YUSUF & ELTON AT GLASTONBURY

“Some things change, some stay the same,” sings Chrissie Hynde in ‘Hymn To Her’, a song on The Pretenders album Get Close that seems to me to be an invocation of women as supreme beings, the mothers of mankind, as they surely are. It certainly wasn’t meant to refer to ageing pop stars but it struck me as pretty apt on Sunday as I watched Yusuf/Cat Stevens and Elton John at Glastonbury from the comfort of our sofa. Yusuf had changed but Elton hadn’t, and it wasn’t just their choice of names.

        Sunday at Glastonbury was always likely to send me back to a time when reviewing shows by Elton, Cat Stevens and Blondie was what I did for a living. Indeed, I saw both Steve – as Cat Stevens, now Yusuf, was known to his associates – and Elton for the first time at outdoor festivals in 1970, the former at Plumpton on August 8, and the latter at Krumlin, near Halifax, two weeks later, on August 15, and 50-odd years ago now I interviewed and wrote about both extensively for Melody Maker. Blondie, of course, came later, at CBGBs in New York, and their Sunday set – midway between Yusuf and Elton – was pretty much the same as when I saw them last year in Brighton, very professional, up-to-date, slick, even if Debbie’s voice doesn’t quite pack the punch it once did. 

        But it’s Yusuf and Elton that concern me here. 

Yusuf looks much older, with thinning white hair, and he seemed slightly unsure of himself facing an audience that was surely far greater than he’d ever faced before in any of his multiple careers. He seemed genuinely surprised by the warmth with which he was received, and humble too, openly grateful that his songs still struck a chord with the crowd. Wisely, he ran through several of the earliest in a medley that included ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’ and he concluded his set an hour later with ‘Father And Son’, both songs that have been covered by many. Bravely, perhaps, he included a handful of more recent songs, but none slackened the momentum of his set, and I liked the animated, slightly quirky, understated graphics beamed behind him. His band, too, were low key.

        Back in the early seventies he usually sat on a tall stool to perform and bobbed around a lot as he played, and he was invariably accompanied by the guitarist Alun Davies, but to my disappointment there was no sign of Alun on Sunday. Steve, his long black hair framing olive Mediterranean features, was a heartthrob in those days. Girls adored him. Now he’s a kindly old man. I could imagine him surrounded by children, telling fairy stories at bedtime. 

In 1983 I wrote a book about Yusuf and met with him to discuss it. He was adamant that he’d put his guitar away for good, and would no longer perform or write songs, all which were proscribed by the Islamic faith he’d adopted in 1978 when he changed his name from Cat Stevens to Yusuf Islam. A change of heart occurred in 2006 when he released his first new album for 28 years and since then he’s performed intermittently around the world. 

“Don't you feel a change a coming,” he sang in ‘Changes IV’ from Teaser And The Firecat in 1971, the first of two albums (the other was Tea For The Tillerman released earlier the same year) that defined his career. Yes, you have changed a lot I thought as he exited the stage, waving shyly at a vast crowd on an afternoon he’ll surely remember for the rest of his days. 

An hour or three later, dinner with red wine consumed, I sat down to watch Elton. He hasn’t changed at all, I thought. The songs he sang were largely the same as those he sang when I saw him perform regularly, all bar five I specify below. He didn’t look that much different either, no less podgy but a tad stiff, ungainly in his movements, as if he’d risen from a long rest and needed to stretch, and he seemed to have considerably more hair than he did 50 years ago. His gold lamé suit, perhaps modelled on the one worn by Elvis, was a bit bulky and didn’t seem to fit him too well, but he was the same ebullient showman he always was, a curious mix of humility and effervescence, his sincerity and professionalism intact, just as they always have been. His voice was a bit deeper but, as ever, he played his grand piano superbly. 

  Elton delivered 21 songs, 16 of which were recorded during the first flourish of his career, up to 1976, a staggering proportion of old, safe and reliable material to my mind. (This was the year when he announced [to me] his impending retirement from live shows for the first time.) Of the rest, two were from 1983, one from 1984, one from 1991 and one, ‘Until I Found You’ by Stephen Sanchez, with whom he duetted, from 2021. 

His audience, however, looked to me to be considerably less than half his age, which is 76, the same as me, with many even younger. The 16 early songs were first released around 50 years ago, yet the huge crowd of boys and girls born long after they were recorded seemed to know them all, singing along lustily as festival audiences are inclined to do. The obvious conclusion is that Elton’s hits compilations sell far more than his albums of new material, but it must be galling for him to have to base his show on so many old evergreens.  Furthermore, his band included the same guitarist, Davey Johnstone, and drummer, Nigel Olsson, who’ve played with him for decades, as has percussionist Ray Cooper, which is not a criticism, just an observation. 

