Kerry Parnell: Elton John says he’s done, but I’m not sure about that

The sun has finally set on Elton John’s live performance career (or so he says, but so many before him have given the game away only to return to centre stage and the limelight.

No one could describe Elton John as the shy and retiring type, so it makes sense that the Rocket Man turned his retirement party into a record-breaking one.

After starting his goodbye tour five years ago, this week, he finally reaches the end with his last concert. It follows a triumphant appearance at last weekend’s Glastonbury Festival, concluding a live career spanning five decades.

It’s no mean feat – as poor Madonna, 64, will testify, as she recovers from a bacterial infection while preparing for her own gruelling world tour.

Just as Elton’s career has gone on and on, so has the star’s exit. The 76-year-old announced his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour would be his last, kicking it off in 2018 in the United States.

Elton John performing at Glastonbury. Photo by Harry Durrant/Getty Images)

Thanks to a combination of lockdown and health issues, the entertainer is still on his marathon journey along that yellow brick road. Dorothy and Toto would have given up long ago, were it not for the gazillions of dollars at the end of it, as it has become the highest-grossing tour ever.

And while it would have been wizard of him to have played his last show in Oz, he instead ends in Stockholm on Saturday, July 8.

Talk about the long goodbye … but what a way to go. Never mind slinking off silently, we should all do an Elton and host flamboyant leaving parties when we retire/resign/are made redundant/get the chop. Gold suits, glittery glasses, the lot. At least it would be a memorable exit.

And while I wish Elton a well-deserved rest after the lengthiest farewell ever, if I was him I wouldn’t auction off his comedy specs too soon, as what’s the betting it’s not actually the last we’ll hear of the Crocodile Rocker?

He wouldn’t be the first musician to come back for an encore. Ozzy Osbourne, 74, embarked on his No More Tours tour in 1992, then returned with an aptly named Retirement Sucks tour in 1995.

His second farewell tour began in 2018, titled, you guessed it, No More Tours 2.

Jay-Z, 53, also threw a retirement party at Madison Square Garden after his release of The Black Album in 2003. Three years later, he released another album. “It was the worst retirement, maybe, in history,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

Or how about John Farnham, 74, who played his The Last Time tour in 2002 and is still The Voice two decades later. “I never said I was going to retire, I just said I was never going to do those big (indoor) venues again under my own steam,” he later clarified to News Corp.

Or he could always do an ABBA and turn himself into an Eltonatar, in a digital concert which plays into eternity, Black Mirror-style.

It’s worked for the Super Troopers, whose astonishing ABBA Voyage show, in London, will soon embark on a world tour of its own, while the real band members sit at home in their slippers.

That way he really would still be standing better than he ever did, looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid.

Originally published as Kerry Parnell: Elton John says he’s done, but I’m not sure about that