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A multiple Grammy-winning legend and flamboyant superstar, Elton is the most enduringly successful singer/songwriter of his generation.

Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE, is one of the most highly acclaimed and successful solo artists of all time.
Elton has achieved 26 gold, 38 platinum or multi-platinum and 1 diamond, 40 platinum or multi-platinum, and 23 gold albums, over 50 Top 40 hits, and he has sold more than 300 million records worldwide. He holds the record for the biggest selling single of all time, Candle In The Wind 1997, which sold over 33 million copies. Since launching his first tour in 1970, Elton has over 4,000 performances in more than 80 countries to his credit.
Elton is the most successful solo male in the history of the American charts and the third most successful artist overall, behind only Madonna and the Beatles. He has logged 67 Hot 100 entries between 1970 and 2000, including nine No. 1s and 27 top 10s. He achieved seven #1 albums in the three-and-a-half-year period from 1972 to 1975 — a period of concentrated success surpassed only by the Beatles.
Elton was born on March 25, 1947, in Pinner, Middlesex, England, and given the name Reginald Kenneth Dwight. At the age of three he astonished his family by sitting at the piano and playing The Skater’s Waltz by ear. At the age of 11 he was awarded a scholarship as a Junior Exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Music and he attended the Academy on Saturday mornings for the next four years.
Besides his knighthood, Elton’s landmark awards include Best British Male Artist BRIT Award, 1991; Songwriters Hall of Fame (with Bernie Taupin), 1992; Officer of Arts & Letters (France) 1993; induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1994; Polar Music Prize, 1995; MusiCares Person of the Year, 2000; Kennedy Center Honor, 2004; Billboard Magazine Legend of Live Award, 2006; Songwriters Hall of Fame Johnny Mercer Award (with Bernie Taupin), 2013; BRITs Icon Award, 2013; Rockefeller Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2013 and the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative Leadership Award, 2013. In 2002, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music and in 2004 he became a Fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers.
Elton has won 13 Ivor Novello Awards between 1973 and 2001, been nominated for a Grammy Award 11 times (winning in 1986, 1991, 1994, 1997 and 2000), and received the Grammy Legend Award in 2001. Three of his albums have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, including his 1970 eponymous album. Elton has 3 Oscar Award nominations (winning in 1995), and a Tony Award (with 4 nominations) for Best Original Score for Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida in 2000.

Top left: April 1969 - Elton with his new Hillman Husky Estate auto.

Bottom left: Elton in a smart winter coat.

Right: Elton playing piano at age 6 in Pinner, England.

Musical Theatre
Elton has composed songs, in collaboration with lyricists Sir Tim Rice, Lee Hall, and Bernie Taupin, for:
★ The Lion King (1998) – Six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and named the highest-grossing stage show or film release in the world.
★ Elton John & Tim Rice's Aida (2000) – Tony Award for Best Original Score; Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album.
★ Billy Elliot the Musical (2005) – Olivier Award for Best Musical; 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
★ Lestat (2006)

The Lion King on stage.

Sports
Music may be Elton John’s first passion, but another abiding interest runs it a close second: sport.
In some ways, it’s an unsurprising second love, as the parallels are numerous. A devotion to high-level performance, the adrenaline rush of playing in front of big crowds — and the ever-present knowledge that you’re only as good as your last performance. To rise to — and stay — at the top in both disciplines also requires similar qualities: stamina, endless practice and an unstinting professional approach. Oh yes, and a rich seam of natural talent.
Elton’s most publicised involvement with the sporting world is his enduring connection with Watford Football Club. It was the club he supported as a boy and of which he later became Chairman, guiding it to the highest echelon of the professional game in England.
In 2012, he founded Rocket Sports Management, with the aim of guiding emergent sporting stars through their careers, whatever the highs and lows.

Elton John’s historic sold-out concerts at Dodger Stadium. (Photo: Terry O'Neill @ Iconic Images)

Charities
When Elton is not recording or touring he devotes his efforts to a variety of charities, including his own Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised over $450 million and funded programs across four continents in the 24 years it has existed. He has also been a regular performer at fundraisers for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Rainforest Foundation, and the Robin Hood Foundation. Elton is Patron or Ambassador to 23 charities and is a Member of Executive Advisory Board to four charities and endows scholarship funds at The Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School of Music.
Discover more

Rocket Entertainment
Rocket Entertainment Group incorporates Rocket Music, Rocket Pictures, Rocket Stage and Rocket Sports. Each has been co-founded by Elton John and focuses on the development and management of artists, athletes and projects across the entertainment industry as a whole.

Sir Elton John, CBE, is a multi-award winning solo artist who has achieved 38 gold and 31 platinum or multi-platinum albums, has sold more than 300 million records worldwide, and holds the record for the biggest-selling single of all time, 'Candle in the Wind 1997'. In August 2018 Elton was named the most successful male solo artist in the Billboard Hot 100 chart history, having logged 67 entries, including nine Number 1s and 27 Top 10s. Elton launched his first tour in 1970 and since then has performed over 4,000 times in more than 80 countries. When not recording or touring, Elton devotes his time to a number of charities, including his own Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised over $450 million and funded programmes across four continents in the twenty-four years it has existed. He is married to David Furnish, and they have two sons.

'Me' is his first and only official autobiography.

Elton John
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For the footballer, see Elton John (footballer). For the album, see Elton John (album). For the 18th-century explorer, see John Elton.
Sir
Elton John
CBE

John at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival
Born
Reginald Kenneth Dwight
25 March 1947 (age 72)
Pinner, Middlesex, England
Occupation
Singersongwriterpianistcomposer
Years active
1962–present
Spouse(s)
Renate Blauel
(m. 1984; div. 1988)
David Furnish
(m. 2014)
Children
2
Musical career
Genres
Rockpop rockglam rocksoft rock
Instruments
Vocalspianokeyboards
Labels
PhilipsCongressDJMUniParamountMCAGeffenRocketIslandMercuryIsland Def Jam
Associated acts
Eric ClaptonKiki DeeBilly JoelNik KershawJohn LennonGeorge MichaelQueenTim RiceBernie TaupinStevie Wonder
Website
eltonjohn.com

Sir Elton Hercules John CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight; 25 March 1947)[1] is an English singer, songwriter, pianist, and composer. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums. John has sold more than 300 million records, making him one of the world's best-selling music artists.[2][3] He has more than fifty Top 40 hits, as well as seven consecutive number-one albums in the United States, 58 Billboard Top 40 singles, 27 Top 10 singles, four of which peaked at number two and nine of which reached number one. His tribute single "Candle in the Wind 1997", rewritten in dedication to Diana, Princess of Wales, sold over 33 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling single in the history of the UK and US singles charts.[4][5][6] He has also produced records and occasionally acted in films. John owned Watford F.C. from 1976 to 1987 and from 1997 to 2002, and is an honorary Life President of the club.
Raised in the Pinner area of London, John learned to play piano at an early age, and by 1962 had formed Bluesology, an R&B band with whom he played until 1967. He met his longtime musical partner Taupin in 1967, after they both answered an advert for songwriters. For two years, they wrote songs for artists including Lulu, and John worked as a session musician for artists including the Hollies and the Scaffold. In 1969, John's debut album, Empty Sky, was released. In 1970, his first hit single, "Your Song", from his second album, Elton John, reached the top ten in the UK and the US. John has also had success in musical films and theatre, composing for The Lion King and its stage adaptation, Aida and Billy Elliot the Musical.
John has received five Grammy Awards, five Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, a Disney Legends award, and the Kennedy Center Honor. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him 49th on its list of 100 influential musicians of the rock and roll era.[7] In 2013, Billboard ranked him the most successful male solo artist on the Billboard Hot 100 Top All-Time Artists, and third overall, behind the Beatles and Madonna.[8] He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. He was knighted by Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.[9] John has performed at a number of royal events, such as the funeral of Princess Diana at Westminster Abbey in 1997, the Party at the Palace in 2002 and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace in 2012.
John has been involved in the fight against AIDS since the late 1980s.[10] In 1992, he established the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and a year later he began hosting his annual Academy Awards Party, which has since become one of the highest-profile Oscar parties in the Hollywood film industry. Since its inception, the foundation has raised over £300 million.[11] John, who announced he was bisexual in 1976 and has been openly gay since 1988, entered into a civil partnership with David Furnish on 21 December 2005; they married after same-sex marriage became legal in England and Wales in 2014. Presenting John with France's highest civilian award, the Legion d'honneur, in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron called him a "melodic genius" and praised his work on behalf of the LGBT community. In 2018, John embarked on a three-year farewell tour.[12]

Contents
1
Early life
2
Career
2.1
Pub pianist to staff songwriter (1962–1969)
2.2
Debut album to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1969–1973)
2.3
The Rocket Record Company to 21 at 33 (1974–1980)
2.4
The Fox to Sleeping with the Past (1981–1989)
2.5
"Sacrifice" to Aida (1990–1999)
2.6
Billy Elliot the Musical and 60th birthday (2000–2009)
2.7
The Union to Wonderful Crazy Night (2010–2018)
2.8
Rocketman biopic and retirement tour (2018–present)
3
Musicianship
4
Personal life
4.1
Sexuality and family
4.2
Wealth
4.3
Other
4.4
Football
5
Political views
6
AIDS Foundation
7
Honours and awards
8
Elton John Band
9
Discography
9.1
Studio albums
9.2
Collaboration albums
9.3
Soundtrack albums
10
Filmography
11
References
12
Further reading
13
External links
Early life
Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947 in Pinner, Middlesex, the eldest child of Stanley Dwight (1925–1991) and only child of Sheila Eileen (née Harris; 1925–2017),[13][14][15] and was raised in a council house in Pinner by his maternal grandparents. His parents married in 1945,[16] when the family moved to a nearby semi-detached house.[17][18][19] He was educated at Pinner Wood Junior School, Reddiford School and Pinner County Grammar School, until he was 17, when he left just prior to his A-Level examinations to pursue a career in music.[20][21][22]
When John began to consider a career in music seriously, his father, who served as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, tried to steer him toward a more conventional career, such as banking.[20] John has said that his wild stage costumes and performances were his way of letting go after such a restrictive childhood.[22] Both his parents were musically inclined, his father having been a trumpet player with the Bob Millar Band, a semi-professional big band that played at military dances.[22] The Dwights were keen record buyers, exposing John to the popular singers and musicians of the day, and he has said he remembers being immediately hooked on rock and roll when his mother brought home records by Elvis Presley and Bill Haley & His Comets in 1956.[20][21]
John started playing his grandmother's piano as a young boy,[23] and within a year his mother heard him picking out Winifred Atwell's "The Skater's Waltz" by ear.[20][21] After performing at parties and family gatherings, at age 7 he began formal piano lessons. He showed musical aptitude at school, including the ability to compose melodies and gained some notoriety by playing like Jerry Lee Lewis at school functions. At age 11, he won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. According to one of his instructors, John promptly played back, like a "gramophone record", a four-page piece by George Frideric Handel after hearing it for the first time.[21]

Elton John (known then as Reg Dwight) studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London for five years.
For the next five years, he attended Saturday classes at the Academy in central London, and he has said he enjoyed playing Frédéric Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach and singing in the choir during Saturday classes, but that he was not otherwise a diligent classical student.[21] "I kind of resented going to the Academy,” he said. "I was one of those children who could just about get away without practising and still pass, scrape through the grades."[21] He has said that he would sometimes skip classes and ride around on the London Underground.[21] Several instructors have attested that he was a "model student," and during the last few years he took lessons from a private tutor in addition to his classes at the Academy.[21] He left the Academy before taking the final exams.[24]
John's mother, though strict with her son, was more vivacious than her husband, and something of a free spirit. With Stanley Dwight uninterested in his son and often absent, John was raised primarily by his mother and maternal grandmother. When his father was home, the Dwights had vehement arguments that greatly distressed John.[21] When he was 14, they divorced. His mother then married a local painter, Fred Farebrother, a caring and supportive stepfather whom John affectionately called "Derf" ("Fred" backwards).[21] They moved into flat No. 1A in an eight-unit apartment building called Frome Court, not far from both previous homes. There John wrote the songs that launched his career as a rock star; he lived there until he had four albums simultaneously in the American Top 40.[25]
Career
Pub pianist to staff songwriter (1962–1969)
See also: Bluesology
At age 15, with his mother's and stepfather's help, John was hired as a pianist at a nearby pub, the Northwood Hills Hotel, playing Thursday to Sunday nights.[26][27] Known simply as "Reggie", he played a range of popular standards, including songs by Jim Reeves and Ray Charles, as well as his own songs.[28][29] A stint with a short-lived group called the Corvettes rounded out his time.[21] Although normal-sighted as a teenager, John began wearing horn-rimmed glasses to imitate Buddy Holly.[30][31]
In 1962, John and some friends formed a band called Bluesology. By day, he ran errands for a music publishing company; he divided his nights between solo gigs at a London hotel bar and working with Bluesology. By the mid-1960s, Bluesology was backing touring American soul and R&B musicians like the Isley Brothers, Major Lance and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. In 1966, the band became Long John Baldry's supporting band and played 16 times at the Marquee Club.[32]

