Me

by Elton John

  ‘I was in the bar,’ I said indignantly. ‘With Duran Duran.’

  Bob gave me another look, one that suggested he was trying to work out whether I was being serious or not. Then he sighed. ‘Yes, you were,’ he said. ‘At first.’

  * * *

  It had all been going so well. It was June 1983, and we were in Cannes, shooting a video for ‘I’m Still Standing’, which was planned as the first single off my forthcoming album Too Low for Zero. Ever since the ‘Ego’ debacle, I had tried to have the minimum level of involvement in the making of videos, but this time I’d decided to push the boat out. That was partly because the director was Russell Mulcahy, who I’d worked with before, and really liked. Russell was the go-to man in the early eighties if you wanted your video glossy, exotic and expensive-looking – he was the guy who flew Duran Duran to Antigua and filmed them singing ‘Rio’ on a yacht. But it was also because I wanted ‘I’m Still Standing’ and Too Low for Zero to be commercial successes. Bernie and I were back writing together full-time. We had come up with some good songs during our trial separation, but we realized that we needed to make a whole album together for the partnership to really click. I’d enjoyed the gigs I’d played with Dee and Nigel, so got my old band back together in the studio, with Davey on guitar and Ray Cooper on percussion. My friend from the Royal Academy of Music Skaila Kanga came and played harp, just as she had on Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection.

  We flew to George Martin’s studio in Montserrat to record, where the producer Chris Thomas had assembled a really good team of engineers and tape operators: Bill Price, Peggy McCreary, who arrived fresh from working with Prince, and a German girl called Renate Blauel. I’d taped some of my previous album, Jump Up!, there in 1981, but this was different. Bernie was there and it was the first album to properly reunite the old Elton John Band since Captain Fantastic in 1975. It was like a well-oiled machine coming back to life, but the results didn’t sound like the albums we had made in the 1970s, they sounded really fresh. I’d been experimenting more with playing a synthesizer as well as piano. The songs sparkled: ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’, ‘Kiss The Bride’, ‘Cold As Christmas’. And ‘I’m Still Standing’ sounded like the whole album’s calling-card. The lyric was about one of Bernie’s exes, but I also thought it worked as a message to my new American record company, who were, quite frankly, turning out to be a terrible pain in the arse.

  Geffen Records was a relatively new label – it had been founded in 1980 – but it opened its account by signing the biggest stars it could: not just me, but Donna Summer, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and John Lennon. All of us had been lured by David Geffen’s reputation – he had steered The Eagles and Jackson Browne to success in the seventies – and by the promise of complete artistic freedom. But my first album for them, 1981’s The Fox, hadn’t done great. Jump Up! had been an improvement sales-wise, but the only one of their big signings who thus far had had a big hit for them was John, and that was because he was murdered. Before his death his album with Yoko, Double Fantasy, had received bad reviews and sales had been slow. That seemed a pretty drastic way to get a hit. So Geffen panicked and started doing ridiculous things. They fired Donna Summer’s producer, Giorgio Moroder, who had masterminded literally every hit single she had made. They put Joni Mitchell in the studio with a synthesizer whizzkid called Thomas Dolby, which was about as appropriate for Joni’s music as putting her in the studio with an Alpine yodelling choir. They eventually tried to sue Neil Young for being unpredictable, which if you knew anything at all about his career, was like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young. I didn’t like the look of any of it, and thought ‘I’m Still Standing’ sounded like a warning shot across their bows. It was a big, swaggering, confident fuck-you of a song.

  It needed a big, swaggering, confident video to match, and Russell provided it, a huge production involving aerial shots from helicopters and legions of dancers wearing body paint and costumes. My convertible Bentley was brought to Nice for me to cruise along the Croisette in. There was choreography, in which I was expected to take part, at least initially. Visibly stunned by my demonstration of the moves I’d honed on the dance floors of Crisco Disco and Studio 54, the choreographer Arlene Phillips went pale and suddenly scaled down my involvement in that side of things, until all I really had to do was click my fingers and walk along the seafront in time to the music. Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she’d ever worked with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.

