Elton John
speaker
119 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Elton John’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I know. He just considered... There was an expression in him called wide boy, which meant crook. He said, if I became a... Elton is... My mother read the letter to me. It's in a thing called Tantrums. Elton would become a wide boy if he carried... Rock and roll is just... There's no future. He wanted... A solid future for me in a bank or in the Air Force or doing a proper job.
You know, it was all down. You grew up in the 50s. You knew what it was like. When Elvis came, it was a revolution. It was a social revolution. And people were horrified. And people in England were horrified who had, you know, conservative opinions of what was good and what was bad. If I became a rock and roller, my life would fall apart. To a certain extent, he was right.
No, not really. He never came to my shows. He never wrote a letter saying, well done.
No, no, no. He had four other sons that he had with his – married to Edna. He was a tactile father to them and loving. He just – you know, I've done so much therapy and rehab. And I just look back on it and saying this was an unfortunate meeting of two people who should never have met each other.
I think he was a musical snob, yeah.
And, you know, I grew up – I'm so grateful for – I mean, I always had music in the house, Terry. I grew up with, you know, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, George Shearing. This is great music. All great music. I mean, all from America, obviously, but great music. When I was like nine years old, I think I got Songs for Swinging Lovers as my Christmas present by Frank Sinatra.
And I loved George Shearing. He was a jazz player, pianist, who was blind, who came from Pinner, where I came from. And when I first became successful in the early 70s, I went to New York and I phoned him. And I said, thank you. I grew up with your music. And it was fantastic. And I was only six or seven years old when I heard your music. But I loved it.
And it made me want to play the piano like you, although I couldn't play as well as you. But I was very grateful to the music I had. But when Elvis Presley came knocking on the door and little Richard and Jerry Lewis, who started jumping on the piano, then that was what I wanted to do.
Well, of course. Liberace came to England and there was a columnist in the Daily Mirror who said he was gay, a guy called Cassandra. Well, that was his pseudonym. And Liberace sued and won. And he said, I'm not gay. And he won the libel case. When I was young and I watched the Liberace show or any show that came from America that was musical – It was pure magic.
The Americans did things on a bigger scale. Liberace, because he played the piano, I was very much interested in. He was a good pianist, but he was not a great pianist. And I was enchanted by him and I loved him. You know, his dialogue with the audience was very, very funny, especially when he did live shows. And I did get to meet him.
I did the Royal Variety Show with him in London at the London Palladium. And I planned my two big outfits and I thought, well, Liberace, I've got to do something special. So I had two fabulous lurex suits made in red, white and blue. And they were hanging up, you know, very proudly in the dressing room. And then Lee, who he liked to be called Liberace, Lee walked in with trunk after trunk.
He wore that outfit with the light bulbs in it. And, you know, so my attempt to, you know, go one up on Liberace failed absolutely miserably. But he was so charming and so lovely and very, very funny and very, very intelligent. And he was a huge influence on me. It's like he was being who he was. He wasn't publicly out. He didn't give a flying monkeys about what he was wearing.
He just went for it. And that was who he was. And that, of course, influenced me when I started wearing the clothes and, you know, subconsciously must have, you know, if you're stuck at a piano and you're not a lead guitarist or lead vocalist, you're kind of at a nine foot plank and you have to. do something about it.
So my thing was to leap on the piano, do handstand and wear clothes that would attract attention to me because that's the focus for two and a half hours or two hours. I'm not walking around the stage. I'm not moving. So he gave me that idea probably subconsciously because before then I'd never seen anyone dressed like that.
Well, all my stuff has been done with firmly tongue-in-cheek. I wasn't a heartthrob David Bowie or Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart in those days. I was Elton at the piano. And, you know, I just had to turn the attention onto something comedic or even more outrageous than it was. Of course, with those kind of things, as is my want in everything I do, I took it too far. And it, you know, became…
In the beginning, it was natural. I didn't think about it. It was like, oh, yeah, let's do this, let's do that. And then it became like, oh, what am I going to do next? And that's the dangerous side. It's like you think about it too much. In the end, it became tired and it became too much. And it became less fun. I think a lot of the critics, the costumes...
put people off me they weren't listening to the music as more or less looking at what I was wearing I was singing great songs but I was also wearing you know a giant chicken outfit at the time and being helped on stage by Mr. Universe on his shoulders so you know anything like that it was you know it was all down to me it was my fault if anything you know if they didn't like what I was wearing then I couldn't really do much about it but you know I had to take responsibility for it
It lights up. You can show films on it. You can show video. It was a suggestion from Yamaha, who made my piano, said, you know, we're coming up with an idea for you. And I You know, the first show I did in Las Vegas was a red piano. I had a red piano. And then we had to think, well, if we're going to go back, what can we do?
And they came up with this idea before we ever thought of going back to Vegas. And I thought, well, if I go back to Vegas, this sounds like a great idea. You know, and it's, I introduced, the piano has a name. She's named Blossom after Blossom Deary.
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