Why Elton John feels at home in Australia
All Elton John knew of Australia before his 1971 tour was Skippy the Kangaroo and Germaine Greer. But in his new autobiography, the pop superstar reveals how many of the biggest moments in his life happened on our shores.
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The first words I ever said onstage in Australia were: “Well, here we are in the outback!”
That wouldn’t have been a problem if we were in the outback.
But I was in the middle of Perth.
And moreover, I was unaware of how unfailingly hilarious Australians find British people assailing them with a selection of jokes about the outback, kangaroos, barbecues, boomerangs and hats with corks on them.
“I grew used to the fabled English sense of humour,” as Clive James once glumly put it, “but preferred to steer clear of it whenever possible, for fear of laughing too hard.”
But then, I was unaware of almost anything about Australia when I first arrived there in 1971.
It wasn’t like going to America for the first time the previous year.
However peculiar I found some aspects of American behaviour — not least that my US publicist thought it was a marvellous idea to meet us at the airport in a red double-decker London bus with ELTON JOHN HAS ARRIVED written on the side of it — the place itself felt strangely familiar: I’d seen it so often in films and on TV, in magazines and on album sleeves.
Australia was the other side of the world.
Back then, Australia hardly ever reached England.
There were no big Australian films, hardly any Australian pop stars: just The Seekers and The Easybeats.
I’d heard of Germaine Greer and seen Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, but, with the greatest of respect to both of them, even I realised that radical feminism and talking kangaroos probably didn’t constitute a full picture of what the country was like.
In a way, it made the reception I got there all the more incredible.
It didn’t start out terribly well. The first thing I learned about Australia was that it wasn’t a country used to pop stars with their hair dyed orange and green: the woman at customs looked at me like I was a certifiable lunatic and asked “what is this, a bloody a travelling circus?”
But as soon as I got onstage, the audiences went nuts.
It was fabulous, but it was also a genuinely weird experience.
When Bernie Taupin and I wrote songs, we never imagined someone hearing them nearly 10,000 miles away: in fairness, 18 months before, Bernie and I had been writing songs that no one wanted to listen to at all.
And yet, here they were: literally thousands of people, on the other side of the world.
In Europe and the US, we were still playing in theatres and universities.
In Australia, we were booked into sports stadiums — football grounds, tennis centres, even a racetrack — which was a completely new experience.
Back then, no one played sports stadiums except The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. And now, apparently, us.
What the hell was going on?
And, furthermore, why was it so cold?
We’d arrived in October, utterly oblivious to the fact that October in Australia can occasionally be chilly.
I was completely baffled.
The extensive research I’d conducted into Australia by watching Skippy The Bush Kangaroo had led me to believe the place was always sweltering. It never rained in Waratah National Park.
So why was it absolutely tipping it down and blowing a gale in Sydney?
I was completely unprepared: sartorially understated as usual, I’d brought a specially-made cape with me to wear onstage.
I ended up going on in my overcoat instead, which wasn’t really the outrageous showman of rock image I was looking for.
Then again, what I was wearing onstage in Sydney quickly became a moot point, because the crowd couldn’t see me at all.
The storm blew the tarpaulin covering the top of the stage off and it landed on top of me and the band.
I just kept playing, which is what I learned to do at the start of my career.
When I was a teenager, my first paying gig was as a pianist in a pretty rough pub called the Northwood Hills Hotel, where, without fail, there would be a punch-up every night: glasses flying, tables pushed over, the works.
You just kept playing, in the hope that you might calm them down.
You know, if you spent your musical apprenticeship trying to play Roll Out The Barrell while the clientele of a North London pub beat the living crap out of each other, you really don’t scare easily onstage.
I don’t want to sound blasé, but, frankly, a tarpaulin falling on top of you in the middle of Take Me To The Pilot is nothing.
Besides, the audience seemed to love it.
The Australian audiences seemed to love everything.
They made so much noise that it started me thinking about the sound we made.
