Me

by Elton John

  But sexual or not, the relationship started to develop a momentum of its own. Linda decided to move to London and find a flat. Linda could afford one, and so we could move in together. Bernie could be our lodger.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of unease at all this, not least because Linda had started expressing misgivings about the music I was making. She was a big fan of an American crooner called Buddy Greco, and made it fairly clear she thought I would be better off modelling myself on him. But my unease was surprisingly easy to drown out. I liked the idea of moving out of Frome Court. And I suppose I was doing what I thought I should be doing at twenty – settling down with someone.

  And so we ended up in a flat in Furlong Road, Islington: me, Bernie, Linda and her pet Chihuahua, Caspar. She got a job as a secretary, and the conversation increasingly turned to getting engaged. By now, the sound of alarm bells was hard to ignore, because the people closest to me kept ringing them. My mother was dead set against the idea, and you can get a pretty good sense of what Bernie thought from the lyrics of the song he subsequently wrote about that period, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. It’s hardly a glowing appraisal of Linda’s multitude of good qualities: ‘a dominating queen’, ‘sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair’. Bernie didn’t like her at all. He thought she was going to screw up our music with all this stuff about Buddy Greco. He thought she was bossy – he was furious that, for some reason, she’d made him take down a Simon and Garfunkel poster he’d put up in his room.

  A cocktail of stubbornness and my aversion to confrontation enabled me to blot the alarm bells out. We got engaged on my twenty-first birthday – I can’t remember who asked who. A wedding date was set. Arrangements were being made. I started to panic. The obvious course of action was simply to be honest. But the obvious course of action didn’t appeal – actually telling Linda how I felt was beyond me. So I decided to stage a suicide bid instead.

  Bernie, who came to my rescue, has never let me forget the exact details of my supposed attempt to end it all by gassing myself. Someone who really wants to kill themselves will commit the act in solitude, so as not to be stopped; they’ll do it at the dead of night, or in a place where they’re alone. I, on the other hand, did it in the middle of the afternoon in a flat full of people: Bernie was in his bedroom, Linda was having a nap. I’d not only put a pillow in the bottom of the oven to rest my head on, I’d taken the precaution of turning the gas to low and opening all the windows in the kitchen. It momentarily seemed quite dramatic when Bernie hauled me out of the oven, but there wasn’t enough carbon monoxide in the room to kill a wasp. I’d expected the reaction to be one of terrible shock, followed by a sudden realization on Linda’s part that my suicidal despair was rooted in unhappiness at our impending marriage. Instead the reaction was mild bemusement. Worse, Linda seemed to think that if I was depressed, it was because of the failure of ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ to light up the charts. Clearly, this would have been an ideal moment to tell her the truth. Instead, I said nothing. The suicide bid was forgotten, and the wedding remained in the diary. We started looking for a flat together in Mill Hill.

  It took Long John Baldry to spell out what I already knew. We’d stayed good friends after my departure from Bluesology, and I had asked him to be my best man at the wedding. He seemed quietly entertained by the idea that I was getting married at all, but agreed. We arranged to meet at the Bag O’ Nails club in Soho to talk over the details. Bernie tagged along.

  There was something strange about John’s mood from the minute that he arrived. He appeared preoccupied. I had no idea what with. I assumed something was going on in his personal life. Perhaps Ozzie had declined to spin around on his dick, or whatever it was they did in private. It took a few drinks until he told me what the problem was, in no uncertain terms.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he erupted. ‘What are you doing living with a fucking woman? Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay. You love Bernie more than you love her.’

  There was an awkward silence. I knew he was right, at least up to a point. I didn’t love Linda, certainly not enough to marry her. I did love Bernie. Not in a sexual way, but he was my best friend in the world. I certainly cared far more about our musical partnership than I did about my fiancée. But gay? I wasn’t sure about that at all, largely because I still wasn’t 100 per cent certain what being gay entailed, although thanks to a few frank conversations with Tony King I was getting a better idea. Maybe I was gay. Maybe that’s why I admired Tony so much – I didn’t just want to emulate his clothes and his sense of urbane sophistication, I saw something of myself in him.

  It was a lot to mull over. Instead of doing that, I argued back. John was being ridiculous. He was drunk – yet again – and making a fuss about nothing. I couldn’t possibly cancel the wedding. Everything was arranged. We’d ordered a cake.

  But John wouldn’t listen. He kept on at me. I’d ruin my life and Linda’s too if I went through with it. I was a fucking idiot, and a coward to boot. As the conversation got more heated and emotional, it began attracting attention. People from adjoining tables became involved. Because it was the Bag O’ Nails, the people from adjoining tables all happened to be pop stars, which lent everything an increasingly surreal edge. Cindy Birdsong from The Supremes chipped in – I’d known her back in the Bluesology days, when she’d been one of Patti LaBelle’s Blue Belles. Then, somehow, P. J. Proby became embroiled in the conversation. I’d love to be able to tell you what the trouser-splitting, ponytail-wearing enfant terrible of mid-sixties pop had to say regarding my impending wedding, its potential cancellation and, indeed, whether or not I was a homosexual, but by then I was incredibly pissed, and the exact details are a little hazy, although at some point I must have given in and conceded that John was right, at least about the marriage.

