The story of Elton John

Reggie from Pinner

Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on the twenty fifth of March 1947 in Pinner, a suburb on the north western edge of London. He grew up in his grandmother's council house, and it was on her piano that the little boy started to play. His mother soon heard him picking out a waltz entirely by ear. His father Stanley served in the Royal Air Force and had played trumpet in a big band, but he was often away, and when he came home the house filled with rows. Elton later wrote that his parents gave every impression of hating each other. He escaped to his bedroom with his records and comics, daydreaming that he was Little Richard, Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis.[1] [2] [3]

At seven he began formal piano lessons, and at eleven he won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in central London. One of his teachers remembered him hearing a four page piece by Handel just once and playing it straight back, like a gramophone record. For five years he went to Saturday classes there. He admitted he was not a diligent classical student, and he sometimes skipped lessons to ride around on the London Underground. He left before sitting his final exams, because rock and roll had already claimed him. In 1956 his mother brought home records by Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, and he later said that once he heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, he never wanted to be anything else.[1]

When Reggie was in his early teens his parents divorced. His mother married a local painter called Fred Farebrother, a kind and supportive stepfather whom Reggie nicknamed Derf, which is Fred spelled backwards. The family moved into a small flat in a block called Frome Court, not far from his earlier homes, and it was in that flat that he would later write the songs that made him famous. He stayed there until he had four albums in the American top forty at the same time. At fifteen, with help from his mother and Derf, he got a job as the resident pianist at the Northwood Hills Hotel pub, playing Thursday to Sunday nights. Known simply as Reggie, he played Jim Reeves and Ray Charles songs and slipped in a few of his own.[1]

Around this time Reggie started wearing heavy horn rimmed glasses. There was nothing wrong with his eyes. He simply wanted to look like Buddy Holly. His father, strict and remote by Elton's own account, hoped his son would settle for a sensible career like banking. Reggie had other plans. At seventeen he walked out of Pinner County Grammar School just before his A level exams to try his luck in music. Years later he said that the outrageous costumes and wild stage shows of his fame were his way of letting go after such a restrictive childhood. For now, though, the future superstar was running errands for a music publisher by day and playing with a band called Bluesology by night.[1] [2]

Bluesology, Long John Baldry and an envelope of lyrics

Bluesology grew out of a local Pinner group, and Reggie said its name was a nod to the Django Reinhardt album Djangology. By 1963 the band had a weekly slot at the Establishment Club in London, playing blues by Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim. In 1965 they turned professional and were hired out to back visiting American soul acts, including the Isley Brothers, Patti LaBelle and Major Lance. Fontana Records signed them, and when the label heard Reggie sing, they preferred his voice to the band's original singer. His own song Come Back Baby became their first single in July 1965. It flopped, and so did the follow up. Still, this was his real apprenticeship, including a tour of Germany and long nights backing visiting stars.[1] [2]

In late 1966 the towering blues singer Long John Baldry, six foot seven and a veteran of the London blues scene, took on Bluesology as his regular backing band. Baldry had given Rod Stewart his start a couple of years earlier. But Baldry was drifting toward the cabaret circuit, and Reggie grew restless. When he left in 1967 he needed a stage name. He borrowed Elton from the band's saxophonist, Elton Dean, and John from Long John Baldry himself. It stuck. On the seventh of January 1972 he made it legal, becoming Elton Hercules John. The Hercules came from the name of a horse in the television sitcom Steptoe and Son, which he adored.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1967 Reggie answered an advert in the New Musical Express placed by Ray Williams of Liberty Records, who was looking for new talent. Across the country, a seventeen year old from a Lincolnshire farm called Bernie Taupin answered the same ad. Neither passed the Liberty audition. But Reggie mentioned he could not write lyrics, and Williams handed him a sealed envelope from the pile of submissions. Reggie opened it on the Underground ride home. Inside were Taupin's poems. He wrote music for them and sent it back, and the partnership was under way. When they finally met, they recorded their first song together, Scarecrow. To this day Bernie writes the words alone, and Elton writes the music afterwards.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1968 the pair became staff songwriters for Dick James, the publisher who had made a fortune with the Beatles' songs. Their job was to churn out easy listening tunes for other singers. Bernie could write a batch of lyrics in under an hour, and Elton would set each one in about half an hour, binning any he could not crack quickly. One effort was entered to become Britain's Eurovision song for Lulu in 1969. It came sixth out of six. Elton also recorded a psychedelic album, Regimental Sgt. Zippo, but James did not like its direction and shelved it. It finally came out in 2021. Instead, his debut album Empty Sky appeared in June 1969, made at DJM's small studio, with Elton often walking home at four in the morning.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The late sixties also held a darker episode. In 1968 Elton was engaged to a woman named Linda Woodrow, and the couple shared a flat in Highbury, north London, with Bernie. Elton did not love her and felt trapped. One night he made a half hearted attempt to take his own life with the gas oven. Long John Baldry then took him aside and talked him out of the marriage, and his parents came with a van the next day to take him home. Elton called the wedding off two weeks before the date. Years later Bernie turned the whole episode into the song Someone Saved My Life Tonight, with Baldry as the someone. In 2020, fifty years on, Elton helped pay Woodrow's medical bills when she asked.[1] [2] [3] [4]