The 1910 piano on which Elton John composed his first five albums, including his first hit single, "Your Song"
In 1967, John answered an advertisement in the British magazine New Musical Express, placed by Ray Williams, then the A&R manager for Liberty Records.[33] At their first meeting, Williams gave John an unopened envelope of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin, who had answered the same ad.[34] John wrote music for the lyrics and then sent it to Taupin, beginning a partnership that still continues. When the two first met in 1967, they recorded the first Elton John/Bernie Taupin song, "Scarecrow". Six months later, John began going by the name Elton John in homage to two members of Bluesology: saxophonist Elton Dean and vocalist Long John Baldry.[28] He legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John on 7 January 1972.[35]
The team of John and Taupin joined Dick James's DJM Records as staff songwriters in 1968, and over the next two years wrote material for various artists, among them Roger Cook and Lulu.[36] Taupin would write a batch of lyrics in under an hour and give it to John, who would write music for them in half an hour, disposing of the lyrics if he could not come up with anything quickly.[36] For two years they wrote easy-listening tunes for James to peddle to singers. Their early output included a contender for the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest 1969, for Lulu, called "I Can't Go On (Living Without You)". It came sixth of six songs. In 1969, John provided piano for Roger Hodgson on his first released single, "Mr. Boyd" by Argosy, a quartet that was completed by Caleb Quaye and Nigel Olsson.[37][38]
Debut album to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1969–1973)

Elton John on stage in 1971
On the advice of music publisher Steve Brown, John and Taupin began writing more complex songs for John to record for DJM. The first was the single "I've Been Loving You" (1968), produced by Caleb Quaye, Bluesology's former guitarist. In 1969, with Quaye, drummer Roger Pope, and bassist Tony Murray, John recorded another single, "Lady Samantha", and an album, Empty Sky. For their follow-up album, Elton John, John and Taupin enlisted Gus Dudgeon as producer and Paul Buckmaster as musical arranger. Elton John was released in April 1970 on DJM Records/Pye Records in the UK and Uni Records in the US, and established the formula for subsequent albums: gospel-chorded rockers and poignant ballads. The album's first single, "Border Song", peaked at 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. The second, "Your Song", reached number seven in the UK Singles Chart and number eight in the US, becoming John's first hit single as a singer.[39] The album soon became his first hit album, reaching number four on the US Billboard 200 and number five on the UK Albums Chart.[39][40]
Backed by former Spencer Davis Group drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray, John's first American concert took place at the Troubadour in Los Angeles on 25 August 1970, and was a success.[41] The concept album Tumbleweed Connection was released in October 1970 and reached number two in the UK and number five in the US.[39] The live album 17-11-70 (titled 11–17–70 in the US) was recorded at a live show aired from A&R Studios on WABC-FM in New York City. Sales of the live album took a blow in the US when an east-coast bootlegger released the performance several weeks before the official album, including all 60 minutes of the aircast, not just the 40 minutes selected by Dick James Music.[42]

Elton John at the Musikhalle Hamburg, in March 1972
John and Taupin then wrote the soundtrack to the 1971 film Friends and then the album Madman Across the Water, which reached number eight in the US and included the hit songs "Levon" and the album's opening track, "Tiny Dancer". In 1972, Davey Johnstone joined the Elton John Band on guitar and backing vocals. Released in 1972, Honky Château became John's first US number one album, spending five weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and began a streak of seven consecutive US number-one albums.[43] The album reached number two in the UK, and spawned the hit singles "Rocket Man" and "Honky Cat".[44]
The pop album Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player came out at the start of 1973 and reached number one in the UK, the US and Australia, among other countries.[39] The album produced the hits "Crocodile Rock", his first US Billboard Hot 100 number one, and "Daniel", which reached number two in the US and number four in the UK.[39][45] The album and "Crocodile Rock" were respectively the first album and single on the consolidated MCA Records label in the US, replacing MCA's other labels, including Uni.[46]
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, released in October 1973, gained instant critical acclaim and topped the chart on both sides of the Atlantic, remaining at number one for two months.[47] It also temporarily established John as a glam rock star. It contained the US number 1 "Bennie and the Jets", along with the hits "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Candle in the Wind", "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding". Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is included in the VH1 Classic Albums series, in which the making, recording, and popularity of the album are discussed, with concert and home video footage, including interviews.[48]
The Rocket Record Company to 21 at 33 (1974–1980)

Elton John on the piano during a live performance in 1975
John formed his own label, The Rocket Record Company (distributed in the US by MCA and initially by Island in the UK), and signed acts to it—notably Neil Sedaka (John sang background vocals on Sedaka's "Bad Blood") and Kiki Dee, in whom he took a personal interest. Instead of releasing his own records on Rocket, he signed an $8 million contract with MCA. When the contract was signed in 1974, MCA reportedly took out a $25 million insurance policy on John's life.[49] In 1974, MCA released Elton John's Greatest Hits, a UK and US number one that is certified Diamond by the RIAA for US sales of 16 million copies.[39][50]
In 1974, John collaborated with John Lennon on his cover of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", the B-side of which was Lennon's "One Day at a Time." In return, John was featured on "Whatever Gets You thru the Night" on Lennon's album Walls and Bridges. Later that year, in Lennon's last major live performance, the pair performed these two number-one hits, along with the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There", at Madison Square Garden in New York. Lennon made the rare stage appearance with John and his band to keep the promise he had made that he would appear on stage with him if "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" became a US number one single.[51]
Caribou was released in 1974, becoming John's third number one in the UK and topping the charts in the US, Canada and Australia.[39][52] Reportedly recorded in two weeks between live appearances, it featured "The Bitch Is Back" and the orchestrated "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me".[52] "Step into Christmas" was released as a stand-alone single in November 1973, and appears in the album's 1995 remastered reissue.[53]

Elton John often wore elaborate stage costumes as part of the glam rock era in the UK music scene.[54]
Pete Townshend of the Who asked John to play the "Local Lad" in the 1975 film adaptation of the rock opera Tommy, and to perform the song "Pinball Wizard". Drawing on power chords, John's version was recorded and used in the movie. The song charted at number 7 in the UK.[39] Bally subsequently released a "Captain Fantastic" pinball machine featuring an illustration of John in his movie guise.[55]
The 1975 autobiographical album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy debuted at number one in the US, the first album ever to do so, and stayed there for seven weeks.[56] John revealed his previously ambiguous personality on the album, with Taupin's lyrics describing their early days as struggling songwriters and musicians in London. The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time that is otherwise rare in his music. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" was the hit single from this album and captured an early turning point in John's life. The album's release signalled the end of the Elton John Band, as an unhappy and overworked John dismissed Olsson and Murray, two people who had contributed much of the band's signature sound and helped build his live following.[55]
According to Circus, a spokesman for John Reid said the decision was reached mutually via phone while John was in Australia promoting Tommy.[57] She said there was no way Reid could have fired them "because the band are not employed by John Reid, they're employed by Elton John."[57] She said Olsson would return to solo work and Murray would do session work "and possibly cut a solo album".[57]
Davey Johnstone and Ray Cooper were retained, Quaye and Roger Pope returned, and the new bassist was Kenny Passarelli; this rhythm section provided a heavier backbeat. James Newton Howard joined to arrange in the studio and to play keyboards.[58] In June 1975 John introduced the lineup before a crowd of 75,000 at London's Wembley Stadium.[58]

Elton John during a Captain Fantastic concert in 1975
The rock-oriented Rock of the Westies entered the US albums chart at number 1, as had Captain Fantastic, a previously unattained feat.[56] John's stage wardrobe now included ostrich feathers, $5,000 spectacles that spelled his name in lights, and costumes such as the Statue of Liberty, Donald Duck, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.[59] In 1975, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[60]
To celebrate five years since he had first appeared at the venue, in 1975, John played a two-night, four-show stand at the Troubadour. With seating limited to under 500 per show, the chance to purchase tickets was determined by a postcard lottery, with each winner allowed two tickets. Everyone who attended the performances received a hardbound "yearbook" of the band's history. That year, he also played piano on Kevin Ayers's Sweet Deceiver and was among the first and few white artists to appear on the African-American television series Soul Train.[47] On 9 August 1975, John was named the outstanding rock personality of the year at the first annual Rock Music Awards in Santa Monica, California.[61]
In May 1976, the live album Here and There was released, followed in October by the album Blue Moves, which contained the single "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word". His biggest success in 1976 was "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", a duet with Kiki Dee that topped a number of charts, including the UK, the US, Australia, France and Canada.[39][62]

Elton John performing live with Ray Cooper in Dublin in 1979
Besides being John's most commercially successful period, 1970–1976 is also held in the highest regard critically. In the three-year span from 1972 to 1975, John saw seven consecutive albums reach number one in the US, something that had not been accomplished before.[47] All six of his albums to make Rolling Stone's 2003 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" are from this period, with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ranked highest at number 91.[63]
In November 1977, John announced he was retiring from performing; Taupin began collaborating with others. Now producing only one album a year, John issued A Single Man in 1978 with a new lyricist, Gary Osborne; the album produced no singles that made the top 20 in the US, but the two singles from the album released in the UK, "Part-Time Love" and "Song for Guy", both made the top 20 there, with the latter reaching the top 5.[39] In 1979, accompanied by Ray Cooper, John became one of the first Western artists to tour the Soviet Union and Israel.[64][65] John returned to the US top ten with "Mama Can't Buy You Love" (number 9), a song MCA rejected in 1977, recorded with Philadelphia soul producer Thom Bell.[66] John said Bell was the first person to give him voice lessons and encouraged him to sing in a lower register.[67] A disco-influenced album, Victim of Love, was poorly received. In 1979, John and Taupin reunited, though they did not collaborate on a full album until 1983's Too Low For Zero. 21 at 33, released the following year, was a significant career boost, aided by his biggest hit in four years, "Little Jeannie" (number 3 US), with the lyrics by Gary Osborne.[68]
The Fox to Sleeping with the Past (1981–1989)

Elton John performing in the 1980s
John's 1981 album The Fox was recorded during the same sessions as 21 at 33 and included collaborations with Tom Robinson and Judie Tzuke. On 13 September 1980, with Olsson and Murray back in the Elton John Band, John performed a free concert to an estimated 400,000 fans on The Great Lawn in Central Park in New York.[69]
With original band members Johnstone, Murray and Olsson together again, John returned to the charts with the 1983 album Too Low for Zero, which included "I'm Still Standing" (No. 4 UK) and "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues", the latter of which featured Stevie Wonder on harmonica and reached number four in the US and number five in the UK.[39][62] In October 1983, John caused controversy when he broke the United Nations' cultural boycott on apartheid-era South Africa by performing at Sun City.[70] He married his close friend and sound engineer, Renate Blauel, on Valentine's Day 1984; the marriage lasted three years.[71]

Elton John costume from the 1986 Tour de Force Australian concerts, on display in the Hard Rock Cafe, London
In 1985, John was one of the many performers at Live Aid, held at Wembley Stadium.[72] He played "Bennie and the Jets" and "Rocket Man"; then "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" with Kiki Dee for the first time since the Hammersmith Odeon on 24 December 1982; and introduced George Michael, still then of Wham!, to sing "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me".[72] In 1984, he released Breaking Hearts, which featured the song "Sad Songs (Say So Much)", number five in the US and number seven in the UK.[39] John also recorded material with Millie Jackson in 1985. In 1986, he played the piano on two tracks on the heavy metal band Saxon's album Rock the Nations.[73]
In 1987, John won a libel case against The Sun, which published false allegations that he had had sex with rent boys.[74] In 1988, he performed five sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in New York, giving him 26 for his career.[75] Netting over $20 million, 2,000 items of John's memorabilia were auctioned off at Sotheby's in London.[76]
John had other hits during the 1980s, including "Nikita", whose music video was directed by Ken Russell. The song reached number three in the UK and number seven in the US. In 1986, a live orchestral version of "Candle in the Wind" reached number six in the US, while "I Don't Wanna Go on with You Like That" reached number two there in 1988.[39][62] John's highest-charting single was a collaboration with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder called "That's What Friends Are For". It reached number one in the US in 1985; credited as Dionne and Friends, the song raised funds for HIV/AIDS research.[62] His albums continued to sell, but of those released in the latter half of the 1980s, only Reg Strikes Back (number 16, 1988) placed in the top 20 in the US.[62]
"Sacrifice" to Aida (1990–1999)
In 1990, John achieved his first solo UK number one hit single, with "Sacrifice" (coupled with "Healing Hands") from the previous year's album Sleeping with the Past; it stayed at the top spot for six weeks.[77] The following year, "Basque" won the Grammy for Best Instrumental, and a guest concert appearance at Wembley Arena John made on George Michael's cover of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" was released as a single and topped the charts in both the UK and the US.[78] At the 1991 Brit Awards in London, John won Best British Male.[79]
In 1992, John released the US number 8 album The One, featuring the hit song "The One".[80][81] He also released "Runaway Train", a duet he recorded with his longtime friend Eric Clapton, with whom he played on Clapton's World Tour.[82] John and Taupin then signed a music publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music for an estimated $39 million over 12 years, including the largest cash advance in music publishing history.[83] In April 1992, John appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium, performing "The Show Must Go On" with the remaining members of Queen, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" with Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses and Queen's remaining members.[84] In September, John performed "The One" at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards and closed the ceremony performing "November Rain" with Guns N' Roses.[85] The following year, he released Duets, which featured collaborations with 15 artists, including Tammy Wynette and RuPaul. This included a new collaboration with Kiki Dee, "True Love", which reached the Top 10 of the UK charts.[86] In the same year, The Bunbury Tails, a multi-artist charity album, was released, which was the soundtrack to the British animated television series of the same name. "Up The Revolution" was John's track, alongside contributions from George Harrison, the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton. The album was issued briefly, and only in the UK.[87]
"For myself as well as for many others no-one has been there more for inspiration than Elton John. When we talk of great rock duos like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, John (Lennon) and Paul (McCartney), Mick (Jagger) and Keith (Richards), I like to think of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Also tonight I think that Elton should be honoured for his great work and contribution in the fight against AIDS. And also his bravery in exposing all the triumphs and tragedies of his personal life. "
—Axl Rose speech inducting Elton John into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[88]
Along with Tim Rice, John wrote the songs for the 1994 Disney animated film The Lion King. At the 67th Academy Awards, three of the five nominees for the Academy Award for Best Song were from The Lion King soundtrack. John won the award for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight".[89] Both that and "Circle of Life" became hits.[90][91] "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" also won the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the 37th Annual Grammy Awards.[89] After the release of The Lion King soundtrack, the album remained at the top of Billboard 200 for nine weeks. On 10 November 1999, the RIAA certified The Lion King "Diamond" for selling 15 million copies.[92]
In 1994, John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Guns N' Roses' frontman Axl Rose.[93] In 1995, he released the album Made in England (number 3). The title track is an autobiographical recounting of parts of his life. The album also featured the single "Believe".[94] John performed "Believe" at the 1995 Brit Awards and won the Outstanding Contribution to Music prize.[95]

