Me

by Elton John

It was the kind of forced leisure that would ordinarily have driven me up the wall – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent this long at home – but, as ill as I felt, I found I really enjoyed it.

if you want more time, you need to learn to live like this, you have to slow down.

Music was the most wonderful thing, but it still didn’t sound as good as Zachary chattering about what had happened at Cubs or football practice.

Distributors would refuse to take on the film because it was R-rated and ask if we could cut it and turn it into a family movie, a PG-13. Sorry, but no: I wanted the film to be truthful, and I’m afraid I’ve just not led a PG-13-rated life.

At one point, Justin Timberlake was going to play me.

Oh good lord no

And Matthew also pointed out that Taron Egerton, who he’d directed in both Kingsman films, could sing. In fact, he’d already performed one of my songs, ‘I’m Still Standing’, in the animated film Sing,

My favorite serendipitous fact about this movie

I just adored Taron. I knew he was the right man for the job when I heard him sing ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’.

‘Got up. Tidied house. Watched football on TV. Wrote “Candle In The Wind”.

I heard that Taron had hated having his hair thinned out with a razor to make it look more like mine in the seventies, which I thought was hilarious: welcome to my world, baby – at least yours will grow back.

I’m sorry: what? What blow job scene? I mean, I’ve obviously got nothing against blow jobs – in fact, I’d describe myself as an ardent and lifelong fan of them

Millions of dollars are being spent making a film about your life and you suddenly learn it includes a long and apparently controversial blow job scene: it’s not exactly the perfect recipe for a restful night.

Still, my bursting into tears finally succeeded in changing his mood completely: he stopped looking nervous and started looking suicidal.

Lmao

But it could have been written about the people who lived in that house: no one was happy, everyone felt they were stuck there against their will, everyone was looking for something else, everyone knew there was a better life for them outside its walls. I suddenly realized that lyrics I’d sung scores of times summed up my childhood and my family perfectly. And that’s when the floodgates opened.

I looked at David, who was still wearing an expression suggesting he didn’t think life had that much left to offer him. ‘So?’ he sighed. ‘Don’t change a thing about it,’ I said. ‘I love it.’

One night in LA, I took him to Joni Mitchell’s house. That was a huge deal for him – Taron is a massive Joni Mitchell fan.

Since then, some mutual friends of ours, the country singer Brandi Carlile and her wife Catherine, had started visiting her every week, bringing other musicians along and encouraging Joni to sing with them, everyone from Herbie Hancock to Chaka Khan. Joni had a lot of gruelling physiotherapy as well, but I couldn’t help thinking that Brandi’s visits were part of her recovery: they reconnected her with something she loved, something she was incredibly gifted at.

Brandi was there with Tim and Phil, the identical twins who play bass and guitar in her band.

Even Tim and Phil got a shout out shut up!!!

And that era was what the whole evening made me think of: the magical version of LA I’d encountered on my first visit to America, the parties up in Laurel Canyon where musicians would get together and sing and play just for the love of it.

‘Elton, she’s … a goddess.’ But he’s been back there since, without me. The last I heard, he was happily belting out ‘Your Song’ in Joni Mitchell’s front room as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

I love crying

I was really disappointed when Taron didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

Me and you both buddy

But for one thing, I wanted Bernie to get an Oscar: I already had one, but it was for The Lion King, and I wrote that with Tim Rice.

I was sitting backstage in a state of complete terror when I heard a familiar greeting at the dressing room door: ‘Hello, you old cunt.’ It was Eminem, who was performing ‘Lose Yourself’ at the ceremony.

I managed to say a few words of thanks, talk about how important Bernie was to me and how proud I was that our partnership was being rewarded fifty-two years into our career,

I performed with Sam Fender, one of my favourite young artists: hardly anyone at the party knew who he was, but he absolutely tore the roof off.

SAM

I always thought that was hilarious: no one noticed any of the songs that Bernie wrote in the seventies that actually did allude to my sexuality, but everyone jumped on one that had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Classic stan culture

But the sweetest thing about the reviews was their sense of affection, a real sadness that I’d decided to stop touring, that an era was drawing to a close.

a security guard walked in with a handsome blond man in tow. I stared at him disbelievingly: Ray Williams looked exactly the same as he had when I’d walked into his office at Liberty Records, fifty-two years ago.

Wow

Backstage in Charlotte, Ray didn’t seem to want to bring the past up at all. There was no bitterness from him, just a grin and a huge hug. He told me how proud he was of what I’d achieved and how much he’d enjoyed Rocketman. It was genuinely wonderful to see him.

In fact, the only person who didn’t seem pleased for me was Rod Stewart. When the tour was announced, he went on a chat show in America and said that he would never announce his retirement, because that wasn’t ‘rock and roll’: I didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean, but I certainly didn’t feel like I needed a lecture on the feral spirit of rock and roll from someone who’d spent most of the last decade crooning his way through the Great American Songbook and ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’.

The way I just cackled

I had no idea what I’d done to upset him so much – which was ironic, given the hours I’d put in over the years deliberately trying to annoy him

It just seems really strange and sad, not least because it’s deprived me of the opportunity to point out to him how much better my tour’s selling than his.

Get him!

It felt suspiciously like I was having the best year of my career, aged seventy-two: I don’t need to tell you that’s a remarkable state of affairs for a rock star.

For the first time in my life, I became incredibly conscious of the fact that I was wearing a hairpiece. There seemed every chance that before the song was over, someone in Tasmania was going to find themselves wearing my wig.

Dying

Even when it went disastrously wrong, my farewell tour had a strange sense of circularity about it.

Donatella Versace was there; Alessandro Michele from Gucci and his partner Vanni;

Can I have no peace?

She wasn’t being mean, she was just terrified for him: at the time, that’s what people fully expected a gay man’s life to entail. It wasn’t that long ago, and look at us today.

They could have supported it even more strongly by repeating what I’d said at the press conference, which was that I had no intention whatsoever of actually retiring from music, or even live performances.

I spent my whole life trying to run away from Reg Dwight, because Reg Dwight really wasn’t a happy budgie. But what running away from Reg Dwight taught me is that when I got too far from him, too removed from the normal person I once was, things went horribly wrong;

From the moment I was ushered out of a failed audition and handed an envelope of Bernie’s lyrics as I got to the door, nothing has ever really turned out how I thought it would.