by Elton John
As my mind raced, I became aware that elsewhere in the room, Steve Brown was still talking. He was saying something about ‘Lady What’s Tomorrow’, one of the songs we’d written that we hadn’t even bothered to try and sell. It was influenced by Leonard Cohen, and clearly Cilla Black wasn’t going to be interested. But Steve Brown apparently was.
‘You need to write more songs like that,’ he continued. ‘You need to do what you want to do, not what you think will sell. I’m going to talk to Dick and see if we can make an album.’
Afterwards, Bernie and I sat in the pub, trying to process what had just happened. On the one hand, I didn’t have any great ambitions to be a solo artist. On the other, the opportunity to stop writing the weepies and bubblegum pop was too good to turn down. And we still thought releasing Elton John records was a good way of showcasing the kind of songs we liked. The more exposure our songs got, the more likely it was that another, more famous artist might hear them and decide to record one themselves.
There was one problem. The deal with Philips was for singles: they wanted a follow-up to ‘I’ve Been Loving You’, not an album. So Steve Brown recorded a new song that Bernie and I had written, following his instruction to stop trying to be commercial and do what we liked. It was called ‘Lady Samantha’, and it felt like a breakthrough. Admittedly, at this stage of my career, making a single that I could listen to without emitting an involuntary yell of horror would have constituted a breakthrough, but ‘Lady Samantha’ was a pretty good song. It sounded completely different from ‘I’ve Been Loving You’: it was weightier, hipper, more confident. Released in January 1969, it became what used to be called a ‘turntable hit’, which was a polite way of saying it was a single that got played on the radio a lot but no one actually bought.
In the aftermath of its failure, we discovered Philips weren’t interested in renewing our deal: for some inexplicable reason, they seemed very resistant to financing an album by an artist who’d so far done nothing but lose them money. Dick James vaguely mentioned putting it out himself, setting up a proper label, rather than just licensing recordings out to other record companies, but he seemed more keen on talking about the Eurovision Song Contest. Much to Dick’s delight, one of the attempts at middle-of-the-road songwriting we were supposed to have forgotten about had now been mooted as a potential UK entry. Lulu was going to sing six songs on her TV show and the British public were going to vote for a winner. To say Bernie greeted this news coolly was an understatement. He was appalled. Back then, Eurovision wasn’t quite the orgy of embarrassment it is now, but still, it wasn’t like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were queuing up to get involved. Worse, he hadn’t actually had anything to do with the song, even though it had his name on the credits. I’d knocked together the lyrics myself. It was ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ all over again. We were suddenly back where we started.
Bernie’s worst fears were confirmed when we sat down in Frome Court to watch the Lulu show. Our song – my song – was completely undistinguished and forgettable, which was more than you could say for the rest of them. Every other songwriter seemed to have come up with an idea so horrendous you couldn’t forget it if you tried. One was like something drunk Germans would slap their knees to in a Bavarian beer hall. Another featured the appalling combination of a big band and a bouzouki. Another was called ‘March’. The title didn’t refer to the month. The song was literally about marching, with an arrangement featuring a military brass band to ram home the point. Steve Brown was right. We really couldn’t do this kind of thing at all, a fact underlined when our song came last in the public vote. The German oompah song won. It was called ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’.
The next day, we arrived at DJM to discover that the Daily Express had published an article helpfully explaining that our song had lost because it was self-evidently the worst of the lot. Dick wearily conceded that perhaps it might be better if we stopped wasting everybody’s time and made our own album instead. If Philips wouldn’t release it, then he would hire a press and promotions guy and start his own record label after all.
So we were sequestered in the little DJM studio, with Steve Brown producing and Clive Franks operating the tape machine. Clive was the guy who recorded The Troggs Tape; years later, he ended up co-producing some of my albums, and he still works with me today, doing the sound engineering for my live shows. We collectively threw everything we could at the new songs. Psychedelic sound effects, harpsichords, backwards guitar solos courtesy of Caleb, flutes, bongos, stereo panning, improvised jazz interludes, trick endings where the songs faded out then suddenly back in again, the sound of Clive whistling. If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re making your first album. There’s a faint voice at the back of your mind telling you that you might never make another, so you may as well try everything while you have the chance. But, God, it was so much fun, such an adventure. The album was called Empty Sky. It came out on Dick’s new DJM label on 6 June 1969. I can remember listening back to the title track and thinking it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life.
Empty Sky wasn’t a hit – it only sold a few thousand copies – but I could still sense things were starting to move, very gradually. The reviews were promising rather than great, but they were definitely an improvement on being told by the Daily Express that you couldn’t write a song as good as ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’. Just as the album was released, we got a phone call to say that Three Dog Night had covered ‘Lady Samantha’ on their new album. Three Dog Night! They were American! An actual American rock band had recorded one of our songs. Not a light entertainer with a Saturday-night variety show on BBC1, not an entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest: a hip, successful American rock band. Bernie and I had a song on an album that was in the US Top Twenty.