Elton John with Luciano Pavarotti in Modena, 1996
A duet with Luciano Pavarotti, "Live Like Horses", reached number nine in the UK in December 1996.[39] A compilation album, Love Songs, was released in 1996.[96] Early in 1997, John held a 50th birthday party, costumed as Louis XIV of France, with 500 friends. He performed with the surviving members of Queen in Paris at the opening night (17 January 1997) of Le Presbytère N'a Rien Perdu De Son Charme Ni Le Jardin De Son Éclat, a work by French ballet legend Maurice Béjart that draws upon the AIDS crisis and the deaths of Freddie Mercury and the company's principal dancer, Jorge Donn. Later in 1997, two close friends died: designer Gianni Versace was murdered, and Diana, Princess of Wales died in a Paris car crash on 31 August.[97]
In early September, John asked Taupin to revise the lyrics of their 1973 song "Candle in the Wind" to honour Diana, and Taupin agreed.[98] On 6 September 1997, John performed "Candle in the Wind 1997" live for the only time at Diana's funeral in Westminster Abbey.[99][100] The song became the fastest- and biggest-selling single of all time, eventually selling over 33 million copies worldwide,[92][101] the best-selling single in UK chart history,[102] the best-selling single in Billboard history and the first single certified Diamond in the US, where it sold over 11 million copies.[5][92][103] The 2009 Guinness World Records states that the song is "the biggest-selling single since UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s, having accumulated worldwide sales of 33 million copies".[6] The song's proceeds of approximately £55 million were donated to Diana's charities via the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.[104] It won the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards in 1998.[101] The song "Something About the Way You Look Tonight" was released as a double A-side.[100]
On 15 September 1997, John appeared at the Music for Montserrat charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, performing "Your Song", "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" and "Live Like Horses" solo before finishing with "Hey Jude" alongside Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler and Sting.[105] In November 1997, John performed in the BBC's Children in Need charity single "Perfect Day", which reached number one in the UK.[106] John appeared in the Spice Girls film Spice World, released in December 1997.[107]
The Lion King musical debuted on Broadway in 1997 and the West End in 1999. In 2014, it had grossed over $6 billion and became the top-earning title in box-office history for both stage productions and films, surpassing the record previously held by Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera.[108] In addition to The Lion King, John composed music for a Disney's musical production Aida in 1999 with lyricist Tim Rice, for which they received the Tony Award for Best Original Score at the 54th Tony Awards,[109] and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards.[110][111] The musical had its world premiere at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre and went on to Chicago and eventually Broadway. John released a live compilation album, Elton John One Night Only – The Greatest Hits, featuring songs from the show he did at Madison Square Garden in New York City that same year. A concept album of songs from the musical Aida, Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida, was also released and featured the John duets "Written in the Stars" with LeAnn Rimes, and "I Know the Truth" with Janet Jackson.[112]
Billy Elliot the Musical and 60th birthday (2000–2009)

Elton John performs at the Skagerak Arena in Skien, June 2009
By this time, John disliked appearing in his own music videos; the video for "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" featured Justin Timberlake portraying a young John, and the video for "I Want Love" featured Robert Downey, Jr. lip-syncing the song.[113] At the 2001 Grammy Awards, John performed "Stan" with Eminem.[114] One month after the 11 September attacks, John appeared at the Concert for New York City, performing "I Want Love" as well as "Your Song" as a duet with Billy Joel.[115]
In August 2003, John's fifth UK number one single, "Are You Ready for Love", topped the charts.[116] Returning to musical theatre, John composed music for a West End production of Billy Elliot the Musical in 2005 with playwright Lee Hall. Opening to strong reviews, the show won four Laurence Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical. The 11th-longest-running musical in West End history, the London production ran through April 2016, with 4,566 performances.[117] As of December 2015, Billy Elliot has been seen by over 5.25 million people in London and nearly 11 million people worldwide (on Broadway, in Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago, Toronto, Seoul, the Netherlands and São Paulo, Brazil etc.), grossed over $800 million worldwide and won over 80 theatre awards internationally.[118] John's only theatrical project with Taupin is Lestat: The Musical, based on Anne Rice's vampire novels. It received negative reviews from critics and closed in May 2006 after 39 performances.[119] John featured on rapper Tupac Shakur's posthumous single "Ghetto Gospel", which topped the UK charts in July 2005.[39]

Elton John has had two residencies at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. The first, The Red Piano, ran from 2004 to 2009, and the second, The Million Dollar Piano (sign pictured) ran from 2011 to 2017.
In September 2003, John headlined the final night of the 100th birthday celebration of motorcycle manufacturer Harley Davidson, much to the disappointment of the 'biker' crowd, as he has neither ridden nor sung about motorcycles.[120] In October 2003, he announced that he had signed an exclusive agreement to perform 75 shows over three years at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip. The show, The Red Piano, was a multimedia concert featuring massive props and video montages created by David LaChapelle. Effectively, he and Celine Dion shared performances at Caesars Palace throughout the year; while one performed, the other rested. The first of these shows took place on 13 February 2004.[121] In February 2006, John and Dion sang together at the venue to raise money for Harrah's Entertainment Inc. workers affected by the 2005 hurricanes, performing "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" and "Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting)."[122]
The Walt Disney Company named John a Disney Legend for his contributions to Disney's films and theatrical works on 9 October 2006.[123] Also in 2006, he told Rolling Stone that he planned for his next record to be in R&B and hip hop. "I want to work with Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, Snoop [Dogg], Kanye [West], Eminem and just see what happens", he said.[124] West sampled John's “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” on his 2007 song “Good Morning” and in 2010 invited him to his Hawaii studio to play piano and sing on “All of the Lights.”[125]

Elton John on piano at the Concert for Diana, commemorating the 10 year passing of Princess Diana, at Wembley Stadium on 1 July 2007
In March 2007, John performed at Madison Square Garden for a record-breaking 60th time for his 60th birthday; the concert was broadcast live and a DVD recording was released as Elton 60—Live at Madison Square Garden;[126] a greatest-hits compilation CD, Rocket Man—Number Ones, was released in 17 different versions worldwide, including a CD/DVD combo; and his back catalogue—almost 500 songs from 32 albums—became available for legal paid download.[127]
On 1 July 2007, John appeared at the Concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium in honour of Diana, Princess of Wales on what would have been her 46th birthday, with the concert's proceeds going to Diana's charities as well as to charities of which her sons Prince William and Prince Harry are patrons.[128][129] John opened the concert with "Your Song" and closed it with "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting", "Tiny Dancer", and "Are You Ready For Love".[128]
On 21 June 2008, John performed his 200th show at Caesars Palace. A DVD/CD package of The Red Piano was released through Best Buy in November 2008. A two-year global tour was sandwiched between commitments in Las Vegas, some of the venues of which were new to John. The Red Piano Tour closed in Las Vegas in April 2009.[130] In a September 2008 GQ interview John said, "I'm going on the road again with Billy Joel again next year", referring to "Face to Face", a series of concerts featuring the two. The tour began in March.[131]
In 2009, John accepted Jerry Cantrell's invitation to collaborate with his band Alice in Chains.[132] John played the piano in the song "Black Gives Way to Blue", a tribute to the band's late lead singer, Layne Staley, which was the title track and closing song of the album Black Gives Way to Blue, released in September 2009.[133] The first concert Staley attended was one of John's, and his mother said he was blown away by it.[133] Cantrell added. "Elton is a very important musical influence to all of us in varying degrees, and especially to me. My first album was Elton John’s Greatest Hits. And actually, we were reminded by Layne's stepfather that Elton was his first concert, so it was all really appropriate. So I wrote [Elton] an e-mail and explained what his music meant to us, and that this song was for Layne. We sent him a demo, and he said it was beautiful and he’d love to play on it. In the studio he was really relaxed and gracious, and he's got a great sense of humor. We were just trying to be cool: 'Oh, yeah, no big deal.' But we were excited. [Drummer Sean Kinney] and I had to walk out a couple of times to smoke cigarettes, like, 'Holy shit, this is killer.' It's one of those highlights you can't expect in life, and you're lucky to get them once in a while. And that is one."[134] John said he had long admired Cantrell and couldn't resist the offer.[135][136] "I was kind of surprised that Alice in Chains would ask me to do anything. I never thought I’d play on an Alice in Chains record. When I heard the song I really wanted to do it. I liked the fact that it was so beautiful and very simple. They had a great idea of what they wanted me to do on it and it turned out great", John said.[134]
The Union to Wonderful Crazy Night (2010–2018)

Elton John on World AIDS Day in Sydney, Australia on 1 December 2011
John performed a piano duet with Lady Gaga at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards.[137] On 6 June 2010, he performed at the fourth wedding of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh for a reported $1 million.[138] Eleven days later, and 17 years to the day after his previous performance in Israel, he performed at the Ramat Gan Stadium; this was significant because of other then-recent cancellations by other performers in the fallout surrounding an Israeli raid on Gaza Flotilla the month before. In his introduction to that concert, John said that he and other musicians should not "cherry-pick our conscience", in reference to Elvis Costello, who was to have performed in Israel two weeks after John did but cancelled in the wake of the aforementioned raid, citing his conscience.[139][140]
John released The Union on 19 October 2010. He has said the album, a collaboration with American singer, songwriter and sideman Leon Russell, marked a new chapter in his recording career, saying: "I don't have to make pop records any more."[141] He began his new show The Million Dollar Piano at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, on 28 September 2011,[142] and performed it there for the next three years. He performed his 3000th concert on 8 October 2011 at Caesars.[143] Also in 2011, John performed vocals on "Snowed in at Wheeler Street" with Kate Bush for her album 50 Words for Snow.[144] On 3 February 2012, he visited Costa Rica for the first time, performing at the recently built National Stadium.[145]

Elton John performing at the Allstate Arena, Chicago in November 2013
On 4 June 2012, John performed at the Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace, including "Your Song", "Crocodile Rock" and "I'm Still Standing".[146] On 30 June, he performed in Kiev, Ukraine, at a joint concert with Queen + Adam Lambert for the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation.[147] An album containing remixes of songs that he recorded in the 1970s, Good Morning to the Night, was released in July 2012. The remixes were conducted by Australian group Pnau, and the album reached number one in the UK.[148] At the 2012 Pride of Britain Awards on 30 October, along with Michael Caine, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and Stephen Fry, John recited Rudyard Kipling's poem "If—" in tribute to the 2012 British Olympic and Paralympics athletes.[149]
In February 2013, John performed a duet with singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards.[150] Later in 2013, he collaborated with rock band Queens of the Stone Age on their sixth studio album, ...Like Clockwork, contributing piano and vocals on the song "Fairweather Friends". He said he was a fan of frontman Josh Homme's side project, Them Crooked Vultures, and had phoned Homme to ask if he could perform on the album.[151] In September 2013, John received the first Brits Icon Award for his "lasting impact" on the culture of the United Kingdom.[152] Rod Stewart presented him with the award on stage at the London Palladium before the two performed a duet of "Sad Songs (Say So Much)".[153] John's 31st album, The Diving Board, produced by T-Bone Burnett, was released in September 2013 and reached number three in the UK and number four in the US.[39][154] In October 2015, it was announced he would release his 32nd studio album, Wonderful Crazy Night, on 5 February 2016. It too was produced by Burnett.[155] The album's first single, "Looking Up", was released in the same month. This album marked John's first full album recorded with his touring band since 2006's The Captain & the Kid.[156] He also had a major role, as himself, in the action sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which was released in September 2017.[157]

