Me

by Elton John

A wheelbarrow full of dead chickens and ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ twice a night, respectively.

she could start an argument in an empty room.

If she liked to scare people, she must have been overjoyed by me, because I was fucking terrified of her. I

came howling down the stairs with my foreskin caught in my trouser zip and asked her to get it out. She just sighed and got on with it, as though extracting a small boy’s penis from a zip was the kind of thing she did every day.

He was a typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character.

The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That went on for decades. I stayed in bad business relationships and bad personal

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.

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

years on, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different from our parents, that made us feel we could achieve something. It’s

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.

for some inexplicable reason, they seemed very resistant to financing an album by an artist who’d so far done nothing but lose them money.

The Band told: ‘Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train, ‘til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore the tracks up again’.

‘The name is Lee Sutton, DSM, OBE – Dirty Sex Maniac, On the Bed with Everybody’

He had reacted to another client, Janis Joplin, becoming addicted to heroin not by intervening but by taking a life insurance policy out on her. Word

just get a lot of pleasure out of making people feel included or letting them know I’m thinking about them. I love seeing people’s faces when you treat them to something.

don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that material possessions aren’t a replacement for love or personal happiness. I’ve spent enough miserable, lonely nights in houses filled with beautiful things to have worked that out for myself a long time ago. And I really don’t recommend going shopping in the depressing aftermath of a three-day cocaine binge, unless you want to wake up the next day confronted by bags and bags filled with absolute crap you don’t actually remember buying.

I’ve got 1,000 candles in a closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I’ll tell you what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.

Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.

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.

making our way through a pile of coke, when someone knocked at the door. 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.

‘And do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’

had dyed my hair bright green and brought suitcases filled with suits by the designer Tommy Nutter that were so loud they could permanently damage your hearing.

There aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it.

you’re never too successful to fall flat on your arse.

Divine and me being turned away from Crisco Disco. Let’s look at the circumstantial evidence: I’d been trying to get into a gay club, named after a famous anal lubricant, with the world’s most famous drag queen. The news that I wasn’t heterosexual could hardly have come as a bolt from the blue.

I left the clinic after the first procedure reeling in agony, lost my footing as I tried to get into the back of a waiting car and hit the top of my head on the door frame. It was at that moment I discovered that however much a hair transplant hurt, it was a mere pinprick compared to the sensation of hitting your head on a car door immediately after having a hair transplant.

One piece of advice I would give anyone planning on publicly coming out is this. Try and make sure you don’t do it immediately after being appointed chairman of a British football club, unless you want to spend your Saturday afternoons listening to thousands of away supporters singing – to the tune of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ – ‘Don’t sit down when Elton’s around, or you’ll get a penis up your arse’. I

‘you’ve got a fucking giraffe for a centre-forward’

When the breakdown truck arrived, they were understandably disconcerted to find themselves attending a convertible Bentley driven by a man in a clown suit and make-up, covered in blood.

That’s the thing about success. It gives you a licence to misbehave, a licence that doesn’t get revoked until your success dries up completely, or you man up and decide to hand it in yourself.

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. That’s a pretty dismal cocktail for life in general, but for any kind of personal relationship, it’s lethal. If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough.

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.

famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake.

I AM WORTHY, I AM A GOOD PERSON

‘I ’ave found you the most incredible tablecloth, you must buy it, for dinner on Christmas Day. Made by nuns, it takes them thirty years to make, look at it, it’s wonderful. It costs a million dollars.’

there was nothing not to like about Gianni, unless you designed handbags out of nylon.

tried to reassure him by lying through my teeth, promising that the reports he had heard of Michael’s eccentricities had been greatly exaggerated. This probably wasn’t very convincing, given that some of the reports of Michael’s eccentricities had come directly from me.

And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.

‘Sand And Water’, from an album by the singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman that was released the day Gianni was murdered. I’d played it over and over in Nice: ‘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’.

‘You think you’re smart, you Cockney shite, you want to be suspicious – while you were on the picket line, I went and fucked your missus.’

the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level.

‘Well all the fun has died, it’s raining in my heart, I know down in my soul I’m really going to miss you’.

song you’ve played a thousand times that unexpectedly causes a long-forgotten memory to reappear in your mind.

I’ve had hot dogs thrown at me in Paris; I’ve been knocked unconscious by a hash pipe while wearing a giant chicken outfit in North Carolina – my band thought I’d been shot – and I’ve run onstage in a gorilla costume in an attempt to surprise Iggy Pop.

thought it would be funny if I hired a gorilla costume and ran onstage during their set – you know, just adding to the general mayhem and anarchy. Instead, I was taught an important life lesson, which is 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. I discovered this when my appearance was greeted not with gales of laughter but the sight of Iggy Pop screaming and shrinking away from me in terror. This was quickly followed by the realization that I was no longer on the stage but flying through the air at high speed. Sensing the need for decisive action, another member of The Stooges had stopped playing, picked me up and thrown me into the crowd.