by Elton John
I was flat on my back with my legs in the air because we were flying Aeroflot, and the moment we took off, it became apparent that the Russian state airline didn’t stretch to actually bolting the seats to the floor of the plane. Nor, I couldn’t help noticing, did there seem to be any oxygen masks in case of an emergency. What the plane did have in abundance was a very distinctive smell: antiseptic and sharp, it reminded me a bit of the carbolic soap my grandma used to wash me with when I was a kid. I never found out exactly what it was, but it was the smell of Russia in 1979 – every hotel had it too.
I’d suggested playing in Russia to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith almost as a joke. I never thought it would happen. Western rock music was more or less forbidden under communism – tapes of albums got passed around like contraband goods – and homosexuality was illegal, so the chances of them agreeing to be entertained by an openly gay rock star seemed almost non-existent. But Moscow was scheduled to host the Olympic Games in 1980, and I think they were looking for some positive advance publicity. They didn’t want the Soviet Union to be seen as a monolithic, grey state where fun was banned. Harvey made a request via the Foreign Office and the Russians sent an official from the state music promoter to see a gig Ray and I played in Oxford. Having established that we weren’t the Sex Pistols, and deeming us no great threat to the morals of communist youth, they gave the green light to the tour. I took my mum and Derf, a handful of British and American journalists and a film crew, fronted by the writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, to make a documentary. It felt hugely exciting, a genuine journey into the unknown, albeit one that could end at any moment with death by suffocation if the plane lost pressure.
We were met at Moscow Airport by a group of dignitaries, two girls who were going to act as our translators and an ex-army guy called Sasha. I was told he was going to be my bodyguard. Everyone else in our party automatically assumed he was spying on us for the KGB. I decided he could spy on me to his heart’s content – he was extremely good-looking, if disappointingly keen on telling me about his wife and children. We boarded a sleeper train bound for Leningrad. It was hot – I’d dressed for winter in the Siberian steppes, only to find Moscow in the grip of a sweltering heatwave – and it was uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the Russians’ fault. It was down to the fact that, through the thin wall, I could very clearly hear John Reid, in the next sleeper cabin, apparently doing his persistent best to seduce a reporter from the Daily Mail.
The hotel in Leningrad didn’t look terribly promising. The food was indescribable: fifty-seven varieties of beetroot soup and potatoes. If this was what they were serving in the best hotels, what the hell were ordinary people eating? Every floor was guarded by a stern-faced old woman, a proper Russian babushka, on the lookout for any kind of Western impropriety. But it turned out to be quite the swinging spot. The first morning we were there, the road crew turned up for breakfast looking dazed and delighted. They had learned that being from the West and having any connection to rock and roll, even carrying the speakers, made you sexually irresistible to the chambermaids. They would turn up in the room, start running a bath in order to distract the ears of the ever-vigilant babushkas, then take all their clothes off and jump on you. The hotel bar seemed to be a non-stop party, filled with people who’d travelled from Finland with the specific intention of getting as pissed as possible on cheap Russian vodka. The stuff was lethal. At one point, someone sidled up to me and, to my disbelief, handed me a joint. Here, in the middle of repressive, communist Russia, the road crew had somehow managed to source some pot. They seemed to be having all the luck. Perhaps it was rubbing off – not long afterwards, Sasha showed up and suggested we go up to my room. I was so taken aback, I brought up the subject of his wife and children unprompted. No, he said, it was fine: ‘In the army, all the men have sex with each other, because we don’t see our wives.’ So I ended the evening drunk, stoned and having sex with a soldier. I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting from my first forty-eight hours in Russia, but this definitely wasn’t it.
I still would have fallen in love with Russia even if one of its citizens hadn’t taken me to bed. The people were impossibly kind and generous. Weirdly, they reminded me of Americans: they had that same sense of instant warmth and hospitality. We were shown the Hermitage and the Summer Palace; Peter the Great’s log cabin and the Kremlin. We saw collections of Impressionist art and Fabergé eggs extraordinary enough to take your mind off what you’d be having for lunch. Everywhere we went, people tried to give us presents: bars of chocolate, soft toys, things that they must have had to save up to buy. They would press them into your hands in the street or push them through the windows of your train as it pulled out of the station. It made my mum cry: ‘These people have got absolutely nothing, and they’re giving things to you.’
The gigs were in Leningrad and Moscow, and they turned out to be fantastic. I say turned out, because they always started badly. All the best seats were given to high-ranking Communist Party officials, to ensure that the reaction was nothing more exciting than polite applause. The people who actually wanted to see me were crammed at the back. But they had reckoned without Ray Cooper. Ray is a fabulous musician, who plays the most inconspicuous instruments in the most conspicuous way imaginable. He’s like the Jimi Hendrix of the tambourine, a born frontman trapped in a percussionist’s body. And in Russia, he played as if every other wildly flamboyant performance he’d given over the years was merely a warm-up. He would goad the audience into clapping along, or run to the front of the stage and scream at them to get on their feet. It worked. The kids at the back ran down the aisles to the front. They threw flowers and asked for autographs in between songs. I’d been told not to sing ‘Back In The USSR’, so of course I did. If the KGB had been spying on me, they clearly hadn’t been spying closely enough to learn that one of the quickest ways to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it.