Elton John performing a tribute to the late George Michael at Twickenham, London in June 2017
On 26 January 2017, it was announced that John would compose the score for the Broadway musical version of the novel The Devil Wears Prada and its film adaptation, with Kevin McCollum as producer and Paul Rudnick writing the lyrics and story. The timeline for the musical is yet to be announced.[158] In June 2017, John appeared in the award-winning documentary The American Epic Sessions, directed by Bernard MacMahon. In the film, he recorded live on the restored first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s.[159][160] John composed and arranged a lyric by Taupin, “Two Fingers of Whiskey”, written specially for the film, live on camera with the help of Burnett and Jack White.[161][162] Danny Eccleston in Mojo pointed out that “in one of the series’ most extraordinary moments, Elton John arrives toting a box-fresh lyric by Bernie Taupin and works it up in an instant, the song materializing in front of the viewers eyes before John and Jack White go for the take. There's the magic right there.”[163] “Two Fingers of Whiskey” was released on 9 June 2017 on Music from The American Epic Sessions: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.[164]
Rocketman biopic and retirement tour (2018–present)
On 24 January 2018, it was announced that John was retiring from touring and would soon embark on a three-year farewell tour. The first concert took place in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on 8 September 2018. John cited spending time with his children as the reason for his retirement: "Ten years ago if you asked me if I would stop touring I would have said no. But we had children and that changed our lives. I have had an amazing life and career but my life has changed. My priorities are now my children and my husband and my family."[165] Consisting of more than 300 concerts worldwide, the tour is expected to end in England in December 2020.[166] In September 2018, John reportedly signed an agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG) to represent his new music "for the rest of his career" in addition to his work from the last 50 years.[167][168]
A biopic about John's life from his childhood through the 1980s, Rocketman, was produced by Paramount Pictures and released in May 2019.[169] It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who directed Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic about John's close friend Freddie Mercury, and stars Taron Egerton as John.[170][171] John and Taron Egerton performed a new song written for Rocketman, "(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again," which premiered on BBC Radio 2 in 2019.[172] In October 2019, John released his first official autobiography, Me.[173][174] As part of his farewell tour, in June 2019, John was presented with France's highest civilian award, the Legion d'honneur, by President Emmanuel Macron during a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in Paris. Macron called John a "melodic genius" and one of the first gay artists to give a voice to the LGBT community.[175]
On 25 June 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed John as one of hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.[176]
Musicianship

Elton John with Bernie Taupin (left) in 1971. They have collaborated on more than thirty albums to date.
Elton John has written with Bernie Taupin since 1967, when he answered an advertisement for talent placed in the popular UK music publication, New Musical Express, by Liberty records A&R man Ray Williams.[33] The pair have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.[177] Their method involves Taupin writing the lyrics on his own, and John then putting them to music, with the two never in the same room during the process. Taupin writes a set of lyrics, then sends them to John, who then writes the music and records the song.[178] In November 2017, John said of their 50-year partnership, "we've never ever had an argument professionally or personally, which is extraordinary because most songwriters sometimes split up because they get jealous of each other. And it's exciting because it's never changed from the first day we wrote songs. I still write the song when he's not there and then I go and play it to him. So the excitement is still the same as it was from day one and that's kept it fresh and it's kept it exciting."[179]
In 1992, along with Taupin, John was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. He is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA).[180] His voice was once classed as a tenor; it is now a baritone.[21] His piano playing is influenced by classical music and gospel music.[181] He used Paul Buckmaster to arrange the music on his studio albums during the 1970s.[182]
Personal life
Sexuality and family
In the late 1960s, John was engaged to be married to his first lover, secretary Linda Woodrow, who is mentioned in the song "Someone Saved My Life Tonight".[183][184] In 1970, right after his first US shows in Los Angeles, he lost his virginity to and started his first gay relationship with John Reid, the Tamla Motown label manager for the UK, who later became John's manager until 1998. The relationship ended five years later.[185] He married German recording engineer Renate Blauel on 14 February 1984, in Darling Point, Sydney, with speculation that the marriage was a cover for his homosexuality. John had come out as bisexual in a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone,[183][184] but after his divorce from Blauel in 1988, he told the magazine in 1992 that he was "quite comfortable about being gay."[186]
In 1993, John began a relationship with David Furnish, a former advertising executive and now filmmaker originally from Toronto. On 21 December 2005 (the day the Civil Partnership Act came into force), John and Furnish were among the first couples to form a civil partnership in the United Kingdom, which was held at the Windsor Guildhall.[187] After gay marriage became legal in England in March 2014, John and Furnish married in Windsor, Berkshire, on 21 December 2014, the ninth anniversary of their civil partnership.[188][189][190]
They have two sons.[191] The elder, Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, was born to a surrogate mother on 25 December 2010 in California.[192][193] The younger, Elijah Joseph Daniel Furnish-John, was born on 11 January 2013 to the same woman.[194] John also has ten godchildren, including Sean Lennon, David and Victoria Beckham's sons Brooklyn and Romeo, Elizabeth Hurley's son Damian Hurley, and Seymour Stein's daughter.[195]
In 2010, some Christian groups in the US criticised John after he described Jesus as a "compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems". Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and opponent of gay marriage, responded: "To call Jesus a homosexual is to label him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, 'From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.'"[196]
In 2008, John said he preferred civil partnerships to marriage for gay people,[197] but by 2012, he changed his position and become a staunch supporter of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom. "There is a world of difference between calling someone your 'partner' and calling them your 'husband'. 'Partner' is a word that should be preserved for people you play tennis with, or work alongside in business. It doesn't come close to describing the love that I have for David, and he for me. In contrast, 'husband' does", John said.[198] In 2014, he claimed Jesus would have been in favour of same-sex marriage.[199]
In 2013, John resisted calls to boycott Russia in protest at the Russian gay propaganda law, but told fans at a Moscow concert that the laws were "inhumane and isolating", and he was "deeply saddened and shocked over the current legislation".[200] In a January 2014 interview, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke of John in an attempt to show that there was no discrimination against gays in Russia, saying, "Elton John – he's an extraordinary person, a distinguished musician, and millions of our people sincerely love him, regardless of his sexual orientation."[201] John responded by offering to introduce Putin to Russians abused under Russian legislation banning "homosexual propaganda".[201] On 24 September 2015, the Associated Press reported that Putin called John and invited him to meet in the future to discuss LGBT rights in Russia.[202] Putin's call came just a few days after two pranksters phoned John, pretending to be Putin and his spokesman, and causing John to erroneously thank Putin for the call on John's Instagram account.[203]
Wealth

The lined drive to Elton John's home in Woodside in Old Windsor, Berkshire
In April 2009, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated John's wealth at £175 million (US$265 million) and ranked him the 322nd wealthiest person in Britain.[204] John was estimated to have a fortune of £195 million in the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List, making him one of the 10 wealthiest people in the British music industry.[205] Aside from his main home, Woodside, in Old Windsor, Berkshire, John owns residences in Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, Nice and Venice. His property in Nice is on Mont Boron. John is an art collector and is believed to have one of the largest private photography collections in the world.[206]
In 2000, John admitted to spending £30 million in just under two years—an average of £1.5 million a month. Between January 1996 and September 1997, he spent more than £9.6m on property and £293,000 on flowers.[207] In June 2001, John sold 20 of his cars at Christie's, saying he never had the chance to drive them because he was out of the country so often.[208] The sale, which included a 1993 Jaguar XJ220, the most expensive at £234,750, and several Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, and Bentleys, raised nearly £2 million.[209] In 2003, John sold the contents of his Holland Park home—expected to fetch £800,000 at Sotheby's—to modernise the decoration and to display some of his contemporary art collection.[210] Every year since 2004, John has opened a shop called "Elton's Closet", in which he sells his secondhand clothes.[211]
Other
By 1975, the pressures of stardom had begun to take a serious toll on John. During "Elton Week" in Los Angeles that year, he had a cocaine overdose.[212] He also developed the eating disorder bulimia. In a 2002 CNN interview with Larry King, King asked if John knew of Diana, Princess of Wales's eating disorder. John replied, "Yes, I did. We were both bulimic."[213] In a 29 July 2019 Instagram post, John stated he had been sober for 29 years.[214]
A longtime tennis enthusiast, he wrote the song "Philadelphia Freedom" in tribute to his friend Billie Jean King's World Team Tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. King was a player-coach for the team at the time. John and King remain friends and co-host an annual pro-am event to benefit AIDS charities, most notably the Elton John AIDS Foundation, of which King is a chairperson. John, who maintains a part-time residence in Atlanta, Georgia, became a fan of the Atlanta Braves baseball team when he moved there in 1991.[215]
An admirer of Monty Python (John would present the comedy troupe the Empire Inspiration Award in 1997), in 1975 he was among a group of musicians who helped finance their film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.[216]
In 2015, John was named one of GQ's 50 best-dressed British men.[217] On 22 April 2017, John was discharged from hospital after two nights of intensive care for contracting "a harmful and unusual" bacterial infection during his return flight home from a South American tour in Santiago, Chile, and was forced to cancel all his shows scheduled for April and May 2017.[218]
Football
"At the 1984 Cup Final, the song 'Abide with Me' was played and that's why I cried. The song evokes my memory of childhood."
—Elton John on his emotions during the FA Cup Final's traditional pre-match hymn.[219]
Having supported Watford since growing up locally, Elton John became the club's chairman and director in 1976, appointing Graham Taylor as manager and investing large sums of money as the club rose three divisions into the English First Division.[220] The pinnacle of the club's success was finishing runners up in the First Division to Liverpool in 1983 and reaching the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium in 1984. John sold the club to Jack Petchey in 1987, but remained president.[221]
In 1997, John repurchased the club from Petchey and once again became chairman. He stepped down in 2002 when the club needed a full-time chairman, but continued as president.[221] Although no longer the majority shareholder, John still holds a significant financial interest. He held a concert at Watford's home stadium, Vicarage Road, in June 2005, donating the funds to the club, and another in May 2010.[221] He has remained friends with a number of high-profile players in football, including Pelé and David Beckham.[195][222] From late 1975 to 1976, he was a part-owner of the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League. On 13 December 2014, he appeared at Watford's Vicarage Road with his husband and sons for the opening of the "Sir Elton John stand".[223] He called the occasion "one of the greatest days of my life".[223]
His paternal cousin Roy Dwight was a professional footballer, who scored for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup Final before breaking his leg later in the same match.[224]
Political views
John announced his intention to vote Remain during the UK's 2016 EU referendum on Instagram, sharing an image with the words “build bridges not walls”, along with the caption “I'm voting to remain. #StrongerInEurope”.[225] In 2019, he said the Brexit vote and the way it had been handled had made him ashamed.[226]
AIDS Foundation
Main article: Elton John AIDS Foundation
John has said that he took risks with unprotected sex during the 1980s and considers himself lucky to have avoided contracting HIV.[227] In 1986, he joined with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder to record the single "That's What Friends Are For", with profits donated to the American Foundation for AIDS Research. The song won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. In April 1990, John performed his 1968 ballad "Skyline Pigeon" at the funeral of Ryan White, a teenage haemophiliac he had befriended.[228]

Elton John and United States Secretary of State John Kerry discuss AIDS relief and the work of the Elton John AIDS Foundation at the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C., 24 October 2014
John became more closely associated with AIDS charities following the deaths of his friends Ryan White in 1990 and Freddie Mercury in 1991, raising large amounts of money and using his public profile to raise awareness of the disease. He founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992 as a charity to fund programmes for HIV/AIDS prevention, for the elimination of prejudice and discrimination against HIV/AIDS-affected individuals, and to provide services to people living with or at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. This continues to be one of his passions. In 1993, he began hosting his annual Academy Award Party, which has become one of the highest-profile Oscar parties in the Hollywood film industry and has raised over US$200 million.[11]
To raise money for his AIDS charity, John annually hosts a White Tie & Tiara Ball on the grounds of his home in Old Windsor in Berkshire, to which many celebrities are invited.[229] The 9th annual White Tie & Tiara Ball took place on 28 June 2007. The menu consisted of a truffle soufflé followed by surf and turf and a giant Knickerbocker glory ice cream. An auction followed, emceed by Stephen Fry. A Rolls Royce 'Phantom' drophead coupe and a piece of Tracey Emin's artwork both raised £800,000 for the charity fund, with the total amount raised reaching £3.5 million.[230] Later John sang "Delilah" with Tom Jones and "Big Spender" with Shirley Bassey.[231] The 2011 guests included Sarah, Duchess of York, Elizabeth Hurley and George Michael (who performed "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with John), and the auction raised £5 million, adding to the £45 million the Balls have raised for John's foundation.[229]
Honours and awards

