Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John is a British singer, songwriter and pianist. His music and showmanship have had a significant, lasting effect on the music industry, and his songwriting partnership with the lyricist Bernie Taupin is one of the most successful in history. John was the 19th EGOT winner in history. He has sold over 300 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
John learnt to play piano at an early age, winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. In the 1960s he formed the blues band Bluesology, wrote songs for other artists alongside Taupin, and worked as a session musician, before releasing his debut album, Empty Sky. Throughout the next six decades, John cemented his status as a cultural icon with 32 studio albums, including Honky Château, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rock of the Westies, Sleeping with the Past, The One, Songs from the West Coast, The Diving Board and The Lockdown Sessions. His catalogue of hit singles includes "Your Song", "Tiny Dancer", "Rocket Man", "Crocodile Rock", "Bennie and the Jets", "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", "I'm Still Standing", "Sacrifice", "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" and "Cold Heart". He has also had success in musical films and theatre, composing music for The Lion King, Aida, and Billy Elliot the Musical. John's final tour, Farewell Yellow Brick Road, became the highest-grossing tour ever at the time. His life and career were dramatised in the 2019 biographical film Rocketman.
John is an HIV/AIDS charity fundraiser and has been involved in the fight against AIDS since the late 1980s. In 1992 he established the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised over £300 million since its inception, and a year later he began hosting his annual AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Party, which has since become one of the biggest high-profile Oscars parties in the Hollywood film industry. John was the chairman and director of Watford Football Club from 1976 to 1987, and again from 1997 to 2002, and is an honorary life president of the club. From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, John developed a severe addiction to drugs and alcohol, but has been clean and sober since 1990. In 2005 he entered a civil partnership with his long-term partner, the Canadian filmmaker David Furnish. They married in 2014, when same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales.
John has had more than fifty top-40 hits on the UK singles chart and US Billboard Hot 100, including nine number ones in both countries, as well as seven consecutive number-one albums in the US. He is the most successful solo artist in the history of the US Billboard charts. His tribute single to Diana, Princess of Wales, "Candle in the Wind 1997", a rewritten version of his 1974 single, sold over 33million copies worldwide and is the best-selling chart single of all time. In 2021 he became the first solo artist with UK top 10 singles across six decades. John's awards include a Primetime Emmy Award, five Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award and the Kennedy Center Honor. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and is a fellow of The Ivors Academy. He was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to music and charity in 1998 and was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2020.
Early life and education
Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born on 25 March 1947 in Pinner, Middlesex, the eldest child of Stanley Dwight and only child of Sheila Eileen, who had married in 1945. He was raised in a council house in Pinner where his maternal grandparents lived. When he was six, the family moved to a nearby semi-detached house. He was educated at Pinner Wood Junior School, Reddiford School and Pinner County Grammar School, until he was 17, when he left just before his A-Level examinations to pursue a career in music.When John began to consider a career in music seriously, his father, who served in the Royal Air Force, tried to steer him toward a more conventional career, such as banking. John has said that his wild stage costumes and performances were his way of letting go after a restrictive childhood. Both his parents were musically inclined, his father having been a trumpet player with the Bob Millar Band, a semi-professional big band that played at military dances. The Dwights were keen record buyers, exposing John to the popular singers and musicians of the day. John started playing his grandmother's piano as a young boy, and within a year his mother heard him picking out Émile Waldteufel's "The Skater's Waltz" by ear. After performing at parties and family gatherings, at age seven, he began formal piano lessons. He showed musical aptitude at school, including the ability to compose melodies, and gained some notoriety by playing like Jerry Lee Lewis at school functions. At age 11, he won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. According to one of his instructors, John promptly played back, like a "gramophone record", a four-page piece by George Frideric Handel after hearing it for the first time.
For the next five years, John attended Saturday classes at the Academy in Central London, and he has said he enjoyed playing Frédéric Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach and singing in the choir during Saturday classes, but that he was not otherwise a diligent classical student. "I kind of resented going to the Academy," he said. "I was one of those children who could just about get away without practising and still pass, scrape through the grades." He has said that he would sometimes skip classes and ride around on the London Underground. Several instructors have attested that he was a "model student", and during the last few years he took lessons from a private tutor in addition to his classes at the Academy. He left the Academy before taking the final exams.
John's mother, though strict with her son, was more outgoing than her husband, and something of a free spirit. With Stanley Dwight uninterested in his son and often absent, John was raised primarily by his mother and maternal grandmother. When his father was home, the Dwights had vehement arguments that greatly distressed John. When he was 14, they divorced. His mother then married a local painter, Fred Farebrother, a caring and supportive stepfather whom John affectionately called "Derf", "Fred" backward. They moved into flat No. 3A in an eight-unit apartment building called Frome Court, not far from both previous homes. There John wrote the songs that launched his career as a rock star. He lived there until he had four albums, simultaneously, in the American Top 40.