And Empty Sky gave me material, which meant I could play live. The first gigs were pretty tentative. They were little pop-up shows; I was playing with any musicians I could find – usually Caleb and his new band Hookfoot – and I was still nervous: the last time I had been onstage, Long John Baldry had his tape recorder out and I was in a kaftan, suffering a complete collapse of the will to live. But the gigs got better the more comfortable I felt, and they really took off when I assembled my own band. I had met Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray lurking around DJM. Nigel was playing with a band called Plastic Penny, who had a big hit single in 1968 and, incredibly, had actually bought one of the songs Bernie and I had been trying to sell the previous year. It somehow seemed symbolic of our luck that they recorded it on an album that was released just as Plastic Penny’s moment in the spotlight passed and their career went down the toilet. Dee, meanwhile, had been in The Mirage, a psychedelic band who released singles for years without getting anywhere. They were fantastic musicians and we clicked straight away. Dee was an incredible bass player. Nigel was a drummer from the Keith Moon and Ginger Baker school, a showman with a kit that took up most of our rehearsal space and had his name emblazoned across his twin bass drums. They could both sing. We didn’t need a guitarist. The sound the three of us made was already huge and raw. Plus, there’s something about performing in a trio that gives you a real freedom to play off the cuff. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t replicate the tricky arrangements of the album: instead we could stretch out and improvise, play solos, turn songs into medleys, suddenly launch into an old Elvis cover or a version of ‘Give Peace A Chance’.
I started to think more about how I looked onstage. I wanted to be a frontman, but I was trapped behind a piano. I couldn’t strut around like Mick Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend: bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day. So I thought about the piano players I’d loved as a ki
d, how they had managed to communicate excitement while stuck behind the old nine-foot plank, as I affectionately called it. I thought of Jerry Lee Lewis kicking his stool away and jumping on the keyboard, how Little Richard stood up and leaned back when he played, even the way Winifred Atwell would turn to the audience and grin. They all influenced my performances. It turned out that playing the piano standing up like Little Richard is bloody hard work when you have arms as short as mine, but I persevered. We didn’t sound like anyone else, and now we didn’t look like anyone else either. Whatever else might have been happening in pop as the sixties turned into the seventies, I was fairly certain there weren’t any other piano-led power trios whose frontman was trying to mix the outrageousness and aggression of early rock and roll with Winifred Atwell’s bonhomie.
As we toured around colleges and hippy venues like the Roundhouse, the gigs got wilder and the music got better, especially when we started playing the latest batch of songs Bernie and I had come up with. I confess, I’m not always the best judge of my own work – I am, after all, the man who loudly announced that ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was such a terrible song that I would never countenance releasing it, of which more later – but even I could tell that our new material was in a different league to anything we’d produced before. They were easy songs to write – Bernie got the lyrics to ‘Your Song’ over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in fifteen minutes flat – because, in a way, we’d already done all the hard work. The way they sounded was the culmination of the hours we’d previously put in trying to write together, the gigs I’d been playing with Nigel and Dee that had boosted my confidence, the years I’d spent at the Royal Academy much against my will, the nights on the club circuit in Bluesology. Something like ‘Border Song’ or ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ had a sort of funk and soulfulness that I’d picked up backing Patti LaBelle and Major Lance, but they also had a classical influence that seeped in from all those Saturday mornings where I’d been forced to study Chopin and Bartók.
They were also the product of the bedroom at Frome Court. At the time we were writing, two artists were constantly on the Littlewoods stereo. One was the rock/soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. I was completely obsessed with the way their keyboardist, Leon Russell, played. It was like he’d somehow climbed into my head and worked out exactly how I wanted to play piano before I did. He’d managed to synthesize all the music I loved – rock and roll, blues, gospel, country – into one, perfectly natural style.
And the other was The Band. We played their first two albums over and over again. Like Leon Russell’s piano playing, their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. ‘Chest Fever’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Weight’: this was what we craved to write. Bernie went crazy for the lyrics. Ever since he was a kid, he’d loved gritty stories about old America, and that was what The Band told: ‘Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train, ‘til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore the tracks up again’. They were white musicians making soul music without covering ‘In The Midnight Hour’, or doing something that was just a pale imitation of what black artists did. It was a revelation.
When we played Dick the demos of the new songs, he was knocked out. Despite the sales of Empty Sky, he said he wanted another album. What’s more, he was going to give us £6,000 to make it. That was a remarkable leap of faith. It was an incredible amount of money to spend on an album in those days, especially one by an artist who had barely sold any records yet. There’s no doubting the belief Dick had in us, but I think his hand may also have been forced a little. Bernie and I had become friends with Muff Winwood, Stevie’s brother, who worked for Island Records and lived not far from Frome Court – I think we literally bumped into him on a train back to Pinner one day. We would go round to his house a couple of nights a week with a bottle of Mateus Rosé and a box of chocolates for his wife Zena – very sophisticated – play table football or Monopoly and pump Muff for advice about the music business. When he heard the new songs, he was really enthusiastic, and wanted to sign us to Island, a much bigger and cooler label than DJM. Word of a competitor got back to Dick, which might have galvanized him into getting his chequebook out.
Whatever the reason, the money meant we could move out of DJM into a proper studio, Trident in Soho. Steve Brown suggested we should get an outside producer: Gus Dudgeon, who’d produced David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, a number one single that we all loved the sound of. We could afford strings and an arranger, Paul Buckmaster, who had worked on ‘Space Oddity’ too. Paul arrived looking like D’Artagnan – he had long centre-parted hair, a goatee beard and a big hat. He seemed a bit eccentric, which, as it turned out, was a false first impression. Paul wasn’t a bit eccentric. He was so eccentric as to suggest he might be genuinely nuts. He would stand in front of the orchestra and make noises with his mouth to indicate what he wanted them to do: ‘I don’t know how to describe what I want, but I want you to make a sound like this.’ They got it exactly right. He was a genius.
But then everything about the sessions was weirdly magical. Me, Gus, Steve and Paul had planned everything out in advance – the songs, the sound, the arrangements – and it all just fell into place. I had barely touched a harpsichord before we hired one for ‘I Need You To Turn To’; it was a really hard instrument to play, but I did it. I was petrified about playing live with an orchestra, but I psyched myself up, telling myself that this was it, something was finally coming to fruition. All those crappy clubs with Long John Baldry and his tape recorder, all the session work, Derf carrying his pint pot round for tips at the Northwood Hills Hotel, Bernie and me escaping from Furlong Road and Linda’s dreams of turning me into Buddy Greco: it was all leading up to this. And it worked. The whole album was done in four days.
We knew we’d made something good, something that would push us on to the next level. We were right. When it came out in April 1970 the reviews of Elton John were fantastic; John Peel played it and it crept into the bottom end of the charts. We started getting offers to play in Europe, although every time we went there something bizarre seemed to happen. In Paris, some genius booked us as the support act to Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66. An audience expecting an evening of bossa nova showed their delight at having their musical horizons unexpectedly broadened by booing us off. We turned up in Knokke, Belgium to discover we weren’t playing a gig at all: it was a televised song contest. We went to Holland to appear on a TV show and instead of getting us to perform, they insisted on making a film of me in a park, miming ‘Your Song’ into a microphone while surrounded, for some reason, by actors pretending to be paparazzi taking my photograph. They still show it on TV sometimes. I look absolutely furious, like I’m about to punch somebody – a fairly accurate representation of how I felt, but not really the ideal delivery for a tender ballad about blossoming love.
Back at home, though, a buzz was definitely building. In August, we played the Krumlin Festival in Yorkshire, which should have been a disaster. It was in a field in the middle of the moors. It was freezing cold, pouring with rain and completely disorganized. The stage was still being built when the festival was supposed to start, which gave the bands who were supposed to play time to start squabbling over the running order. I couldn’t be bothered getting involved with that, so we just went on, handed out brandy to the crowd and tore the place apart while Atomic Rooster and The Pretty Things were still backstage, arguing about who was the biggest star. I started seeing famous faces in the audiences at our London shows, which meant that word was getting about in the music business that we were worth checking out. A couple of weeks before we played Krumlin, Pete Townshend from The Who and Jeff Beck had turned up to our show at the Speakeasy club, which had taken over from the Cromwellian and the Bag O’ Nails as London’s big music industry hang-out. We got invited on Top of the Pops to play ‘Border Song’: our appearance didn’t do much to help it
s sales as a single, but Dusty Springfield introduced herself to us in the dressing room and offered to mime backing vocals during our performance. My mouth just hung open. I’d travelled to Harrow to see her live with The Springfields when I was still at school, and hung around outside the stage door afterwards, just to get another glimpse of her: she walked past in a lilac top and mauve skirt, looking incredibly chic. I’d joined her fan club in the early sixties and stuck posters of her on my bedroom wall.
The only obstacle to our progress was Dick, who had got it into his head that we should go to America and play there. He had managed to sell the album to a US label called Uni – a division of MCA – and kept talking about how enthusiastic they were about it, how they wanted us to play some club shows. I couldn’t see the point, and told him so. Something was starting to happen in Britain. The gigs were great, the album was selling OK and Dusty Springfield liked me. Bernie and I were writing song after song – we’d already started working on demos for the next album. Why lose the momentum by leaving now and going to America, where no one knew who I was?
The more I argued, the more adamant Dick became that we should go. But then I was handed a lifeline. After the Speakeasy show, Jeff Beck had invited me along to his rehearsal space in Chalk Farm to jam. Then his agent set up a meeting at DJM. Jeff effectively wanted to use me, Dee and Nigel as his backing band for an American tour. I would get a solo spot during the set, where I could play my own songs. It seemed like an incredible offer. Jeff Beck was one of the greatest guitar players I’d ever seen. His last album, Beck-Ola, had been a huge hit. Admittedly, we were only to get 10 per cent of the nightly earnings, but 10 per cent of Jeff Beck’s earnings was still a lot more than we were making now. And the important thing was the exposure. These would be big audiences, and I’d be playing my songs in front of them – not as a completely unknown artist, but as part of Jeff Beck’s band; not as a support act that everyone could ignore, but in the middle of the main set.