Sir Elton John's coat of arms. Granted to him in 1987, the shield includes piano keys and records. The Spanish motto, "el tono es bueno", combines a pun on Elton John's name with the translation "the tone is good".[232] The black, red and gold colours are also those of Watford F.C. The steel helmet above the shield faced forwards and with its visor open indicates that John is a knight.
John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1994. He and Taupin had already been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992. John was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1995.[233] For his charitable, work he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on 24 February 1998.[234][235] In October 1975, John became the 1,662nd person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[60]
John was awarded Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.[236] He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2004 and a Disney Legends Award in 2006. In 2000, he was named the MusiCares Person of the Year for his artistic achievement in the music industry and dedication to philanthropy.[237] In 2010, he received the PRS for Music Heritage Award, which was erected on The Namaste Lounge Pub in Northwood, London, where John performed his first gig.[238] In 2019, President Emmanuel Macron appointed John a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.[175]
Music awards include the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" from The Lion King, the 1994 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" from The Lion King, and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Aida, all of which he shared with Tim Rice. He has also received five Brit Awards, including the 1991 award for Best British Male, and awards for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 1986 and 1995. In 2013, John received the first Brits Icon award in recognition of his "lasting impact" on UK culture, which was presented to him by his close friend Rod Stewart.[152][239]
Academy Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1995
"Can You Feel the Love Tonight"
Best Original Song
Won
"Circle of Life"
Nominated
"Hakuna Matata"
Brit Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1977
Himself
Best British Male
Nominated
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Best British Album
1984
Himself
Best British Male
1986
Outstanding Contribution to Music
Won
1991
Best British Male
Sleeping with the Past
Best British Album
Nominated
1993
The One
Himself
Best British Male
1995
Outstanding Contribution to Music
Won
1998
Freddie Mercury Award
Best British Male
Nominated
"Candle in the Wind 1997"
Best British Single
2002
"I Want Love"
Best British Video
Himself
Best British Male
2013
Brits Icon
Won
Grammy Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1971
Himself
Best New Artist
Nominated
Elton John
Album of the Year
Best Contemporary Male Vocalist
1972
Friends
Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture
1974
"Daniel"
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1975
"Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"
Record of the Year
Caribou
Album of the Year
1976
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1977
"Don't Go Breaking My Heart" with Kiki Dee
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1980
"Mama Can't Buy You Love"
Best R&B Vocal Performance – Male
1983
"Blue Eyes"
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1985
"Restless"
1987
"That's What Friends Are For"
Record of the Year
Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal
Won
1988
"Candle in the Wind" (live)
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
Nominated
1992
"Basque"
Best Instrumental Composition
Won
1993
"Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with George Michael
Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal
Nominated
"The One"
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1995
"Can You Feel the Love Tonight"
Song of the Year
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
Won
Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television
Nominated
"Circle of Life"
Song of the Year
1996
"Believe"
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
1998
"Candle in the Wind 1997"
Won
1999
Himself
Grammy Legend Award
2001
Elton John & Tim Rice's Aida
Best Musical Show Album
2002
Songs from the West Coast
Best Pop Vocal Album
Nominated
"I Want Love"
Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
2003
"Original Sin"
2005
"Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" with Ray Charles
Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals
2011
"If It Wasn't for Bad" with Leon Russell
Ivor Novello Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1974
"Daniel"
Best Song Musically and Lyrically
Won
1977
"Don't Go Breaking My Heart"
The Best Pop Song
International Hit of the Year
Nominated
Most Performed Work
1979
"Song for Guy"
Best Instrumental or Popular Orchestral Work
Won
1986
Himself
Outstanding Contribution to British Music
"Nikita"
International Hit of the Year
Nominated
Best Song Musically and Lyrically
Won
1991
"Sacrifice"
Best Selling A-Side
1995
"Circle of Life"
Best Song Included in Film
1998
"Candle in the Wind 1997"
Best Selling UK Single
2000
Himself
International Achievement in Musical Theater
2007
"I Don't Feel Like Dancin'"
Most Performed Work
International Hit of the Year
Nominated
Juno Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1986
"Nikita"
International Single of the Year
Nominated
MTV Video Music Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1984
"I'm Still Standing"
Best Choreography
Nominated
Best Editing
1985
"Sad Songs (Say So Much)"
Best Choreography
1987
Himself
Special Recognition Award
Won
1995
"Believe"
Best Male Video
Nominated
2002
"This Train Don't Stop There Anymore"
Best Direction
Best Male Video
MVPA Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
2002
"This Train Don't Stop There Anymore"
Best Hair
Won
2003
"Original Sin"
Best Adult Contemporary Video
NRJ Music Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
2003
"Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" with Blue
International Song of the Year
Won
Tony Awards

Year
Nominee / work
Award
Result
1998
The Lion King
Best Original Musical Score
Nominated
2000
Aida
Won
2009
Billy Elliot the Musical
Nominated
2010
Next Fall
Best Play (as producer)
Elton John Band

The Elton John Band performing on 15 March 2012. Left to right: John, Johnstone, Birch, and (not pictured, right), Olsson and Cooper
Since 1970, John's band, of which he is the pianist and lead singer, has been known as the Elton John Band.[240][241] The band has had multiple line-up changes, but Nigel Olsson, Davey Johnstone, and Ray Cooper have been members (albeit not continuously) since 1969, 1971 and 1974 respectively. Olsson left the band in 1984 but rejoined in 2000.[242][243] Cooper has worked on and off with the Elton John Band, because he maintains obligations to other musicians as a session player and sideman as a road-tour percussionist.[244]
Current members
Elton John – lead vocals, piano (1969–present)
Nigel Olsson – drums, vocals (1969–1975, 1980–1984, 1988, 2001–present)
Davey Johnstone – guitar, musical director, vocals (1971–1977, 1982–present)
Ray Cooper – percussion (1973–1977, 1979, 1985–87, 1993–95, 2009–present)
John Mahon – percussion, vocals (1997–present)
Kim Bullard – keyboards (2009–present)
Matt Bissonette – bass guitar, vocals (2012–present)
Previous band members
Tony Murray – bass (1969–1970)
Roger Pope – drums, percussion (1969–1971, 1975–1976, died 2013)
Caleb Quaye – guitar, drums, percussion (1969–1971, 1975–1976)
Dee Murray – bass guitar, vocals (1970–1975, 1980–1984, 1988, died 1992)
David Hentschel – synthesiser (1972–1973)
Kenny Passarelli – bass guitar, background vocals (1975–1976)
James Newton Howard – keyboards, conductor, orchestrations (1975–1981)
Tim Renwick – guitar (1980)
Richie Zito – guitar (1980)
Fred Mandel – keyboards, guitars (1984–1990)
Charlie Morgan – drums (1985–1987, 1990, 1992–1998)
David Paton – bass guitar, vocals (1985–1986)
Jody Linscott – percussion (1986–1987)
Romeo Williams – bass guitar (1988–1990)
Jonathan Moffett – drums (1988–1989)
Guy Babylon – keyboards (1988–2009, his death)
Bob Birch – bass guitar, vocals (1992–2012, his death)
John Jorgenson – guitars, saxophone, pedal steel, mandolin, vocals (1995–2000)
Jack Bruno – drums (1998–1999)
Táta Vega – backing vocals (2010–2014)
Rose Stone – backing vocals (2010–2014)
Lisa Stone – backing vocals (2010–2014)
Jean Witherspoon – backing vocals (2010–2014)
Luka Šulić – cello (2011–2014)
Stjepan Hauser – cello (2011–2014)
Discography
Main articles: Elton John albums discography and singles
Studio albums
Empty Sky (1969)
Elton John (1970)
Tumbleweed Connection (1970)
Madman Across the Water (1971)
Honky Château (1972)
Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (1973)
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)
Caribou (1974)
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)
Rock of the Westies (1975)

Blue Moves (1976)
A Single Man (1978)
Victim of Love (1979)
21 at 33 (1980)
The Fox (1981)
Jump Up! (1982)
Too Low for Zero (1983)
Breaking Hearts (1984)
Ice on Fire (1985)
Leather Jackets (1986)

Reg Strikes Back (1988)
Sleeping with the Past (1989)
The One (1992)
Made in England (1995)
The Big Picture (1997)
Songs from the West Coast (2001)
Peachtree Road (2004)
The Captain & the Kid (2006)
The Diving Board (2013)
Wonderful Crazy Night (2016)

Collaboration albums
Live in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (1986)
Duets (1993)
The Union with Leon Russell (2010)
Good Morning to the Night with Pnau (2012)
Soundtrack albums
Friends (1971)
The Lion King (1994)
Aida (1998)
Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida (1999)
The Muse (1999)
The Road to El Dorado (2000)
Billy Elliot (2005)
Lestat (2005)
Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)
The Lion King (2019)
Filmography
Born to Boogie, US (1972) as himself with Marc Bolan and Ringo Starr
Tommy, UK (1975) as Pinball Wizard
The Muppet Show (1978) (season 2) guest appearance as himself
Spice World, UK (1997) as himself
Elton John: Tantrums & Tiaras (1997) autobiography as himself
South Park (1998) (season 2) guest appearance as himself
The Simpsons (1998) (season 10) guest appearance as himself
The Road to El Dorado (2000) as the Narrator
The Country Bears, US (2002) as himself
Elton John: Me, Myself & I (2007) autobiography as himself
Nashville (2016) (season 4) guest appearance as himself
The American Epic Sessions (2017) as himself
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) as himself

Elton John Biography
(1947–)
Updated:Oct 23, 2019Original:Jan 25, 2018

Elton John is a British singer, pianist and composer. Along with selling more than 300 million records, he has found success on Broadway, composing the music score for the Tony award-winning hit 'Billy Elliot.'
Who Is Elton John?
Elton John's unique blend of pop and rock styles turned him into one of the 20th century's biggest music icons. He was musically gifted from a young age, and released his first self-titled American album in 1970, making him a huge international star. Some of his chart-topping hits include "Crocodile Rock," "Philadelphia Freedom" and "Candle in the Wind." He also found success on Broadway, composing the score for Billy Elliot (2008), which went on to win 10 Tony Awards. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and knighted in 1998.
Elton John's Craziest Looks

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Gallery
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Early Life & Career in England
Singer, songwriter, composer and icon Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on March 25, 1947, in Pinner, Middlesex, England. He discovered his passion for music at an early age and taught himself how to play the piano when he was only four years old. Proving to be a great talent, he won a scholarship to a youth program at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
John had a difficult relationship with his father, Stanley Dwight, a member of the Royal Air Force. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he and his father clashed over his future. John, captivated by the sounds of early rock and roll, wanted to pursue a career in pop music. And much to his father's dismay, John dropped out of school at 17 to follow his dream. He started playing with a group called Bluesology, and he cobbled together his stage moniker from the names of two members of the group.

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In 1967 John answered an ad for a songwriter for Liberty Records. He got the job and soon teamed up with lyricist Bernie Taupin. The duo switched to the DJM label the following year, writing songs for other artists.
John got his first break as a singer with his 1969 album Empty Sky, featuring songs by John and Taupin. While that recording failed to catch on, his 1970 self-titled effort featured John's first hit, "Your Song." More hits soon followed, including No. 1 smashes such as "Crocodile Rock," "Bennie and the Jets" and "Island Girl." John enjoyed a series of top-selling albums during this time, including Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) and Rock of the Westies (1975).

Elton John and his long-term songwriting partner, lyricist Bernie Taupin, in 1985.
Photo: Terry O'Neill/Getty Images

Memorable Songs & Energetic Live Performances
One of the top acts of the 1970s, John became equally famous for his live shows. He dressed in fabulous, over-the-top costumes and glasses for his elaborate concerts. In an interview with W, John explained that "I wasn't a sex symbol like Bowie, Marc Bolan or Freddie Mercury, so I dressed more on the humorous side, because if I was going to be stuck at the piano for two hours, I was going to make people look at me."

'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'
In 1976 John hit the top of the charts again with "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," his duet with Kiki Dee. He soon decided to take a break from music, focusing his energies on his soccer team that he co-owned in England. Around this time, John also publicly announced that he was bisexual (he later came out as a gay man). At the time, John was ridiculed and taunted for his sexuality. The controversy died down, and he made a triumphant return to music in 1979 with the album A Single Man.
'Little Jeannie,' 'Empty Garden'
While not producing smash hits in the 1980s, John still did well on the charts. Some of the most memorable songs from this period include the ballads "Little Jeannie" and "Empty Garden (Hey, Hey Johnny)," the latter written as a tribute to his friend John Lennon of the Beatles, who had been killed in 1980.
'Can You Feel the Love Tonight'
Branching out in different directions, John teamed up with lyricist Tim Rice for several projects. They worked together on the soundtrack for the 1994 animated hit The Lion King, and one of the movie's songs, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," brought John his first Academy Award win for Best Original Song. The pair later netted a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 2000 for their musical Aida.
John received a number of honors around this time. In 1994 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Queen Elizabeth II made John a Commander of the Order of the British Empire the following year (The queen knighted him several years later, making him officially "Sir Elton John").
'Candle in the Wind 1997'
While he enjoyed all of the recognition and praise, he soon found himself rocked by grief. During the summer of 1997, John lost two good friends — fashion designer Gianni Versace and Princess Diana. He reworked one of his classic songs, "Candle in the Wind," as a tribute to Princess Diana, with the song's proceeds going to a charitable trust established in her honor. "Candle in the Wind 1997" proved to be a tremendous success, selling more than 30 million copies that year.

Elton John performing at an open-air concert in May 1974 in Watford, England.
Photo: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images
Later Albums, Books, Broadway, and Movie
John continued to record new music later in his extensive career. In 2006 he released The Captain & the Kid, a sequel to his earlier autobiographical effort Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975). He also teamed up with Leon Russell for 2010's The Union, which led to a joint tour. John later released The Diving Board (2013), his 30th studio album, produced by T Bone Burnett.
In February 2016 John released his 33rd studio album, Wonderful Crazy Night, to generally positive reviews. The album featured the Elton John Band, with whom he last collaborated a decade prior.

