Elton John Music Quotes

I’ll not complain about your boring life, if you just leave me to mine

Cause what the hell is wrong with expressing yourself, trying to be me?

There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. I was twenty-four, successful, settled and in love.

There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from.

There aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it.

If you ask how I am then I’ll just say inspired

As everyone knows, fame, especially sudden fame, is a hollow, shallow and dangerous thing, its dark, seductive powers no substitute for true love or real friendship. On the other hand, if you’re a terribly shy person, desperately in need of a confidence boost – someone who spent a lot of their childhood trying to be as invisible as possible so you didn’t provoke one of your mum’s moods or your dad’s rage – I can tell you for a fact that being hailed as the future of rock and roll in the LA Times and feted by a succession of your musical heroes will definitely do the trick.

I’m sure the music at Boy would have sounded as wonderful as ever, but there does come a point where, in that environment, you start to feel like the dowager duchess at the debutantes’ ball, peering down your pince-nez at the latest arrivals.

Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.

For variety, she threw in the occasional thunderclap of real anger. I never knew when they were coming or what was going to provoke them. Spending time with her was like inviting an unexploded bomb to lunch or on holiday with you: I was always on edge, wondering what was going to set her off. Once it was the fact that I’d bought a kennel for the dogs we kept at the house in Nice. Once it was Billy Elliot, apparently the only thing I’d done in about ten years that she thought was any good. The musical had really taken off in a way that no one involved in it had predicted, not just in the UK but in countries where people had barely heard of the Miners’ Strike or the impact of Thatcherism on the British manufacturing industry: the story at its heart turned out to be universal. Mum went to see it in London dozens of times, until one afternoon, when the box office misplaced her tickets for the matinee and took five minutes to find them, something she decided I had deliberately, meticulously planned in an attempt to humiliate her.

When rock bands like the Rolling Stones came to prominence in the 1960s, they were perceived as dangerously anti-establishment. Some exploited this reputation by promoting social revolution and sexual hedonism. Even now old rockers in their seventies retain an aura of wildness. Yet Sir Mick Jagger and his ilk changed very little in the society they professed to loathe, and today it is common enough to find our celebrated cultural rebels enjoying multi-millionaire lifestyles based on shrewd investments. They live in large mansions. They enjoy access to the best health care. They take exotic holidays, and so on. We may love the music of Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John and Bob Geldof, KBE, but now we must see that it really is “only rock and roll.” Such people are part of the kinnocratic illusion (see Chapter 7), manipulating the story of being-like-us, fighting for fairness, making the world a better place with their sonic flares in the gloom.

Elton John’s music is regal. With it comes the genial conflation of Rock ‘n’ Roll and funk, enough to rebuild depressing moods and turn pleasantly warm a once gelid atmosphere.

In the early to mid-’70s, a small loft located up a short set of wooden stairs in the Rainbow led to the lair of the Hollywood Vampires. In short, the Vampires were a celebrity drinking club. Formed by my friend Alice Cooper, it consisted of a rotating cast of characters depending on who was in town at any given time. The principles were, aside from Alice and myself, Ringo Starr, Micky Dolenz, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, and on occasion, John Lennon. Outside of these gatherings I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the Rainbow; it just wasn’t my sort of place.

If our wonderful impostor had been in charge of the whole Bricky situation, then he would have wrestled that first dragon to the ground in the middle of the men’s finals at Wimbledon right in front of the royal box with the entire Royal Family in attendance, possibly with Sir Elton John playing the incidental music, and then finished it off with his sonic sodding screwdriver. As a finale he’d have magicked up strawberries and cream for the entire crowd at no extra cost, making Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand look like the act of a misanthropic miser.