So it was that I couldn’t help but think that little of Elton has changed since I last saw him perform in person, in America in August 1976. It was on this trip, on his private plane mid-air between Chicago and Cincinnati, that he told me he, “felt like stopping for a time. I’ve done it for six years and I’m fed up with it. I could change my mind. I’m not retiring. I just want to lay off for a bit.” I thought back to that conversation as I watched him. 

        The 1970 Krumlin Festival where I first saw Elton was a disaster, though this energetic newcomer on piano did his utmost to raise the spirits of a cold, damp audience. I was unacquainted with his songs but thought he was terrific, a fabulous showman, and afterwards went to the caravan backstage that was his dressing room, knocked on the door and was admitted by Sandy Denny who was inside, sharing a bottle of cognac with him. Elton was delighted that someone from Melody Maker was showing an interest in his work and happily supplied the titles with which I was unfamiliar. I went back to the office and wrote up a rave review, said he was the highlight of the festival, a star in the making, and this cemented a genial yet professional relationship that lasted for as long as I was a working music writer. In that time, no matter how big he became, I was welcomed into Elton’s entourage, granted interviews and on first-name terms. 

       The relationship was unlikely to withstand my departure from MM but it didn’t matter. I watched his life progress, read about his troubles and triumphs, his tantrums and tiaras. Throughout it all he remained the same, as he still is, quite remarkably in fact; little difference between the eager 23-year-old I saw at Krumlin in 1970 and the wise old 76-year-old I watched on Sunday. If he does retire, which I somehow doubt, I wish him the best. 

(Pic of Yusuf: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock; Elton: Samir Hussein/Wire Image)

ME by Elton John

A popular musician who has stepped on stage dressed as Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse and Amadeus Mozart, complete with elevated, powdered wig, is unlikely to take himself too seriously. So it comes as no surprise that Elton John’s autobiography is laced with scandalous tales of the rich and famous, lacerating self-denunciation and brutal honesty. Nevertheless, irrespective of his fame, his wealth and his extremes in taste and behaviour, Elton still manages to come across a bit like a kid in a sweet shop, as if everything that’s happened to him in his extraordinary life might still be a dream and he’ll wake up one day as Reg Dwight again, back in the pub in Pinner playing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ on the piano while someone passes round the hat. Me doesn’t so much dispel that myth as reinforce it in spades. It is indiscreet in ways that suggest its author is really a naughty boy telling tales out of school, and in this respect it is hilariously funny, with most of the fun poked at himself. 

         We learn, for example, that his friendship with Rod Stewart – ‘Phyllis’ to his ‘Sharon’ – is contingent on them forever exchanging insults and doing their best to demean one another; that he believes the reason he never caught AIDS was because he’s a sexual voyeur who prefers to watch men doing it than join in himself; and that an unnamed American guitarist who auditioned for his band was passed over because he expressed a fondness for decapitating chickens while sexually engaging with them. “Apparently when you do that their sphincters contract and it makes you come,” he writes, nonchalantly.

         This is the tip of the iceberg. There are stories about the Royal Family, mostly fairly benign except for when, prior to dinner at Elton’s New Windsor home, Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone square up to one another over the favours of another guest, Princess Diana; stories about rock royalty, like the time he mistook Bob Dylan for a gardener, or when he and John Lennon declined to admit Andy Warhol to their hotel suite because, squinting through the spyhole in the door, Elton confirmed that the prince of pop art was carrying his Polaroid so, as Lennon pointed out, it wasn’t wise to have him taking pictures with ‘icicles of coke’ hanging from Elton’s nose; and, lest we forget amidst the A-listers, uncomfortable stories about his mum and dad, neither of whom were equipped for raising a child, let alone one who would become a rock superstar.

         Therein, perhaps, lies the genesis of Elton’s story: escape from a miserable, repressed childhood in drab North London homes where Ma and Pa Dwight rowed constantly. This led young Reg to lock himself away in his bedroom and tend to his record collection, lovingly listing the credits on the labels and cutting out pictures of pop stars to Sellotape to singles bags. All he seems to have inherited from both was an unusually short temper which would manifest itself in ways that eventually led to that TV documentary Tantrums And Tiaras. When he discovered he had an ear for music by picking out tunes on the family piano at an early age, he was away, firstly taking lessons, then attending the RSM, then playing in the pub, then Bluesology backing Long John Baldry and minor US soul singers, then a bit of session work before finding lyricist Bernie Taupin, and the rest is history.

