Biographer: A piano for Christmas? Never happened
Elton John’s biographer has revealed the true story behind the star’s early musical talent – but said he never did get a piano for Christmas.
Philip Norman recounted how Elton’s musical career began very early and on a piano – in the front room of his grandparents’ council house where he lived with his mum Sheila and nan Ivy while his father was abroad, posted to Iraq with the RAF.
He was only three when Ivy first sat him on the piano stool, and encouraged him to play.
Elton – then still known by his real name, Reginald Dwight – was a piano prodigy and an entertainer for his family.
When, at the age of seven, the band failed to turn up at his cousin Roy’s wedding, the youngster was ordered to the piano, in his “white tail suit and bow tie” to keep the party going.
Mr Norman says Elton was a polite, considerate and punctilious boy, whose only fault was a tendency towards temper tantrums – usually brought on by fatigue at too much piano practise.
It was a character trait which was to continue into later life.
Indeed, it was a heated row with his mother over arrangements for his civil partnership to David Furnish in 2005 which lead to the pair having a lengthy rift, from which they were not reconciled until 2016, the year before her death.
It is said they didn’t speak for ten years.