Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour adds encore dates for Australia in 2023
When the British pop superstar stepped off a Sydney stage in March 2020, everyone thought that would be his final performance on Australian soil. Well, not quite.
When Elton John stepped off the stage at Western Sydney Stadium on March 7, 2020, his legion of fans and the man himself thought that would be his final performance on Australian soil.
Well, not quite: the British singer-songwriter and his band will return for a final series of stadium shows in January, in addition to two outdoor shows in Auckland that were rescheduled due to the Covid pandemic.
The announcement on Wednesday was accompanied by the release of a striking portrait of the artist flanked by red roses and nude models. The image was created by US photographer David LaChapelle, who is renowned for his hyper-realistic and highly stylised shoots with celebrities.
When John arrived here in November 2019 for a final world tour, named Farewell Yellow Brick Road, it was the beginning of a 40-date trek across Australia and New Zealand that saw more than 705,000 tickets sold across three months, before Covid interrupted the last few shows.
His encore run of Australian shows will begin in Newcastle on January 10 and end in Brisbane on January 21 before moving on to New Zealand.
For concert promoter Michael Chugg, who first met John in 1971, the chance to work with the British performer one last time was an opportunity that was too good to pass up.
“He announced earlier this year that his kids loved Australia so much that he’d spend Christmas here, knowing he had those two Auckland shows to honour,” Mr Chugg told The Australian.
“He reached out, and we’ve put in some extra shows, including Christchurch where he hasn’t been for over 30 years.
“We talked about what else he could do, and it turned out he’d never played Newcastle. With that stadium having been renovated, we thought, well, let’s have a crack at that.”
The singer-songwriter began his final world tour in September 2018; by the time it ends in July 2023, he and his band will have visited five continents across more than 350 dates.
According to a report by US music industry publication Pollstar in late 2019, John ranked No. 11 on its list of top touring artists of the decade, with a box office gross of $US675m ($985m).
After the final show in Brisbane, John, who is 75, will have played 233 concerts in Australia across six decades.
In his revealing, absorbing and hilarious 2019 memoir, titled simply Me, the superstar wrote that “there isn’t really anything left to do during a gig that I haven’t already done – but of course, when you do start thinking that, life has a habit of letting you know you’re wrong”.
The artist then recounted a night in Las Vegas in 2017 when, as he played the last chord of Rocket Man and leapt up from the piano to bask in the crowd’s applause, he was doing something novel.
“Pissing myself in front of an audience while wearing a nappy: this was definitely hitherto uncharted territory,” he wrote.
“There aren’t a huge number of positives about contracting prostate cancer, but at least it had enabled me to have an entirely new and unprecedented experience onstage.”
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