         Success didn’t so much come suddenly after five years of struggle as discomfortingly massive all of a sudden. A year after the release of his second album he was front-page news and for the next five years the pace rarely slackened, making him the most prolific rock star of his era, and one of the richest, as singles and LPs sold in their millions and endless tours visited the world's largest stadia, all accompanied by extravagance in dress and performance hitherto unseen on a rock stage. Thereafter his career slips into a familiar trajectory, with management issues and missing money, sex – albeit gay rather than straight – and a drugs and drink ‘hell’ from which he eventually emerges an older but wiser man, now elevated to knighthood and saintliness through his campaigning for AIDS. In the meantime there’s his association with Watford Football Club and that nasty business with the Sun newspaper, and the icing on the cake is his marriage to David Furnish and parenthood of two boys through a surrogate.

         All of this is told disarmingly frankly, seasoned by absurdities like his OTT spending sprees and the time he rang up his management company to demand someone do something about the weather. The only curtain is drawn across the ‘intimate details’ of his marriage to Renate Blauel, an agreement both continue to respect. Nothing else is off the table which must have made ghost writer Alexis Petridis’ job a whole lot easier than those in this line of work who are faced with PR-driven reticence. We are left to ponder on how the work was apportioned but, since Elton’s lawyers probably insisted on Petridis signing an NDA, we are never likely to find out. He’s certainly done Elton proud however, with a journalistic affinity for detail and off-the-wall stories, and a droll, understated way of setting them down on paper. There is a refreshing absence of unnecessary exclamation marks.

         There is also an absence of musical insight. Perhaps correctly assuming that his readers don’t really want to know how he does it, or perhaps because he doesn’t really know how to explain it himself, Elton largely refrains from talking about his talents as a musician, though he showers praise on others, most notably lyricist Taupin. It’s as if he takes it for granted that he can knock out a delightful melody in a matter of minutes, and to dwell on the art of composition might put a brake on the book’s pace.

         The only time the pace does slacken is when Elton muses briefly on the pressures of fame and his hatred of the Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome, when a superstar surrounds himself with courtiers who say only what they believe their employer wants to hear. In a melancholy but spellbinding passage about when he and Taupin met the famously bad-tempered Elvis in Landover, Maryland, Elton cites the ‘barely coherent’ King of Rock’n’Roll as the personification of this. At this point I couldn’t help but ponder on how – as he readily admits – Elton, too, explodes in angry tantrums when something doesn’t go right or when someone says something he doesn’t want to hear. There were clearly times when Elton, too, was ‘barely coherent’ but, unlike Elvis, Elton had the presence of mind to snap out of it before someone found him face down in a gilded bathroom.  

         But this is a good-natured book by a good-hearted man who shares his foibles in a way that few in his position would dare to do. And he absolutely loves to puncture fabrications, like this example from the funeral of couturier Gianni Versace. “I feel I should point out that the famous shot they got of [Diana] supposedly consoling me – where she’s leaning forward towards me, speaking, while I’m red-eyed and glazed with grief – is the one moment in the service when she wasn’t doing anything of the sort. They snapped her just as she was leaning past me, reaching for a mint that David offered her. The warm words of comfort coming from her lips at that exact moment were actually, ‘God, I’d love a Polo’.”

ROCKETMAN - Movie Review

Mondays on Melody Maker were always a bit stressful for me. It was the day when we had to come up with a front page lead story and, as the paper’s News Editor, this was often my responsibility. I can remember quite clearly how we chose Elton John over Pink Floyd for the cover story for MM’s November 28, 1970, edition; a decision made in committee by editor Ray Coleman, assistant editor Richard Williams, chief sub Alan Lewis and myself. Though Elton had never been on MM’s cover before, we opted to go with the bold headline DYLAN DIGS ELTON!, a rather OTT reaction to the news that Bob Dylan had evidently twice visited New York’s Fillmore East to see Elton perform during the previous week. I guess we assumed that Dylan wouldn’t have gone back a second time if he hadn’t ‘dug’ him.

         At this time Elton John was by no means the big star he would soon become. His first album failed to chart, his second had spent 14 weeks on the LP charts during the summer, rising no higher than number 11, and ‘Your Song’ wouldn’t become his first hit single until the following January, and even then it only reached number seven. So we were taking a bit of a chance on Elton. As it happened I’d seen him in impressive action at least twice by then and this no doubt swayed my vote, even if it did mean that my story about the forthcoming Floyd tour was relegated to the left hand column.

