John

And then, catastrophe struck: Long John Baldry had a huge hit single. Obviously, this would usually have been the cause of great rejoicing, but ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ was an appalling record, a syrupy, middle-of-the-road, Housewives’ Choice ballad. It was a million miles from the kind of music John should have been making, and it was Number One for weeks, never off the radio. I’d say I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew exactly what he was thinking, and I couldn’t really blame him. He’d been slogging around for years and this was the first time he’d made any money. The blues cellars stopped booking us and we started playing the supper clubs, which paid better. Often we’d play two a night. They weren’t interested in John’s pivotal role in the British blues boom or his mastery of the 12-string guitar. They just wanted to see someone who’d been on television. Occasionally, I got the feeling they weren’t that interested in music, full stop. In some clubs, if you played over your allotted time, they’d simply close the curtains on you, mid-song. On the plus side, at least the supper club audiences enjoyed ‘The Threshing Machine’ more than the mods did.

It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a musician. Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard, sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet, here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.

Almost as an afterthought, or a consolation prize after rejecting me, Ray had handed me an envelope. Someone responding to the same advert had sent in some lyrics. I had a feeling Ray hadn’t actually read any of them before he passed them on to me.

The guy who wrote them came from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire, hardly the pulsating rock and roll capital of the world. He apparently worked on a chicken farm, carting dead birds around in a wheelbarrow. But his lyrics were pretty good. Esoteric, a bit Tolkien-influenced, not unlike ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ by Procol Harum. Crucially, none of them made me want to rip my own head off with embarrassment, which meant they were a vast improvement on anything I’d come up with.

Admittedly, we hadn’t actually managed to get any other artists to buy the bloody things yet, and if we committed to it full-time, we’d be broke. But other than money, what did we have to lose? A wheelbarrow full of dead chickens and ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ twice a night, respectively.

It didn’t matter what he [Elvis] was saying, because something almost physical happened while he was singing. You could literally feel this strange energy he was giving off, like it was contagious, like it was coming out of the radiogram speaker straight into your body.

At one point, I distinctly remember him using the phrase ‘what will the neighbours say?’ It wasn’t Uncle Reg’s fault. That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.

If you spend your life waiting for the next eruption of anger from your mum, or your dad announcing another rule that you’d broken, you end up not knowing what to do: the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next fills you with fear. So I was incredibly insecure, scared of my own shadow. On top of that, I thought I was somehow responsible for the state of my parents’ marriage, because a lot of their rows would be about me. My father would tell me off, my mother would intervene, and there would be a huge argument about how I was being brought up. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, which manifested in a lack of confidence in my appearance that lasted well into adulthood. For years and years, I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I really hated what I saw: I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to, including not prematurely fall out. The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That went on for decades. I stayed in bad business relationships and bad personal relationships because I didn’t want to rock the boat.

Even now, I get sent the charts every day, the radio chart positions in America, the box office charts for films and Broadway plays. Most artists don’t do that; they’re not interested. When I’m talking to them, I know more about how their single’s doing than they do, which is crazy. The official excuse is that I need to know what’s going on because, these days, I own a company that makes films and manages artists. The truth is that I’d be doing it if I was working in a bank. I’m just an anorak.

Sixty years on, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different from our parents, that made us feel we could achieve something. It’s also hard to explain the extent to which the older generation despised it. Take every example of moral panic pop music has provoked since – punk and gangster rap, mods and rockers and heavy metal – then add them all together and double it: that’s how much outrage rock and roll caused. People fucking hated it.

And yet that envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained. You try and figure that out without giving yourself a headache. Who knows? Maybe I would have found another writing partner, or joined another band, or made my way as a musician without it. But I do know my life and my career would have been very different, most likely substantially worse – it’s hard to see how it could have turned out any better – and I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this now.

We were really just trying on other people’s styles and finding none of them quite fitted us, but that’s how the process of discovering your own voice works, and the process was fun. Everything was fun. Bernie had moved to London and our friendship had really bloomed. We got on so well, it felt like he was the brother I’d never had, a state of affairs magnified by the fact that we were, at least temporarily, sleeping in bunk beds in my bedroom at Frome Court.

The next day, we arrived at DJM to discover that the Daily Express had published an article helpfully explaining that our song had lost because it was self-evidently the worst of the lot. Dick wearily conceded that perhaps it might be better if we stopped wasting everybody’s time and made our own album instead. If Philips wouldn’t release it, then he would hire a press and promotions guy and start his own record label after all.

