A fascinating memoir from Pinner’s most gossipy global superstar
‘You can say I am a talentless, bald old poof, if that’s your opinion,” Sir Elton John magnanimously notes in his longawaited autobiography Me. “If it was against the law to express colourful opinions about people, I’d have been locked up years ago.”
If you are in the market for an autobiography crammed with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, Elton is clearly your man. One of the world’s greatest songwriters and entertainers for more than 50 years, he has never been particularly noted for bashful discretion. Indeed, anyone who has read his blunt interviews or seen blockbuster biopic Rocketman will have an idea of what to expect. Written with music critic Alexis Petridis, Me offers a chatty, gossipy, amusing and, at times, brutally candid account of a shy piano prodigy’s rise from humble origins in Pinner, Middlesex to the maddest excesses of cocaine-addled global superstardom and its long aftermath of addiction and recovery.
As acutely aware of his own foibles as you might expect from a man who has spent decades in therapy, Elton maintains an engagingly light, selfmocking tone. Early scenes of his parents’ toxic approach to child-rearing might be distressing were it not for forgiving observations about their stubbornness and short tempers “being two delightful characteristics it’s been my good fortune to inherit”.
While acknowledging that he was “a child raised in fear”, he recognises the way it contributed to the private nurturing of his musical imagination. As he rises to stardom, he brings the same quality of amused acceptance to his own flaws and excesses, noting that “if you fancy living in a world of unending delusional bulls---, I really can’t recommend cocaine enough”. After a three-day binge, he woke up to find himself the baffled owner of a working tram, delivered by two Chinook helicopters, to stand alongside the full-scale model of a Tyrannosaurus rex acquired from Ringo Starr.
Page after page offers amusing anecdotes, from scenes of Elton and John Lennon hiding from Andy Warhol, lest he takes incriminating Polaroids of their cocaine binge, to Lou Reed and transsexual partner Rachel deep in conversation with Cliff Richard at Studio 54 (“the mind did boggle a little at what they were talking about,” Elton drily notes). Elvis Presley appears in narcotic disrepair, Freddie Mercury offers waspish asides about Michael Jackson, and Dusty Springfield explains how to throw the perfect tantrum.
A curiously innocent young man who had to have his homosexuality pointed out to him by gay blues singer Long John Baldry and a member of the Supremes, Elton did not lose his virginity until he was 23, but evidently more than made up for it. None the less, his autobiography could never really be described as revelatory. The story is too familiar and the tone largely genial.
Inevitably, the earlier years prove more compelling than the saner times that have followed his recovery. The second half takes on more serious tones as he addresses his work with HIV/ Aids, discusses sobriety, gay rights, love, marriage, family and mortality. But there are enough musical insights and strange encounters (such as Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone fighting over the Princess of Wales) to keep the pages turning. Sir Elton has lived his life as an open book and has now written a very entertaining one. Neil Mccormick