Me

by Elton John

and I’m Eminem’s AA sponsor. Whenever I ring to check in on him, he always greets me the same way: ‘Hello, you cunt’,

scream

Since then, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised over $450 million, and we’ve hosted some incredible events. The last time Aretha Franklin performed live was at our twenty-fifth anniversary gala,

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, where her singing career had begun.

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.

Dude IM CRYING just thinking about it

I wrote ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. I wrote ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’. I wrote ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’. And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot.

Howling

I thought the finished film was completely extraordinary. I’m not the kind of artist who invites people over to play them my new album, but I loved The Lion King so much that I arranged a couple of private screenings so friends could see it.

Right now I'm realizing that even more of my favorite movies have Elton John in common than I used to believe. I've never counted Lion King in there, but it really is another one.

‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’ won an Oscar for Best Original Song: three of the five nominations in that category had come from The Lion King: one of them was ‘Hakuna Matata’, the song about the farting warthog. The soundtrack sold eighteen million copies – more than any album I’ve ever released except my first Greatest Hits collection.

I kept telling people that turning an animated film into a stage show was both impossible and doomed to failure – I couldn’t see it at all. But the director, Julie Taymor, did an amazing job. It opened to rave reviews, was nominated for eleven Tony Awards, won six, and became the most successful theatrical production in the history of Broadway.

Deserved!

I regretfully turned Disney’s deal down. At least the world was spared an Elton John theme park.

Imagine an Elton version of rockin rollercoaster tho

The only one who didn’t seem terribly pleased to be there was a Canadian guy in a tartan Armani waistcoat called David.

The new, improved, sober Elton John wasn’t going to decide he’d fallen madly in love with someone within minutes of meeting them.

It transpired that my casual request for his number hadn’t looked quite as casual as I thought. Judging by the reaction of his friends, who’d spent the entire journey back to London mercilessly teasing him and singing the chorus of ‘Daniel’ at him,

I just happened to be in London. I behaved as if this was a remarkable coincidence, but frankly, if David had been in Botswana, I suspect I would have happened to be there that evening too:

There were leather bars on Fire Island less obviously homosexual than Gianni.

But the problem with the lunch party wasn’t really my mum. It was one of the other guests, a psychiatrist, who at the last minute informed me that his client Michael Jackson was in England, and asked if he could bring him along.

every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking 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.

And now he was coming to the lunch at which my boyfriend was scheduled to meet my mother for the first time. Fantastic.

I still think a world in which artists are coached not to say anything that might upset anyone and are presented as perfect figures is boring.

Real

They can be fabulous and charming and they can be outrageous and stupid, and that’s what I wanted to show in Tantrums and Tiaras.

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.

I just thought: come on, do your job properly. You’ve really only got three things to do onstage – sing in tune, play the right notes and remember the words. If you can only be bothered to do two of them you may as well go and find another job instead –

Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone.

‘I will see you in the light of a thousand suns, I will hear you in the sound of the waves, I will know you when I come, as we all will come, through the doors beyond the grave’.

Instead, I arranged another series of live dates with Billy Joel. We’d been touring together since the early nineties: both of us onstage at the same time, playing each other’s songs.

Yaaaas

We played together for years, although it ended badly, because Billy had a lot of personal problems at the time, and the biggest one was alcohol.

Eventually, I suggested that he needed the kind of help that I had got, which didn’t make me very popular. He said I was being judgemental, but I genuinely wasn’t. I just couldn’t stand to watch a nice guy do that to himself any longer.

however close other artists claimed to be to their managers, I doubted any of them had lost their virginity to them.

LOL

From the moment he’d turned up in the lobby of the Miyako Hotel, our lives had been completely entwined. We’d been lovers, friends, partners, a team that had survived everything: fame, drugs, punch-ups, all the stupidity, all the extremes that came with me becoming Elton John.

Whenever someone told me he was aggressive, or complained about his temper, I thought of the line Don Henley used about The Eagles’ manager, Irving Azoff: ‘he may be Satan, but he’s our Satan’.

Not Irving

It was as if someone had taken the story of me and my dad and written a happy ending for it,

She would rather move to a foreign country than back down or apologize.

At one point, Sharon Osbourne sidled up to me as I was looking on. ‘I know she’s your mother,’ she muttered, ‘but I want to kill her.’

You obviously want to believe you wouldn’t make the same mistakes as your own mum and dad, but what if you did?

It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know what’s around the corner.

We called him Zachary Jackson Levon. Everybody always assumes the last name came from the song Bernie and I wrote on Madman Across the Water, but they’re wrong: he’s named after Lev. He had to be.

Lev was the reason we were there, on a maternity ward, holding our son, knowing that our lives had just completely changed forever.

However normal we tried to make our child’s life, the fact is that it was never going to be entirely normal,

There’s obviously a degree of privilege that goes with being Elton John’s son, but you would be fooling yourself if you didn’t think there was also a degree of burden.

and it seemed right that he should have a sibling who he could share with, who would understand his experience of life.

it’s strange sometimes how fame affects the people around you more than it affects you.

It was broken by my uncle Reg, addressing his sister for the last time. ‘You can’t answer anyone back now, can you, Sheila?’ he muttered.

the music will always surprise you,

Love this

if you’re planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check first to see whether or not the person you’re surprising has taken so much acid before the show that they’re unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and an actual gorilla.

as I was walking across the stage, basking in the crowd’s applause and punching the air, I was also, unbeknown to the audience, copiously urinating into an adult nappy concealed beneath my suit. Pissing myself in front of an audience while wearing a giant nappy: this was definitely hitherto uncharted territory.

Ok

There’s something incredibly gratifying about seeing an audience that’s completely different from the people who normally come to see you enjoying what you do.

There was one week when I was literally in the studio with both Fall Out Boy and Engelbert Humperdinck. I went from playing with an emo punk band, doing a song with lyrics that were all ‘fuck you’ and ‘I’m here to scream’ – and came with a video that involved me getting covered in blood while people were stabbed and smashed in the face with crowbars

.....pardon

never underestimate the zeal of the newly sober.

I didn’t want to be anywhere other than with Zachary and Elijah. I’d finally found something that matched the lure of the stage.

if pissing yourself in front of 4,000 people constitutes the highlight of your day, you’re clearly in a bad way.

We were worlds apart. I don’t know how it all still worked between us, but then, I never understood how it worked in the first place. It just did. It just does.