by Elton John
John severed his management contract and gave up his claim on my future earnings. He closed John Reid Enterprises and retired from management the following year. And I went back on tour. I had debts to pay off.
fifteen
One of the many things I love about Bernie is that he’s someone who feels no compunction about telling you the last album you made together – an album which sold millions, went Top Ten around the world and spawned a string of hit singles – was a disaster of unimaginable proportions that required an immediate crisis meeting to ensure nothing like it ever happened again. Bernie and I had been on a commercial roll. We’d made two new albums, Made in England in 1995 and The Big Picture in autumn 1997, and they’d both done great: gone platinum everywhere from Australia to Switzerland. But The Big Picture was the problem, as far as Bernie was concerned. He hated everything about it: the songs, his lyrics, the production, the fact that we’d recorded it in England and he had to travel from the US for the sessions. The end result, he opined, as he sat on the terrace of our house in Nice three years later, was a load of clinical, boring, middle-of-the-road shit. In fact, he continued, clearly gathering steam, it was the worst album we’d ever made.
I wasn’t a huge fan of The Big Picture myself, but I thought that was laying it on a bit thick. I certainly didn’t think it was as bad as Leather Jackets, which in fairness wasn’t saying much. Leather Jackets, you may remember, wasn’t an album so much as an exercise in trying to make music while taking so much cocaine you’ve essentially rendered yourself clinically insane. But even that feeble defence cut no mustard. No, Bernie insisted, The Big Picture was even worse than that.
I didn’t agree, but Bernie was clearly pissed off: pissed off enough to fly all the way from his home in America to the south of France to talk about it. And there definitely was something in what he said. I’d been listening to Ryan Adams’ album Heartbreaker a lot. He was a classic country rock singer-songwriter, really – I could imagine him onstage at the Troubadour in the seventies. But there was a toughness and a freshness about it that did make The Big Picture sound weirdly dated and staid. Perhaps I had taken my eye off the ball when it came to my solo albums. Ever since the success of The Lion King, I’d become more and more interested in film and stage music. I’d written the soundtrack for a comedy called The Muse, and an instrumental piece for Women Talking Dirty, a British comedy-drama that David had produced. I wasn’t writing songs, I was writing proper instrumental scores, where I had to sit watching the film and come up with thirty or sixty seconds of music to fit each given scene. I thought it would be boring, but I really loved it. When you get it right, it’s incredibly inspiring, because you literally see the effect music can have: a little snatch of it can totally change how a scene feels, or how it works emotionally.
And Tim Rice and I had done the songs for the DreamWorks animation film The Road to El Dorado – the movie I’d promised Jeffrey Katzenberg I would make – then written another stage musical, Aida. That had been much harder work than The Lion King. There were problems with the set, the directors and designers were changed, and I stormed out of one of the Broadway previews midway through the first act, when I realized they hadn’t changed the arrangements of a couple of the songs as I’d asked them to. If they weren’t going to listen to me asking nicely, perhaps they would listen to me stomping up the aisle and out of the theatre. But the hard work – and indeed the stomping out – paid off. It ran on Broadway for four years, we won a Grammy, and a Tony Award for Best Score. And I already had another idea for a musical bubbling. We had been to see Billy Elliot at the Cannes Film Festival and I’m afraid I made rather a spectacle of myself. I had no idea what the film was about. I just assumed it was going to be a nice little British comedy with Julie Walters in it. I was completely unprepared for how much it was going to affect me emotionally. The scene where his father sees him dancing in the gym, and realizes that his son is really gifted at something, even though he doesn’t understand it; the finale, where his dad goes to see him perform and feels proud and moved; it was just too close to home. It was as if someone had taken the story of me and my dad and written a happy ending for it, instead of what had actually happened in real life. I couldn’t handle it at all. I was so upset that David literally had to help me out of the cinema. If he hadn’t, there’s every chance I would still be sat there now, heaving with sobs.