'Billy Elliott the Musical' and 'Rocketman'
Also in demand as a songwriter, John was instrumental in bringing Billy Elliott the Musical to the stage. The show, adapted from the 2000 film, opened on Broadway in 2008, where it quickly became a critical and commercial success. John also worked on the 2011 animated film Gnomeo & Juliet, serving as a producer and a composer.
Even with a toned-down stage persona, John remained a very popular live act. In 2012, he performed with Ozzy Osbourne, Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney, among others, in celebration of Queen Elizabeth's 60 years on the throne.
Around this time, it was revealed that John and his husband were working on a biopic about the legendary musician titled Rocketman. Starring Taron Egerton, the film finally reached the finish line with its premiere at the May 2019 Cannes Film Festival, drawing attention for its whimsical musical scenes as well as its unflinching portrayal of John's sexuality. The artist followed with the publication of his autobiography, Me, later that year.
Farewell Tour
On January 24, 2018, John announced that he would retire from the road after his planned Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, set to kick off that September. "My priorities have changed," he said, citing his desire to spend more time with his husband, David, and their kids. "In 2015, David and I sat down with a school schedule ... I don’t want to miss too much of this."
That year also brought an end to his Las Vegas residency, "The Million Dollar Piano," which wrapped with a May 17 performance at Caesar's Palace.
Substance Abuse Issues & Elton John AIDS Foundation
In 1990, after years of battling substance abuse issues, particularly cocaine, which may have triggered severe epileptic seizures, John went into rehabilitation. The newly sober musical star, delighted at his second chance at life, soon founded his own charitable organization to help in the fight against AIDS. Established in the United States in 1992, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has brought in more than $400 million to support HIV/AIDS programs around the world.
In addition to his own foundation, John supports a number of different charities and arts organizations, including the Globe Theatre and the Royal Academy of Music.

Elton John with his husband, David Furnish, and sons Zachary Furnish-John and Elijah Furish-John
Photo: Dave Benett/Elton John AIDS Foundation/WireImage
Husband and Sons
John met his longtime partner David Furnish at a dinner party in 1993. The pair got married in a civil ceremony on December 21, 2005 — the same day the Civil Partnership Act 2004 went into effect. With the help of a surrogate, the couple welcomed their first son, Zachary Furnish-John, in December 2010, and welcomed their second child, Elijah Joseph Daniel Furnish-John, in January 2013. Nine years after their civil ceremony, on December 21, 2014, the couple wed after laws allowing gay marriage took effect the same year in Britain.

John was previously married to Renate Blauel from 1984 to 1988.

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Citation Information
Article Title
Elton John Biography
Author
Biography.com Editors
Website Name
The Biography.com website
URL
https://www.biography.com/musician/elton-john
Access Date
November 10, 2019
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
October 23, 2019
Original Published Date
April 2, 2014

Elton John’s Bookshelves Are Meticulous. Just Ask Him.

Credit...
Jillian Tamaki
Oct. 17, 2019

“I hate seeing things lying on the floor in a horrible state,” says the singer and songwriter, whose new memoir is “Me.” “I’m a very organized bloke.”
What books are on your nightstand?
I bought two books in Los Angeles recently. The first is Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte,” a reworking of “Don Quixote” set in modern-day America. It’s had really fantastic reviews. The other is by the musician Ben Folds, whom I love, and it’s called “A Dream About Lightning Bugs,” a kind of memoir. I haven’t started either of them yet, but they’re on my nightstand, waiting, alongside a lot of photography catalogs I’m going through in search of stuff to buy.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
That would probably be on holiday, at our house in Nice — we spend every summer there. Lying on my bed in the air-conditioned fabulousness. Or, if it’s not too hot, sitting outside on the terrace. I tend to gravitate toward nonfiction: biographies, memoirs, autobiographies.
Which writers working today do you admire the most?
I was going to say Toni Morrison, but obviously she just died. Antonia Fraser and Simon Sebag Montefiore, both historical biographers. Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette is magnificent. I love the details she digs out. And Simon Sebag Montefiore is just a brilliant writer. His book on the Romanovs is incredible. Every time he has a book out, I always rush to get it.
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Have any books influenced your artistic development as a songwriter or musician?
No! Not at all.
What is your favorite memoir by a musician?
Arthur Rubinstein, the classical pianist, has two volumes of memoirs, “My Young Years” and “My Many Years,” which are unbelievably detailed and just filled with amazing stories from a time when the world was rapidly changing: from the late 19th century, across two world wars, to the 1970s. His memory is incredible — he can remember the name of a girl he touched up in Uruguay in 1918. I think the thing I love about him, apart from the fact that he was one of the most wonderful musicians of all time, is his lust for life. And his lust in general: Classical musicians behave even worse than pop musicians sometimes. The other memoir I loved was Pete Townshend’s “Who I Am.” He’s incredibly intelligent, really interesting, never short of an opinion, very thoughtful about his own work.

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Which genres do you especially enjoy reading and which do you avoid?
There isn’t a great deal of modern poetry that floats my boat, although I love Philip Larkin and John Cooper Clarke. For me, the greatest modern poets were lyricists — Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. I love diaries. People like Cecil Beaton and Kenneth Williams, people that make me laugh out loud. They’re not necessarily writing to be published, so they don’t care what they write and I find that fantastic — there’s no holds barred, full of opinions about whether they like or hate people, it’s really refreshing. And they appeal to the fact that British people are really nosy.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
“The Vagina Monologues.” It’s very entertaining and beautifully written.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift and the most inappropriate book you’ve ever received as a gift?
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When I was a young kid, I loved English comics, so the best book I got as a gift was “The Beano Annual,” every Christmas. The Beano was a real delight every year. It was a huge part of British childhood in the 1950s — Eric Clapton’s reading one on the cover of an early Bluesbreakers album. Conversely, the most disappointing book I ever got came from some far-off auntie, who’d clearly heard of my love of comics and got me “The Bunty Annual.” Bunty was a comic for girls — it was full of comic strips about boarding schools and aspiring ballerinas. I just thought: Why has she bought me this? Doesn’t she know what sex I am? How distant a relation is this woman?
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine and who is your favorite villain or antihero?
Because I loved Charles Dickens so much when I was a kid, I’d say my favorite hero was David Copperfield. And as for antiheroes, either Dracula or the Vampire Lestat. I wouldn’t mind being a vampire myself.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I was a voracious reader, I was almost as obsessed with reading as I was with music and football. I read a lot of classics — “Moby-Dick,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Robert Louis Stevenson. “Moby-Dick” was quite terrifying; it really caused my imagination to run riot. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was incredible — slavery and racism were really strong topics for a kid in ’50s Britain to be reading about. All those classics, I bought them all leather-bound from a book club when I was a teenager and I still have those copies. I often go back and read them — I read “Moby-Dick” not so long ago. It’s still completely amazing.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Charles Dickens, obviously. Margaret Atwood — I’d love to sit down with her. The first time I read “The Handmaid’s Tale,” I immediately thought, “I’d like to meet the person who wrote this.” She’s a brilliant writer and I love her values. And then someone who would completely throw the party into chaos, someone incredibly opinionated and waspish, like Dirk Bogarde.
What book do you plan to read next?
I think I might reread “D.V.,” by Diana Vreeland. It’s one of the campest books I’ve ever read in my life, and I’m fairly certain that you should take quite a lot of the anecdotes in it with a pinch of salt — you do spend your time reading it with one eyebrow raised, muttering, “Yeah, right” — but it’s incredibly entertaining. Every time I see a paperback copy of it, I buy it in order to give it to someone as a gift. I’ve bought it many, many times.
What moves you most in a work of literature?
It’s the same as with music: I’m drawn to melancholy in books. And the way a good author describes people — that’s my favorite thing about Dickens, the incredible way he depicts other human beings. That’s true of nonfiction too. Something like “The Moon’s a Balloon,” David Niven’s memoir, he describes other people so well that you feel like you were there when he encountered them, like an onlooker. I think that’s the secret of great writing.
What’s the best book about music you’ve ever read?
Pete Townshend sent me a book by Joe Boyd, called “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.” He’s an American who was involved with the blues scene and the folk revival in the early ’60s, then came to London and made his name as a producer during the Summer Of Love: He produced the first Pink Floyd single, then went on to work with Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. I knew him a little when I was starting out — just before I became famous, I got some session work singing Nick Drake’s songs for a demo tape, which Joe thought he could use to interest other artists in covering them. “White Bicycles” is a brilliant book. He’s got a really interesting view of London in the ’60s, because he was an outsider who ended up in the thick of the whole hippie movement. His writing really brings that era alive.
How do you organize your books?
Very well! I’m very meticulous about things like that. I have a huge library of books on art and photography, kept in the gallery at my home in Windsor, all cataloged and detailed so I can have what I want at my fingertips. They’re very well arranged. I hate seeing things lying on the floor in a horrible state. I’m a very organized bloke.

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A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 20, 2019, Page 7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Elton John. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Recappin’ Fantastic: The Most Fascinating Reveals From Elton John’s Memoir
The deeply dishy book tells almost all about coming out, straight marriage, bad-hair decades, cocaine-fueled album disasters, refusing to play his biggest hit, fallen fellow celebs, rehab and rebirth.
By Chris Willman
Chris Willman
Music Writer
@https://twitter.com/ChrisWillman
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CREDIT: Laurent VU/SIPA/Shutterstock
How charming, and jaw-droppingly candid, is Elton John’s memoir, “Me”? Consider this: It’s a 350-page book that’s not so overly caught up in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — which, to be sure, it supplies in roughly equal, copious amounts — that it won’t take a time-out to recount the party where Elton made the shocking discovery that Bob Dylan is really, really bad at charades.
Rock memoirs rarely have come as funny, utterly self-aware or bracing as “Me,” which is everything a pop fan could want in a wryly revelatory tell-all from a performer whose artistic brilliance and superfluous flamboyance have somehow not conspired to cancel each other out. Picking out highlights when there’s gold on nearly every page is a tough task, but here are some of the book’s most curiosity-satisfying moments:

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John explains everything you ever wanted to know about his hair but were afraid to ask. After what he says was a toxic dye job that he says wrecked havoc on his hair, he had virtually none left on the top of his head in 1976. “Some people are blessed with the kind of face that looks good with a bald head,” he writes. “I am not one of those people. Without hair, I bear a disturbing resemblance to the cartoon character Shrek.” He resorted to a painful procedure called “strip harvesting,” and after that failed, an elaborate weave. “A writer noted that I looked like I had a dead squirrel on my head. He was mean, but, I was forced to concede, he also had a point.” Finally, after wearing hats full-time for about a decade, he just went with a wig — and was happy to learn that, after so many years of conjecture and ridicule about his hair, people suddenly stopped mentioning it.

His cocaine jag lasted for 16 years, before he went through rehab in 1990. “If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough,” he writes. After he mistook Dylan for a trespassing hobo at a party, George Harrison said, “Elton, I really think you need to go steady on the old marching powder.” Lyricist Bernie Taupin slyly forced Elton to sing about his own drug habit. “Sometimes the lyrics he gave me were quite pointed. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out what he was driving at when he sent me a song called ‘White Lady White Powder.’ I had the brass balls to sing it as if was about someone else.”
He plans to never go into all the details of his four-year marriage to Renate Blauel. John does say that the first time he brought up marriage to Blauel (an engineer on two of his ‘70s albums), there’d never been a hint of romance between them. He leaves some of what happened later a mystery — the only time in the book he holds anything back: “Renate and I agreed when we divorced that we would never publicly discuss the intimate details of our marriage. And I am respecting that.” He’s quite open, though, about how he came to obsess on marrying her: “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…” As for the nuptials, they were “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.” (That would be then-manager John Reid.)

John says his coming out in Rolling Stone in the 1970s was fairly easy and untraumatic. He was surprised when people continued to be more fixated on his hair than his sexuality … and took jokes about the latter in stride. ““One piece of advice I would give anyone planning on coming out publicly is this,” he writes. “Try and make sure you don’t do it immediately after being appointed chairman of a British football club, unless you want to spend your Saturday afternoons listening to thousands of away supporters singing — to the tune of ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ — ‘Don’t sit down when Elton’s around, or you’ll get a penis up your arse.’ I suppose I should deliver a lecture here decrying the homophobia of football fans in the mid-‘70s, but I have to be honest: I thought it was funny.”
“Leather Jackets” is, in his estimation, far and away his worst album — even worse than an earlier disco album. The 1986 record “wasn’t an album so much as an exercise in trying to make music while taking so much cocaine you’ve essentially rendered yourself critically insane. … 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, ooh, it’ll send her.’ You can tell what I thought of that by the fact that I declined to put my own name to it… ‘Leather Jackets’ had four legs and a tail and barked if a postman came to the door.”
He took recovery very, very seriously. John says that for years, on a daily basis, even while on tour, he would find AA or other support groups to attend. He estimates he went to 1,400 support-group meetings. Finally, “I got to a point where I didn’t want to talk about alcohol or cocaine or bulimia every day.” John writes that it’s been 28 years since he did a line of coke, but he still dreams about it every night — not out of desire, but remembering the bad taste in the back of his throat, while dreaming that people are walking in on him doing the drug.