1970: Your Song and the Troubadour

For the second album, Dick James brought in producer Gus Dudgeon, who had just made David Bowie's Space Oddity, and arranger Paul Buckmaster, who wrote sweeping strings. Dudgeon later said he thought he was making a glamorous set of demos to sell the songs to other singers. The album, simply called Elton John, came out in April 1970. On it was Your Song. Bernie had scribbled the words at the kitchen table of Elton's mother's flat, and Elton said the melody came out in about twenty minutes. In America it was first put out as the B side of Take Me to the Pilot, but disc jockeys flipped the record over. By January 1971 it had reached number eight in the United States and number seven in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In April 1970 Elton formed a stripped down trio with bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson, both lately of the Spencer Davis Group. No guitarist. Then Dick James sent them to Los Angeles. As Olsson tells it, James warned that if it went badly, he could always find them jobs in a shoe shop on Oxford Street. On the twenty fifth of August 1970 they played the Troubadour club. Neil Diamond introduced them, and Elton's piano hero Leon Russell was in the crowd. The Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn wrote that rock music had a new star. Elton left England unknown and came home a month later hailed as rock's saviour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Things now moved at dizzying speed. Tumbleweed Connection, released in October 1970, was a concept album steeped in the American West, although Bernie pointed out they wrote it before either of them had set foot in the States. Their real inspiration was the Band. In November a live radio broadcast from a New York studio was captured as the album 17 11 70, but a bootlegger beat it into the shops with the full hour of the show. In 1971 came a film soundtrack called Friends and then Madman Across the Water, which held Tiny Dancer and Levon. Oddly, that album stalled at number forty one in Britain, while it reached the top ten in America. At home, he was still not a big star.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Late in 1970, at a Motown Christmas party in London, Elton met John Reid, the young Scot who ran the Tamla Motown label in Britain. Reid later admitted he first saw a dumpy little guy in a funny jumpsuit, but they fell for each other. Elton was twenty three, and Reid became his first boyfriend. Reid also became his manager. The romance lasted about five years, but the business partnership lasted until 1998. Reid was fiercely protective and had a notorious temper. In 1974 in Auckland, New Zealand, he threw champagne at a party host and punched a journalist, Judith Baragwanath, knocking her to the floor. He was convicted of assault and sentenced to a month in prison.[1] [2] [3]

Seven number ones in a row

Until 1972, the record company had only allowed Murray and Olsson to play on one track per album, using session men for the rest. That changed when Elton used his growing clout, and Scottish guitarist Davey Johnstone joined as a full member. The band decamped to the Château d'Hérouville, an eighteenth century French country house with a studio, and made Honky Château, released in May 1972. It gave Elton his first American number one album, the start of a streak of seven in a row. The single Rocket Man introduced the band's trademark three part backing harmonies, sung by Johnstone, Murray and Olsson. Producer Gus Dudgeon used a slide guitar to suggest the sound of a spaceship launch.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player arrived early in 1973 and went to number one in Britain and America. Its single Crocodile Rock became Elton's first American number one. He wrote it after hearing the Australian band Daddy Cool's hit Eagle Rock on tour, and Bernie posed for the sleeve wearing a badge reading Daddy Who. Elton happily called the song a rip off of the rock and roll he grew up with. The same album held Daniel, which Bernie based on a magazine article about a wounded Vietnam veteran who wanted to escape all the attention when he came home. Meanwhile the shows grew wilder. After the tap dancing drummer Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band upstaged him at the 1972 Royal Variety Performance, Elton simply hired him for his next American tour.[1] [2] [3]