I pulled myself together enough to attend the reception afterwards. We were talking to the film’s director Stephen Daldry and the writer Lee Hall, when David mentioned that he thought it would make a good stage musical. I thought he had a point. So did Lee, although he wanted to know who was going to write the lyrics. I told him he was: it was his story, he came from Easington, where the film was set. He complained that he’d never written a lyric in his life, but said he’d give it a go. I couldn’t believe the stuff he came back with. Lee was a natural. I never had to change a single word that he’d written, and, better still, they were completely different from any words I’d worked with before. His lyrics were tough and political: ‘You think you’re smart, you Cockney shite, you want to be suspicious – while you were on the picket line, I went and fucked your missus.’ There were songs about wishing Margaret Thatcher dead. There was a song that didn’t make it into the final play called ‘Only Poofs Do Ballet’. It was another completely new challenge. Perhaps the thought of recording a twenty-seventh Elton John album did seem a little routine by comparison.
Or maybe there was a way of changing that routine. In Nice, Bernie had started talking wistfully about the way we made albums in the seventies: how we used to record things on analogue tape, without too many overdubs, and with my piano at the front and centre of the sound. It was funny – I’d been thinking about the same thing. Perhaps it had to do with seeing Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous, which was a kind of love letter to early seventies rock, personified by a fictional band called Stillwater. One scene uses ‘Tiny Dancer’: the band start singing along to it on their tour bus. In fact, that scene turned ‘Tiny Dancer’ into one of my biggest songs overnight. People forget that when it came out as a single in 1971, it flopped. It didn’t make the Top Forty in America, and the record label in Britain wouldn’t release it at all. When it turned up on the soundtrack of Almost Famous, I think a lot of people had no idea what it was, or who it was by. I think the film subconsciously put some ideas into my head, about the kind of artist I’d been back then, about how my music was made and how it was perceived, before I became absolutely huge.
It wasn’t that I wanted to turn the clock back. I didn’t have any interest in doing something retro. I think nostalgia can be a real trap for an artist. When you reminisce about the good old days, you naturally see it all through rose-tinted spectacles. In my case in particular, I think that’s forgivable, because I probably was literally wearing rose-tinted spectacles at the time, with flashing lights and ostrich feathers attached to them. But if you end up convincing yourself that everything in the past was better than it is now, you might as well give up writing music and retire.
What I did like was the idea of recapturing that spirit, that directness, the same thing that I heard in Ryan Adams’ music: stripping things down, just focusing on making music rather than worrying whether it was going to be a hit; going backwards to go forwards.
So that was how we made the next album, Songs from the West Coast. It came out in October 2001 and got the best reviews I’d had in years. Bernie wrote powerful, simple, direct lyrics: ‘I Want Love’, ‘Look Ma’, ‘No Hands’, ‘American Triangle’, which was a very harrowing, angry song about the homophobic murder of Matthew Shephard in Wyoming in 1998. We used a studio in LA, where we hadn’t recorded for years, and a new producer, Pat Leonard, who was best known for working with Madonna, but was absolutely steeped in seventies rock. It was hilarious: he was the guy who co-wrote ‘Like A Prayer’ and ‘La Isla Bonita’, but he was completely obsessed with Jethro Tull. He’d probably have been happier if Madonna
had played a flute while standing on one leg.
It ended up being a very Californian-sounding record. It’s just different writing there, rather than making a record in London when it’s pissing with rain every day. It’s as if the warmth gets into your bones and relaxes you, and the sunlight somehow glows in the music you make. I loved the results, and I’ve used the same approach on a lot of albums I’ve made since then: thinking about what I’d done in the past, taking an idea and developing it differently. The follow-up, Peachtree Road, was the same: digging into the country and soul influences on Tumbleweed Connection and songs like ‘Take Me To The Pilot’. The Captain and the Kid was a sequel to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, with Bernie writing about what had happened to us after we went to America in 1970: everything from that stupid double-decker bus they picked us up from the airport in, to the way our partnership temporarily broke up. The Diving Board was me playing with just a bassist and drummer, the same as the original Elton John Band, but doing things I’d never done before, improvising instrumental passages between the songs. On Wonderful Crazy Night, I suppose I was thinking a little more of the pop side of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I recorded it in 2015, and the news was just relentless misery: I wanted something light and fun, a sense of escape, lots of bright colours and 12-string guitar.
