Rocket Man’s highs, lows and his path to glory Captain Fantastic

On April 30, 1969, jobbing songwriter and minor local celebrity Elton John noted three key facts in his diary: ‘Offer to open a car-wash in Cricklewood!! Stayed in tonight. My glasses broke.’

Five years later, things were rather different. Letters arrived at his door simply addressed to ‘Elton John, Los Angeles’.

He thought nothing of buying his secretary a $23,000 raccoon coat or of giving his friend Rod Stewart a drawing by Rembrandt.

This warm, pacy canter through the first decade of Elton’s career, during which he became responsible for one in every 50 records sold, suggests that his success was down to the three old showbiz chestnuts: talent, luck and drive.

The luck was perfect timing. The key figures who saw his early shows

– Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, John Lennon – spread the word, despite his resemblance to ‘a toe-curlingly over-keen children’s entertainer’.

The man whom Sixties star Long John Baldry had described as ‘a strange boy with myopic lenses and a fat a***’ was reborn, liberated by his success to become the flamboyant, stack-heeled centre of attention, once landing noisily by helicopter for his support slot at a Rolling Stones show, which they considered a grotesque attempt to ‘showboat’.

However, Elton’s shy, awkward self soon makes a reappearance. He cries in corridors over broken love affairs, veers from strict diets to tubs of ice cream and starts taking a line of cocaine every four minutes.

The book takes a cruelly comic turn when Elton has a hair transplant, bumps his head on the car door and has to meekly return for a reattachment.

We know how the story ends, of course: rehab, a long relationship, a sense of fun without the manic insecurity. But the troubled star who entered the Eighties expressed himself in the most peculiar ways. What did he send his godson Sean Lennon when his father was murdered?

A chocolate cake.