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was meant to be recorded in Jamaica in January 1973, but a bad studio piano, the chaos around the Frazier and Foreman title fight, and local unrest drove the band back to the French château. They cut it there in about two weeks, and with twenty two songs written, it became a double album. Released in October 1973, it topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and was America's best selling album of 1974. It holds Candle in the Wind, written about Marilyn Monroe, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting and Bennie and the Jets. Elton did not want Bennie released as a single, but a Canadian station near Detroit played it hard, and it became an American number one.[1] [2] [3]

In 1973 Elton launched his own label, the Rocket Record Company, reviving Neil Sedaka's career and making a star of Kiki Dee. The next year he signed a deal worth eight million dollars with MCA, and the label reportedly took out a twenty five million dollar insurance policy on his life. That year he also sang on John Lennon's Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, and Lennon promised to join him on stage if it reached number one. It did. Later in 1974, at Madison Square Garden, Lennon walked out and they played three songs together, including Elton's cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It proved to be Lennon's last major concert appearance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 1975 came Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, an autobiographical album about Elton and Bernie's struggling years in London. It was certified gold on advance orders alone, two weeks before release, and became the first album ever to enter the American chart at number one. Elton considered it perhaps his finest record. He refused to let Someone Saved My Life Tonight be cut down for radio, even at almost seven minutes, and it still reached the top five. Then, exhausted and unhappy, he broke up the classic band. Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson were dismissed. In June 1975 he unveiled a new line up at Wembley Stadium, where he played the new album from start to finish.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fame and freefall, 1975 to 1979

By 1975 fame was taking a heavy toll. During a week of celebrations in Los Angeles that October, officially named Elton Week, he suffered a cocaine overdose. He had also developed bulimia. On the eve of two sold out shows at Dodger Stadium, at his Beverly Hills home, in front of friends and family, he swallowed a large amount of Valium and threw himself into the swimming pool. Accounts of how serious it was vary. What is certain is that twenty four hours later he was on stage at Dodger Stadium in a sequined baseball uniform designed by Bob Mackie. He later called those shows a complete triumph, and they remain among the most celebrated of his career.[1] [2] [3]

The hits kept coming. Philadelphia Freedom was a tribute to his friend Billie Jean King's tennis team. He played the Pinball Wizard in the film of the Who's Tommy. He appeared on Soul Train, one of very few white artists to do so, after Bennie and the Jets crossed over to black radio. Rock of the Westies, with the new band, repeated the unheard of feat of entering the American chart at number one, and Island Girl gave him another number one single. Then in 1976 came his first British number one, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, a duet with Kiki Dee, which topped the charts in both Britain and America. Elton and Bernie wrote it under the joke pseudonyms Ann Orson and Carte Blanche.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In an October 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, Elton said publicly that he was bisexual, telling the magazine there was nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of your own sex, and that he thought everybody was bisexual to a certain degree. Blue Moves, his first album on his own Rocket label, gave him Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word but ended his run of American number one albums. That same year he became chairman of Watford, the football club he had supported since boyhood. He hired Graham Taylor as manager and poured in money, and the club rose from the fourth division to finish second in the top flight in 1983 and reach the FA Cup final in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1977 Elton announced he was retiring from performing. Bernie went off to write with Alice Cooper, and Elton turned to a new lyricist, Gary Osborne, for the 1978 album A Single Man, which gave him the instrumental hit Song for Guy. He worked with the Philadelphia soul producer Thom Bell, who gave him his first singing lessons and encouraged him to sing lower. A disco album, Victim of Love, was poorly received. The retirement did not last. In May 1979, with percussionist Ray Cooper as his only accompanist, he played eight concerts in Leningrad and Moscow, making him one of the first Western rock stars to perform in the Soviet Union. Each night ended with Back in the U.S.S.R.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The eighties: survival, scandal and excess

On the thirteenth of September 1980, with Murray and Olsson back in the band, Elton played a free concert on the Great Lawn in New York's Central Park to an estimated 400,000 people. For part of the set he dressed as Donald Duck. Less than three months later, on the eighth of December 1980, John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York home by Mark David Chapman. Lennon had been a close friend, and Elton is godfather to Lennon's son Sean. On the 1982 album Jump Up, Elton and Bernie paid tribute with Empty Garden. By then Elton and Bernie were writing together again, and with the classic band reunited, 1983's Too Low for Zero brought I'm Still Standing and I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues.[1] [2] [3]

The I'm Still Standing video was shot on the French Riviera in Cannes and Nice. Choreographer Arlene Phillips took one look at Elton's dance moves and quietly reduced him to clicking his fingers and strolling along the seafront. The director fell into the sea with a camera full of footage, and during the shoot Elton ran into Duran Duran, who poured six martinis into him. By all accounts, chaos followed at his hotel. In October 1983 came real controversy, when he broke the United Nations cultural boycott of apartheid era South Africa by playing Sun City. Then, on Valentine's Day 1984, in Sydney, Elton married Renate Blauel, a German recording engineer and close friend. John Reid was his best man.[1] [2] [3]

The marriage lasted until 1988. Elton later said that Renate was the classiest woman he had ever met, but that he had been living a lie. Blauel later said she attempted suicide during their honeymoon after Elton told her he wanted to end it. In July 1985 he played Live Aid at Wembley, bringing on George Michael for Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me. In early 1986 That's What Friends Are For, recorded with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder, reached number one in America and raised money for AIDS research. And after a tour of Australia ending in December 1986, Elton had throat surgery in January 1987. His voice changed for good, from a tenor to a baritone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1987 The Sun newspaper, under editor Kelvin MacKenzie, splashed a completely false front page story claiming Elton had paid for sex with underage rent boys. It followed up with another invented story, that he had had the voice boxes of his guard dogs removed. A reporter sent to his house soon found the dogs barking perfectly well. Elton sued over both stories, and in 1988 he was awarded one million pounds in libel damages. The episode came at the height of his addiction to cocaine and alcohol. He later described the period around 1988's Reg Strikes Back as heading for the abyss. That year he sold two thousand items of memorabilia at Sotheby's in London for more than twenty million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

There were money battles too. In 1985 it was reported that Elton was suing his old publisher Dick James over the rights to his early songs. It was a case Elton lost, and James died of a heart attack in February 1986. In 1989 Sleeping with the Past, a tribute to the soul records of their youth, was recorded while Elton was sober, just, as he put it. On the tour that followed he went off the rails again and collapsed on stage in the first week. He later admitted he had taken risks with unprotected sex through the eighties and considered himself lucky to have escaped HIV. Friends, Bernie among them, begged him to stop using drugs, but he was not yet ready to listen.[1] [2] [3]

Sober, and a new purpose

The turning point was a teenager from Indiana. Ryan White was a haemophiliac who contracted HIV from contaminated blood treatment and was barred from school in the mid eighties by frightened parents and teachers. Elton befriended him and his family, and he lent Ryan's mother the deposit for a new house, then put the repaid money into a college fund for Ryan's sister. In April 1990 Elton sat by Ryan's hospital bed in Indianapolis. Ryan died on the eighth of April, aged eighteen. Elton was a pallbearer and sang Skyline Pigeon at the funeral. He said the White family showed him how crazy his own life was, and that without them he would probably be dead. That same year he went into rehab and got sober.[1] [2] [3]

Clean at last, Elton scored his first solo British number one in June 1990 with Sacrifice, a song that had stalled until the Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright kept playing it. Then came more loss. His bass player of the golden years, Dee Murray, died in January 1992 of a stroke after years of skin cancer. He was forty five, and Elton played a benefit at the Grand Ole Opry for Murray's family. Freddie Mercury had died of AIDS in November 1991, and weeks later a painting Freddie had chosen for him arrived at Christmas. In 1992 Elton founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has since raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The One, released that year, was his first album made entirely sober.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In a 1992 interview with Rolling Stone he said he was quite comfortable about being gay. The following year he asked a friend to gather some new faces for a Saturday dinner at his home in Windsor. One of them was David Furnish, a Canadian advertising executive. Elton said he was attracted immediately, and they fell in love fast. Around the same time he teamed up with lyricist Tim Rice on Disney's The Lion King. Elton objected when he heard Can You Feel the Love Tonight was going to be sung for laughs by Timon and Pumbaa, and he won. It took the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1995. In 1994 Axl Rose inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The summer of 1997 brought double grief. On the fifteenth of July his friend Gianni Versace was shot dead outside his Miami Beach mansion by the spree killer Andrew Cunanan. At the funeral in Milan, Diana, Princess of Wales, was photographed comforting a distraught Elton. Weeks later, on the thirty first of August, Diana herself died in a car crash in Paris. Bernie rewrote the words of Candle in the Wind for her, and on the sixth of September Elton sang it at her funeral in Westminster Abbey. It is the only time he has performed that version live. The single sold around thirty three million copies, and about fifty five million pounds went to her memorial fund.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty fourth of February 1998 the Queen knighted him, for services to music and charity. That same year his partnership with John Reid ended badly. A man named Benjamin Pell had been going through the rubbish bins and computer system of Reid's office and found letters from accountants worried about Elton's spending, which ended up in the Daily Mirror. The fallout led to court in 2000, where it emerged Elton had spent thirty million pounds in under two years, including almost three hundred thousand pounds on flowers. Reid settled out of court, paying Elton a reported three point four million pounds. Also in 2000, Aida, his second musical with Tim Rice, won the Tony for Best Original Score.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Theatre, Las Vegas and a family

In 2001 Songs from the West Coast took him back to the piano driven sound of his early records. One track, American Triangle, was about Matthew Shepard, the gay student murdered in 1998, and the album was dedicated to him and to Davey Johnstone's late son Oliver. Elton no longer liked appearing in his own videos, so Justin Timberlake played a young Elton in one, and Robert Downey Junior lip synced another. Then in July 2002, the producer of his golden years, Gus Dudgeon, was killed with his wife Sheila when his car left the M4 motorway at high speed and landed in a storm drain. An inquest heard he was over the drink drive limit. Elton dedicated his 2004 album Peachtree Road to him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Theatre became a second career. Elton saw the film Billy Elliot and said of the boy who wants to dance, he's like me. With writer Lee Hall he turned it into a musical that opened in London in 2005, ran for more than four and a half thousand performances and won the Tony for Best Musical on Broadway. His one stage show with Bernie, Lestat, closed after thirty nine performances. From 2004 he took a residency called The Red Piano at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, alternating with Celine Dion, and he played it more than two hundred times. On his sixtieth birthday in March 2007 he played Madison Square Garden for a record sixtieth time.[1] [2]

On the twenty first of December 2005, the first day civil partnerships became legal in England and Wales, Elton and David Furnish were among the first couples to form one, at Windsor Guildhall. In 2009 they hoped to adopt an HIV positive boy from a Ukrainian orphanage, but officials refused. Their first son, Zachary, was born through a surrogate on Christmas Day 2010, and his brother Elijah followed in January 2013. There were threats too. After Elton described Jesus in a 2010 interview as a compassionate gay man, a Georgia activist named Neal Horsley filmed himself outside Elton's Atlanta home declaring that Elton had to die. He was arrested for making terrorist threats, though the charges were later dropped.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2009, on safari in South Africa, Elton heard a Leon Russell song on his partner's iPod and burst into tears. Russell, his first piano hero, had been playing small clubs for years. Elton tracked him down, and in 2010 they released a joint album, The Union, produced by T Bone Burnett. Russell died in 2016, and Elton called him a mentor and an inspiration. In 2013 Elton played Moscow despite calls for a boycott over Russia's anti gay laws, and told the crowd the laws were inhumane. On the twenty first of December 2014, after same sex marriage became legal, he and David married in Windsor. In 2016 Wonderful Crazy Night was his first album with his touring band in a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Farewell, and not quite goodbye

In January 2018 Elton announced he would stop touring to spend time with his sons and husband. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on the eighth of September 2018. In May 2019 came Rocketman, a fantasy musical about his life, with Taron Egerton playing Elton and Jamie Bell as Bernie. Its song I'm Gonna Love Me Again won Elton and Bernie an Oscar in 2020, Bernie's first and Elton's second. In Russia, distributors cut about five minutes of gay and drug scenes, which Elton condemned. That October he published his autobiography, Me. In 2020 Renate Blauel sued him, saying the book broke the terms of their divorce agreement. The case was settled later that year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The pandemic halted the tour, so Elton made The Lockdown Sessions, saying he felt like a session musician again, just as in the late sixties. Its single Cold Heart, a remix built from pieces of four old songs and sung with Dua Lipa, hit number one in Britain in October 2021, in the same week he had hip surgery. It made him the first solo artist with British top ten hits in six different decades. That Christmas a duet with Ed Sheeran went to number one too. In 2022 he recorded Hold Me Closer with Britney Spears, her first new music in six years, and President Joe Biden surprised him at the White House with the National Humanities Medal.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty fifth of June 2023 Elton headlined Glastonbury, his last British concert of the tour, and an average of seven point three million people watched on BBC television. On the eighth of July 2023, in Stockholm, he played the final show. The tour ran to 330 concerts and grossed close to a billion dollars, the biggest tour ever at that point, until Taylor Swift's Eras tour overtook it. In the weeks that followed he gave evidence by video link as a defence witness at Kevin Spacey's sexual assault trial, about Spacey attending his annual charity ball. In 2024 an Emmy for the Dodger Stadium farewell film made him an EGOT winner, and he and Bernie shared the Gershwin Prize.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In July 2024, while summering in the south of France, Elton caught a severe eye infection. It left him blind in his right eye and with poor vision in his left. By December he told a London audience he could not see his own new musical, The Devil Wears Prada, and in 2025 he said he could no longer read, watch television or see his sons play rugby. Yet he finished an album. Who Believes in Angels, made with Brandi Carlile, producer Andrew Watt and Bernie, came out in April 2025. A documentary showed him slamming down headphones and threatening to quit during the sessions, but it became his tenth British number one album. That month he also made peace with Madonna after two decades of barbs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

He kept fighting in public. In 2025 he called the British government absolute losers over plans to let artificial intelligence firms use artists' work without paying, and that April Russia banned his AIDS foundation as an undesirable organisation. In early 2026 a privacy case that he and David Furnish had brought with Prince Harry and others against the publisher of the Daily Mail finally came to trial. Elton appeared by video link, apologised for his eyesight, and called the paper's reporting on the birth of their son abhorrent. On the seventh of July 2026 the High Court dismissed all the claims. As of 2026 he is in his late seventies, partly blind, still working with Bernie Taupin, and still one of the best selling artists who ever lived.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Elton John

Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Paired by chance through an envelope of lyrics in 1967, they have written together for almost sixty years, with Bernie writing words alone and Elton setting them to music. They split up briefly in the late seventies but never truly fell out. Elton calls it the most important relationship in his life outside his family. Bernie visited him in rehab, and together they won an Oscar in 2020 and the Gershwin Prize in 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Elton John and John Reid. Reid was Elton's first boyfriend and, from 1970, his manager. The romance ended after about five years, but Reid ran his career until 1998 and was best man at his wedding in 1984. It ended bitterly after leaked documents exposed Elton's spending, and in 2000 Reid paid a reported three point four million pounds to settle. Reid once said he still hoped they might bump into each other one day.[1] [2]

Elton John and David Furnish. They met at a dinner party at Elton's Windsor home in 1993. Elton said he fell for Furnish because he had his own job and was not afraid of him. They formed a civil partnership in 2005, married in 2014 and have two sons. Furnish chairs the AIDS foundation, co directed the documentary Never Too Late and now manages Elton's career.[1] [2] [3]

Elton John and Renate Blauel. The German sound engineer married Elton in Sydney on Valentine's Day 1984. They divorced in 1988, and Elton later said she was the classiest woman he ever met but that he had been living a lie. For decades she refused to talk to the press about him, then in 2020 sued him over passages in his memoir. The case was settled that year.[1] [2]

Elton John and Long John Baldry. Baldry, the six foot seven blues pioneer, hired Bluesology as his band in 1966 and gave Elton half his stage name. In 1968 he talked Elton out of an unhappy marriage, and he is the someone in Someone Saved My Life Tonight. Elton and Rod Stewart later produced Baldry's 1971 album It Ain't Easy. Baldry died in Vancouver in 2005.[1] [2] [3]

Elton John and Gus Dudgeon. Dudgeon produced every classic Elton album from 1970 to 1976, from Your Song to Captain Fantastic, and helped found the Rocket label. Elton trusted him so much he often left once his piano and vocals were done. They parted in 1976 and reunited in the mid eighties. Dudgeon and his wife were killed in a car crash in 2002.[1] [2]

Elton John and Nigel Olsson. Olsson and bassist Dee Murray were Elton's first band, the trio that conquered the Troubadour in 1970. Their harmonies with Davey Johnstone defined the classic records. Elton fired both in 1975, then brought them back. Murray died in 1992, and Olsson says he thinks of him every day. Olsson went on to play more than two thousand concerts with Elton.[1] [2] [3]

Elton John and John Lennon. Lennon said Your Song was the first new thing to happen since the Beatles. In 1974 they recorded together and Lennon kept a bet by joining Elton on stage at Madison Square Garden, his last major concert. Elton became godfather to Lennon's son Sean, and after Lennon's murder in 1980 he wrote Empty Garden in tribute.[1] [2] [3]

Elton John and Kiki Dee. Kiki Dee signed to Elton's Rocket label and became a household name there. She sang backing vocals on his records, and their 1976 duet Don't Go Breaking My Heart topped the charts in Britain and America. They reunited at Live Aid in 1985 and again for True Love in 1993.[1] [2] [3]

Elton John and Madonna. Their feud began in 2002 when Elton called her Bond theme the worst ever, and in 2004 he mocked her on stage and accused her of lip syncing. In April 2025 Madonna confronted him backstage at Saturday Night Live, he asked her forgiveness for his big mouth, and they hugged. She said seeing him live as a teenager in Detroit had changed her life.[1]