  Filming started at 4 a.m. and went on all day. As the sun went down, a break was called and I went back to my hotel, the Negresco, to freshen up before the night shoot. I was in the lobby when I bumped into Simon Le Bon. He was in town with Duran Duran, and they were just heading to the bar. Did I want to come along? I didn’t know him that well, but I thought a quick drink might liven me up. I was dithering over what to order, when Simon asked if I’d ever had a vodka martini. I had not. Perhaps I should try one.

  Reports vary about precisely what happened next. I’m afraid I can’t confirm or deny them because I don’t really remember anything beyond thinking Duran Duran were enormously jolly company and noticing that the vodka martini had slipped down remarkably easily. Depending on who you believe, I had either six or eight more of them in the space of an hour, and a couple of lines of coke. I then apparently returned to the video set, demanded they begin running the cameras, took all my clothes off and started rolling around on the floor naked. John Reid was there, performing as an extra in the video, dressed as a clown. He remonstrated with me, an intervention I took very badly. So badly, in fact, that I punched him in the face. Some observers said it looked like I’d broken his nose. That explained why my hands hurt, but I was quite shocked. I had never hit anyone in my adult life before, and I never have since. I hate physical violence to the point that I can’t even watch a rugby match. Then again, if I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and punch someone in the face, it might as well be John Reid; he could take it as payback for thumping me when we were a couple.

  John stormed off set, grabbing the keys to the Bentley, and sped away into the night. The next anybody heard of him was the following day, when he rang Rocket’s office, screaming at them to call the AA. He had driven through the night to Calais, jumped on the ferry to Dover, then promptly broken down. When the breakdown truck arrived, they were understandably disconcerted to find themselves attending a convertible Bentley driven by a man in a clown suit and make-up, covered in blood.

  After John Reid’s departure, someone else managed to get my clothes back on – this, I was told, took several attempts – and Bob Halley hustled me upstairs. I expressed my displeasure about his intervention by smashing up his hotel room. As a finale, I’d stamped on his hat, then staggered back to my own room and passed out.

  Bob and I sat on the bed in hysterics. There was nothing to do other than howl with laughter at the awfulness of it all, and then make some apologetic phone calls. It was a day that should have made me think long and hard about how I was behaving. But, and you might be ahead of me here, it didn’t work out that way at all. The main impact the events in Nice had on my life was that – wait for it – I decided to drink more vodka martinis. From now on, that’s how an evening out would begin: four or five vodka martinis, then out to a restaurant – perhaps L’Orangerie if I was in Los Angeles – a bottle and a half of wine over dinner, then all back to mine to start on the coke and the spliffs. They became my drink of choice partly because they came with an added bonus – they made me black out, so I couldn’t remember how appallingly I’d behaved the night before. Occasionally someone would feel impelled to ring up and remind me and I would say sorry. I recall one livid phone call from Bernie after a night at Le Dome, an LA restaurant I had a financial stake in, where I got drunk and made what I thought was a hilarious speech, during which I managed to insult John Reid�
��s mother. But there was something comforting about not knowing first-hand. It meant I could kid myself that it probably wasn’t as bad as people had said, or that it was just an isolated incident. After all, most of the time no one dared say anything, because of who I was. That’s the thing about success. It gives you a licence to misbehave, a licence that doesn’t get revoked until your success dries up completely, or you man up and decide to hand it in yourself. And, for the time being, there was no danger of either of those things happening to me.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of 1983 travelling. I went on holiday with Rod Stewart, which was becoming a regular event. We’d previously gone to Rio de Janeiro for the carnival, which was hilarious. Trying to ensure we could identify each other in the crowds, we had bought sailor suits from a fancy dress shop. We put them on and left the hotel to discover that a huge naval ship had just docked in the port and that the streets were thronged with sailors in uniform: it was like a Royal Navy conference out there. This time, we went on safari to Africa. We thought that everyone there was going to assume we were boorish, scruffy rock stars, so insisted on dressing for dinner every night in full white tie, despite the sweltering heat. Far from being reassured, our fellow safari-goers – dressed in a way more befitting the climate – kept passing troubled glances our way, as if the safari party had been joined by a couple of maniacs.

