Me and Elton John
I grew up with Elton John, not literally, but he was always there. First thing I was aware of was probably Candle in the Wind. It was about Marilyn Monroes who was a pretty dead lady. I might have seen her in such films as Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend and especially that one where she wore the short jumper which kept me awake at night. The candle burned out long before her legend did. I couldn't quite make sense of the metaphor, even then.
Many centuries later my mother bought the Candle in the Wind 1997 goodbye England's rose version. On cassette. She helped make it the best-selling single of all time. It was the first record (in the widest sense) she's bought for over 30 years. I don't know why, as she doesn’t even own a tape player, let along a CD player. I am having a flashback now that I've written about this before, perhaps on this blog, and that keener readers (no, not you) might be thinking that I am a senile old fool.
Instead I am "senescent with ennui", as Amis fils has it in his latest offering.
I'm not even that, I am fizzing with rejuvenation, I just like dropping that phrase into the conversation lately.
Elton followed up Candle with The Bitch is Back, but that wasn't a top ten hit so I never heard it at the time. It had to be in the top ten and on TOTP before 1976 or it would almost certainly pass me by. I was no more or less a pop fan than any normal child at the time. The following year it all went wrong with the pubescent spurt (please).
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds I was very keen on, and we had it on a Top of the Pops album, one of those you got from Boots for 79p with a bikini-clad dolly bird on the cover. I had no idea that the songs weren't by the original artists. I played it very loud on Grand National Day, I have no idea why this sticks in my mind but it has stuck and therefore you are being told about it, as the raison d'etre of this piece is every last thing I can tell you about Elton John in an hour.
Of course I know now that Elton had operated as a budget album cover artist singer many years earlier. He sang Yellow River by one-hit wonders Christie, which I've got by REM somewhere, but that's not important right now.
What is important is that Yellow River was a favourite song of the playground cognoscenti because of yellow rivers of piss, you see, which is the height of sophisticated toilet humour when your name is Spazzy Magee.
When I was seventeen
I stayed up listening to Queen
I drank some very good beer
Some very good beer I bought with a fake ID
My name was Spazzy Magee...
But back to Elton, or of course Reginald Hercules Dwight from Pinner as we all know he was born. And then he mixed up Elton Dean, Long John Baldry and became the big pink glasses wearing, platform booted, boiler suited, piano bestriding colossus of piano pop and sometimes rock - Sir Elton John.
I liked his songs, all his singles of this time, the 1970s when in fact, as history now proves, every song released was good.
Another good thing about him was his interest in football and being Director of Watford FC, which for a while I followed as my patronising lower division team because I was born there and their manager was called Graham (Taylor, who could do no wrong in the 1970s). And the great Bertie Mee, also a big cheese at Watford at the time, in his post-Arsenal years, said don't insult my intelligence when asked if Elton being gay would interfere with him being allowed in the dressing room to romp about in the bath with the lads. Watford raced up the charts and so did Elton, having his first number one hit as a duet artist with Kiki Dee, with big-chinned voluminous dungaree-wearing lass from Bradford with the really quite irritating Don't Go Breaking My Heart (I couldn't if I tried) which I never cared for to tell you the truth.
Elton was the first person in Britain to be bisexual, apart from Dave Bowie but everyone knew he was just larking about.
I asked for Elton's Greatest Hits for Christmas once and they gave me volume two, which had just come out, and so I couldn’t blame them, but I was disappointed, and then wracked with guilt because I was such a geek that I couldn't bring myself to listen to volume two without having heard volume one first. At such a tender age, I was displaying worrying record nit tendencies with secondary analism of the collectivitis gland. Volume two wasn't much cop, he'd started to lose it by about 1978.
At school I soon found out that Elton wasn't remotely cool to like. You had to be into Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin who didn't make singles and appear on Top of the Pops compilations which were for clueless spazmos anyway.
So I kept a bit quite about how much I liked Your Song and Daniel and Rocket Man and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest word and all his more wistful and melancholy tunes. Grey Seal with its piano run and characteristically oblique (copyright, everyone) Bernie Taupin lyrics is another personal favourite.