Elton John and Leon Russell. Russell was Elton's piano idol and was in the audience at the Troubadour in 1970. Elton once opened for him, then lost touch. Hearing Russell on an iPod on safari in 2009 made Elton cry, and he tracked him down to make The Union in 2010, reviving Russell's career. Russell died in 2016.[1] [2]

Elton John and Ryan White. Elton befriended the Indiana teenager who had been shunned for having AIDS, helped his family financially and was at his bedside when he died in April 1990. He was a pallbearer at the funeral. Elton credits the Whites with shaming him into sobriety, and their friendship inspired his AIDS foundation.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Elton John

• Elton's middle name Hercules came from a horse in the sitcom Steptoe and Son. When he legally changed his name in January 1972, he chose Elton Hercules John. Hercules was the name of the rag and bone men's horse in Steptoe and Son, a show he loved.[1]
• As a teenager he had perfect eyesight but wore horn rimmed glasses anyway, to look like Buddy Holly. The glasses that became his trademark started as pure image. Normal sighted as a boy, he adopted Buddy Holly style frames and never looked back.[1]
• Drummer Nigel Olsson once rehearsed with the band that became Supertramp, but preferred life on the road. Before joining Elton full time, Olsson spent a stint writing songs with a new group in the countryside. He hated being cooped up, went back to London, and that group turned out to be Supertramp.[1]
• In 1969 Elton played piano on a single by Argosy, a one off group that included future Supertramp singer Roger Hodgson. The flower power single Mr. Boyd featured Reg Dwight on piano, Caleb Quaye on guitar, Nigel Olsson on drums and Roger Hodgson, who later co founded Supertramp.[1] [2]
• Elton and Bernie's attempt at a Eurovision song for Lulu came sixth out of six. As DJM staff writers they wrote I Can't Go On Living Without You as a contender to be Britain's Eurovision entry in 1969. It finished last of the six songs in the running.[1]
• Three Dog Night released Your Song before Elton did, but kindly chose not to make it a single. Elton had been opening for Three Dog Night, and they put Your Song on their album It Ain't Easy in March 1970. They held back from a single so the young newcomer could have the hit himself.[1] [2]
• The crowd on Bennie and the Jets is fake. The song was recorded in a studio. Gus Dudgeon added audience noise from a 1972 Elton show at the Royal Festival Hall, a Jimi Hendrix set at the Isle of Wight, whistles from Vancouver, and extra claps and shouts.[1]
• Crocodile Rock was the very first single on the newly merged MCA label in America. When MCA folded its smaller labels like Uni into one brand, Crocodile Rock got catalogue number 40000, and Don't Shoot Me was the first album on the new label.[1] [2]
• The suit Elton wore on the Rocket Man single sleeve had been stolen from a Flying Burrito Brother. The Nudie suit was made for Chris Ethridge of the Flying Burrito Brothers and stolen years earlier. Almost fifty years after the single, Ethridge's family recovered it, and it went on show at the Country Music Hall of Fame.[1]
• The Tumbleweed Connection cover, all Wild West atmosphere, was shot at a railway station in Sussex. The photo was taken at Sheffield Park station on the Bluebell Railway. In 2020, for the album's fiftieth anniversary, the railway restored the station to look just as it did on the cover.[1]
• The Madman Across the Water cover was embroidered by hand on the back of an old Levi's jacket. Janis Larkham, wife of art director David Larkham, spent two weeks stitching it. She credited herself as Yanis, and the original jacket was given to Elton.[1]
• Madman Across the Water, home of Tiny Dancer and Levon, only reached number forty one in Britain. While it made the American top ten, it spent just two weeks on the British chart. Tiny Dancer was not even released as a single in the UK.[1] [2]
• Captain Fantastic went gold two weeks before it was even released. Advance orders alone earned the certification in early May 1975. It then became the first album ever to enter the Billboard chart at number one, reportedly selling 1.4 million copies in four days.[1]
• Don't Go Breaking My Heart was credited to writers called Ann Orson and Carte Blanche. Elton and Bernie used the joke pseudonyms for their Motown pastiche. They first planned to record it with Dusty Springfield before duetting with Kiki Dee instead.[1]
• The B side of Don't Go Breaking My Heart was a put down of Cher that both writers later disowned. Snow Queen was inspired by Bernie's failed attempt at romance with Cher. It was poorly received, and it stayed off CD almost everywhere for more than forty years.[1]
• Elton helped pay for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A big Python fan, he was one of a group of rock musicians who put money into the 1975 film.[1]
• Island Girl knocked Neil Sedaka's Bad Blood off number one, a song Elton sang on without credit. Elton had signed Sedaka to his Rocket label and sang uncredited backing and duet vocals on Bad Blood. In October 1975 his own Island Girl replaced it at the top.[1] [2]