  Next, I went to China with the Watford team, who were flying out on a post-season tour, the first British football club to be invited to visit. It was strange, and not unappealing, to be in a country where literally no one, other than the people I was with, had any idea who I was. And China was fascinating. It was before the country had really opened up to the West. I went back there with Watford a couple of years later, and you could see a Western influence creeping in. There were people cycling around with microwave ovens strapped to their backs and Madonna records were played in bars. But, for the moment, it was still like visiting another world. For reasons known only to the Communist Party of China, no one was allowed to cheer during football games, so the matches took place in eerie silence. We went to visit Mao’s tomb, and had a look at him in his crystal coffin, which was a bizarre experience. I’d seen Lenin’s body in Russia, and he looked fine, but there was definitely something not right about Mao or, rather, what had been done to Mao in order to preserve his corpse. He was the same shade of bright pink as those foam-like shrimp sweets kids used to eat. I don’t want to cast aspersions on the embalmers who’d worked on him, but Mao looked suspiciously like he might be going off.

  And then, in October, I flew to South Africa and played Sun City, a spectacularly stupid idea. The campaign against it hadn’t really picked up steam – that only happened after Queen performed there in 1984 – but there was still enough controversy around playing in South Africa at all to fuel my doubts. John Reid assured me it was going to be fine. Black artists had played at Sun City: Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, even Curtis Mayfield. How bad could it be if the great poet of the civil rights movement had agreed to play there? It wasn’t technically in South Africa, it was in Bophuthatswana. The audiences weren’t racially segregated.

  Of course, it wasn’t fine at all. The audience might as well have been racially segregated – the ticket prices meant black South Africans couldn’t afford to go even if they wanted to. If I’d bothered to look into it more closely I’d have found out that when Ray Charles played there, black South Africans were so enraged that they stoned his tour bus, and his concerts in Soweto had to be cancelled. But I didn’t. I just blundered into it. It wasn’t like going to Russia in the face of opposition. In South Africa, the people who were suffering as a result of apartheid really did want artists to boycott the country. You couldn’t achieve anything positive by going there. So there’s no point trying to justify it. Sometimes you fuck up, and you have to hold your hand up and admit it. Every one of those black artists I mentioned bitterly regretted their decision later, and so did I. When I got back I signed a public pledge put together by anti-apartheid campaigners, saying I would never go there again.

  Back in England, my father was seriously ill. One of my half-brothers had come backstage at a gig in Manchester and told me he had a heart problem and needed a quadruple bypass operation. I’d kept my distance over the years, but I phoned him at home and offered to pay for him to have the operation done privately. He flatly refused. It was a shame, as much for his other kids and my stepmother as anything else: he loved them and they loved him, and it would have been good for them to try and get his health problems sorted as quickly as possible. But he didn’t want my help. I suggested we should meet up in Liverpool, when Watford played there. It wouldn’t be too far for him to travel. He agreed. Football was the only thing we had in common. I don’t recall him ever coming to see me play live, or talking about music with him. What I was doing clearly wasn’t really his thing.