* * *
Those albums weren’t flops, but they weren’t huge commercial successes either. It’s always frustrating at first when that happens to an album you think is brilliant, but you have to take it on the chin. They weren’t commercial albums, they didn’t have big hit singles built in; The Diving Board in particular was incredibly dark and depressing. But they were albums I wanted to make, albums I thought you would be able to play in twenty years’ time and still feel proud of. Of course, I would have loved it if they’d gone to Number One, but that wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I’ve had my moment selling zillions of records, and it was fabulous, but from the second it began, I realized it wouldn’t last forever. If you believe it will, you can end up in terrible trouble. I honestly think that’s one of the things that tipped Michael Jackson over the edge: he was convinced he could make an album bigger than Thriller, and was crushed every time it didn’t happen.
Just before we started working on The Captain and the Kid, I got asked to do a residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. They had built a huge new theatre, the Colosseum. Celine Dion was playing there, and they wanted me to do a show as well. My immediate thought was that I didn’t want to do it. In my head, Las Vegas was still linked to the cabaret circuit I’d escaped in 1967. It was The Rat Pack and Donny and Marie Osmond. It was the Elvis I’d met in 1976 – seven years on the Vegas strip visibly hadn’t done him much good – and performers in tuxedos talking to the audience: ‘You know, one of the wonderful things about showbiz…’ But then I started wondering if it was possible to do something completely different with a Vegas show. The photographer and director David LaChapelle had directed a great video for one of the singles from Songs from the West Coast, ‘This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore’. It featured Justin Timberlake lip-synching to the song, dressed as me backstage in the seventies, complete with a John Reid figure in the background, beating up a reporter and knocking a cop’s hat off. I loved it and contacted him about getting involved with designing a whole show. I told him to do whatever he wanted, let his imagination run riot, be as outrageous as he wanted to be.
If you know anything at all about David’s work, you’ll realize this isn’t a sentence you say to him lightly. He’s brilliant, but at that stage in his career he couldn’t take a holiday snap of someone without first getting them to dress up as Jesus and stand on top of a giant stuffed flamingo surrounded by neon signs and muscular boys in snakeskin jockstraps. This is a man who photographed Naomi Campbell as a topless wrestler stamping on a man’s face in stiletto-heeled boots, while a crowd of masked men with dwarfism looked on. One of his fashion shoots featured an immaculately dressed model standing next to the corpse of a woman who’d been killed by an air-conditioning unit falling from a window, her head splattered into a bloody mess on the pavement. He somehow managed to convince Courtney Love to pose as Mary Magdalene, with what looked like Kurt Cobain’s dead body draped over her knees. For my Vegas show, he designed a set full of neon signs and inflatable bananas and hot dogs and lipsticks: you didn’t have to have a filthy imagination to notice that every last one of them looked remarkably like an erect penis. He directed a succession of videos for each song, arty and wild and unapologetically gay. There was a reconstruction of my suicide bid back in Furlong Road in the sixties – it was quite literally a dramatization in so far as it made my suicide bid look hugely dramatic rather than pathetic in the extreme. There were blue teddy bears ice-skating and feeding homoerotic angels honey. There were films of people sniffing cocaine off a boy’s naked bum. There was a scene which featured the transsexual model Amanda Lepore naked, in an electric chair, with sparks flying out of her vagina. The show was called The Red Piano, an innocuous enough title given what it actually contained.