I only ever heard Goodbye Yellowbrick Road and Blue Moves all the way though, of his studio albums. I don't think I ever played the long, mournful song Tonight more than once, but I still remember how it goes. Elton had a way with a tune.
Goodbye Yellowbrick Road had a song about a prostitute on it which I thought was very bold move. I was such an almightily blinkered and sheltered little lord prude you can't begin to imagine. Perhaps you can.
I very much liked two of his lesser singles, Crazy Water and Bite Your Lip, but that was in the year when every song that I heard was imbued with dripping glory and magic. I think my raging hormones must have amplified my emotional response to everything I heard. This is why Marquee Moon, heard at the same time, is still my best song in the world.
Ego came out of nowhere and was a curious paranoid burst of bad energy, which seems to have been written out of history. Song For Guy was ineffably sad, and it came on a 12" with Funeral for a Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding - his greatest work - on the other side. At the height of punk rock, I proudly carried it aloft.
The other album I heard all the way though, I just remembered, was his first self-titled one, with strange songs like Last Episode in Hienton and 40 Years On. Those titles could be slightly wrong, and it might not even have been his first one. he was a serious singer-songwriter in them days (ref points David Ackles and Mickey Newbury types) and wasn't dressing up and doing Crocodile Rocking type bouncy pop numbers.
It doesn't surprise me that I have absolutely no recollection of (recently re-released UK number one) Are You Ready for Love being a minor hit in 1979 as I had moved on from Elton by then in an entirely healthy pop snob manouevre. It's a pretty little number (I know I sound like Pete Murray or Ed Stewart or some old fossil) though and I was pleased to see it resurface.
Next up was Elton weeping at the FA Cup final with his delightful wife Renee out of Renee and Renata. What was he thinking of, eh? Don't
Some Elton moments:
Hearing B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets in that posho cricket fellow's car as he drove us to a game. It sounded mighty fine on a summer's day and I loved it and forgot that I was supposed to be mainly into American hardcore gubbins.
I'm Still Standing was played more than any song ever on the radio in the summer of 1983 and it was the only song of his from the 80s I liked.
Like a gimlet-eyed recalcitrant cur I sneered until my face went lopsided with concussion at Elton doing Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me with George Michael.
A fantastic interview in Q mag where Elton revealed the extent of his drug hell lost years, demanding that his aides stop the wind outside his hotel and detailing his curious cockle fetish (he would scoff 40 jars of Sainsbury's seafood delicacy.) And cocaine. even if Elton didn't make great pop singles anymore, and he didn't - Saccereefice was schlock - he could be relied upon to be a top-notch Parky guest, full of witty asides and tearful confessions. A fine one with the repartee and the cheeky anecdote.
Elton as the Pinball Wizard in Tommy with the 20-foot boots. "You wouldn't want to spend your pocket money on a pop record like this would you?"
My dad wanted to bond with me so drove me to the Imperial war Museum, because I was 12 year old boy and was into war and guns and soldiers and that, right? All I remember is 1) before...
leaving my radio on the bed as I reluctantly went with him. Someone Saved My Life Tonight was the last song I heard and
2) after... when I came back I realised I'd left the radio on and the batteries had run down. Nothing in between. How the memory works. Many similar blanks.
Tiny Dancer passed me by at the time, and I had no idea it was seen as an Elton moment until it surfaced in Almost Famous and the OGWT repeats showed him performing it.
So, musical Elton has been a stranger to me for 20 long years and now my hour's up. Ding!
+ + + + + + + + + + +
Wordcount:1679. Please explain. I signed up for National Novel Writing Month and I wanted to get some practice in, see how many words I can churn out in an hour with no planning or revision. NaNo asks you to write a (relatively short) 50,000 word novel in a month, which is an average of 1667 a day. Of course I can't just open my mind up and spew out some pop memories onto the page like that but it's quite encouraging in terms of mere numbers.
