by Elton John
But back in Montserrat, the songs came thick and fast, and there was one other bright side to the recording sessions. I started spending more and more time with Renate. I really enjoyed her company. She was smart and kind and very, very funny – she had a very British sense of humour. She was very beautiful, but didn’t seem aware of it, always dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt. She seemed a little isolated and lonely, a woman in a man’s world, and isolated and lonely was exactly how I felt inside. We got on incredibly well; so well, I became more interested in talking to her than I was in spending time with Gary. I would invent reasons for us to hang out together, ask her back to the studio after dinner on the pretext of listening to the day’s work, just so we could talk. On more than one occasion, I found myself idly reflecting that she was everything that I would have wanted a woman to be, if I was straight.
Obviously, that was a big if. In fact, it was an if so immense that it would have taken an astonishing amount of convoluted, irrational thinking to see it as anything other than completely insurmountable. Luckily, convoluted, irrational thinking was very much my forte in those days, and I quickly set to. What if the problem with my relationships wasn’t me? What if it was the fact that they were gay relationships? What if a relationship with a woman could make me happy in a way that relationships with men had thus far failed to do? What if the fact that I enjoyed Renate’s company so much wasn’t a kind of affectionate bond between two lonely people a long way from home, but a sudden and unexpected stirring of heterosexual desire? What if I’d only spent the last fourteen years sleeping with men because I hadn’t found the right woman yet? And what if I now had?
The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was true. It was a tricky line of argument that didn’t really hold up to close scrutiny, or indeed any scrutiny whatsoever. But tricky as it was, it was easier than facing up to the real problem.
We were both drunk in a restaurant called the Chicken Shack when I first mooted the idea of getting married. Renate understandably laughed it off, assuming it was a joke. Up to that point, there hadn’t been any hint of actual romance between us, not so much as a kiss. If I’d had any sense, I would have left it at that. But by now I’d absolutely convinced myself that this was the right thing. It was what I wanted; it was going to solve all my problems at a stroke. In my own way, I was infatuated: with the idea of getting married, with Renate’s company. I missed her when she wasn’t there. It felt remarkably like I was in love.
So when the whole entourage moved from Montserrat to Sydney – me and the band to prepare for an Australian tour, Renate and Chris Thomas to mix the album – I took her out for dinner to an Indian restaurant and asked her again. I loved her and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We should get married. We should do it right away, here in Australia. It was 10 February 1984 – we could get married on Valentine’s Day. I could make this happen. It was insanity, but it sounded romantic. Renate said yes.
* * *
We rushed back to the hotel we were staying in, the Sebel Townhouse, assembled everyone in the bar and announced the news: ‘Hey! Guess what?’ It was greeted by a sea of aghast faces, not least Gary’s, who’d travelled to Australia with us and now suddenly found himself my ex-boyfriend once more. I asked John Reid and Bernie to be my best men. The resulting party broke the record for the amount of money spent in the bar in one night. Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just happened.
The next few days passed by in a blur. There was a reception to organize, a church to find, problems with getting a marriage licence at short notice to overcome. I spoke to Renate’s father on the phone, asking for her hand in marriage. He was a businessman from Munich, and extremely gracious, given that he had just been informed, out of the blue, that his daughter was going to marry a famously homosexual rock star in four days’ time. I rang my mum and Derf and told them. They seemed as bemused as everyone else, although, like everyone else, they didn’t attempt to stop me. There was no point. At that stage in my life, what I said went and if anyone tried to challenge me, people got screamed at and inanimate objects got thrown and smashed. It’s nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. Instead, some friends tried to make sense of what I was doing, usually coming to the conclusion that I was getting married because I’d decided I wanted children. I let them think that – in all honesty, it was a more plausible explanation than the truth – but nothing could have been further from my mind. Nearly forty, and more than capable of behaving like a child myself, the last thing I needed was an actual child thrown into the equation. Perhaps if she’d had more time to mull it over, Renate might have changed her mind. But I don’t think she would have done.
