Don’t let the sun go down on Elton’s spaced-out time at the top
What have I been up to? How nice of you to ask! I’ve just been to South Africa, if you really want to know, and naturally spent a bit of time at the airport trying to find a book.
The obvious big-ticket item on display was Terry O’Neill’s definitive set of portraits of Sir Elton John, with particular focus given to the singer as he was 40 years ago.
On the flight over, by the small pool of seating light, I squinted at Rocketman, the ‘‘heart-racing, toe-tapping deliriously entertaining’’ movie that also has to do with what its subject happened to be doing during the same period.
Returning to New Zealand, every other entertainmentrelated notification has mostly been about this week’s appearance of the singer’s selfdescribed no-holds-barred autobiography, Me, another item in the John catalogue that glances back 40 years, replete with tall tales of hard-living, high platforms and the author’s bespectacled visions of the masses who push and plead.
You really get the idea that the publicists flogging this latest title are working as hard as the backing band on Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting to get the pundits to party like it’s 1979.
Oh, sure, there have been some up-to-the-moment references thrown in. As, for instance, in John’s rather sweet revelation that he would wish to be reincarnated as Jacinda Ardern.
‘‘She’s one of the few politicians that I respect and love – she’s got dignity and she’s humane,’’ he explained to The Guardian. ‘‘I think she’s doing a brilliant job.’’
Even here, though, you can’t help but wonder if the star isn’t prepping for a potentially awkward backstage meeting in Auckland with the New Zealand prime minister after he arrives in February on his swansong
Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour of hits from the 1970s.
Elton: ‘‘But enough about me, Jacinda. What were YOU doing 40 years ago?’’
Jacinda [chuckles]: ‘‘Actually, that was around the time I was born.
‘‘I probably would have been on the floor at a nursery with the other babies.’’
Elton: ‘‘Well, even though I never knew you at all, I know you would have had the grace to hold yourself while those around you crawled…’’
‘‘I’ve never been very interested in looking back at my career,’’ the 72-year-old also told The Guardian.
‘‘It happened, I’m incredibly grateful, but I’m more interested in what I’m doing next rather than what I did 40 years ago.’’
So why does every media move in the Elton John repertoire these days consciously invoke or evoke this one historical point?
The answer is probably because that’s the glorious, and, alas, never-to-be-repeated period when he crushed out a slew of soul-flecked pop LPs, beginning in earnest with 1973’s cinematic Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and more or less ending with the 1976 doublealbum Blue Moves.
The critics didn’t much care for some of those recordings – at least, not at the time – but critics don’t buy records and, more to the point, they don’t spend a lot of time listening to the radio, which is where John’s best work always made the jauntiest sense.
Daniel, Crocodile Rock, Tiny Dancer, Grey Seal, The Bitch is Back, Philadelphia Freedom, Someone Saved My Life Tonight… so many dynamic moments.
Some were not always wellpenned (does it really matter if a woman dancing happens to be ‘‘tiny’’? And if she dances so jolly well, why keep on asking her to stop for a shrimpy embrace?) sometimes not even particularly well-played, but, on the radio in the 1970s, they always moved in time.
All praise here to John’s collaborator Bernie Taupin, whose preposterous verse nevertheless set the lyrical scene for virtually all of John’s most enduring hits.
Their creative high point, arguably, remains Bennie and the Jets, which first slunk on to New Zealand radio in 1974 as a B-side to Candle in the Wind.
Oh, but it’s still so spaced out, this whirlpool of unconventional piano pop that deserved every decibel of the canned applause layered into it by producer Gus Dudgeon.
You can hear the song today as the centrepiece of the pair’s best work, the recently reissued and remastered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition).
As with Mick Ronson and David Bowie (with whom John also rather famously fell out 40 years ago), the proof of the pudding wasn’t only in the great songs, but in the creative dry patch each of them hit after they went their separate ways.
John and Taupin have occasionally collaborated since then. Mostly, though, the more recent work has been a case of the fizzled-sizzle – hence the great and growing emphasis on what they did together you know when.
The problem with living in the past is that there’s never any future in it.
David Cohen is a Wellington journalist and author. His recent Book of Cohen was about the artist Leonard Cohen.