Why Elton John is pop’s original radical

On Sunday night, at Glastonbury Festival, Sir Elton John played his last ever show on British soil. One of the greatest songwriters of all time, performing some of the ­biggest tunes in pop history, at the best festival on Earth: it was the most spectacular retirement party in rock history.

Although his five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will then roll on to Europe – concluding in Stockholm on July 8 – Glastonbury was the big one. Elton revamped his set for the occasion, reviving songs he says he “hasn’t played in 10 years”, and invited on stage a host of special guests. As Elton himself declared on BBC Radio 1 earlier this week, “it couldn’t be a more perfect ending”.

But it was also a bittersweet moment for British music: when Elton stepped off the stage last night, he left behind a gaping hole in our cultural landscape. Since his first hit with Your Song in 1970, he has sold more than 300 million albums worldwide, had 57 top 40 singles in the US (second only to Elvis Presley) and still holds the record for the biggest-selling single of all time with his 1997 recording of Candle in the Wind, released as a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales.

He has duetted with almost every major star of the modern era – from John Lennon to Eminem, Luciano Pavarotti to Ed Sheeran – and weathered the fickleness of popular taste to remain relevant for over half a century. According to UK figures released only this week (by Phonographic Performance Limited), last year Elton was still one of the top 10 most played British artists, the sole veteran on a list of contemporary stars. It is genuinely hard to imagine pop music without him.

At the age of 76, Elton has for so long held a place in the mainstream that it’s easy to forget what a radically unlikely pop star he once was: a gay, portly, balding, bespectacled pianist from Pinner, who conquered the world by singing lyrically overloaded, melodically luxurious songs while dressed in glittery jumpsuits, feather boas and stacked heels.

Elton was the Brit who took glam rock to America, scoring massive hits with songs as eccentrically wild and conceptually ambitious as sci-fi epic Rocket Man (1972), violent stomper Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting) (1973) and the weird and wonderful Bennie and the Jets (1974) while David Bowie was still struggling to break into the US top 40. Bowie’s first – indeed, only – US number one didn’t arrive until Fame in 1975, and he could never quite forgive Elton for stealing his glam thunder, once dismissing him in Rolling Stone magazine as “the token queen of pop”. 

While Bowie was whinging, Elton was smuggling mind-expanding musical fantasias on to daytime radio and taking his transgressive rock’n’roll values to the American Midwest, where conservative local values had made it a “fly over zone” for many of Britain’s more outlandish artists. At a time when Bowie, Slade, Queen and Roxy Music were struggling to get a foothold beyond America’s coastal metropolises, Elton broke through by packaging the same musical influences into mass-market entertainment, underpinning songs with the kind of colourfully accessible arrangements pedalled by the Beatles. 

Yet, at the same time, he was dressing like an explosion in a fancy-dress shop and partying like a rock’n’roll viking. He flew around in a converted Boeing 720 with private bedchambers set aside for sexual assignations and a bar with a piano where Stevie Wonder once played Happy Birthday to him at 40,000 ft. Somehow Elton cultivated an image as a family-friendly entertainer while living dangerously and drinking himself into blackouts. “I’ve had some very good times that I can’t remember,” he told me once.

He came out to the press in 1976 but says he was never in the closet. “I thought everybody knew,” he told me. “I was living in Wentworth in a bungalow with my manager John Reid and having gay parties and the National Youth Theatre coming down for the weekend. Hello?! I wasn’t living a secret life.” He notes that other gay artists often affected no interest in sex; Boy George, for one, famously proclaimed he would “rather have a cup of tea”. “I wouldn’t!” guffawed Elton. “I’d like someone cute to give me the cup of tea first.”

As for his songs, they have rarely fitted the formula for standard chart music fare, with short verses and simple choruses. Among his most popular hits, there are a handful of elegant ballads – such as the tongue tied Your Song (probably the most touching love song of the modern age) or the abjectly miserable Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word – and a couple of dollops of unapologetic bubblegum in Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Sad Songs (Say So Much). But the big ones are something else entirely, with philosophical themes and musical dimensions that expanded the very notion of what a popular song could be. They include songs of disillusionment (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore), existential crisis (Rocket Man, I Want Love), suicidal despair (Someone Saved My Life Tonight), tender mourning (Daniel, Candle in the Wind), eccentric friendship (Levon, Tiny Dancer), rip roaring defiance (The Bitch Is Back, I’m Still Standing) and unambiguous queer celebration (Philadelphia Freedom).

The lyrics have (for the most part) been written by Elton’s near lifelong creative partner Bernie Taupin. In a sense, the show business legend that is Elton John is the synthesis of these two remarkable talents. There is Reginald Dwight, the piano prodigy born in Middlesex in 1947, who attended master classes at the Royal Academy of Music but always preferred the lively vigour of pop to the pretensions of classical music. Dwight started playing in pubs as a teenager in 1962, before blossoming into an extrovert and changing his name to the more showbiz-tastic Elton Hercules John in 1967.

