Husband brought joy ... by biographer

something. He was trying to say, through God or someone else, you can be a dad, look at how much pleasure I gave you in an hour and a half.”

It finally seemed a natural progression to have their own sons, via the same surrogate they say they “love as a sister” in California.

Elton has now made the decision to retire from touring, to be home with his lads in Windsor, to do the school run, making sure they do chores, tidy their rooms, teaching them values of kindness, and watching them play football.

Elton the doing father is not the Elton I met.

For the first time his life is about other people, not him, and he admits he has never felt so content within an environment which previously would have felt mundane.

He explained recently: “It’s fantastic being a dad. But 10 years ago if you’d have told me that, I’d have said you’re crazy. I have learned that a parent’s capacity for love is endless.” So in giving so much love, it seems to have finally sated his own need to be loved – something which always struck me as a psychosis, firmly rooted in what he believes was in large part an unhappy childhood.

Elton has repeatedly talked about how he feels let down by his parents.

The pictures he paints of his mother and father, Sheila and Stanley Dwight, are always fraught with emotion. Sheila, but again the relationship seems to have carried its own share of resentment.

He now says: “She always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy, always seemed to be in search of a fight.”

The pair were estranged for years. She infamously invited an Elton lookalike to her 90th birthday.

Sheila maintained she never actually got to meet her grandchildren. Elton, on the other hand, now says it was her choice not to meet them.

He once explained: “I don’t hate her, but I don’t want her in my life.”

She in turn told him: “I love you but I don’t like you at all.”

They only reconciled around a year before Sheila’s death in 2017.

But a friend of hers who remained in contact until the end confided to me relations were never as good before her death as Elton has painted publicly.

One comment Sheila made to the same friend was that “Himself ”, as she