I grew up with Elton John, not literally, but he was always there. First thing I was aware of was probably Candle in the Wind. It was about Marilyn Monroes who was a pretty dead lady. I might have seen her in such films as Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend and especially that one where she wore the short jumper which kept me awake at night. The candle burned out long before her legend did. I couldn't quite make sense of the metaphor, even then.
Many centuries later my mother bought the Candle in the Wind 1997 goodbye England's rose version. On cassette. She helped make it the best-selling single of all time. It was the first record (in the widest sense) she's bought for over 30 years. I don't know why, as she doesn’t even own a tape player, let along a CD player. I am having a flashback now that I've written about this before, perhaps on this blog, and that keener readers (no, not you) might be thinking that I am a senile old fool.
Instead I am "senescent with ennui", as Amis fils has it in his latest offering.
I'm not even that, I am fizzing with rejuvenation, I just like dropping that phrase into the conversation lately.
Elton followed up Candle with The Bitch is Back, but that wasn't a top ten hit so I never heard it at the time. It had to be in the top ten and on TOTP before 1976 or it would almost certainly pass me by. I was no more or less a pop fan than any normal child at the time. The following year it all went wrong with the pubescent spurt (please).
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds I was very keen on, and we had it on a Top of the Pops album, one of those you got from Boots for 79p with a bikini-clad dolly bird on the cover. I had no idea that the songs weren't by the original artists. I played it very loud on Grand National Day, I have no idea why this sticks in my mind but it has stuck and therefore you are being told about it, as the raison d'etre of this piece is every last thing I can tell you about Elton John in an hour.
Of course I know now that Elton had operated as a budget album cover artist singer many years earlier. He sang Yellow River by one-hit wonders Christie, which I've got by REM somewhere, but that's not important right now.
What is important is that Yellow River was a favourite song of the playground cognoscenti because of yellow rivers of piss, you see, which is the height of sophisticated toilet humour when your name is Spazzy Magee.
When I was seventeen
I stayed up listening to Queen
I drank some very good beer
Some very good beer I bought with a fake ID
My name was Spazzy Magee...
But back to Elton, or of course Reginald Hercules Dwight from Pinner as we all know he was born. And then he mixed up Elton Dean, Long John Baldry and became the big pink glasses wearing, platform booted, boiler suited, piano bestriding colossus of piano pop and sometimes rock - Sir Elton John.
I liked his songs, all his singles of this time, the 1970s when in fact, as history now proves, every song released was good.
Another good thing about him was his interest in football and being Director of Watford FC, which for a while I followed as my patronising lower division team because I was born there and their manager was called Graham (Taylor, who could do no wrong in the 1970s). And the great Bertie Mee, also a big cheese at Watford at the time, in his post-Arsenal years, said don't insult my intelligence when asked if Elton being gay would interfere with him being allowed in the dressing room to romp about in the bath with the lads. Watford raced up the charts and so did Elton, having his first number one hit as a duet artist with Kiki Dee, with big-chinned voluminous dungaree-wearing lass from Bradford with the really quite irritating Don't Go Breaking My Heart (I couldn't if I tried) which I never cared for to tell you the truth.
Elton was the first person in Britain to be bisexual, apart from Dave Bowie but everyone knew he was just larking about.
I asked for Elton's Greatest Hits for Christmas once and they gave me volume two, which had just come out, and so I couldn’t blame them, but I was disappointed, and then wracked with guilt because I was such a geek that I couldn't bring myself to listen to volume two without having heard volume one first. At such a tender age, I was displaying worrying record nit tendencies with secondary analism of the collectivitis gland. Volume two wasn't much cop, he'd started to lose it by about 1978.
At school I soon found out that Elton wasn't remotely cool to like. You had to be into Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin who didn't make singles and appear on Top of the Pops compilations which were for clueless spazmos anyway.
So I kept a bit quite about how much I liked Your Song and Daniel and Rocket Man and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest word and all his more wistful and melancholy tunes. Grey Seal with its piano run and characteristically oblique (copyright, everyone) Bernie Taupin lyrics is another personal favourite.