  In my memory, the rest of the night plays out in fractured images. Walking up the road to the flat as dawn was breaking – arm in arm with Bernie, for moral support – and the pair of us stumbling against cars and knocking dustbins over. A terrible row, during which Linda threatened to kill herself. A slurred conversation held through the locked door of Bernie’s room – he’d made himself very scarce shortly after our arrival – about whether or not we thought Linda was actually going to kill herself. Another conversation through Bernie’s door, asking if he’d mind unlocking it so I could sleep on the floor.

  The next morning there was another row, and a desperate phone call to Frome Court. ‘They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home,’ Bernie wrote in ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. That was a bit of poetic licence. There was no ‘they’ and no truck: only Derf in his little decorator’s van. But Bernie and I did get taken home. Back to the bunk beds in Frome Court we went. Bernie stuck his Simon and Garfunkel poster on the wall. Neither of us ever saw Linda again.

  three

  In theory, Bernie and I were only back in Frome Court temporarily, until we found somewhere of our own. It slowly sank in that, in reality, we were going to be there for the foreseeable future. We wouldn’t be getting anywhere of our own, because we couldn’t afford anywhere of our own. We couldn’t afford anywhere of our own because Britain’s singers continued to prove implacably opposed to recording our songs. Occasionally, word would reach us that an artist’s manager or producer was interested in something we’d written. You would get your hopes up and then … nothing. The rejections piled up. It’s a no from Cliff, I’m afraid. Sorry, Cilla doesn’t think it’s quite right for her. No, Octopus don’t want ‘When I Was Tealby Abbey’. Octopus? Who the hell were Octopus? Literally the only thing I knew about them was that they didn’t like our songs. We were being turned down by people we’d never even heard of.

  Nothing was moving. Nothing was happening. It was hard not to get dispirited, although one advantage of living at Frome Court was that my mum was always on hand, armed with her patent method of snapping me out of despair. This involved a straight-faced sugge
stion that I abandon my songwriting career and go and work in a local shop instead: ‘Well, you’ve got a choice, you know. There’s a job going in the launderette, if you like.’ The launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers sounds, I think I’ll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.

  So instead of moving out, we tried to make a bedroom with bunks in it look like an acceptable place for two grown men to live. I joined a Reader’s Digest book club and gradually filled up the shelves with leather-bound editions of Moby Dick and David Copperfield. We got a stereo and two sets of headphones out of the Littlewoods catalogue – we could afford them because you paid in instalments. We bought a Man Ray poster from Athena in Oxford Street, then went next door to a shop called India Craft and bought some joss sticks. Lying on the floor, with our headphones on, our latest purchase from Musicland on the turntable and the air heady with incense smoke, Bernie and I could momentarily convince ourselves that we were artists living a bohemian existence at the cutting edge of the counterculture. Or at least we could until the spell was broken by my mum knocking on the bedroom door, asking to know what that bleedin’ smell was and, by the way, what did we want for our dinner?

  I had a little more money than Bernie, because Tony King had used his connections at AIR Studios and Abbey Road to get me work as a session musician. You got £3 an hour for a three-hour session, paid in cash if you were working at Abbey Road. Better yet, if the session went even a minute over the allotted time, the Musicians’ Union rules meant that you got paid for a session and a half: nearly fifteen quid, the same as I earned in a week at DJM. The final bonus would be if I bumped into Shirley Burns and Carol Weston, the AIR Studios secretaries. They were so fabulous, always ready for a gossip, always happy to suggest my name if they heard of a job going. Something about me apparently brought out the maternal instinct in them, and they would quietly slip me their luncheon vouchers. So that meant a free meal on top of everything else – I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  But forget the money: the session work was a fantastic experience. A session musician can’t afford to be picky. Whenever work came in, whatever work it was, you accepted it. You had to work quickly and you had to be on point, because your fellow session players were some of the best musicians in the country. Frightening isn’t an adjective you would normally associate with the Mike Sammes Singers, who did backing vocals for everyone – they looked like middle-aged aunties and uncles who’d arrived at the studio direct from a golf club dinner dance. But if you had to sing alongside them, they suddenly struck the fear of God into you, because they were so good at what they did.

  And you had to be adaptable, because you were expected to play an incredible variety of music. One day you’d be singing backing vocals for Tom Jones, the next you’d be making a comedy record with The Scaffold, or arranging and playing piano with The Hollies, or trying to come up with a rock version of the theme from Zorba the Greek for The Bread and Beer Band, a project of Tony King’s that never really got off the ground. You constantly met new people and made new contacts: musicians, producers, arrangers, record company staff. One day, I was recording with The Barron Knights when Paul McCartney suddenly walked into the studio. He sat in the control room and listened for a while. Then he went to the piano, announced that this was what he was doing in a studio nearby, and played ‘Hey Jude’ for eight minutes. That certainly threw what The Barron Knights were doing – making a novelty record about Des O’Connor taking part in the Olympic Games – into quite stark relief.

