It’s the most anticipated autobiography of the year.
Sir Elton John explains how – despite consuming mountains of cocaine and lakes of vodka martinis – he’s not only still standing at the age of 72, but has become one of our mostbeloved national icons.
Full of indiscreet tales about his friends – made up of the most famous names on the planet – the book called Me spares no egos, most especially his own as Sir Elton details his many misadventures and mishaps in a brutally honest and tongue-in-cheek fashion.
From his unhappy childhood in Pinner, Harrow, to becoming one of he biggest stars on the planet, then nearly losing it all, and finally after 50 years of fame finding family contentment with David Furnish and their two boys, it’s all there in music’s most revealing read.
Here’s just a few of the revelations from the extraordinary life of Elton...
Children
People think it was a boy called Lev at a Ukrainian orphanage that made Elton realise he wanted to be a father.
But he’s revealed his paternal instincts first appeared in South Africa in 2009 on a visit to a Soweto drop-in centre for orphaned children living with HIV.
He says: “A small boy wouldn’t sit with the other kids. He just seemed to take a shine to me. He was called Noosa. He was adorable. I realised I felt something that wasn’t pity or fondness. There was a flicker of something more else there.”
He discussed adoption with partner David Furnish. In the end they found he was living happily with his grandmother and a sister.
Later that year meeting 14-month-old Ukrainian Lev convinced Elton he really wanted to be a dad.
It proved impossible to adopt little Lev but anonymously Elton worked with a charity to get him and his brother out of an orphanage and fund their lives with their grandmother.
Elton adds: “When the Russians invaded Ukraine, we worked with the same charity to evacuate them to Kiev. We’ll always keep an eye on them.”
When their oldest son was born at 2.30am on Christmas Day 2010 that visit to Ukraine was still close their hearts.
Elton says: “We called him Zachary Jackson Levon. Everybody assumes the last name came from a song Bernie and I wrote, but they’re wrong: he’s named after Lev. He had to be.
“Lev was like an angel, a messenger, who taught me something about myself. Lev was the reason we were there, on a maternity ward, holding our son, knowing our lives had completely changed forever.”
Princess Diana
The pair were close friends until they fell out when she withdrew support for a book raising funds for AIDs.
They reunited after the mxz0urder of Gianni Versace, and there is one very famous photograph of the princess consoling the red-eyed grief-stricken singer during the service.
But Elton says: “She wasn’t doing anything of the sort. She was leaning past me, reaching for a mint that David offered her. The warm words of comfort coming from her lips at that exact moment were actually: ‘God, I’d love a Polo.’...
...being 24hrs from death
Elton has revealed he was close to dying after contracting a major infection following surgery for prostrate cancer.
Touring South America in 2017 the pain became so unbearable he was forced to fly back to the UK.
Taken for a scan at King Edward VII’s Hospital, London, he was told he was suffering a rare condition that left fluid leaking from his lymph nodes. And it was so serious the hospital feared it didn’t have the equipment to cope.
Elton says: “I lay awake all night, wondering if I was going to die. In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, I prayed, ‘Please don’t let me die, please let me see my kids again’.” He was in intensive care for two days but after doctors drained the lymphatic fluid and gave him with antibiotics he spent seven weeks at home recuperating and learning how to walk again.
Rod Stewart
The two great contemporaries have pet names for each other – Elton is nicknamed Sharon and Rod is Phyllis.
Elton writes that when people joked about his hair loss Rod sent him a helmet-shaped hairdryer women used to sit under in salons. In relation Elton sent his rival back a Zimmer frame covered in fairy lights.
He recounts a story of when Rod was playing Earl’s Court and the promoters advertised the gig by flying a blimp with his face over the venue. Elton says: “I called my management, who hired someone to shoot it down: Apparently it landed on top of a double-decker bus.”
The phone soon went. Rod was on the other end and he really did want to talk about it. “Where’s my f***ing balloon gone? It was you, wasn’t it? You cow! You bitch!’”
John Lennon
First Lennon was his idol, then another great friend. Elton was devastated at his murder in New York in 1980. In the previous decade the pair had enjoyed drug-fuelled times.
Elton relates one highlight when he and the Beatle were holed up in a hotel suite in New York working their way through a pile of cocaine and there was a knock at the door.
Elton was terrified it was the police but peeping through the spyhole he realised it was Andy Warhol and went to let him in.
The knocking continued but Lennon was having none of it – asking if Warhol had “that f***ing camera with him”. Lennon had to ask if Elton wanted to be seen with “icicles of cocaine hanging out of your nose.”
Elton obviously did not – and so the world’s most famous pop artist was left in the hotel corridor.
watching porn with his mum at 30,000 feet
In the seventies Elton used the Boeing 720, which featured bar, an organ, dining tables, sofas and a TV with a video recorder. Once when travelling on board with his mother, she insisted on watching the pornographic film Deep Throat starring Linda Lovelace while she was eating her lunch. “Everyone’s talking about it, aren’t they? What’s is about then?” she said.
Elton remembers the reaction, and his mum’s words: “Oh gawd, no, what’s happening now? Oh! I can’t look! How’s she doing that?”
Pop judgment
Elton’s manager John Reid played him a pressing of the hit song Bohemian Rhapsody which he described as the “campest thing I have ever heard in my life” thinking it would never be a hit.
Shopping
Don’t go shopping after a three-day cocaine binge, or: “You wake to a phone call informing you that you have bought a tram. A Melbourne W2 class drop-centre combination tram, that the voice at the end of the phone is informing you has to be shipped from Australia to Britain, where it can only be delivered by hanging it from two Chinook helicopters.”
Dancing
The 1983 song I’m Still Standing was a song requiring a confident video. Helicopter shots were planned with body-painted dancers and Elton cruising in a Bentley.
Not only that but Arlene Phillips – later a Strictly Come Dancing judge – would choreograph the dancing.
Elton was keen to show off his moves honed at Studio 54. But he says: “Visibly stunned Arlene went pale and suddenly scaled down my involvement in that side of things.”
In the end all he was left to do was click his fingers...
Terrifying Iggy Pop
It was 1973 and Elton had been to see The Stooges at a club called Richards in Atlanta in the US. He thought it was “just the greatest thing I’d ever seen”, so went again the following night… this time dressed as a gorilla.
He thought it would be amusing and add to the chaotic performance.
Instead he says he learned one vital fact about surprising stars while dressed as an ape. He says: “Always check to see whether or not the person you’re surpassing has taken so much acid before the show they’re unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and a gorilla.”
Instead of finding ape-man Elton hilarious, Iggy Pop screamed and ran away terrified.
- Me: Elton John Official Autobiography by Elton John is published by Macmillan on Tuesday (OCT 15), £25