I thought it was all confirmation that David LaChapelle was a genius. I knew we’d got it right when I spotted a few people walking out in disgust, and when my mother told me she hated it. She came to the first night, expressed her aversion to what was happening onstage by theatrically putting on a pair of dark glasses after about five minutes, then came backstage afterwards with a face like thunder, telling everyone that it was so awful it was going to end my career overnight. Sam Taylor-Wood was there too – David and I knew her through the art world. I loved Sam’s photography: I had bought her version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and got her to direct a video for another single off Songs from the West Coast, ‘I Want Love’. She couldn’t believe my mum’s reaction – ‘I felt like taking my shoe off,’ she said, ‘and hitting her over the head with it’ – but in fairness, she didn’t know my mum that well. The drizzle of criticism that had started in the mid-seventies had continued pretty much unabated ever since: the woman didn’t like anything. I’d got used to tuning it out, or laughing it off, but other people seemed to get a shock when they came into contact with it.
Some people hated The Red Piano because they hadn’t got what they expected, which was the whole point. But what they expected proved they hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of my career. The whole thing had been founded on live performances that were outrageous and over-the-top. The Vegas residency worked because it fitted my character, and the way I’d presented myself in the past. It wasn’t just a load of shocking visuals grafted on for effect, it was another form of going backwards to go forwards, an updated version of the seventies shows where I’d been introduced onstage by famous porn stars and brought Divine out in full drag. Despite the occasional angry letter to the management and Mum’s dire imprecations, they were enormously successful shows, and I think they might have been groundbreaking, too. Maybe they changed the image of Las Vegas a little, made it seem less showbiz, a bit more edgy; it became a place where Lady Gaga or Britney Spears or Bruno Mars could perform without anyone raising an eyebrow.
* * *
In Britain, the law around gay partnerships was changing. At the end of 2005 it became legal for same-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships: marriages in all but name, a couple of minor technical differences aside. David and I talked about it and decided we wanted to be first in line. We’d been together for over ten years, and it was an incredibly important piece of legislation for gay couples. As a result of AIDS, I’d seen so many people lose their partner, then discover they had no legal rights whatsoever as a couple. Their late boyfriend’s family would come steaming in, cut them out of the equation entirely – out of greed, or because they never liked the fact that their son or brother was gay – and they would lose everything. Although we had discussed it very soberly and sensibly, I still managed to spring a surprise on David. I proposed to him in
the middle of a dinner party we were hosting for the Scissor Sisters at Woodside. I did it properly and got down on one knee. Even though I knew he would say yes, it was still a really lovely moment. We had the rings we’d bought for each other in Paris – the weekend I thought I could remain incognito while wearing the entire Versace spring/summer menswear collection at once – re-blessed.
The new law came in at the start of December, and there was a statutory fifteen-day waiting period. The first day we could legally become civil partners was 21 December. There was a lot to do. The ceremony itself was to be held at the Guildhall in Windsor, the same place Prince Charles got married to Camilla Parker Bowles. That was going to be a private, intimate event: just me and David, Mum and Derf, David’s parents, our dog Arthur, Ingrid and Sandy and our friends Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood.
The original idea was to have a huge reception in the evening at Pinewood Studios, but the planner involved somehow managed to come back with a budget that even I thought was ridiculous, a not unimpressive feat in itself. I can remember looking at it and thinking, ‘I could go mad in the Old Masters department of Sotheby’s for that kind of money.’ We couldn’t find anywhere else to host our reception – it was just before Christmas, everywhere was already booked – so we decided to have the party at Woodside. We erected three interlinked marquees in the grounds: the first was a reception room, the second a dining room and the third housed a huge dance floor. There was going to be live entertainment: James Blunt was going to sing, and so was Joss Stone. There were six hundred guests, and David insisted on doing the seating plans himself. He was really meticulous. One of his pet hates is the kind of party where everyone is thrown together at random and you end up sitting next to a complete stranger. Besides, we needed to exercise a degree of caution, because the guest list was about as eclectic as it was possible to get: there were people invited from absolutely every area of our lives. I was quite proud of the fact that we were having a party where members of the Royal Family had been invited alongside a selection of star performers from the gay porn studio BelAmi, but it seemed perhaps best to ensure they weren’t actually sitting together. So David very carefully arranged everything around what he called tribes: there was a table for the sports stars who were coming, a table for people from the fashion world, a table for the former Beatles and their associates. And then I put my own personal mark on his painstaking efforts by ruining them.