So we were sequestered in the little DJM studio, with Steve Brown producing and Clive Franks operating the tape machine. Clive was the guy who recorded The Troggs Tape; years later, he ended up co-producing some of my albums, and he still works with me today, doing the sound engineering for my live shows. We collectively threw everything we could at the new songs. Psychedelic sound effects, harpsichords, backwards guitar solos courtesy of Caleb, flutes, bongos, stereo panning, improvised jazz interludes, trick endings where the songs faded out then suddenly back in again, the sound of Clive whistling. If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re making your first album. There’s a faint voice at the back of your mind telling you that you might never make another, so you may as well try everything while you have the chance. But, God, it was so much fun, such an adventure. The album was called Empty Sky. It came out on Dick’s new DJM label on 6 June 1969. I can remember listening back to the title track and thinking it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

They were also the product of the bedroom at Frome Court. At the time we were writing, two artists were constantly on the Littlewoods stereo. One was the rock/soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. I was completely obsessed with the way their keyboardist, Leon Russell, played. It was like he’d somehow climbed into my head and worked out exactly how I wanted to play piano before I did. He’d managed to synthesize all the music I loved – rock and roll, blues, gospel, country – into one, perfectly natural style.

And the other was The Band. We played their first two albums over and over again. Like Leon Russell’s piano playing, their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. ‘Chest Fever’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Weight’: this was what we craved to write.

The stuff in the window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in. Once I did, Tommy Roberts was so friendly and enthusiastic that he talked me into buying a selection of clothes not even Tony King would have countenanced wearing in public. Wearing them, I felt different, like I was expressing a side of my personality that I’d kept hidden, a desire to be outrageous and over-the-top. I suppose it all went back to chancing on that photo of Elvis in the barber’s in Pinner when I was a kid: I liked that sense of shock, of seeing a star who made you wonder what the hell was going on. The clothes from Mr Freedom weren’t outrageous because they were sexy or threatening, they were outrageous because they were larger than life, more fun than the world around them. I loved them. Before I went onstage at the Troubadour, I put them all on at once. So instead of an introspective hippy singer-songwriter, the audience were greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked. This was not the way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.

People talk about Derek And The Dominos being a real disaster area, strung out on heroin and booze, but you would never have known that if you’d seen them live that autumn. They were phenomenal. From the side of the stage, I took mental notes about their performance. Eric Clapton was the star, but it was their keyboard player, Bobby Whitlock, that I watched like a hawk. He was from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played with that soulful, Deep Southern gospel feel. Touring with them or Leon was like being on the road with Patti LaBelle or Major Lance when I was in Bluesology: you watched and you learned, from people who had more experience than you.

It wasn’t just The Band who wanted to meet us. It was their managers, Albert Grossman and Bennett Glotzer. They were legendary American music business figures, particularly Grossman, a renowned tough guy who’d managed Bob Dylan since the early sixties. He had reacted to another client, Janis Joplin, becoming addicted to heroin not by intervening but by taking a life insurance policy out on her. Word must have reached them that I was currently without a manager. Ray Williams was a lovely man, I owed him a great deal and he was incredibly loyal – he’d even named his daughter Amoreena, after another of the Tumbleweed Connection songs – but after the first American trip, I’d talked it over with the rest of the band, and no one thought he was the right person to look after us. But nor were Grossman and Glotzer, as I realized the moment I met them.

Just before we left for France I’d legally changed my name to Elton John. Elton Hercules John. I’d always thought middle names were slightly ridiculous, so I did the most ridiculous thing I could think of and took mine from the rag and bone man’s horse in the sitcom Steptoe and Son. Basically, I had got sick of the fuss in shops when the cashier recognized me but not the name on my chequebook. But it really seemed more symbolic than practical – like I was finally, conclusively, legally leaving Reg Dwight behind, fully becoming the person I was supposed to be. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, but in that moment, it felt good.

It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me. How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might seem that it’s all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but it’s not. I couldn’t say to them, ‘I think I’m taking too many drugs’, because they would never understand; they didn’t know what cocaine was. I hadn’t got the guts to tell them, ‘Look, I’m really not feeling very good, I need a bit of love’, because I didn’t want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was too strong-willed – and too afraid of her reaction – to just take my mum aside and say, ‘Listen, Mum, I really need to talk to you – I’m not doing very well here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?’ Instead of doing that, I bottled it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged this ridiculous suicide bid. That’s who I am: it’s all or nothing. It wasn’t my family’s fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasn’t perfect. It was pathetic.

