he dealt with an enthused Jack Black on Graham Norton’s show very well, and he and Brandi recently spoke to Radio 2’s Scott Mills from his Vinyl Room. ‘The song just appeared,’ Brandi sighed about her friend, a man who has been inventing melodies, which have been heard by millions, if not billions, for over 50 years. Hence why I can see him out of my window.