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He’s made a mission of getting other celebrities to follow his path into sobriety… but not always successfully. He is Eminem’s AA sponsor, and got Rufus Wainwright into rehab (“He was taking so much crystal meth that, at one point, he’d gone temporarily blind”). Some he refrains from mentioning, since they haven’t gone public. On the sadder side, Dionne Warwick called him asking to intervene with Whitney Houston, “but either the messages I left didn’t get through, or she didn’t want to know. And George Michael really didn’t want to know.” His former good friend wrote an open letter to a magazine “telling me at considerable length to f— off and mind my own business. I wish we hadn’t fallen out. But more than that, I wish he was still alive.” He helped stage an intervention for Donatella Versace, which seemed to be going poorly until she suddenly blurted out, “My life is like your candle in the wind! I want to die!” — and gave in and got help.
His joint tours with Billy Joel came to an end over differing attitudes toward sobriety. Although he loved co-headlining stadiums with Joel, John writes that “it ended badly, because Billy had a lot of personal problems at the time, and the biggest one was alcohol.” Joel, he said, would mix medication he was taking for a chest infection with booze, “then fall asleep in the middle of singing ‘Piano Man.’ Eventually, I suggested that he needed the kind of help that I had got, which didn’t make me very popular. … I just couldn’t stand to watch a nice guy doing that to himself any longer.”
A joint tour with Tina Turner never got off the ground because he found her to be a complete terror. “She rang me up at home, apparently with the express intention of telling me how awful I was and how I had to change before we could work together.” He agreed to at least start by doing a duet with her for a “VH1 Divas” special, but arrived at rehearsal with his band already threatening to quit, before Turner quickly laid into John’s own piano playing. “The subsequent debate about whether or not I knew how to play ‘Proud Mary’ became quite heated quite quickly, before I brought it to a conclusion by telling Tina Turner to stick her f—ing song up her arse and storming off.” Years later, they made up.

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Elton had a very happy reunion with his old hero Leon Russell, with not many years to spare. Not having spoken with or even heard a mention of Russell in ages, John had a sudden whim to call him and propose a joint album, which delighted Russell — who alarmed Elton with his poor health when they went into the studio, although he was able to work in top form for a couple hours a day. “One day his nose started running; it was fluid leaking from his brain.” John was delighted that their work together resulted in Russell making a comeback and being able to tour in front of bigger crowds before he died.
He says Cameron Crowe’s use of “Tiny Dancer” in “Almost Famous” spurred him to get back more to his roots as an album maker. John points out that “Tiny Dancer” had never been a single or a real hit of any sort before Crowe’s movie popularized it, and the reaction spurred him to want to get back to that type of sound in the 2000s, starting with “Songs from the West Coast.” He’s hoping to re-engage with that sort of album-length artistry even more now, after retiring from the road.
Loyalty to Jeffrey Katzenberg put the kibosh on a lucrative Disney partnership. After the blockbuster success of “The Lion King,” Disney wanted to get further into the Elton John business with films, TV shows and books. “There was even talk about a theme park, which boggled the mind a little. There was just one problem: I’d agreed to make another film with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been chairman of Disney when ‘The Lion King’ was made,” and Katzenberg was suing Disney for $150 million, so it had to be one or the other. “There wasn’t anything in writing with Jeffrey, but I’d given him my word … so I regrettably turned Disney’s deal down. At least the world was spared an Elton John theme park.” (John doesn’t say whether the film he subsequently worked on for Katzenberg, “The Road to El Dorado,” was worth it.)
He witnessed Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere nearly come to blows over the affections of Princess Diana at a dinner party. At the1981 dinner, after the two actors were separated in a hallway on the verge of fisticuffs, Diana went back to a seemingly flirtatious conversation with Gere, and Stallone stormed out, telling John, “I never would have come if I’d known Prince f—in’ Charming was gonna be here… If I’d wanted her, I would have taken her.”

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John was stricken with a real dread in preparing to sing a rewritten version of an old hit at Diana’s funeral. “What if I went into autopilot and sang the wrong version? I’d performed ‘Candle in the Wind’ hundreds of times. It really wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that I might lose myself in the performance,” he writes. “You’d have a hard time bluffing your way out of singing about Marilyn Monroe being found dead in the nude, or how your feelings were something more than sexual, at a state funeral, in front of a global audience of two billion people.”
John felt conflicted about the record-shattering success of the Diana-themed “Candle in the Wind” single, feeling it contributed to a kind of grief porn, and he has avoided it in every way since the funeral. “I started feeling really uncomfortable with the charity single’s longevity. It success meant there was footage of Diana’s funeral week after week on ‘Top of the Pops’ — it felt as if people were somehow wallowing in her death,” he writes. I really didn’t think it was what Diana would have wanted. I thought the media had gone from reflecting the public mood to deliberately stoking it…” In fact, he says he only ever sang that version of the lyrics three times: twice in the studio when he recorded it and once live at the funeral — and never since. He refused to allow it to appear on a Diana-themed charity album ad has never included it on his own best-ofs. He even nixed singing the original, Monroe-themed version for years.
Michael Jackson unnerved him when he came to one of John’s dinner parties. “God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking that the poor guy had totally lost his marbles. I don’t mean that in a light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around…. off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.” John describes him as showing up “wearing makeup that looked like it had been applied by a maniac.” After Jackson disappeared for hours, Elton eventually found him playing videogames in the housekeeper’s nearby cottage with her 11-year-old son. “For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”

In defending Lady Gaga, he lost a friendship with Madonna. He laid into Madonna for disparaging Gaga, but didn’t expect it to go public. “I used to make fun of her for lip-synching on stage, but the problem really started when she ran Gaga down on an American chat show. I got that Gaga’s single ‘Born This Way’ definitely sounded similar to ‘Express Yourself,’ but I couldn’t see why she was so ungracious and nasty about it, rather than taking it as a compliment… particularly when she claims to be a champion for women.” He assumed his interstitial remarks during a TV taping were off the record, but “they broadcast it anyway, which brought that particular old friendship to a very swift conclusion. Still, I shouldn’t have said it. I apologized…” As for Gaga, she “turned out to be a great godmother: she would turn up backstage and insist on giving Zachary his bath while dressed in full Gaga regalia, which was quite an incredible sight.”
His mother seemed determined to spoil his civil partnership ceremony with David Furnish. Anything dour about Elton’s parents in the biopic “Rocketman” seems positively whitewashed compared to the disdain both of them show for John and/or his career in the book. There’s a laugh, at lest, when his mum, who frequently lived at his estate over the years, is described as having a disturbing tendency to interrupt moments of post-coital contentment by walking in waving bills and demanding to know why he’d spent so much money on, say, a dress for Kiki Dee. “As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff.” At the 2005 ceremony, “when David and I exchanged our vows, she started talking very loudly, over the top of us: rattling on about how she didn’t like the venue and how she couldn’t imagine getting married in a place like this.” At the reception, Sharon Osbourne said to John, “I know she’s your mother, but I want to kill her.” Eventually he learned that, although she’d earlier seemed supportive of his coming out, she disapproved of same-sex unions after all.

Watching himself in the 1997 documentary “Tantrums and Tiaras” helped him clean up his anger issues. But he fears he helped create reality TV. “Watching it was cathartic, and I think the shock of seeing myself changed the way I behave,” he writes. “The only thing I regret about ‘Tantrums and Tiaras’ is how influential it became. … It’s not the most edifying thing having ‘Being Bobby Brown’ and ‘The Anna Nicole Show’ on your conscience. There’s a sense in which ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ might ultimately be my fault, for which I can only prostrate myself before the human race and beg their forgiveness.”
He had his prostate removed a few years ago amid a bout with cancer, which led to some first-time situations on stage. Reviving his residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2017, he had a burst of enthusiasm and paced the stage waving to the audience — not the only burst he was experiencing. “Pissing myself in front of an audience while wearing a giant nappy: this was definitely hitherto uncharted territory,” he writes.
Taron Egerton, who starred as John in “Rocketman” (and narrates the audio version of the memoir), came later in the movie’s casting process than another famous actor, whom Elton nixed for reasons of musical verisimilitude.“Tom Hardy was going to play me,” John says, “but he couldn’t sing.”
One of the biggest highlights of his many Elton Johns AIDS Foundation benefits: Aretha Franklin’s public swan song. He was shocked by her diminished stature when she showed up at St. John the Divine Cathedral, then equally shocked by Franklin’s undiminished prowess. “I think she must have known that this was the last time she would perform, and she liked the fact that it was for the charity and that the gala was in a church … However sick she was, it hadn’t affected her voice — she sounded astonishing. I stood at the front of the stage watching the greatest singer in the world sing for the final time, crying my eyes out.”

23 October 2019
Elton John’s Me: a bracingly open and spectacularly funny autobiography
Dignity is thrillingly cast aside in this riotously entertaining book full of premium celebrity tittle-tattle.

By
Giles Smith

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“I’ve done gigs dressed as a woman,” recalls Elton John, “a cat, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, a Ruritanian general, a musketeer, a pantomime dame and, very occasionally, a normal human being.” When Reg Dwight from Pinner was transforming himself into the biggest pop star on the planet, dignity wasn’t always a major concern, and it isn’t in this bracingly open and spectacularly funny autobiography, either.
So, the mock 18th-century wig the author wears for his 60th birthday party is so towering that he has to be transported to the venue in the back of a furniture van. The van then gets stuck in traffic for over an hour. When he goes to collect his knighthood at Buckingham Palace, the Lord Chamberlain announces him to the Queen as “Sir John Elton”. He leaves a clinic with his scalp tenderised after a hair transplant, and promptly bangs the top of his head getting into his car. It’s around this period of maximum hair-loss trauma that his beloved old pal and fierce rival Rod Stewart gleefully sends him a sit-under salon hair-dryer.

Of course, in the background to all this frolicking, John and Bernie Taupin spent most of the Seventies and Eighties prodigiously and permanently expanding the standard repertoire of popular song, but this book isn’t particularly interested in how they managed it. We learn that, handed a new lyric by Taupin, Elton gives it 40 minutes or so and if a tune isn’t happening, he moves on. Some of the best-loved melodies of the modern era seem to have taken Elton only slightly longer to compose than to sing. Certainly, earnestness rarely seems to have come into it. On holiday in Barbados, he and Taupin dash off two songs – the international smash hit “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and another number called “I’m Always on the Bonk”.
Stay, though, for the premium celebrity tittle-tattle. Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone squabble over Princess Diana in the corridor at Elton’s house in Windsor. The Queen Mother drops in for lunch. Michael Jackson appears for dinner with an incomplete nose. In a definitively English scene, Elton finds himself at Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle, on the dancefloor with Princess Anne and the Queen, moving decorously to “Rock Around the Clock”, which is being played at such a low volume that it can barely be heard above the shuffling of feet.
Elsewhere, practically everyone who is anyone in rock jumps briefly but revealingly into view. At a party at home in Los Angeles, Elton is affronted to see the gardener helping himself to the drink and then realises that it’s Bob Dylan. Elton buys John Lennon a cuckoo clock wherein the part of the emerging cuckoo is played by a wooden penis. He also sends Lennon an utterly withering parody of “Imagine”, recalibrated to acknowledge John and Yoko’s significant real-estate holdings in the Dakota Building: “Imagine six apartments/It isn’t hard to do/One is full of fur coats/The other’s full of shoes.” Somehow their friendship survives.

With equally beguiling unguardedness, Elton meditates on his epic temper and monumental unreasonableness, traits inherited, he suggests, from his mother, although he seems to have put his own unique spin on them. The legend that he once rang his office in a rage and asked his people to do something about the wind outside his hotel room is cheerfully confirmed. On the night of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he is made apocalyptically angry by something and storms back to his hotel. Then, in a sudden fit of remorse, he returns to the venue, only to become apocalyptically angry again and walk out for a second time. Back at the hotel, remorse again descends and Elton once more departs for the venue, only for anger to consume him yet again and oblige him to leave. This goes on for most of the evening.
Clearly these are lessons in rock-star behaviour from one of the original pioneers of the concept. Elton’s outlandish impulse-buys include a full-scale fibreglass Tyrannosaurus Rex which once belonged to Ringo and a tram which once belonged to the city of Melbourne and has to be gingerly lowered into Elton’s garden by helicopter. Apparently you know your shopping habit has got out of hand when you can’t get on to your squash court because it is wedged tight with unopened packages. And you know your cocaine habit has got out of hand when somebody wakes you in a Cannes hotel suite and invites you to witness the destruction you have wrought in a nearby room – destruction you have no memory whatsoever of wreaking.
This, from the Eighties, turns out to be the first of a series of moments of self-disgust, unsparingly recounted, which eventually inspire Elton to clean up, to settle down a bit, have children, and slip at least part-way free of the self-obsession that is rock stardom’s traditional counterpart and which doesn’t tend to produce books as riotously entertaining as this one.
There is no tidy reconciliation at the end, alas, with Elton’s mother, now deceased, who seemed to have no issue with him being gay and promiscuous, but did have a problem with him marrying and settling down with somebody he loved. On the morning of Elton’s wedding to David Furnish, she “turned up in character as a sociopath”, sat outside in the car for a while and then pointedly drove away.
In the main, though, perhaps this heroic volume’s most uplifting lesson is that, with a clear head and enough will, major tiffs with almost anyone can be overcome – even Tina Turner, who ignites a huge firestorm by telling Elton that he looks fat in Versace and that he can’t play “Proud Mary” properly. Yet she later spends a happy time at his house in Nice and leaves a lipstick kiss in the visitors’ book. For a follow-up, the publishers could do worse than reproduce Elton’s visitors’ books. Who wouldn’t want to read those?