But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days. The sound was perfect, so was the weather. I can remember standing onstage, feeling the adrenalin coursing through me.

It was a pinnacle, and I was smart enough to know that it couldn’t last, at least not at that pitch. Success on that level never does; it doesn’t matter who you are, or how great you are, your records aren’t going to enter the charts at Number One forever. I knew someone or something else was going to come along. I was waiting for that moment to happen, and the thought of it didn’t scare me at all.

I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together, but I owe Watford far more than Watford owe me. I was chairman throughout the worst period of my life: years of addiction and unhappiness, failed relationships, bad business deals, court cases, unending turmoil. Through all of that, Watford were a constant source of happiness to me. When I didn’t feel I had any love in my personal life, I knew I had love from the club and the supporters. It gave me something else to concentrate on, a passion that could take my mind away from everything that was going wrong. For obvious reasons, there are chunks of the eighties I have no recollection of – I struggled to remember what had happened the next day, let alone thirty years later – but every Watford game I saw is permanently etched on my memory.

One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs for it – I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort. Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible – if the title track had come on at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it – but making an album in bad faith like that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.

When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity bubble.

You think you’re surrounding yourself with people and making your life easier. But in reality you’re just isolating yourself from the real world, and, in my experience at least, the more isolated you are from reality – the more removed you become from the person you’re naturally supposed to be – the harder you’re making your life and the less happy you become. You end up with something like a medieval court, with you as the monarch and everyone around you jockeying for position, scared of losing their place in the pecking order and fighting each other to see who can be closest to you, who can exert the most influence on you. It’s a grotesque, soul-destroying environment to live in. And you’ve created it yourself.

Of course, I would have loved it if they’d gone to Number One, but that wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I’ve had my moment selling zillions of records, and it was fabulous, but from the second it began, I realized it wouldn’t last forever. If you believe it will, you can end up in terrible trouble. I honestly think that’s one of the things that tipped Michael Jackson over the edge: he was convinced he could make an album bigger than Thriller, and was crushed every time it didn’t happen.

The Vegas residency worked because it fitted my character, and the way I’d presented myself in the past. It wasn’t just a load of shocking visuals grafted on for effect, it was another form of going backwards to go forwards, an updated version of the seventies shows where I’d been introduced onstage by famous porn stars and brought Divine out in full drag. Despite the occasional angry letter to the management and Mum’s dire imprecations, they were enormously successful shows, and I think they might have been groundbreaking, too.

I’ve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but I’ve never got bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had – when I was playing the cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was just exhausted – I obviously hadn’t. You could tell by the way I would grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later. Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasn’t, because that feeling is fucking great. It’s addictive. You might get sick of the travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that feeling will always keep you coming back for more.

One night in LA, I took him to Joni Mitchell’s house. That was a massive deal for him - Taron is a massive Joni Mitchell fan. In a way, it was a huge deal for me too. I’ve known Joni for decades, but the last time I’d seen her was at my seventieth birthday party, and she looked terribly frail. She’d suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 and was unconscious on the floor of her home for two or three days before they found her. She was lucky to be alive, but she was still in a wheelchair at my party, a couple of years later. Since then, some mutual friends of ours, the country singer Brandi Carlile and her wife Catherine, had started visiting her every week, bringing other musicians along and encouraging Joni to sing with them, everyone from Herbie Hancock to Chaka Khan. Joni had a lot of gruelling physiotherapy as well, but I couldn’t help thinking that Brandi’s visits were part of her recovery: they reconnected her with something she loved, something she was incredibly gifted at.

You could see how much she’d recovered when we got to her house in Bel Air. Joni was walking unaided, she seemed like a different person than the woman I’d seen a couple of years before. Brandi was there with Tim and Phil, the identical twins who play bass and guitar in her band. So was Bonnie Raitt. We sat around the piano, singing and swapping songs. Joni sang old jazz standards, with Brandi harmonizing: four years ago she couldn’t even speak, and now her voice sounded astonishing. It was fabulous. Joni had lived in the same house since the early seventies. It still had some of the ambiance of that era, with her paintings all over the walls. And that era was what the whole evening made me think of: the magical version of LA I’d encountered on my first visit to America, the parties up in Laurel Canyon where musicians would get together and sing and play just for the love of it.

But what running away from Reg Dwight taught me is that when I got too far from him, too removed from the normal person I once was, things went horribly wrong; I was more miserable than ever. I need - everybody needs - some connection to reality.