Me

by Elton John

There was choreography, in which I was expected to take part, at least initially. Visibly stunned by my demonstration of the moves I’d honed on the dance floors of Crisco Disco and Studio 54, the choreographer Arlene Phillips went pale and suddenly scaled down my involvement in that side of things, until all I really had to do was click my fingers and walk along the seafront in time to the music. Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she’d ever worked with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.

Perhaps that’s why I loved performing so much. You find it hard to accept personal compliments, so your life becomes about finding a more impersonal alternative: chart placings, crowds of nameless faces applauding. No wonder I always claimed my problems melted away onstage.

It probably was a bit cruel to say that Keith Richards looked like a monkey with arthritis, but, in fairness, he’d been pretty foul about me: he got as good as he gave.

But in private she could be hilarious. At another party, I saw her approach Viscount Linley and ask him to look in on his sister, who’d been taken ill and retired to her room. When he repeatedly tried to fob her off, the Queen lightly slapped him across the face, saying ‘Don’t’ – SLAP – ‘argue’ – SLAP – ‘with’ – SLAP – ‘me’ – SLAP – ‘I’ – SLAP – ‘am’ – SLAP – ‘THE QUEEN!’ That seemed to do the trick. As he left, she saw me staring at her, gave me a wink and walked off.

But with Diana it wasn’t like that. Despite her status and background, she was blessed with an incredible social ease, an ability to talk to anybody, to make herself seem ordinary, to make people feel totally comfortable in her company. Her kids have inherited it, Prince Harry in particular; he’s exactly the same as his mum, completely without any interest in formality or grandeur.

William and Harry looked completely shell-shocked. They were fifteen and twelve, and I thought the way they were treated that day was absolutely inhuman. They were forced to walk through the streets of London behind their mother’s coffin, told to show no emotion and look straight ahead. It was a horrendous way to treat two kids who’d just lost their mum.

I couldn’t live with the thought of making my own children as miserable as I had been.

And yet it was true: the responsibility was huge, but there is nothing about being a father that I don’t love. I even found the toddler tantrums weirdly charming. You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew and then broke my manager’s nose?

At the end, her coffin was taken away in a hearse. We all stood there, what was left of the Dwights and the Harrises, watching it go down the long drive at Woodside in silence. 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.

David suddenly started to cry. When I asked what the matter was, he said he’d been thinking about his parents, and the time he’d tried to come out to his mum when he was twenty-one. Her reaction had been enough to send him hurtling back into the closet. She told him that he’d never have children, never get married and never have security in a relationship. He would have no future, he would be discriminated against throughout his life, he might die of AIDS. 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.

Little Richard died and I spent an evening playing his records, thinking about the night I saw him live, the same year I left school – Sam Cooke was his support act, if you can believe that – and how blown away I was by his performance, how much it had influenced me. Reg Dwight might have been born in Pinner in 1947, but Elton John was born in the stalls of the Harrow Granada that night in October 1962.

You can send yourself crazy wondering. But it all happened, and here I am. There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?