Elton John: 'They wanted to tone down the sex and drugs. But
I haven’t led a PG-13 life'
The Observer
Elton John
In this exclusive article, Elton John writes about his
extraordinary life and why he finally decided to give the Rocketman biopic the
green light
Elton John
Sun 26 May 2019 08.00 BST
I was in the cinema for about 15 minutes before I started
crying. Not crying as in the occasional tear quietly trickling down my cheek:
really sobbing, in that loud, unguarded, emotionally destroyed way that makes
people turn around and look at you with alarmed expressions. I was watching my
family – my mum and dad, my nan – in my nan’s old council house in Pinner Hill
Road in the late 1950s, singing I Want Love, a song Bernie Taupin and I had
written in 2001. I knew it was in the film, but I didn’t know how they were
going to use it. Up until that point, I’d kept a discrete distance from the
actual process of making a movie about my life. I gave some suggestions, saw a
few daily rushes, said yay or nay to some important decisions and met two or
three times with Taron Egerton, who plays me. But otherwise I’d kept well away
from Rocketman, letting my husband David [Furnish]be my eyes and ears on set
every day. I figured it would be uncomfortable for everyone to have the person
the film was about lurking around.
So I wasn’t prepared for the power of what I was seeing. I
Want Love is a song Bernie wrote, I think, about himself: a middle-aged man
with a few divorces, wondering if he’s ever going to fall in love again. But it
fitted life in Pinner Hill Road perfectly. I suppose my mum and dad must have
been in love once, but there wasn’t much sign they ever had been by the time I
came along. They gave every impression of hating each other. My dad was strict
and remote and had a terrible temper; my mum was argumentative and prone to
dark moods. When they were together, all I can remember are icy silences or
screaming rows. The rows were usually about me, how I was being brought up.
My dad was in the RAF so he was away from home a lot, and
when he got back, he tried to impose new rules about everything: how I ate, how
I dressed. That would set Mum off. I got the feeling they were staying together
because of me, which just made things more miserable. The best way to escape it
was to shut myself in my bedroom with my record collection and my comics, and
drift off into an imaginary world, fantasising that I was Little Richard or Ray
Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis. I made my peace with it all years ago. They
divorced when I was 13, both remarried, which I was happy about, although my
relationship with both of them was always tricky. I was closer to Mum than Dad,
but there were long periods when we didn’t speak. And my childhood is one thing
I’m still sensitive about.
Even if I hadn’t been, the whole experience of watching
someone else pretend to be you on screen, of seeing things you remember
happening again in front of your eyes, is a very weird, disconcerting one, like
having an incredibly vivid dream. And the story of how I ended up in a cinema,
crying my eyes out at the sight of my family 60 years ago, is a long and
convoluted one. And it begins, naturally enough, with a naked transgender woman
with sparks flying out of her vagina.
The trans woman was Amanda Lepore, a model, singer and
performance artist. She had sparks flying out of her vagina because she was
starring in one of a series of films by David LaChapelle I’d commissioned for
my show in Las Vegas, The Red Piano in 2004. That was his interpretation of the
lyrics of Someone Saved My Life Tonight, a song Bernie and I had written about
our pre-fame years, living in a flat in north London with a woman I’d foolishly
got engaged to when I was still very confused about my sexuality.
An actor was dressed as me in full 70s stage outfit sticking
his head in a gas oven, homoerotic angels figure-skating with giant teddy bears
and Amanda Lepore, naked, in an electric chair, with sparks flying out of her
vagina. I loved it: I’d said all along I didn’t want a standard Vegas show, and
no one was ever going to be able to call The Red Piano that.
But it also got me thinking. David LaChapelle’s films were
based, very loosely, on my life. I really had staged a completely ridiculous
suicide bid that involved sticking my head in a gas oven. Rather than tell my
fiancée I’d made a mistake, that was my brilliant plan to try and get out of
the wedding. If you were going to make a film about me, that would be the way
to do it. Nevertheless, the idea of making a film about my life still seemed
like a big IF. For one thing, I’ve been very successful writing songs and
soundtracks for films, but I’ve never been very comfortable with seeing myself
on a big screen.