I only ever heard Goodbye Yellowbrick Road and Blue Moves all the way though, of his studio albums. I don't think I ever played the long, mournful song Tonight more than once, but I still remember how it goes. Elton had a way with a tune.
Goodbye Yellowbrick Road had a song about a prostitute on it which I thought was very bold move. I was such an almightily blinkered and sheltered little lord prude you can't begin to imagine. Perhaps you can.
I very much liked two of his lesser singles, Crazy Water and Bite Your Lip, but that was in the year when every song that I heard was imbued with dripping glory and magic. I think my raging hormones must have amplified my emotional response to everything I heard. This is why Marquee Moon, heard at the same time, is still my best song in the world.
Ego came out of nowhere and was a curious paranoid burst of bad energy, which seems to have been written out of history. Song For Guy was ineffably sad, and it came on a 12" with Funeral for a Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding - his greatest work - on the other side. At the height of punk rock, I proudly carried it aloft.
The other album I heard all the way though, I just remembered, was his first self-titled one, with strange songs like Last Episode in Hienton and 40 Years On. Those titles could be slightly wrong, and it might not even have been his first one. he was a serious singer-songwriter in them days (ref points David Ackles and Mickey Newbury types) and wasn't dressing up and doing Crocodile Rocking type bouncy pop numbers.
It doesn't surprise me that I have absolutely no recollection of (recently re-released UK number one) Are You Ready for Love being a minor hit in 1979 as I had moved on from Elton by then in an entirely healthy pop snob manouevre. It's a pretty little number (I know I sound like Pete Murray or Ed Stewart or some old fossil) though and I was pleased to see it resurface.
Next up was Elton weeping at the FA Cup final with his delightful wife Renee out of Renee and Renata. What was he thinking of, eh? Don't
Some Elton moments:
Hearing B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets in that posho cricket fellow's car as he drove us to a game. It sounded mighty fine on a summer's day and I loved it and forgot that I was supposed to be mainly into American hardcore gubbins.
I'm Still Standing was played more than any song ever on the radio in the summer of 1983 and it was the only song of his from the 80s I liked.
Like a gimlet-eyed recalcitrant cur I sneered until my face went lopsided with concussion at Elton doing Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me with George Michael.
A fantastic interview in Q mag where Elton revealed the extent of his drug hell lost years, demanding that his aides stop the wind outside his hotel and detailing his curious cockle fetish (he would scoff 40 jars of Sainsbury's seafood delicacy.) And cocaine. even if Elton didn't make great pop singles anymore, and he didn't - Saccereefice was schlock - he could be relied upon to be a top-notch Parky guest, full of witty asides and tearful confessions. A fine one with the repartee and the cheeky anecdote.
Elton as the Pinball Wizard in Tommy with the 20-foot boots. "You wouldn't want to spend your pocket money on a pop record like this would you?"
My dad wanted to bond with me so drove me to the Imperial war Museum, because I was 12 year old boy and was into war and guns and soldiers and that, right? All I remember is 1) before...
leaving my radio on the bed as I reluctantly went with him. Someone Saved My Life Tonight was the last song I heard and
2) after... when I came back I realised I'd left the radio on and the batteries had run down. Nothing in between. How the memory works. Many similar blanks.
Tiny Dancer passed me by at the time, and I had no idea it was seen as an Elton moment until it surfaced in Almost Famous and the OGWT repeats showed him performing it.
So, musical Elton has been a stranger to me for 20 long years and now my hour's up. Ding!
+ + + + + + + + + + +
Wordcount:1679. Please explain. I signed up for National Novel Writing Month and I wanted to get some practice in, see how many words I can churn out in an hour with no planning or revision. NaNo asks you to write a (relatively short) 50,000 word novel in a month, which is an average of 1667 a day. Of course I can't just open my mind up and spew out some pop memories onto the page like that but it's quite encouraging in terms of mere numbers.
posted by joe k 10:19 PM