The wedding itself was as straightforward as any wedding can be at which one of the groom’s best men is his former lover, to whom he lost his virginity. Renate wore a white lace dress with a gold and diamond pendant I’d bought her as a wedding gift. She had flowers in her hair. She looked beautiful. Neither my parents nor Renate’s were there, but plenty of friends flew in: Tony King, Janet Street-Porter. Bernie’s new wife Toni was one of the bridesmaids. Rod Stewart couldn’t make it, but his manager Billy Gaff sent a telegram: ‘You may still be standing, dear,’ it read, ‘but the rest of us are on the fucking floor.’
On the steps of the church, we were surrounded by fans and paparazzi. People were cheering and applauding. Out of a nearby window, someone cranked their stereo up and played ‘Kiss The Bride’ from Too Low for Zero, which, despite its title, is about the least appropriate song to play at a wedding this side of Tammy Wynette’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. Over the strains of me singing ‘Don’t say “I do” – say “bye-bye”‘, a voice rang out, offering congratulations in a very Australian way. ‘You finally did it!’ the voice bellowed. ‘Good on you, you old poof!’
The reception was back at the Sebel and was every bit as inconspicuous and understated as you might expect. White roses had been flown in from New Zealand, where we were to honeymoon. There was lobster and quail and loin of venison, vintage Château Margaux and Puligny-Montrachet, a five-tier wedding cake, a string quartet. As was traditional, there were speeches and the reading of telegrams. As was also traditional, John Reid later punched someone, a guy from the Sun newspaper, to whose reporting of the wedding he’d taken exception.
Later, the party moved up to my hotel suite, where there was more booze and cocaine. At this point, I should say that Renate and I agreed when we divorced that we would never publicly discuss the intimate details of our marriage. And I am respecting that. The truth is I don’t have anything bad to say about Renate at all. Nor does anyone else who met her. The only person who was cold towards her was my mother, and that was nothing to do with Renate, or her personality. I just think my mother hated the idea of the apron strings finally being cut, of someone else occupying the lead role in my life.
The problem was me. I was still capable of locking myself away, alone, with a load of cocaine whenever I felt like it. Everyone at Woodside was now well accustomed to my drug use, and just treated it as a fact of life. I can remember Gladys, one of the cleaners, discreetly taking me aside one day and saying, ‘I found your special white medicine on the floor while I was cleaning your room, so I put it in your bedside drawer,’ and there it was, still on the mirror where I’d been chopping out lines. I suppose I’d thought that being in a settled relationship might somehow bring an end to that kind of behaviour. But it didn’t work like that. It didn’t work like that at all.
ten
It’s worth pointing out that Renate didn’t just marry a gay drug addict. That would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life was about to go haywire in ways he hadn’t previously thought possible. I had a couple of years that were normal enough, at least by my standards. I watched Watford lose the FA Cup Final. I made another album, called Ice on Fire. Gus Dudgeon produced it, the first time we’d worked together since the mid-seventies. In Britain, the big hi
t was ‘Nikita’, a love song to a Russian, who Bernie, whether by accident or out of mischief, had given a man’s name. At Live Aid I set up an area backstage with fake grass and a barbecue, so other artists could drop by. Freddie Mercury arrived, still on a high from Queen’s show-stealing performance, and offered a very Freddie-esque appraisal of the hat I’d chosen to perform in: ‘Darling! What the fuck were you wearing on your head? You looked like the Queen Mother!’ I went to Wham!’s farewell concert at Wembley in the summer of 1986, where I marked George Michael’s momentous decision to leave the frivolity of pop music behind and announce himself a mature singer-songwriter by turning up in a Reliant Robin, dressed as Ronald McDonald. George wanted to sing ‘Candle In The Wind’ as a mark of his new seriousness, but onstage I struck up with a pub piano version of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ instead.