Me
Elton John
Macmillan, 384pp, £25

Me by Elton John review – hilariously self-lacerating
Book of the day
Autobiography and memoir

A memoir that is racy, pacy and crammed with scurrilous anecdotes – what more could you ask from the rocket man?

Hadley Freeman
@HadleyFreeman
Wed 16 Oct 2019 07.30 BST

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Elton John possesses the kind of self-knowledge few of his fame and wealth retain. Photograph: John Lewis & Partners/PA
C
hoosing one’s favourite Elton John story – like choosing one’s favourite Elton song – can feel like limiting oneself to a mere single grape from the horn of plenty. Leaving aside the music for the moment, Elton’s public and maybe even private persona can be divided into two phases: first there was the raging drugs monster, as extravagantly talented as he was costumed. Now that he’s sober, there’s the more conservatively dressed, happily married elder statesman of British pop, a proper establishment figure, albeit one who’s still unafraid to pick fights with everyone from Keith Richards (“a monkey with arthritis”) to Madonna (“looks like a fairground stripper”). Both eras have yielded a steady crop of outstanding Elton anecdotes, often retold by Elton himself, who, possessing the kind of self-knowledge few of his fame and wealth retain, tells his stories better than anyone else. Probably the most infamous of all is the one about the time he’d been up for several days (this, clearly, was from the pre-sobriety era) when he decided something really needed to be sorted out. No, not his devastating drug addiction or his lack of sleep – the problem was the weather. So he called a chap in his office and told him to sort it out: “It’s far too windy here, can you do something about it?”
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Such is the wealth of material he has to choose from, this story gets only a passing mention in his outrageously enjoyable autobiography: “This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true,” he writes, with a self-deprecating shrug. And then he moves on to the next tale, which might be about the night he and John Lennon refused to answer the door to Andy Warhol because, as Lennon hissed to Elton: “Do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?” Or it might be about the time Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone nearly came to blows over Princess Diana at one of his dinner parties. That he has celebrity anecdotes to burn is not a surprise. But the self-mocking tone is more unexpected from a musician so grand that at his 2014 wedding party he had one table dedicated solely to the Beatles and their families. Yet while his extraordinary talent justified his personal excesses, it is his self-awareness that has counterbalanced the narcissism and made him such a likable figure. This is, after all, the man who allowed his husband, David Furnish, to make a documentary about him and call it Tantrums and Tiaras.

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One of 12 Royal mail stamps issued as a tribute to the musical contribution of Elton John. Photograph: Royal Mail/PA
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So it is entirely and pleasingly right that Elton has called his book, quite simply, Me: not for him any pretentious effort to dress up the navel gazing nature of memoir writing as art or courageous truth-telling. It’s just Elton talking about Elton. It quickly becomes clear in Me that few people are more suited to the celebrity autobiography genre, given that he combines the most essential ingredients of the form. First, his life is still hilariously over the top (tabloid photos of Elton, dressed head to toe in Gucci, tootling about on his yacht with his similarly clad family have become as much of a signifier of summer to me as any number of swallows). Unlike other celebrities who act as if their position on the A-list is only provisional and they therefore mustn’t break the rules of discretion among the famous, Elton cheerfully gossips about everyone from Bob Dylan (terrible at charades, FYI) to David Bowie (“don’t know what [his] problem was”) as if they were his neighbours in Pinner, where he grew up. He is Joan Collins mixed with Joan Rivers, and if anyone can think of a more delicious combination they are probably deeper than I am. Best of all, he remembers, if not everything, then certainly a lot – unlike that arthritic monkey, Keith Richards, whose poor ghostwriter, James Fox, “had to do a little sleuthing” to confirm the Rolling Stone’s stories for Life, his 2010 memoir.

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Elton has his own ghostwriter, of course – the “auto” in “celebrity autobiography” is always a loose concept – in the form of Alexis Petridis, this paper’s pop critic. Petridis has a journalist’s eye for the comically absurd, such as Elton’s predilection for sexual voyeurism competing with his innate tidiness (“They’d end up having sex on the snooker table with me shouting, ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’ which tended to puncture the atmosphere a bit”), and he makes sure there is a laugh out loud moment on pretty much every other page. This gives a pacy originality to what could have been a by-the-numbers celebrity tale: the miserable suburban childhood, the early musical failures, the sudden meteoric success, the sex, drugs and dodgy financial advisers, the eventual redemption through marriage, parenthood and activism. The book could also have easily tipped into self-parody, with Elton as a musical Zelig figure, witnessing, in turn, the death of 1960s pop, the emergence of 70s rock, the brief burst of punk, the rise of 90s hip-hop and rap. Alongside all this is the glorious triumph of the gay rights movement in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, handily embodied by Elton himself, a pop star who once barely understood his own sexuality, but can now bring his two sons with Furnish, born by a surrogate, up on stage with him in Las Vegas, and has raised almost half a billion dollars for Aids charities. But Petridis wisely keeps the focus on the personal over the sweeping cultural: Elton’s immediate reaction to the Sex Pistols, for example, was not any cliched shock of the new, but rather delight in Johnny Rotten slagging off his friend and rival, Rod Stewart, on TV.
Elton makes fun of no one more than himself. He is utterly, astonishingly, hilariously self-lacerating
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But credit really must go to Elton, whose extremely amusing voice very much drives the book. The most acclaimed celebrity memoirs of the past two decades have been thoughtful disquisitions on the weirdness of fame itself – Rupert Everett’s autobiographies, and Feel, Chris Heath’s book about Robbie Williams. Me is not like that, and the most Elton has to say about fame is it’s a lot of fun, but probably not very good for you. His book is closer in spirit to David Niven’s memoirs with their litany of namedrops – although Niven, as far as I know, never wrote a line like “I sat around, wanking, in a dressing gown covered in my own puke.”
Me is its own original thing because Elton makes fun of no one more than himself. He is utterly, astonishingly, hilariously self-lacerating. A half-hearted suicide attempt at the height of his fame could have been played for drama; instead Elton merely asks: “Why was I behaving like such a twat?” He sums up the experience of writing songs for The Lion King, which ultimately won him an Oscar, as: “I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot.” And yes, Elton was also mystified by the hysteria over the version of “Candle in the Wind” he wrote for Diana’s funeral.
One subject he has strikingly little interest in is his creation of a catalogue of music that is now a licence to print money. He is very sweet about his friendship with his longterm lyricist, Bernie Taupin, but the process of how they write their songs is dealt with in a single paragraph, which concludes: “I can’t explain it and I don’t want to explain it.” And yet there’s no doubt his talent is miraculous. Some of his songs took as long to write as they do to listen to; in one morning he knocked off “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”, “Amy” and “Rocket Man” before breakfast.
Elton has never come across as an especially warm celebrity: too sharp tongued, too ridiculous. Neither quality is played down in his memoir. And yet his clear-eyed honesty and his ear for the comic line make him a deeply appealing memoirist. By the end of the book I felt only regret that I am unlikely to get an invitation to join him on his yacht, where I could listen to him recall the time he asked Yoko Ono what happened to that herd of cattle she and John Lennon once bought: “Yoko shrugged and said, ‘Oh, I got rid of them. All that mooing.’”
• Me is published by Macmillan (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Elton John review, ‘Me’: ‘Rocket Man’ star’s autobiography is full of warmth and candour

John’s enthusiasm for music continues to shine through, as does the rebellious streak that made him the groundbreaking artist he continues to be today
Roisin O'Connor
@Roisin_OConnor
Monday 14 October 2019 07:30

‘The great thing about rock and roll is that someone like me can be a star’ ( EPA )
Elton John is not an artist known for being shy about his personal life. Even so, the candour with which he speaks in his first – and apparently only – autobiography, Me, is astounding.
From the off, the “Rocket Man” star plunges into accounts of depression (there are multiple recollections of suicide attempts), drug addiction, break-ups and his prostate cancer diagnosis, but never appeals to the reader for sympathy. His voice, assisted by music critic Alexis Petridis (who worked on the book with John for three-and-a-half years) is warm and genial.

There are moments that are by turn hilarious, touching and surprising. The late David Bowie never seemed to like him, he says, taking on a forgiving tone as he observes how the Ziggy Stardust icon was “absolutely out of his mind on coke” when he dismissed him as “the token queen of rock and roll”. You feel a twang of schadenfreude as John recalls drunkenly throwing oranges at Bob Dylan because he was rubbish at charades. By the time you reach the moment he lost his virginity (although the actual moment is glossed over, suggesting even John has his moments of prudishness), aged 23 and already a bona fide star, you’re practically cheering him on. And he certainly made up for lost time – as Petredis pointed out in a recent Guardian feature: “You’ll never look at a snooker table in the same way again.”

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He’s remarkably self-effacing about his temper, addictive personality, and the admitted “dreadful behaviour” with boyfriends whom he’d expect to drop everything to come with him on tour. His reflection on how, regardless of the success or adulation he was enjoying at the time, underneath the glittering costumes he was still Reg Dwight from Middlesex ­– body-conscious, insecure, full of self-doubt and self-loathing – is deeply moving. In between the countless anecdotes with stars from across the decades, John’s enthusiasm for music continues to shine through, even when he explains why he knew he was never cut out to be a classical pianist (“My fingers are too short for a piano player. If you see a photo of a concert pianist, they’ve all got hands like tarantulas.”), or muses that it was likely his parents – however unwillingly – who instilled in him a sense of rebellion that made him the groundbreaking artist he continues to be today.
Towards the end of the book you sense John’s craving for what he perceives as a “normal life” – family dinners, doing the school run, staying at home with his family. It’s wonderful to read about an artist who really has succeeded at both stardom and stability – who wasn’t lost like so many others to the dark side of fame. “The great thing about rock and roll,” John writes, “is that someone like me can be a star.” Really, though, Me is compelling evidence that Elton John was born to be one.

Elton John’s ‘Me’ is a Uniquely Revealing Pop Star Autobiography
The long-awaited book covers his hard childhood, struggles with addiction and road to recovery.
By Andy Greene

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Elton John performs onstage during his "Farewell Yellow Brick Road" tour at Madison Square Garden on November 9, 2018 in New York City.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Earlier this year, the Elton John biopic, Rocketman, hit multiplexes. The movie took huge liberties telling Elton’s story: showing him performing songs years or even decades before they were written; taking his stage name from John Lennon instead of his mentor, little-known English rocker Long John Baldry; levitating high above the piano while belting out “Crocodile Rock”; and even singing “Rocket Man” at the bottom of a swimming pool while his childhood self played the piano dressed as an astronaut.
It was a fantasy musical that went for the emotional truth, making this the perfect time to get the actual story in his long-awaited autobiography, Me. This is the warts-and-all reality, starting with a painful childhood marked by his mother’s extreme emotional neglect and his father’s long absences and bouts of intense rage over seemingly anything young Elton did. “I [got] in trouble if I ate celery in what was deemed The Wrong Way,” Elton writes. “The Right Way to eat celery, in the unlikely event that you’re interested, was apparently not to make too loud of a crunching sound when you bit into it. Once, he hit me because I was supposedly taking my school blazer off incorrectly.”

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Elton found salvation in rock & roll, though only after years of struggling on the British pub circuit and backing American R&B greats like Patti LaBelle and Lee Dorsey. Fame came very quickly after “Your Song” exploded across the world in 1970, but Elton is much more interested in writing about all the wild adventures he had in the Seventies rather than the incredible music he created. Landmark albums like Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, and Honky Château breeze by in a few scant paragraphs, while his first encounter with cocaine gets dissected at length. “The first line I snorted made me retch,” he writes. “I went out to the toilet and threw up. And then I immediately went back . . . and asked for another line.”

Courtesy of Henry Holt and Company.
The moment marks the start of an extremely dark period of about 16 years in his life, when Elton battled cocaine addiction, alcoholism, bulimia, bouts of uncontrollable anger, and extravagant shopping expeditions. The latter two vices remain problems to this day, but he kicked the other ones in 1991 after checking into a no-frills rehab facility in the suburbs of Chicago, where he was forced to clean toilets, do his own laundry, and even share his bedroom with another patient. “[That] didn’t go down very well until I saw my roommate,” Elton writes. “His name was Greg, he was gay and very attractive. At least there was something nice to look at around here.”
The final third of the book is devoted to his post-rehab life, including a sad chapter about the back-to-back losses of his good friends Gianni Versace and Princess Diana, in which he reveals that the huge success of “Candle in the Wind 1997” made him very uncomfortable, especially when it stayed at the top of the charts for 14 weeks. “It felt as if people were somehow wallowing in her death,” he writes, “like the mourning for her had got out of hand and they were refusing to move on. It seemed unhealthy to me — morbid and unnatural. I really don’t think it was what Diana would have wanted.”
Near the end of the book, Elton reveals that he recently survived a frightening bout with prostate cancer right before the start of his ongoing farewell tour. He managed to keep the entire thing secret, even though treatment for the disease briefly left him unable to control his bladder; in one vivid passage, he finds himself urinating into a diaper while singing “Rocket Man” on a Las Vegas stage, in front of 4,000 fans. That’s not a tale many would want to share with anyone, let alone include in their memoir, but Elton has never been one to hold back difficult truths, and Me — while a little skimpy on revelations about his brilliant, groundbreaking music — is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the difficult road that he walked while creating it.