That was the year he paired up with the cerebral, poetic Taupin, a clever wordsmith with a darkly romantic worldview. “Bernie is the tortured one,” Elton once told me. “There are lyrics that I still haven’t got a f---ing clue about. I never ask him. The magic of the relationship is that I put my input into thinking about what he’s getting at. It’s odd, it’s otherworldly, it’s the connection between two minds who seem to be so in sync with what the other one wants, we’ve never had a disagreement over the result of a song. We’ve never had an argument about anything.”

The 1973 barnstorming double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is their masterpiece, from the synth-driven prog rock suite of Funeral For a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding to the flaming boogie of Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock’n’Roll) via singalongs, ballads, whimsy and dirty rockers. Elton and Taupin wrote it as it was being recorded at the 18th-century Château d’Hérouville, in France. “On a typical day, there’d be instruments around the breakfast table,” Elton recalled. “Bernie would be writing at the typewriter, I’d be sitting at the electric piano, and as the band came down for breakfast, I would write the song, they would pick up their instruments and play it.” The whole album was completed in 18 days.

After a red-hot 1970s streak that resulted in 12 classic albums and 16 top 10 US singles, there was a period in the early 1980s in which Elton seemed to lose his way, amid a blizzard of drugs and drink. Mind you, that period also produced Blue Eyes, I’m Still Standing, I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues and Sacrifice, so it wasn’t all bad. 

Around that time, he embarked on a short and bizarre marriage to German sound engineer Renate Blauel that was the subject of much derogatory comment. In 1988 he survived a bitter battle with the Sun newspaper, that had published invasive sexually explicit pictures along with a vicious and – as it turned out – false story of orgies with a rent boy. After his high court victory (when he was awarded a record £1 million damages) Elton memorably remarked, “They can say I’m a fat old sod, they can say I’m an untalented b------, they can call me a poof, but they mustn’t lie about me.”

In the early 1990s, he confessed he had bulimia, was a drug addict and an alcoholic – then topped the charts with the despairing yet defiant Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me, sung with fellow troubled superstar George Michael. Elton got sober in 1990 and met advertising executive David Furnish in 1992. They entered a civil partnership in 2005, married in 2014, and had two sons via surrogacy, Zachary (born 2010) and Elijah (2013). 

Over the same period, Elton made a successful transition into stage musicals, writing The Lion King and Aida (with lyricist Tim Rice) and Billy Elliot (with lyricist Lee Hall). In recent years, his hit singles have tended to come with strategic pop collaborations (with boy band Blue, Ed Sheeran, Britney Spears, Dua Lipa and Pnau) but his (increasingly rare) albums have struck new veins of gravitas, with 2001’s powerful Songs From the West Coast and 2013’s reflective The Diving Board proving his finest since his 1970s glory days.

Perhaps the greatest key to Elton’s success, though, is that – beneath the fantastic hairpieces and outrageous outfits – he has always remained authentically himself. He is not afraid to be uncool, nor to let the world glimpse his petulant side, as he did in 1997 documentary Tantrums & Tiaras. He remains an obsessive music fan who keeps up to date with everything that goes on in the charts, regularly calling up young artists to voice his enthusiasm or to offer advice and support. 

I have been on the receiving end of a few such calls from the great man over the years, ringing out of the blue to discuss something I have written in the Telegraph. “Neil, it’s Elton!” he announces, and before I know it, I am deep into a discussion about Kanye West or Bob Dylan with someone whose records I have loved since my dad brought a copy of his rich and strange second album, Elton John, into our house in 1970. 

There is a great generosity of spirit about Elton, an enthusiast by nature. Asked who he was looking forward to seeing at Glastonbury, he spoke not about headliners but artists in the small tents and at the bottom of the bill, singling out up-and-coming genre-bending female rock duo Nova Twins. “These girls rock my world,” he said. “I think they’re phenomenal.” He’s right, they are.

Looking back at my first interview with Elton, in 2003, when he was 57, I am struck by the only sour note of our encounter, when I asked how he felt about fame. “I’m bored with it,” he confessed. “I’ve had enough of it in my life. I’m very grateful for what I’ve got, but I don’t go chasing publicity any more. Going to live sporting events is an ordeal: sign this, do that, meet this person. I just want to see the game! The paparazzi thing is ridiculous. That does piss me off. I’ve been known to scream at photographers. It’s just not what I want. I’m over it.”

In 2016, during our last face-to-face interview – at his art-filled home in Beverly Hills, LA – he was talking about retirement with genuine anticipation. “I don’t want to die on the road,” he said. “I want to die at home, and I want to spend a lot of time with my kids before I do.” Not that he’s planning to stop entirely: Elton believes in keeping busy. “I’ve always had an insatiable appetite,” he said. “I want to be involved in life. I don’t want to give up. You never know, they might find something in 10 years’ time that means I can live till I’m 350! Life is full of f---ing great surprises.”

On Sunday nigh, whether standing in a field in Somerset or watching on TV, we had one last chance to watch Elton doing his thing – playing with the dazzling virtuosity of the world’s funkiest pub pianist, singing with a voice that still packs a huge weight of emotion, as he rolls out fabulous songs that have been the soundtrack to our lives. There will never be another quite like him.