  Before the match, I took him to lunch at the Adelphi Hotel. It was fine. We stuck to cordial small talk. Occasionally the small talk ran out, and there was an uncomfortable silence, which underlined that we didn’t really know each other well. I was still angry at him for the way he’d treated me, but I didn’t bring that up. I didn’t want a huge confrontation, because it would have ruined the day, and because I was still scared of him: my life had changed so much over the years, but our relationship was still frozen in 1958. We watched the match from the director’s box. Watford got hammered 3–1 – we hadn’t been long in the First Division, and the team just seemed overawed by playing in a huge stadium like Anfield – but I still think he enjoyed it, although it was hard to tell. I suppose, deep down, I’d hoped that he might be impressed by the fact that I was now chairman of the club he’d taken me to see as a kid, that Watford fans now chanted ‘Elton John’s Taylor-made army’ when we scored or pushed forward on the pitch. If I couldn’t get a ‘well done, son, I’m proud of you’ out of him for my music, then maybe I could for what we’d achieved at Watford. But it never happened. I’ve turned it over in my mind since, and I can’t work out whether he had a problem expressing things like that to me, or whether he felt embarrassed over being wrong about the choices I’d made against his wishes. Still, we parted on relatively good terms. I never saw him again. I couldn’t see the point. There was no real relationship to repair. Our lives had been completely separate for decades. There weren’t beautiful childhood reminiscences to be picked over and savoured.

  * * *

  In December 1983 we went back to Montserrat. Too Low for Zero had been a huge hit, the biggest album I’d made for nearly a decade – platinum in Britain and America, five times platinum in Australia – so for the follow-up, we decided to repeat the formula: Bernie writing all the lyrics, the old Elton John Band providing the music, Chris Thomas producing. In fact the only real change to the team was that Renate Blauel was promoted from tape operator to engineer. She was conscientious and everyone liked her – the other musicians, the crew, Chris. She was quiet but tough and self-possessed. Recording studios in those days were a real boys’ club, you really didn’t find many women working in them, but she was making a career for herself just by being incredibly good at what she did; she’d stepped up and worked as an engineer for The Human League and The Jam.

  I flew out on Boxing Day and arrived in a foul mood. My mum and Derf had come to Woodside for Christmas, and Mum had immediately slipped into her old role of managing the house and being foul to the staff. She’d had a huge row with one of the cleaners, which had turned into a huge row with me, and she and Derf had stormed out on Christmas Eve.

  But I perked up on arrival. Tony King had flown in the day before me – he’d come out to stay over New Year. He was living in New York now, working for RCA with Diana Ross and Kenny Rogers. He’d given up drinking, joined AA and looked great, although he had some terrifying stories about what was happening in the gay community in Greenwich Village and on Fire Island as a result of a new disease called AIDS. We messed around in the
studio, me inventing characters – an elderly aristocrat called Lady Choc Ice, a lugubrious, Nico-like singer called Gloria Doom – and Tony pretending to interview them. We both thoroughly approved of the boy who took Renate’s old tape operator job, Steve Jackson: he was blond and gorgeous.

  After a few days, Tony left to go back to New York. I called him there a couple of weeks later, and told him I had some news.

  ‘I’m getting married,’ I said.

  Tony laughed. ‘Oh yes? And who are you getting married to? That glamorous tape operator? Are you going to be Mrs Jackson?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married to Renate.’

  Tony kept laughing.

  ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘I’m serious. I’ve asked Renate to marry me and she’s said yes. The wedding’s in four days’ time. Can you get a plane to Sydney?’

  The laughter at the other end of the phone stopped very abruptly.

  * * *

  I had arrived in Montserrat with my latest boyfriend in tow, an Australian called Gary, who I’d met in Melbourne a couple of years before. It was another in an endless line of young, blond, pretty hostage situations. I’d fallen for him, then set about my usual foolproof course of making both our lives a misery. I had convinced him to leave Australia and come and live with me at Woodside, showered him with gifts, then become bored and got Bob Halley to send him home. We would get in touch again, I’d have a change of heart and ask him to come back to Woodside, then get bored and tell Bob to book him a ticket back to Brisbane. It was going nowhere, other than round and round in circles. Why was it always like this? I knew I was at fault, but I was too stupid to work out what I was doing wrong. Cocaine’s like that. It makes you egotistical and narcissistic; everything has to be about what you want. And it also makes you completely erratic, so you actually have no idea what you want. That’s a pretty dismal cocktail for life in general, but for any kind of personal relationship, it’s lethal. If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough.