Me

by Elton John

But if Queen’s most famous song sailed over my head at first, I got Freddie Mercury straight away. From the minute I met him, I loved him.

Freddie had turned retelling the story into a tour-de-force performance that rivalled anything he did onstage. ‘Oh, darling! That dreadful llama! All the way to California to see Mrs Jackson and she leads me out into the garden and there’s the llama.

eventually I had to shout at her: “For fuck’s sake, Mahalia, get your fucking llama away from me!” Oh,’ he would add, shuddering for comic effect, ‘it was a nightmare, darling.’

In fact, the first time I met John Lennon, he was dancing with Tony King. Nothing unusual in that, other than the fact that they weren’t in a nightclub, there was no music playing and Tony was in full drag as Queen Elizabeth II.

My first thought was that it was the police: if you’ve taken a lot of cocaine and someone unexpectedly knocks at the door, your immediate thought is always that it’s the police.

Bernie always hated the limelight, and not even a desperate Beatle could convince him to change his mind.

But ultimately it led to John reuniting with Yoko, having Sean – my godson – and retreating into a life of domestic contentment in the Dakota Building. I was happy for him, even if I could think of better places to retreat into domestic contentment in than the Dakota. There was something really sinister about that building,

Oh good lord

I was twenty-eight years old and I was, for the moment, the biggest pop star in the world. I was about to play the most prestigious gigs of my career. My family and friends were there, happily sharing in my success. And that was when I decided to try and commit suicide again.

That might have been exactly the response I needed. I was looking for ‘oh, you poor thing’, but instead I got ‘why are you behaving like such a twat?’

That’s who I am: it’s all or nothing. It wasn’t my family’s fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasn’t perfect. It was pathetic.

I wore a sequinned Dodgers uniform and cap, designed by Bob Mackie. I climbed on top of the piano and swung a baseball bat around. I hammered at the piano keys until my fingers split and bled.

it doesn’t matter who you are, or how great you are, your records aren’t going to enter the charts at Number One forever.

The 1976 Elton John world tour was supposed to be a journalist-free zone. I didn’t need to do any press to promote it, because every date had sold out instantly.

It was hard to get out of the hotel. It was August, and Manhattan was unbearably hot, but there was a crowd of fans permanently stationed outside the entrance. If I managed to get past them, wherever I went, there was chaos.

I once sent them a card, rewriting the lyrics to ‘Imagine’: ‘Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do, one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes’.

But, having delivered a penis-themed cuckoo clock to John Lennon, I had nothing else to do,

It seemed to make sense: Mum had introduced me to Elvis’s music; now I was going to introduce her to Elvis himself.

told he was going to be my bodyguard. Everyone else in our party automatically assumed he was spying on us for the KGB. I decided he could spy on me to his heart’s content – he was extremely good-looking,

Lmao

But the duck costume aside, it was a fantastic show: perfect New York autumn weather, audience members climbing the trees to get a better view. I played ‘Imagine’, and dedicated it to John Lennon.

Oh no he's gonna die in a couple months

John Reid went to the cockpit to find out what was going on, and came back in tears, looking completely bewildered. He told me John Lennon had been murdered.

I still used to tear up every time I sang it. I really loved John, and when you love someone that much, I don’t think you ever quite get over their death.

So there’s no point trying to justify it. Sometimes you fuck up, and you have to hold your hand up and admit it.

I didn’t want a huge confrontation, because it would have ruined the day, and because I was still scared of him: my life had changed so much over the years, but our relationship was still frozen in 1958.

I called him there a couple of weeks later, and told him I had some news. ‘I’m getting married,’ I said. Tony laughed. ‘Oh yes? And who are you getting married to? That glamorous tape operator? Are you going to be Mrs Jackson?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married to Renate.’

Cocaine’s like that. It makes you egotistical and narcissistic; everything has to be about what you want. And it also makes you completely erratic, so you actually have no idea what you want.

If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough.

On more than one occasion, 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.

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,

The wedding itself was 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.

Rod Stewart couldn’t make it, but his manager Billy Gaff sent a telegram: ‘You may still be standing, dear,’ it read, ‘but the rest of us are on the fucking floor.’

Out of a nearby window, someone cranked their stereo up and played ‘Kiss The Bride’ from Too Low for Zero, which, despite its title, is about the least appropriate song to play at a wedding

It’s worth pointing out that Renate didn’t just marry a gay drug addict. That would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life was about to go haywire in ways he hadn’t previously thought possible.

I decided I would take the same stoic, show-must-go-on attitude when I told the band and crew what had happened. Instead, I walked into the bar of the Sebel Townhouse – yes, there again – croakily announced, ‘They think I’ve got throat cancer,’ and then burst into tears.

The thought that I might never sing again carried me through it. The highlight was ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’. My voice was rough and raspy, but I don’t think I’ve ever performed that song better: it was always pretty show-stopping with the orchestra thundering away, but that night, every line seemed to have a new meaning, a different emphasis.

After I recovered, I realized that it had changed my voice for good, but I liked how it sounded. It was deeper and I couldn’t sing falsetto anymore, but there was something about the sound I liked. It felt more powerful, more mature; it had a different kind of strength.

I had allegedly readied myself for the orgy by donning a pair of ‘skimpy leather shorts’. Leather shorts? I’ve worn some ridiculous old tat in my time, but I’ve never, ever prepared for a night of passion by squeezing into a pair of leather shorts – you know, I’m trying to get someone to sleep with me, not take one look and run in the opposite direction, screaming.

Scream

Gay man sucks penis: it’s not exactly a Pulitzer-winning scoop.

How boring does your sex life have to be for a blow job to count as the height of unimaginable depravity?

David Guetta DJ’d there

This just threw me so bad. In my mind, we're really in a dated time still and then he drops this name. What year is it???? How old is David Guetta???

Hugh was my latest partner-in-crime: if he was admitting he had a problem, that meant I had a problem. By implication, he was accusing me of being a drug addict.

Bob somehow managed to talk his way out of being dressed in my clothes, but it didn’t change the fact that one of The Beatles was publicly telling me to do something about my cocaine habit.

Sometimes I spent whole days writing out pointless lists of records I owned, songs I’d written, people I would like to work with, football teams I’d seen:

We are both insane ppl who do this and I love that

I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die.

And that was the only work I did for the next year, unless you count unexpectedly turning up onstage in full drag at one of Rod Stewart’s Wembley Arena gigs and sitting on his lap while he tried to sing ‘You’re In My Heart’. And I don’t: spoiling things for Rod has never felt like work, more a thoroughly enjoyable hobby.

Both our counsellors had warned against us staying together: they kept telling us that it wouldn’t work, that the dynamic of the relationship would change irrevocably now that we were sober.

So we rented an apartment, moved in together and discovered to our immense surprise that the dynamic of our relationship appeared to have changed irrevocably now that we were sober, and it wasn’t working out.

He lay there, surrounded by catalogues of Japanese furniture and art, interrupting the conversation to telephone auction houses in order to bid for items he liked the look of:

I couldn’t work out whether he didn’t realize how close to death he was, or if he knew perfectly well but was determined not to let what was happening to him stop him being himself.

There was a note with it: ‘Darling Sharon – thought you’d love this. Love, Melina.’ While he was lying there, he’d spotted it in one of his auction catalogues and bought it for me. He was thinking about Christmas presents for a Christmas he must have known in his heart he wouldn’t see;

I got Rufus Wainwright into rehab – he was taking so much crystal meth that, at one stage, he’d gone temporarily blind

Speechless had no idea