  Sometimes a session was great because the music you were playing was incredible, but sometimes a session was great because the music you were playing was so terrible. I did a lot of covers albums for a label called Marble Arch: hastily knocked-out versions of current chart hits, released on compilations with titles like Top of the Pops, Hit Parade and Chartbusters, that were sold cheaply in supermarkets. Whenever my involvement in them comes up, people talk about it as a desperate low point in my career: the poor, undiscovered artist, reduced to anonymously singing other people’s songs in order to earn a crust. I suppose you could look at it like that with the benefit of hindsight, but it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time, because the sessions for the covers albums were screamingly, howlingly funny.

  The instructions you would get from the producer Alan Caddy were fantastic – one completely insane request after another. ‘Can you sing “Young, Gifted And Black”?’ Well, that’s not a song that makes an enormous amount of sense sung by a white guy from Pinner, but I’ll give it a go. ‘We’re doing “Back Home” next – we need you to sound like the England World Cup Squad.’ OK, there’s only three singers here and one of us is female, so it’s probably not going to sound indistinguishable from the original, but you’re the boss. On one occasion, I was required to sound like Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees, a great singer but a man possessed of a unique vocal style: a kind of eerie, tremulous, nasal vibrato. I couldn’t do it, unless I physically grabbed hold of my throat and wobbled it around while I was singing. I thought this was a real brainwave, but it caused absolute pandemonium among my fellow musicians. I stood there, wailing away, fingers clasped round my neck, desperately trying not to look across the studio, where the other session singers, David Byron and Dana Gillespie, were clinging on to each other and weeping with laughter.

  Here’s how much I enjoyed the sessions for the covers albums, this supposedly lamentable artistic nadir in my professional life: I went back and did one after my solo career took off. I assure you I’m not making this up. ‘Your Song’ was written, the Elton John album was out, I’d been on Top of the Pops, I was about to go to America for my first tour, and I went back into the studio and happily belted out shonky versions of ‘In The Summertime’ and ‘Let’s Work Together’ for some terrible album sold in a supermarket for fourteen and sixpence. It was, as usual, a hoot.

  But the session work was far from the most important thing about my friendship with Tony King. He had a great circle of friends, like a little gang, mostly made up of gay men who worked in the music business. They were record producers, men who worked at the BBC, promoters and pluggers, and a Scottish guy called John Reid, who was young, ambitious, very confident and very funny. He was advancing through the music industry at an incredible rate. Eventually he was made the UK label manager for Tamla Motown, dealing with The Supremes, The Temptations and Smokey Robinson, a prestigious appointment that Tony commemorated with suitable gravitas by always referring to John thereafter as Pamela Motown.

  Tony’s group weren’t particularly wild or outrageous – they had dinner parties, or went out to restaurants and pubs together, rather than haunting London’s gay clubs – but I just loved their company. They were sophisticated and smart and very, very funny: I adored that camp sense of humour. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something odd about how completely at home I felt when I was with them. I’d never been a loner, I’d always had lots of friends – at school, in Bluesology, in Denmark Street – but this was different, more like a sense of belonging. I felt like one of the kids in Mary Poppins, suddenly being exposed to this magical new world. Twelve months after John Baldry had drunkenly announced that I was gay to everyone within earshot at the Bag O’ Nails, I decided he was right.

  As if to underline the point, my libido unexpectedly decided to show its face for the first time, like a flustered latecomer to a party that was supposed to have started ten years ago. At twenty-one, I suddenly seemed to be undergoing some kind of belated adolescence. There were suddenly a lot of quiet crushes on men. It clearly wasn’t just his sense of humour and extensive knowledge of American soul that made me find John Reid so captivating, for one. Of course, I never acted on any of them. I wouldn’t have known how. I’d never knowingly chatted anyone up in my life. I’d never been to a gay club. I had no idea how you picked someone up. What was I supposed to say? ‘Do you want to come to the cinema with me and maybe get your knob out later’? That�
�s the main memory I have of the reality of my sexuality dawning on me. I don’t recall feeling anxious or tormented. I just remember wanting to have sex, having absolutely no idea how to do it and feeling terrified that I might get it wrong. I never even told Tony I was gay.

  Besides, I had other things on my mind. One morning, Bernie and I were called into a meeting at DJM with Steve Brown, who’d recently taken over from Caleb as the studio manager. He told us he’d listened to the songs we had been recording and thought we were wasting our time.

  ‘You need to stop this rubbish. You’re not very good at it. In fact,’ he nodded, clearly warming to this disheartening theme, ‘you’re hopeless. You’re never going to make it as songwriters. You can’t do it at all.’

  I sat there reeling. Oh, wonderful. This is it. The Northwood Hills launderette beckons. Maybe not; there was always the session work. But what about Bernie? The poor sod was going to end up back in Owmby-by-Spital, pushing his wheelbarrow full of dead chickens around again, the only evidence that he’d ever had a career in music one flop single he didn’t actually write and a rejection note from Octopus, whoever they were. We hadn’t even paid off the HP on the stereo.