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was supposed to be made in Jamaica, but a boxing match helped drive the band out. The Frazier and Foreman title fight in Kingston, a poor studio piano and local unrest sent them back to the French château, where they cut the double album in about two weeks.[1]
• Sacrifice flopped at first, until Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright kept playing it. Released in 1989, it stalled at number fifty five in Britain. Wright's championing led to a reissue in 1990, and it became Elton's first solo British number one, staying five weeks.[1]
• Filming the I'm Still Standing video, the director fell into the sea with a camera full of footage. Russell Mulcahy's accident meant a day's shooting in the south of France had to be redone. During the shoot Duran Duran plied Elton with martinis, and his assistant's room ended up wrecked.[1]
• Can You Feel the Love Tonight was nearly a comic song for Timon and Pumbaa. Elton disliked the idea, arguing it should follow Disney's tradition of great love songs. He won, and the song went on to win the Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy.[1]
• Dying of AIDS, Freddie Mercury arranged a painting to be delivered to Elton on Christmas Day. Mercury chose a watercolour by Henry Scott Tuke, Elton's favourite artist, weeks before his death in November 1991. Elton later marvelled that a dying man had found him a lovely Christmas present.[1]
• The Sun once falsely claimed Elton had his guard dogs' voice boxes removed. A reporter sent to his house found the dogs barking perfectly well. Elton sued over that story and a false rent boy story, and won a million pounds in 1988.[1]
• Elton's cousin Roy Dwight scored in the 1959 FA Cup final, then broke his leg in the same match. Roy Dwight was a professional footballer with Nottingham Forest. He put them ahead at Wembley before breaking his leg.[1]
• In the mid seventies Elton was also part owner of an American soccer team, the Los Angeles Aztecs. From late 1975 to 1976 he held a stake in the North American Soccer League club, alongside his chairmanship of Watford.[1]
• A Royal Academy of Music organ is named after Elton and his percussionist Ray Cooper. The two performed benefit shows at the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Opera House to fund it. The Sir Elton John and Ray Cooper Organ was first heard in October 2013.[1]
• Of all their songs, Bernie kept only one original manuscript when he auctioned his lyrics: Scarecrow, their very first. He happily sold drafts of big hits at a Julien's auction but could not part with Scarecrow, saying it meant far more to him than any of the hits.[1]
• Nikita is a man's name in Russian, and Elton says he knew it. The 1985 video by Ken Russell showed a female East German border guard. A songwriter later claimed Nikita copied his song Natasha, but a US judge threw out the case in 2012.[1]
• Elton credits a Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel duet with helping him get sober. In 2014 he said Don't Give Up played a big part in his rebirth. Years earlier, in 1991, Kate Bush had covered Rocket Man, calling Elton her biggest hero since she was eleven.[1] [2]
• In the 1975 Troubadour anniversary shows, tickets were handed out by postcard lottery. Fewer than five hundred people fitted in each show, winners could buy two tickets, and every attendee received a hardbound yearbook of the band's history.[1]
• Elton's greatest hits album Diamonds reached number one in its 374th week on the British chart. The 2017 compilation finally topped the chart in January 2025, setting a record for the longest climb to number one, three months before Who Believes in Angels also went to the top.[1]
• Madonna sneaked out of her house as a high schooler to see Elton play in Detroit. She said the show changed the course of her life and taught her it was fine to be different, which made his public criticism of her hurt all the more.[1]
• Levon's character is born on Christmas Day, and so was Elton's son Zachary, whose middle names include Levon. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John was born on the twenty fifth of December 2010, echoing the 1971 song.[1] [2]
• In 2011 Elton said he owned no computer, no iPad and no mobile phone. Calling himself a Luddite, he admitted he could not even work an iPod. It was David Furnish scrolling through one on safari that led him back to Leon Russell.[1]
• Watford briefly swapped their traditional Z Cars walk out tune for I'm Still Standing in 2019. The change came in April 2019, but after fan pressure and petitions the club went back to Z Cars that August.[1]
• In the Step into Christmas video, Bernie Taupin mimes the tubular bells. Ray Cooper actually played them on the record, but Bernie makes a rare cameo appearance. The song first reached the British top ten in 2018, forty five years after release.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.