The idea of the original Elton John Band was that we were a power trio, like Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but with a piano instead of a guitar.
I hadn’t thought we needed a guitarist: me, my bass player Dee Murray and my drummer Nigel Olsson made a big enough noise without one.
But if we were going to be playing to crowds this big and this loud, maybe it was time to think again.
That was one of the reasons I asked Davey Johnstone to join us a few weeks later.
He’s still with me now: we’ve just played our 3000th live show together, and it all started because of a load of nut cases yelling their heads off at tennis centres in Adelaide and Melbourne and a racecourse in Sydney.
It was the first, but not the last time going to Australia turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life.
I was in Melbourne when I found out John Lennon had been murdered.
I’d only seen him a few weeks before, at a party after a gig I played in New York: he was full of excitement about the new album he was making, and now he was dead.
There was no funeral to go to, and we were still in Melbourne when the memorial Yoko asked for took place five days later, so we hired one of the city’s cathedrals, St Pauls, and held our own service for him at the same time people gathered in Central Park.
That’s what I think about when I remember his death: all of us in St Paul’s Cathedral, in tears — the band, the road crew, everyone — singing The Lord Is My Shepherd.
Later, in 1984, I got married in Australia.
To be honest, I chose it because it was too far for my mum to travel — we really weren’t getting on at the time — but the people in Sydney were so warm and welcoming, it seemed like a good decision.
I remember standing on the steps of St Marks Church afterwards.
Someone who lived nearby had opened their window and started playing my song Kiss The Bride: presumably they hadn’t listened to the lyrics first — the chorus goes “don’t say I do, say bye-bye” — but it was the thought that counted.
While it was playing, a voice rang out from the crowd: “You finally did it! Good on you, you old poof!”
Once again: well, it was the thought that counted.
A couple of years after that, I played what I thought might be the last-ever gig I’d play.
Not because I’d thrown one of my tantrums and announced I was retiring with immediate effect yet again — I don’t think I’ve ever done that in Australia, but I’ve done it so often there’s every chance I have — but because I genuinely thought I might never be able to sing again.
I’d arranged a tour of Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
By now, my life was pretty out of control. I knew the last album I’d made, Leather Jackets, was terrible — it wasn’t so much an album as a 40-minute-long public service announcement about the dangers of taking a lot of cocaine in the studio — and I wanted to do a tour so special it would obliterate its memory.
It turned out to be special, but for all the wrong reasons.
I lost my voice.
The doctors in Sydney found cysts on my vocal cords: they thought they might be cancerous.
Even if they weren’t, I might still be done for a singer — Julie Andrews had famously come out of an operation to remove cysts on her vocal cords with her voice completely destroyed.
They wanted me to cancel the shows, but I said no.
We were meant to be recording a live album, and besides, if I was never going to sing again, I wanted to put off the day I stopped as long as I could.
So we went ahead.
I was terrified, but the final show at Sydney Entertainment Centre was one of the most incredible gigs I’ve ever played.
My voice was rough and raspy, but I got through it, and I don’t think I’ve ever performed Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me better than I did that night: the orchestra sounded amazing, and given the state I was in, every line of Bernie’s lyrics seemed to take on a new meaning, a different emphasis.
Sometimes, you end up with the most powerful memories from the most unpromising circumstances.
Of course, I did sing again, thanks to the doctors at St Vincent’s Hospital.
And I’ve been back to Australia dozens of times since then.
I’ve worked with Australian artists — Catherine Britt and Pnau — and I played the old Sydney Entertainment Centre more times than any other artist: in fact, I’ve played at Sydney Entertainment Centre more times than any other venue except Caesar’s Palace and Madison Square Gardens, which tells you something about how much I love performing in Australia.
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It’s odd: I’ve got houses in England and America and France, but I’ve always felt at home in Australia.
Then again, why wouldn’t I feel at home in Australia?
A lot’s happened to me there.
ME by Elton John. Published by Macmillan. Hardcover RRP $44.99. Available now.