After the Moscow show, there were thousands of people crowded around the venue, chanting my name – far more than could possibly have been at the show. From the window of the dressing room, I threw the flowers I’d been given back to them. My mum looked on. ‘You’d be better off throwing them a tomato,’ she said, the memory of our most recent feast of beetroot soup and potatoes still fresh in her mind. ‘They’ve probably never bleedin’ seen one.’
As a PR exercise for the Soviet Union, my visit was a waste of time. Six months later, they invaded Afghanistan, and whatever international goodwill they’d built up by letting me sing ‘Bennie And The Jets’ didn’t count for much after that. But for me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Russia and with Russians. I’ve never stopped going back there, even when people have said I shouldn’t. If anything, things are worse for gay Russians under Vladimir Putin than they were in 1979, but what would I achieve by boycotting the place? I’m in a very privileged position in Russia. I’ve always been accepted and welcomed, despite the fact they know I’m gay, so I’m not afraid to speak out while I’m there. I can make statements that get reported; I can meet with gay people and people from the Health Ministry and promote the work that the Elton John AIDS Foundation does over there. I never saw Sasha again, but I later learned he was one of the first people to die of AIDS in Russia. Today it has one of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world. That isn’t going to change without negotiation, without sitting down and talking. And the debate has to start somewhere. So I keep going back, and every time I do, I say something onstage about homophobia or gay rights. Sometimes a few people walk out, but the vast majority applaud. I owe it to the Russian people to keep doing that. I owe it to myself.
* * *
If the shows with Ray Cooper taught me anything, it was that I belonged onstage. My private life was still the usual chaos of different boyfriends and drugs – at one point I was rushed from Woodside to hospital with what was reported as a heart problem, but in reality had nothing to do with my heart and everything to do with electing to
play tennis against Billie Jean King in the immediate aftermath of yet another coke binge. Victim of Love aside, my albums were selling OK – its follow-up, 21 at 33, went gold in America in 1980 – but they clearly weren’t selling like they used to, even though I’d started working with Bernie again, albeit tentatively, just a couple of songs each time. Sometimes the lyrics he gave me seemed quite pointed. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out what he was driving at when he sent me a song called ‘White Lady White Powder’, a portrait of a hopeless cocaine addict. I had the brass balls to sing it as if it was about someone else.
But onstage, everything else melted away for a couple of hours. After 21 at 33 was released, I headed out on a world tour. I had re-formed the original Elton John Band – me, Dee and Nigel – and augmented them with a couple of stellar session guitarists, Richie Zito and Tim Renwick, and James Newton Howard on keyboards. For the shows with Ray, I had dressed down, leaving the theatrics to him, but now, I decided to go to town again. I contacted my old costumier Bob Mackie and a designer called Bruce Halperin and told them both to do their worst: the flares and platforms were obviously gone, in keeping with changing fashions, but Bruce came up with something that resembled a military general’s uniform covered in red and yellow thunderflashes and arrows, with lapels that looked like a piano keyboard and a peaked cap to match.
The gigs were bigger than ever. In September 1980, I played in front of half a million people in Central Park, the largest crowd I’d ever performed to. For the encore, Bob had made me a Donald Duck costume. It was a fantastic idea in theory, but the practicalities of it left a little to be desired. First of all, I couldn’t get the bloody thing on properly. I was backstage, with one arm through the leg hole and my leg through the arm, crying with laughter while everyone around urged me to get a move on: ‘There’s 500,000 people out there and they’ll think there’s no encore! They’ll think the gig’s over and go home!’ When I eventually got onstage it struck me that I should probably have had some kind of dress rehearsal to see how the outfit might work. Had I done that I might have discovered that there were two minor problems. First, I couldn’t walk in it – it had huge duck feet, like divers’ flippers. And secondly, I couldn’t sit down in it either – it had an enormous padded bum that meant the best I could manage was perching gingerly on the piano stool. I attempted to play ‘Your Song’, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Every time I caught Dee’s eye – wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as ridiculous as ever – I had a fit of the giggles. Once again, Bernie’s tender ballad of blossoming young love was decimated by my choice of stage wear.
But the duck costume aside, it was a fantastic show: perfect New York autumn weather, audience members climbing the trees to get a better view. I played ‘Imagine’, and dedicated it to John Lennon. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. He’d really gone to ground after Sean was born – probably the last thing he wanted to be reminded of was the boozy madness of 1974 and 1975. But after the gig there was a big party on the Peking, a ship that had been converted into a floating museum on the East River, and he and Yoko showed up, completely out of the blue. He was as hilarious as ever, full of excitement about making a new album, but I was too exhausted to stay long. We said we’d meet up again next time I was in New York.
