![]() Though John has talked endlessly about the avalanche of events that ensued in the years since, Taupin has less often done so - and certainly never with the specificity and flair he has in his new memoir, Scattershot (out September 12). ![]() When John told the label he could write music but not lyrics, he was handed an envelope with poems blindly submitted by Taupin. The two famously found one another other by fluke in 1967 after they each answered an ad in New Music Express from Liberty Records looking for fresh talent. Their rare way of writing - with each working separately, often in different parts of the world, before conferring on small tweaks to set everything in perfect sync - has created one of the most enduring and profitable relationships in pop history. His lyrics tell stories - often eccentric ones - and John makes them sing. He has given them their plots, characters, settings, attitudes, even their worldviews. And, of course, my grandmother came out with the perfect line: ‘I suppose we’ve all got to go home now.For more than 50 years, Bernie Taupin has given Elton John’s indelible melodies far more than their words. There was no way I was going to kill myself doing that. “I’d been working non-stop for five years. “It was stress,” he recalled in the same interview. And then have a shower and start the whole procedure all over again,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2010.Īnd he did make a theatrical suicide attempt in front of his mother and grandmother, jumping into his swimming pool screaming, “I’m going to die!” after swallowing 60 Valiums. And I was bulimic as well, so I wouldn’t eat for three days, then gorge on six bacon sandwiches and a pint of ice cream and throw it up. “Walking around the house, not bathing for three or four days, staying up watching pornography all the time, drinking a bottle of scotch a day. 1 albums in a row and being by far the biggest album act of the 1970s), John did descend into a well-publicized spiral of substance abuse and isolation before finding salvation in rehab and therapy. John admired Baldry as one of the few people in the music scene who was both openly gay and highly esteemed.ĭespite world-beating success (seven U.S. But the John came not from Lennon but from Elton’s early mentor Long John Baldry, whose various blues bands had nurtured some of British rock’s top talents (including Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Jack Bruce, Jimmy Page, and Rod Stewart) and who hired Bluesology as his backup band in 1966. Elton did adopt his first name from a Bluesology bandmate, saxophonist Elton Dean (later with rock band Soft Machine). Some members of this band reformed as Bluesology in 1964 and by a year later were indeed backing visiting American soul artists like the Isley Brothers and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. ![]() Reg responds by borrowing the bandmate’s first name (Elton) but is flummoxed by what to choose as a last name until, asked by music publisher Dick James for his name, he spots a photo of John Lennon on the wall and inspiration strikes.Īs early as 1963, an Elvis-besotted John was in a band playing Ray Charles and Jim Reeves covers at a hotel, rather than a pub, near his native Pinner outside of London. soul acts, leading one of his bandmates to point out Reg needs a name that’s a bit more rock ’n’ roll. Realizing his heart is in rock ’n’ roll, Reg ( Kingsman star Taron Egerton) starts playing with a small band in pubs on Saturday nights. “As soon as I’d finished, he played it straight back to me just like a gramophone.” Biographer Philip Norman wrote that “ Even as a toddler, Reggie Dwight could hear a piece of music just once, then sit at the piano and replicate it note for note.” He did win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, which he attended on Saturdays for four years, and his ability at the academy to reproduce even long and intricate pieces of music after a single listen is backed up by his teacher: “I remember once playing him a prelude by Handel, four pages long,” Helen Piena recalls in Norman’s biography. According to a story repeated both on John’s website and in multiple biographies, young Reg shocked his family by sitting down and playing The Skater’s Waltz by ear. He doesn’t prepare a piece for his audition but instead is admitted after replicating the piece he hears the teacher practicing. At the age of 11, he wins a scholarship to Britain’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music. In the film, the first inkling of little Reg Dwight’s talent comes when, as a tot, he picks out a melody on the family piano after hearing it on the radio, impressing his kindly grandmother and his glamorous if self-absorbed mother, who decide piano lessons are a good investment.
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