Career
1962–1969: Pub pianist to staff songwriter
At age 15, with his mother's and stepfather's help, John was hired as a pianist at a nearby pub, the Northwood Hills Hotel, playing Thursday to Sunday nights. Known simply as "Reggie", he played a range of popular standards, including songs by Jim Reeves and Ray Charles, as well as his own songs. A stint with a short-lived group called the Corvettes rounded out his time. Although normal-sighted as a teenager, John began wearing horn-rimmed glasses to imitate Buddy Holly.In 1962 John and some friends formed a band called Bluesology. By day, he ran errands for a music publishing company; he divided his nights between solo gigs at a London hotel bar and working with Bluesology. By the mid-1960s, Bluesology was backing touring American soul and R&B musicians such as the Isley Brothers, Major Lance and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. In 1966 the band became Long John Baldry's supporting band and played 16 times at the Marquee Club.
In 1967 John answered an advertisement in the British music paper New Musical Express, placed by Ray Williams, then the A&R manager for Liberty Records. At their first meeting, Williams gave John an unopened envelope of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin, who had answered the same ad. John wrote music for the lyrics and then sent it to Taupin, which began their decades-long partnership that. When the two first met in 1967, they recorded the first John/Taupin song, "Scarecrow". Six months later, John began going by the name Elton John in homage to two members of Bluesology: the saxophonist Elton Dean and the vocalist Long John Baldry. He legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John on 7 January 1972. "Hercules" came from the name of a horse in British sitcom Steptoe and Son, of which John was a big fan.
The team of John and Taupin joined Dick James's DJM Records as staff songwriters in 1968, and over the next two years wrote material for various artists, among them Roger Cook and Lulu. Taupin would write a batch of lyrics in under an hour and give it to John, who would write music for each of them in half an hour, disposing of the lyrics if he could not come up with anything quickly. For two years they wrote easy-listening tunes for James to peddle to singers. Their early output included a contender for the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest 1969, for Lulu, called "I Can't Go On ". It came sixth of six songs. In 1969, John provided piano for Roger Hodgson on his first released single, "Mr. Boyd" by Argosy, a quartet that was completed by Caleb Quaye and Nigel Olsson.
1969–1973: ''Empty Sky'' to ''Goodbye Yellow Brick Road''
On the advice of music publisher Steve Brown, John and Taupin began writing more complex songs for John to record for DJM. The first was the single "I've Been Loving You", produced by Caleb Quaye, Bluesology's former guitarist. In 1969, with Quaye, the drummer Roger Pope and the bassist Tony Murray, John recorded another single, "Lady Samantha", and an album, Empty Sky. For their follow-up album, Elton John, John and Taupin enlisted Gus Dudgeon as producer and Paul Buckmaster as musical arranger.Elton John was released in April 1970 on DJM Records/Pye Records in the UK and Uni Records in the US, and established the formula for subsequent albums: gospel-chorded rockers and poignant ballads. The album's first single, "Border Song", peaked at 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. The second, "Your Song", reached number seven in the UK Singles Chart and number eight in the US, becoming John's first hit single as a singer. The album soon became his first hit album, reaching number four on the US Billboard 200 and number five on the UK Albums Chart.
Backed by the former Spencer Davis Group drummer Nigel Olsson and the bassist Dee Murray, John's first American concert took place at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, California, on 25 August 1970, and was a success. The concept album Tumbleweed Connection was released in October 1970 and reached number two in the UK and number five in the US. The live album 17-11-70 was recorded at a live show aired from A&R Studios on WABC-FM in New York City. Sales of the live album took a blow in the US when an east-coast bootlegger released the performance several weeks before the official album, including all 60 minutes of the aircast, not just the 40 minutes selected by Dick James Music.
John and Taupin wrote the soundtrack to the 1971 film Friends and the album Madman Across the Water, which reached number eight in the US and included the hit songs "Levon" and the album's opening track, "Tiny Dancer". In 1972 Davey Johnstone joined the Elton John Band on guitar and backing vocals. Released in 1972, Honky Château became John's first US number-one album, spending five weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and began a streak of seven consecutive US number-one albums. The album reached number two in the UK, and spawned the hit singles "Rocket Man" and "Honky Cat".
In 1972 John performed at the Royal Variety Performance, where he was upstaged by the dancing of Larry Smith, the drummer with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Smith was invited to join John's second US tour; Smith later said: "I suggested adding in various other bizarre elements like me doing "Singin' in the Rain" as a song and dance act with Elton playing piano. Kubrick's Clockwork Orange film had recently featured that song. Plus I designed crazy, over-the-top costumes and giant stage sets – known as 'Legstravaganzas'. Elton loved all of it."
The pop album Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player came out at the start of 1973 and reached number one in the UK, the US, and Australia, among other countries. The album produced the hits "Crocodile Rock", his first US Billboard Hot 100 number one, and "Daniel", which reached number two in the US and number four in the UK. The album and "Crocodile Rock" were respectively the first album and single on the consolidated MCA Records label in the US, replacing MCA's other labels, including Uni.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a double-album released in October 1973, gained instant critical acclaim and topped the chart on both sides of the Atlantic, remaining at number one for two months. It also temporarily established John as a glam rock star. It contained the US number 1 "Bennie and the Jets", along with the hits "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Candle in the Wind", "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding".