SO LOVESICK I TRIED TO END IT ALL WITH PILLS

AS WELL as taking drugs, my personal life had been, more or less, a disaster.

I’d fall in love with straight men all the time, chase after the thing I couldn’t have.

Sometimes it went on for months and months, this madness of thinking that today was the day you’d get a phone call from them saying ‘Oh, by the way, I love you’, despite the fact that they’d told you it was never going to happen.

Or I’d see someone I liked the look of in a gay bar and before I’d actually spoken to them, I’d be hopelessly in love, convinced this was the man I was fated to share the rest of my life with and mentally sketching out a wonderful future. I didn’t pick them up so much as take them hostage.

‘Right, you have to give up what you’re doing, come on the road, fly round the world with me.’ I’d buy them the watch and the shirt and the cars, but eventually they had no reason to be, except to be with me, and I was busy, so they’d be left on the sidelines.

And after three or four months they’d end up resenting it, I’d end up getting bored with them, and it would end in tears. And then I’d get someone else to get rid of them for me and start again.

It was absolutely dreadful behaviour: I’d have one leaving at the airport at the same time as the new one was flying in.

It was a decadent era, and plenty of other pop stars were behaving in a similar way — Rod Stewart occasionally let girls know he’d finished with them by just leaving a plane ticket on their bed, so he wasn’t going to win any awards for chivalry either. But Decadent: Elton and, right, Rod Stewart somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this can’t be right. I couldn’t stand being on my own. I had to be with people.

I was incredibly immature. I was still the little boy from Pinner Hill Road underneath it all. The events, the shows, the records, the success were all great, but when I was away from that, I wasn’t an adult, I was a teenager.

I had been completely wrong when I thought that changing my name meant I’d changed as a person. I wasn’t Elton, I was Reg. And Reg was still the same as he’d been 15 years ago, hiding in his bedroom while his parents fought: insecure and body-conscious and self-loathing. I didn’t want to go home to him at night. If I did, the misery could be all-consuming. One night, while I was recording with the new band up at Caribou studios, I took an overdose of Valium before I went to bed. Twelve tablets. I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to do that, although it was probably some catastrophic love affair gone wrong. When I woke up the next day, I panicked and called Connie Pappas, who worked with John Reid, and told her what I’d done. While I was talking to her, I blacked out. The American session musician James Newton Howard heard me collapse and carried me back upstairs to my room. They called a doctor, who prescribed me pills for my nerves. With the benefit of hindsight, that seems quite an odd thing to do to someone who’s just tried to finish himself off with a load of pills for his nerves, but they must have helped, at least in the short term — the sessions got finished.