         All of this flashed back to me yesterday as I sat and watched Rocketman, the screen musical based on Elton’s life and music, and it was gratifying to see this MM front page flashed up on the screen during an early sequence designed to illustrate how rapidly Elton’s success accelerated during 1971. Blink and you’ll miss it, of course, but for a couple of hours I was transported back to a time when covering Elton’s rise to stardom was part of my brief, one I enthusiastically accepted, following him and his entourage from a cold Halifax night in mid-1970 to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, via London, New York and a few more cities in between until I left the paper in 1977.

         All of which shaded my point of view with regard to Rocketman, and it wasn’t until that sequence that I realised it isn’t intended as a chronologically precise biopic so much as a screen musical based on Elton John’s life and music. As such, the movie wholeheartedly endorses the character of its subject. It’s larger than life, a bit camp and, above all, hugely entertaining in a style that liberally mixes fact with fiction, a bit like musicals in the old Rodgers & Hammerstein Hollywood tradition insofar as the songs are used primarily to move the plot along or convey a mood. Once I got my head around this and stopped saying to myself, ‘But he can’t have sang that then because it came out two years later,’ I found myself enjoying it immensely.

         The story is told in a series of flashbacks while EJ is undergoing therapy for countless issues, alcohol, drugs, sex, bulimia, you name it, and in this respect it’s a Rake’s Progress as we watch sweet young Reg, an introverted schoolboy from a broken home, climb the ladder to success while simultaneously sliding down the ladder of his addictions. The early realisation that he possesses an unusually fine musical ear has echoes of that John Lewis Christmas ad, and the moment when he finds the right melody for ‘Your Song’ on the family piano, watched by his mum, gran and lyricist Bernie Taupin, is magically played.

         Taron Egerton, hitherto unbeknownst to me, gives a bravura performance in the title role, on screen for the remainder of the movie after EJ comes of age, which is about 20 minutes in. He sounds like Elton when he sings and even looks like him, especially when he’s wearing one of those outlandish costumes. Jamie Bell plays well as Taupin, EJ’s key accomplice, but I was slightly dismayed by the clichéd manner in which other supporting characters were portrayed, presumably for stereotypical effect. Manager/boyfriend John Reid could certainly be an effective attack dog when required, but in my recollection he wasn’t quite as nasty as he’s played by Richard Madden, and Dick James, although old school, was far more endearing than Stephen Graham’s characterisation of him as a miserly, arrogant, cloth-eared ogre. I only ever met Sheila, Elton’s mum, on a couple of occasion but she seemed considerably more supportive of her son’s calling than her portrayal here.

         But all that’s quibbling really. The film comes to life in spades during set-pieces when Elton performs, often in a kind of fantasy style that is reminiscent of musicals like Tommy or even Mama Mia!, and, during the early scenes, That’ll Be The Day. I liked how we surreally switch into a street scene, then a fairground, for ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ after Reg plays the piano in a Pinner pub – an early indication that the songs will appear when director Dexter Fletcher wants them to and not when they were written, recorded or released. The Bluesology scenes seem faithful to history while other concert sequences, featuring all the hits you would expect to hear, are eye-catchingly compelling, particularly the Dodgers’ Stadium gig, a tour-de-force with EJ’s character switching outfits more times than I could remember.

         The gay sex scenes are nowhere near as explicit as you might think from reading reviews, and it’s hardly shocking to see Elton hoovering up cocaine in an era when not to do so was regarded as unusual, at least in the music industry. Great attention is paid to period detail, in both the US and UK, with nostalgic street shots featuring cars (I do love a nice Triumph Herald like my dad used to drive), seventies fashions and glitzy interiors that are correct for the era. What isn’t correct, at least not as far as I’m aware, is Elton’s attempt to kill himself by jumping into a swimming pool in LA while out of his skull on booze and Grade As but, again, it fits in with the redemptive plot and conveys the unnecessary message that behaving in this way isn’t recommended.

         The film takes Elton’s life up to around 1990 when, realising that he was becoming friendless through behaving like a spoilt brat, he chose to face his addictions and clean up his act. Fittingly it closes with ‘I’m Still Standing’ – an odd mix of footage from the original video on the beach at Cannes – followed by what seemed to me like a duet on a new song between Egerton and the real Elton. Meanwhile text on the screen reveals the happy ending: the Elton John of today is loved, content and cured of all his bad habits bar excessive shopping.

         So long as you are prepared to overlook the lack of authenticity and treat the film simply as a source of enjoyment, Rocketman is an immensely entertaining film and a fine tribute to one of the world’s best-loved rock stars. Elton really has written loads of memorable, truly wonderful songs. No wonder Dylan dug him.