Elton’s tale of how his life was saved by Watford
Music legend’s memoir contains a telling tribute to the power of sport, writes Simon Briggs
The team’s wins are the only thing he recalls with any clarity
Afascinating sporting memoir was published this week, with considerable fanfare. And yet, when I popped into my local bookshop, I discovered that Sir Elton John’s Me had been misfiled in the music section.
Admittedly, there is also a fair amount of rock and roll in these 376 pages. But you do find yourself wondering whether the piano is the author’s first true love – or whether that honour might actually go to Watford FC. “I’m not exaggerating,” he writes, “when I say I think Watford might have saved my life.”
Me raises many intriguing questions – including whether Elton might be Britain’s sportiest pop star. It is an appealingly subversive thought, undermining those age-old assumptions that machismo and athleticism must always come as a package deal.
Perceptions can be misleading. Elton’s close friend Rod Stewart, for instance, looks like a footballer. On top of the sort of haircut once sported by Stan Bowles, Stewart even trialled for Brentford as a teenager, before realising that this career choice might require the occasional quiet night in.
Elton – by contrast – is short (without his platform heels), chubby and outrageously camp. But as Me reveals, his catholic sporting tastes extend from cricket to squash, which he used to play regularly until a shopping addiction turned his private court into a lumber room. Growing up at Pinner County Grammar School, rugby was the only exception. “Because of my size, they put me in the scrum, where my main role involved being repeatedly kicked in the balls by the opposition team’s prop.”
Once success arrived, Elton took the chance to meet his heroes. Oddly, this brought out the shy kid behind the green hair dye and novelty specs. Billie Jean King – for whom he wrote the US No1 single Philadelphia Freedom – was initially bemused by their first meeting in 1973, when he stared at her from across the room until someone stepped in with an introduction.
The same rule applied on Mike Gatting’s triumphant 1986-87 Ashes tour. As photographer Graham Morris has put it, “Elton John came into the dressing room and it was like he was afraid to go over and talk to the players”. After finally breaking the ice, Elton wound up throwing so many celebration parties for the team that Ian Botham nicknamed him “EJ the DJ”.
Dennis Lillee was furious to have missed one after getting stuck in the lift.
And, so, to football. Elton grew up standing on the Bend at Vicarage Road with his distant and unloving father, Stanley. He hero-worshipped his cousin Roy Dwight, who scored for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup final, and later gave him a way into Soho’s pop scene by finding him a job packing parcels on Denmark Street.
There is something Freudian about the way Elton later bought Watford, hired a young Graham Taylor (“he reminded me of Bernie [Taupin]”) as his manager, and watched them leap from Division Four to the top flight in five seasons. Football being football, visiting fans would sing a homophobic chant about his insatiable appetites. But he writes that “I thought it was funny … I’d just smile and wave at them”.
That all happened in the late 1970s – a period when Elton was lost in cocaine-fuelled angst and alienation. Watford’s wins are the only thing he recalls with any clarity. “There was no bulls---,” he says. “I couldn’t lose my temper or sulk, nor could I get drunk or take drugs, because I was there as a representative of the club.”
The one time he did come in hung-over, and started gulping down the boardroom Scotch, Taylor gave him an almighty dressing down.
Hence the argument that football saved Elton’s life. He even credits Watford for his marriage to David Furnish, because it was his glum mood after a 4-1 defeat at West Bromwich Albion in 1993 that led him to invite a few strangers over for an impromptu dinner party.
Me is great fun. After the grim scenes in Bulgaria this week, it is uplifting to read such an unexpected and wideranging testimony to the power of sport. Especially from someone who has faced the bigots down himself.