Me

by Elton John

Almost as an afterthought, or a consolation prize after rejecting me, Ray had handed me an envelope. Someone responding to the same advert had sent in some lyrics.

Something about them just seemed to click with me. And something about him just seemed to click with me, too.

It turned out that Bernie Taupin wasn’t a country bumpkin at all.

As soon as she said the words Elvis Presley, I recognized them. The previous weekend I’d been looking through the magazines in the local barber shop while I was waiting to have my hair cut, when I came across a photo of the most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen.

As ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ played, it felt like something had changed, that nothing could really be the same again. As it turned out, something had, and nothing was.

That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.

They were both stubborn and short-tempered, two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit.

Either I was genetically predisposed to losing my rag, or I unconsciously learned by example. Whichever it was, it has proved a catastrophic pain in the arse for me and everyone around me for most of my adult life.

It wasn’t enough for me to collect them. Every time I bought one, I kept a note of it in a book. I wrote down the titles of the A and B sides and all the other information off the label: writer, publisher, producer.

This is the equivalent of me taking notes of every music video I saw as a kid

Things were so exhausting at home that a dull life outside the front door seemed oddly welcome,

The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That went on for decades. I stayed in bad business relationships and bad personal relationships because I didn’t want to rock the boat.

Rock and roll was like a bomb that wouldn’t stop going off: a series of explosions that came so thick and fast it was hard to work out what was happening.

Victoria Wine was next door to another record shop. Mr Megson might as well have just put the ten bob he paid me straight into their till and cut out the middleman.

I’m just not very good at keeping money in my pocket if there’s something I want to buy.

Mood

Presumably already alive to the thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in my utter degradation.

While plenty of musicians will tell you that Buddy Holly had a massive impact on their lives, I’m probably the only musician that can say he inadvertently stopped me wanking,

I cannot

didn’t. A couple of years later, it was he who came to school brandishing a copy of ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles, whoever they were, claiming that they were going to be the biggest thing since Elvis. I thought that was laying it on a bit thick until he played it to me,

They made playing the piano seem as visually exciting and sexy and outrageous as playing the guitar or being a vocalist. I’d never realized it could be any of those things before.

Maybe rock and roll had changed me in the rebellious way Dad feared after all.

But football doesn’t work like that, or at least it shouldn’t. It’s in your blood: Watford were my dad’s team, therefore Watford were my team.

I’ve played bad gigs to unappreciative audiences as well, but they’ve never impacted on me too deeply. If I don’t actually have to stop performing and climb out of a window in fear of my life, it’s still an improvement on how I started out.

He said he knew how much I loved music, he knew about the Royal Academy, and that he would let me leave if I promised to work hard and give everything I had to the project.

Years later, after I became successful, he used to write to me telling me how proud he was of what I’d done.

Even today, I still sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and he’s been dead since 1991.

It was easy to imagine The Beatles living the same life, not least because it looked suspiciously like the bed sheets in the attic hadn’t been changed since John and Paul had slept in them.

One minute I was playing ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’, the next my organ was making a noise that sounded like the Luftwaffe had turned up over London to give the Blitz another go.

Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find things liven up quite considerably.

But I didn’t realize that he was gay. I know it seems incredible in retrospect. This was a man who called himself Ada, referred to other men as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and continually gave you in-depth reports on the state of his sex life:

If I’d passed the audition, Ray might not have handed me the envelope containing Bernie’s lyrics. And if he hadn’t handed me Bernie’s lyrics, I don’t really know what would have happened,

He seemed to pull the envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss

And yet that envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained.

We got on so well, it felt like he was the brother I’d never had, a state of affairs magnified by the fact that we were, at least temporarily, sleeping in bunk beds in my bedroom at Frome Court.

and by a new wave of Canadian singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen,

Why does the audiobook say American but here it says Canadian lol. Why does it feel like it was written as American and then someone realized Leonard Cohen was actually Canadian so they changed it even though it sounds crazy because he obviously didn't mean Canadian overall.

The adverts claimed it was ‘the greatest performance on a “first” disc’, that I was ‘1968’s great new talent’ and concluded, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’. The British public reacted as if they’d been warned every copy was contaminated with raw sewage; 1968’s great new talent went back to the drawing board.

My mother was dead set against the idea, and you can get a pretty good sense of what Bernie thought from the lyrics of the song he subsequently wrote about that period, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’.

The obvious course of action was simply to be honest. But the obvious course of action didn’t appeal – actually telling Linda how I felt was beyond me. So I decided to stage a suicide bid instead.

Screaming

It momentarily seemed quite dramatic when Bernie hauled me out of the oven, but there wasn’t enough carbon monoxide in the room to kill a wasp.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he erupted. ‘What are you doing living with a fucking woman? Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay. You love Bernie more than you love her.’

Bernie wrote in ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. That was a bit of poetic licence. There was no ‘they’ and no truck: only Derf in his little decorator’s van. But Bernie and I did get taken home. Back to the bunk beds in Frome Court we went.

So instead of moving out, we tried to make a bedroom with bunks in it look like an acceptable place for two grown men to live.

Twelve months after John Baldry had drunkenly announced that I was gay to everyone within earshot at the Bag O’ Nails, I decided he was right.

It turned out that playing the piano standing up like Little Richard is bloody hard work when you have arms as short as mine, but I persevered.

The clothes from Mr Freedom weren’t outrageous because they were sexy or threatening, they were outrageous because they were larger than life, more fun than the world around them.

As everyone knows, fame, especially sudden fame, is a hollow, shallow and dangerous thing, its dark, seductive powers no substitute for true love or real friendship.

He might as well hang a fucking neon sign out of the window with I AM GAY written on it.’

It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then.

Ruining a Liberace concert while coming out to my parents notwithstanding, life was heaven.

I love seeing people’s faces when you treat them to something.

But for as long as I can remember, I’ve always found collecting things oddly comforting, and I’ve always enjoyed learning about things by collecting them, whether that’s records or photographs or clothes or art.

And, in his own way, John really did love me. He was just completely incapable of keeping his dick in his pants if left to his own devices.