The tour moved on, crossing America, then heading down to Australia. Our plane had just landed in Melbourne when a stewardess’s voice came over the tannoy, saying that the Elton John party couldn’t disembark; we had to stay onboard. It’s strange, the moment they said it, my heart sank; I just knew it meant someone was dead. My first thought was that it was my grandmother. Every time I went away and popped into the Orangery to say goodbye to her, I wondered if she’d still be there when I came back. John Reid went to the cockpit to find out what was going on, and came back in tears, looking completely bewildered. He told me John Lennon had been murdered.
I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the fact of his death, it was the brutality of how it happened. Other friends of mine had died young: first Marc Bolan in 1977 and then Keith Moon in 1978. But they hadn’t died the way John died. Marc had been killed in a car crash and Keith had basically died from an incurable case of being Keith Moon. They hadn’t been murdered, by a complete stranger, outside their home, for no reason whatsoever. It was inexplicable. It was inconceivable.
I didn’t know what to do. What could you do? Rather than flowers, I sent Yoko a huge chocolate cake. She always loved chocolate. There was no funeral to go to, and we were still in Melbourne when the memorial Yoko had asked for took place on the Sunday after his death. So we hired the city cathedral and held our own service at exactly the same time people gathered in Central Park. We sang the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, everyone crying: the band, the road crew, everyone. Later, Bernie and I wrote a song for him, ‘Empty Garden’. It was a great lyric. Not mawkish or sentimental – Bernie knew John too, and knew he would have hated anything like that – just angry and uncomprehending and sad. It’s one of my favourite songs, but I hardly ever play it live. It’s too hard to perform, too emotional. Decades after John died, we put ‘Empty Garden’ in one of my Las Vegas shows and used beautiful images of him given to us by Yoko on the screens. I still used to tear up every time I sang it. I really loved John, and when you love someone that much, I don’t think you ever quite get over their death.
A couple of years after John died, I got a phone call from Yoko. She said she needed to see me, it was urgent, I had to come to New York right away. So I got on a plane. I had no idea what it was about, but she sounded desperate. When I arrived at the Dakota, she told me she’d found a load of tapes with unfinished songs John had been working on just before he died. She asked me if I would complete them, so they could be released. It was very flattering, but I absolutely didn’t want to. I thought it was too soon; the time wasn’t right. Actually, I didn’t think the time would ever be right. Just the thought of it freaked me out. Trying to work out how to finish songs John Lennon had started writing – I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. And the idea of putting my voice on the same record as his – I thought it was horrible. Yoko was insistent, but so was I.
So it was a very uncomfortable meeting. I felt terrible after I left. Yoko thought she was honouring John’s legacy, trying to fulfil his wishes, and I was refusing to help. I knew I was right, but that didn’t make it any less depressing. (In the end, she put the songs out as they were, on an album called Milk and Honey.) In search of something to take my mind off it, I went to the cinema and watched Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I ended up laughing my head off at Mr Creosote, the disgusting man who eats until he explodes. Then I thought how funny John would have found it. It was exactly his sense of humour: surreal and biting and satirical. I could almost hear his laugh, that infectious cackle that always used to set me off. That was how I wanted to remember him. And that’s how I do remember him.
nine
I was awoken by the sound of someone hammering on the door of my hotel suite. I couldn’t think who it was, because I couldn’t think at all. The moment I opened my eyes, I realized I had the kind of hangover that makes you think it’s not a hangover: you can’t possibly feel this ill just through overindulgence – there has to be something more serious wrong with you. It wasn’t just my head. My whole body hurt. Especially my hands. Since when did hangovers make your hands hurt? And why wouldn’t the person knocking at the door just fuck off, despite my repeated instructions to do so?
Instead, the hammering continued, accompanied by a voice calling my name. It was Bob Halley. I got out of bed. God, this hangover was astonishing. I felt worse than I did after Ringo Starr’s 1974 New Year’s Eve party, and that had started at 8 p.m. and ended around three thirty the following afternoon. I felt worse than I had in Paris a couple of years before, when I’d hired an apartment overlooking the Seine, ostensibly to do some recording, then taken deliver
y of some pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and refused to go to the studio at all. John Reid had turned up one morning with the intention of dragging me to a session, only to discover I was still awake from the night before and so wasted I was cheerfully hallucinating that the furniture in the kitchen was dancing with me. It might have been on that same trip to Paris that I decided to have a shave while completely out of my mind and – in my altered state – became so overenthusiastic about the very idea of shaving that I removed not just my stubble but one of my eyebrows, too. These events tend to blur into one.
I opened the door, and Bob gave me a searching look, like he was expecting me to say something. When I didn’t, he said, ‘I think you should come and see this.’
I followed him into his own room. He opened the door to reveal a scene of total devastation. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture left intact, except the bed. Everything else was on its side, or upside down, or in pieces. Sitting among the splinters was a cowboy hat that Bob liked to wear. It was completely flat, like Yosemite Sam’s after Bugs Bunny drops an anvil on his head.
‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
There was a long pause. ‘Elton,’ he said eventually. ‘You happened.’
What did he mean, I happened? What was he talking about? I couldn’t see how this had anything to do with me. The last thing I remembered, I was having an absolutely marvellous time. So why would I smash anything up?