But later that year, things started to go seriously off-piste for me. It began when I noticed there was something wrong with my voice while on tour in America. It was very odd. I was playing Madison Square Garden and I could sing fine, but found I couldn’t speak in anything louder than a whisper offstage. I decided the best course of action would be to rest my voice between shows and make a joke out of it. I got hold of a Harpo Marx wig and a raincoat and took to wearing it backstage, honking a horn instead of speaking.
But my voice got worse when we got to Australia. Just as we arrived, my new album came out. It was called Leather Jackets, and it was about as close to an unmitigated disaster as anything I’ve ever released. I had always tried to be strict about not using drugs in the studio, but this time, that rule went completely out of the window. The coke had precisely the impact on my creative judgement you might expect. I stuck any old crap on Leather Jackets. The big single was meant to be ‘Heartache All Over The World’, a song so lightweight you could have lifted it up with your little finger. There were old out-takes, songs that weren’t good enough for earlier albums but that, after a couple of lines, I suddenly recognized as lost masterpieces the public needed to hear as a matter of urgency. There was a terrible song I co-wrote with Cher called ‘Don’t Trust That Woman’, the lyrics of which were beyond belief: ‘you can rear-end her, oooh, it’ll send her’. You could tell what I thought of that by the fact that I declined to put my own name to it, crediting the song to Cher and my old made-up studio character Lady Choc Ice. Of course, if you hate a song so much that you won’t actually admit you wrote it, it’s generally speaking a good idea not to record and release it, but I was so wasted that any kind of logic was completely beyond me.
It wasn’t all bad: ‘Hoop Of Fire’ was pretty classy, especially compared to the company it was keeping, while a ballad called ‘I Fall Apart’ was another example of Bernie’s uncanny ability to put words in my mouth that so perfectly expressed my personal situation I might have written them myself. But there was no getting around the fact that, overall, Leather Jackets had four legs and a tail and barked if a postman came to the door.
So I wanted the subsequent tour to be something special, an event so ambitious and spectacular it would obliterate the memory of the album that preceded it. I told Bob Mackie to go as crazy as he liked on the costume front, which is how I ended up onstage in Australia variously wearing a giant pink Mohican wig with leopardskin sides, another wig based on the explosive hairstyle made famous by Tina Turner in the eighties, and an outfit that made me look like Mozart had joined a glam rock band – a white sequinned suit teamed with an eighteenth-century powdered wig, white make-up and a fake beauty spot. The Mozart outfit was intended as a wry comment on the second half of the show, during which I was performing with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. If anyone thought I was being pretentious, a rock star carrying on like a great classical composer, well, I had made the connection first.
Going on tour with an orchestra and playing rock and roll was something that no one had ever tried before. It meant that, for the first time, I could perform the songs from my early albums live exactly as they had been recorded, complete with Paul Buckmaster’s beautiful arrangements. Gus Dudgeon flew out to oversee the sound. We miked up every instrument in the orchestra individually, which no one had ever done before either, and the effect was astonishing: when the strings came in on ‘Madman Across The Water’, it took the top of your head off. They made a hell of a sound – with the bass cellos and the double basses in full flight, I could feel the stage vibrating underneath me – which was just as well, as the star attraction was struggling to make any sound whatsoever.
For a singer, it was the most bizarre, disconcerting sensation: whenever I opened my mouth onstage, I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. Sometimes I would sound fine. Other times I would rasp and croak and wheezily fail to hit the notes. For some reason, it particularly seemed to affect me when I spoke rather than sang. I’d try to introduce a song and literally nothing would come out at all. It was as if someone had answered certain critics’ long-held prayers by discovering a way of switching me off.
Something was clearly very wrong. For a while, I kept faith in the old sore throat remedy that Leon Russell had given me backstage at the Troubadour in 1970, gargling with honey, cider vinegar and water as hot as I could stand. It made no difference whatsoever. Eventually, after a show in Sydney during which the loudest sounds I emitted came not during the songs but between them – when I was racked by coughing fits and spat up gunk in a variety of colours so lurid that Bob Mackie’s costumes looked sober by comparison – sanity prevailed and I agreed to see an ear, nose and throat specialist called Dr John Tonkin.