Amazingly, the director Hal Ashby offered me the male lead
in Harold and Maude in 1971, but I turned it down: I loved the script, but it
seemed like the wrong thing to do at the time. I’ve played myself in a couple
of films, none of them exactly Oscar winners: Spice World and a Disney thing
called The Country Bears. I suppose my one famous film role was in Tommy,
although it didn’t really involve acting, just trying not to fall over while
wearing a pair of 4½ft Doc Martens. I initially turned that down, too. They
contacted Rod Stewart and I told him to turn it down as well. “I wouldn’t touch
it with a bargepole, dear.” Then Pete Townshend from the Who rang me and I felt
like I couldn’t say no. Rod was absolutely furious: “You bitch! You did that on
purpose!” I’ve obviously spent a significant proportion of my life deliberately
trying to annoy Rod Stewart – that’s very much the nature of our friendship –
but that time it was completely accidental.
I’ve never been very interested in looking back at my
career. It happened, I’m incredibly grateful, but I’m more interested in what
I’m doing next rather than what I did 40 years ago. But that began to change a
little the older I got, and I really started to approach things in a different
way when I had children. I was 63 when our first son, Zachary, was born, 65
when Elijah came along – and I did start thinking about them in 40 years’ time,
being able to see or read my version of my life. I became less conscious about
keeping it all to myself. I liked the idea of them having a film and an autobiography,
where I was honest.
In some film scenes
I’m disgusting and awful. But at my worst, I was
So when I decided I did want to go ahead with a film, we
commissioned a script from Lee Hall, who I’d worked with on the stage musical
of Billy Elliot. It was brilliant. It had moments that were pure fantasy and
moments that were really hard-hitting, no punches pulled, like Tantrums and
Tiaras, the documentary my husband David made about me not long after we met.
Lots of people told me I was insane to allow that documentary to be released,
but I loved it, because it was truthful. There are moments in it – and moments
in the film – where I’m completely disgusting and awful, but then, at my worst,
I was disgusting and awful, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
But actually making the thing took years. Directors came and
went – David LaChapelle was going to do it, but then he decided to focus on his
fine art career – before the producer Matthew Vaughn, who I’d met when I had a
cameo role in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, suggested Dexter Fletcher. So did
lead actors: Justin Timberlake and Tom Hardy were both in the frame before
Taron came along. Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the
film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life. I
didn’t want a film packed with drugs and sex, but equally, everyone knows I had
quite a lot of both during the 70s and 80s, so there didn’t seem to be much
point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone
back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for
company.
And some studios wanted us to lose the fantasy element and
make a more straightforward biopic, but that was missing the point. Like I
said, I lived in my own head a lot as a kid. And when my career took off, it
took off in such a way that it almost didn’t seem real to me. I wasn’t an
overnight success by any means – I’d been slogging around the clubs, making
records, writing songs with Bernie and trying to sell them to people who
weren’t interested for four or five years before anything big happened. But
when it happened, it went off like a missile: there’s a moment in Rocketman
when I’m playing onstage in the Troubadour club in LA and everything in the
room starts levitating, me included, and honestly, that’s what it felt like.
I left England in August 1970 more or less unknown. Me and
Bernie were so broke, we were sleeping in bunk beds in my mum and stepdad’s
spare room. I was making ends meet working as a session musician, playing on
anyone’s records. I’d had a little bit of press and a few plays on John Peel
for my second album, Elton John – enough that I didn’t see the point of going to
perform in America, where literally no one knew who I was. But I came back from
the States a month later with American critics calling me the saviour of
rock’n’roll. Artists who were just mythic names on the back of album sleeves to
me, people I absolutely worshipped, were suddenly turning up in the dressing
room to tell me and Bernie they loved what we were doing: Brian Wilson of the
Beach Boys, Leon Russell, the Band, Bob Dylan. I’d also lost my virginity, to a
man – John Reid, who later became my manager – and come out as gay, at least to
my friends and family. This all happened in the space of three weeks. To say it
was a lot to take in is a terrible understatement.
‘I came back from the
States with American critics calling me the saviour of rock ’n’ roll’: John
with his mother Sheila and stepfather Fred Fairebrother at their apartment,
London 1971.
Understandably, Bernie and I had no idea what the hell was
going on – you know, I hadn’t even wanted to be a rock star in the first place,
I just wanted to be a successful songwriter – but it just got bigger and bigger
over the next few years. I kept a diary the whole time, and it’s inadvertently
hilarious. I wrote everything down in this matter-of-fact way, which ends up
making it seem even more preposterous: “Woke up, watched Grandstand. Wrote
Candle in the Wind. Went to London, bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for
dinner.”