He examined my larynx and told me I had cysts on my vocal cords. He didn’t know at this stage whether they were cancerous or benign. If they were cancerous, that was it – my larynx would have to be removed and I would never speak again, let alone sing. He wouldn’t know for sure until he performed a biopsy. Then he looked at me and frowned. ‘You smoke dope, don’t you?’ he said.
I completely froze. I’d only started smoking spliffs to take the edge off all the cocaine I was doing, but had quickly discovered I enjoyed them in their own right. It was a different kind of drug to coke and booze, which I thought made me more sociable, despite an ever-increasing mountain of evidence to suggest they were making my behaviour about as antisocial as it was possible to get.
But marijuana didn’t make me want to go out and party, or stay up for days on end. It just made me laugh and made music sound fantastic. I had a particular love for getting stoned and listening to Kraftwerk: their music was so simple and repetitious and hypnotic. Of course, being me, I couldn’t just occasionally smoke a spliff and enjoy listening to Trans-Europe Express or The Man Machine. I immediately became as gung-ho for weed as I was for everything else. By the time of the Australian tour, one member of the road crew was more or less specifically employed just to roll joints. He went everywhere we did, carrying a shoebox full of the things.
When Dr Tonkin questioned whether I smoked dope, I decided to skip over the finer details of the spliff-roller on staff. ‘A bit,’ I croaked. Dr Tonkin rolled his eyes, firmly said, ‘I think you mean “a lot”,’ and told me to stop. It might well have directly caused the cysts, and even if it hadn’t, it certainly wasn’t helping. I never smoked another joint. I wasn’t exactly the master of personal resolve when it came to drink and drugs at that point. I lost count of the times I told myself ‘never again’ while in the grip of a terrible hangover, only to forget I’d ever said it when the hangover wore off. Sometimes I would stick to my decision for months but, sooner or later, I always ended up going back. It turns out there’s nothing like being absolutely terrified to help you quit something, and nothing like the word ‘cancer’ to make you absolutely terrified. Dr Tonkin also told me I should cancel the rest of the Australian tour, but I refused: there was still a week of shows in Sydney to go. For one thing, the cost of cancelling would have been astronomical – there were over a hundred musicians involved, we were supposed to be making a film of the shows and recording them for
a live album. But more importantly, if there was a chance I was never going to sing again, I at least wanted to put off the day I stopped as long as I could.
I decided I would take the same stoic, show-must-go-on attitude when I told the band and crew what had happened. Instead, I walked into the bar of the Sebel Townhouse – yes, there again – croakily announced, ‘They think I’ve got throat cancer,’ and then burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. I was so scared. Even if the operation was successful, even if the biopsy came back clear, I might still be done for, at least as a singer – Julie Andrews had come out of an operation to remove a cyst on her vocal cords with her voice completely destroyed.
We finished the tour. Sick and terrified, I stormed out of the final gig at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, which was being broadcast live on TV, minutes before the show was about to start. I could hear the orchestra playing the overture as I hurried out of the venue. I passed Phil Collins, who was coming in: he was taking his seat at the last moment so as not to be bothered by fans. He looked quite startled to see the star attraction heading in the opposite direction.
‘Oh, hello, Elton … hang on, where are you going?’
‘Home!’ I shouted, not stopping.
I had a bit of a history of storming out of venues when I was meant to be onstage. A few years previously I had walked out of a Christmas show at the Hammersmith Odeon in a fury in between the end of the set and the encore. My car got as far as the Hogarth Roundabout before I calmed down and decided to return: it’s about ten minutes away from the venue, but when we turned the car around, we realized the route back was going to take even longer, because it involved going round a one-way system. Amazingly, the audience were still there when I got back.