I suppose I was trying to normalise what was happening, but
the fact was, what was happening to me wasn’t normal. I’m not complaining at
all, but there was no way you could prepare yourself for it. I don’t think any
human being is psychologically built to cope with all that stuff happening to
you that quickly, let alone me, with all my neuroses going back to my
childhood.
It took a Herculean
effort to get noticed for taking too much cocaine in 70s LA, but I was prepared
to put the hours in
In a way, it’s a miracle I didn’t go off the rails before I
did. It took three or four years – and my discovery of cocaine – before things
started getting out of hand, maybe because I was working so hard that I didn’t
have too much time to think about it. I was always on tour or making a new
album. Of course, when I did go off the rails, that happened like a missile as
well.
It’s strange, I don’t find it painful to watch those parts
of the film. They’re truthful and, unlike my childhood, it was my own fault. No
one forced me to do drugs and drink. In fact, more than a few people tried to
warn me I was out of control. It took a fairly Herculean effort to get yourself
noticed for taking too much cocaine in the music industry of 1970s LA, but I
was clearly prepared to put the hours in.
I gave my diaries to Taron to read when he took on the lead
role in the film. He came to my house, we had a takeaway curry and chatted, and
I let him see them. I knew Taron was the right man when I heard him sing Don’t
Let the Sun Go Down on Me. I thought it was really important that whoever
played me didn’t lip-sync, I wanted them to actually sing the songs, and Taron
had already sung I’m Still Standing brilliantly in the animated film Sing.
But Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me is a really hard song
for a vocalist. I know, because I struggled with it myself. When I tried to
record it in 1974, the session went incredibly badly: I just couldn’t get it
right. Demonstrating my legendary composure and breezy good humour in the face
of a crisis, I ended up threatening to strangle my producer Gus Dudgeon with my
bare hands, then announced that the song was so terrible that I was never going
to release it, and instead was going to give it to Engelbert Humperdinck.
Taron, on the other hand, just sang it: no threats of murder, no mention of
dear old Engelbert.
His singing really astounded me. He isn’t doing an
impersonation of me, he doesn’t look uncannily like me – although they shaved
his head and thinned out his hair to make it look like mine in the 70s, which
he hated. Welcome to my world, baby – at least yours will grow back. But he’s
like me, he’s captured something of me, just as Richard Madden’s got something
of John Reid and Jamie Bell’s got something of Bernie.
Jamie and Taron have even managed to capture my relationship
with Bernie, which is frankly a miracle, because I really have no idea how that
works. We were thrown together at random. I had failed an audition for Liberty
Records in 1967, and a guy from the label gave me an envelope with his lyrics
in it as an afterthought, like a consolation prize. I’m not sure he had even
opened the envelope and read the lyrics himself before he did it: I think he
just felt sorry for me and didn’t want me to go away empty handed.
We were very close right at the start of our career
together, but we’re completely different people. He comes from the wilds of
Lincolnshire, I come from the suburbs of London. He lives in Santa Barbara and
he’s literally won competitions for roping cattle. I collect antique porcelain
and the only way you’d get me on the back of a horse is at gunpoint. Neither of
us can write if the other is in the room. But there’s a weird bond between us
that I felt the minute I opened the envelope – I could just write music to his
words straight away, without even thinking about it – and it’s lasted over 50
years.
We’ve had arguments – you don’t want to get him started on
the subject of some of my more outlandish stage costumes, or indeed the subject
of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a song he’s loathed from the minute it was
finished and continues to loathe to this day – but we’ve never fallen out,
despite all the ridiculous crap we’ve been through.
Outside of my husband and children, it’s the most important
relationship in my life, we really love each other and the film captures that.
There’s a scene in Rocketman where he comes to visit me in rehab, and that
started me sobbing again. It happened just the same way in real life. Bernie
was one of the people who tried to tell me to stop doing drugs. I wouldn’t
listen until years later, but he stuck by me, he never gave up on me, and he
was so relieved and happy when I finally got help.
He was apprehensive about the film. He read the script and
he didn’t like the fantasy aspects of it. “But that didn’t happen, that’s not
true” – very Bernie. Then he saw it and completely got it. I don’t think he
actually burst into tears, but he was incredibly moved by it. He understood the
point of it, which was to make something that was like my life: chaotic, funny,
mad, horrible, brilliant and dark. It’s obviously not all true, but it’s the
truth.
Rocketman is in cinemas now
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