Nostalgia can be a trap, but Elton John’s return offers one final ‘love-fest’ for fans
If you’re thinking that the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour seems to be stretching on a bit, you’re not wrong: by July it will have visited five continents across 350 dates.
Asked what he was going to miss about touring, Elton John’s response was both immediate and succinct. “Nothing,” he said, before repeating the word for emphasis.
“I’ve done it since I was 17, in the back of a van with my first band,” said Mr John, 75. “I can’t imagine how many miles I’ve covered in that time between then and now. I love music. I like playing live – but I’ve played enough concerts, and I can’t really do a better concert than I’m doing now, with a better stage or a better production.”
These comments were made by the British pop singer, songwriter and pianist in pre-show footage that appeared during a worldwide premiere of his final concert from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which was live-streamed globally on Disney + in November.
If these quotes come across as a little churlish, even a little ungrateful, the man born Reginald Dwight clarified his thinking by then describing live performance as “the most gratifying thing – you want your music to be heard by every generation”.
The people who buy tickets to his shows now, John said, vary between being “as old as me, and they’re as young as seven or eight year-old kids in the front row, singing all the words. It’s a love-fest, between me and them, and them and me.”
As far as Australian audiences are concerned, that love-fest ends later this month, when John vacates his piano stool down under for the last time.
If you’re thinking that Sir Elton’s final tour, titled Farewell Yellow Brick Road, seems to be stretching on a bit, you’re not wrong: it began in September 2018, and by the time it ends in July 2023 – with a pair of gigs in Stockholm, rescheduled from October 2021 – he and his band will have visited five continents across more than 350 dates.
In this part of the world, he had almost completed the final leg of the farewell when Covid struck, leaving two New Zealand dates incomplete. Never one to let his fans down, he rescheduled those shows – and then tacked a few extra stadium gigs on to the return visit for good measure.
To that point in February 2020, the 40-date trek across Australia and NZ had been seen by more than 700,000 people; when he returns this month, that total number will exceed one million tickets, becoming only the second tour in Australian history to reach that mark, following Ed Sheeran in 2018.
“I’ve always been a statistics freak,” the musician wrote in his absorbing and hilarious 2019 memoir, titled Me. “Even now, I get sent the charts every day, the radio chart positions in America, the box office charts for films and Broadway plays. Most artists don’t do that; they’re not interested. When I’m talking to them, I know more about how their single’s doing than what they do, which is crazy.
“The official excuse is that I need to know what’s going on because, these days, I own a company that makes films and manages artists.
“The truth is that I’d be doing it if I was working in a bank. I’m just an anorak,” he wrote, using British slang for people with obsessive interests.
That attention to detail means that John is probably well aware that by the end of his final show in Brisbane, he will have played an extraordinary 233 concerts in Australia across five decades. “I think nostalgia can be a real trap for an artist,” he wrote in his memoir.
“When you reminisce about the good old days, you naturally see it all through rose-tinted spectacles. In my case in particular, I think that’s forgivable, because I probably was literally wearing rose-tinted spectacles at the time, with flashing lights and ostrich feathers attached to them.
“But if you end up convincing yourself that everything in the past was better than it is now, you might as well give up writing music and retire.”
To his credit, the singer-songwriter hasn’t stopped writing music – although in the above passage he was reflecting on the origin of 2001’s Songs from the West Coast, his 26th album and one of several collections of new material released this century that you probably haven’t heard.
Although John has had hit singles in recent years – Cold Heart and Hold Me Closer, on which he collaborated with pop stars Dua Lipa and Britney Spears, respectively – these were essentially reworked versions of older hits in Rocket Man (1972) and Tiny Dancer (1971).
Nostalgia, then, is what chiefly drew the masses to see him perform last time around, and I was among the throng at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre a week before Christmas in 2019. A few memories are held in sharp focus.
First was the knockout setlist, packed with more culture-shaping hits than most solo artists could ever hope to command; perhaps only Paul McCartney, who last played stadiums here with his band at the end of 2017, could best him in those stakes.
(McCartney played 34 shows last year, and celebrated his 80th birthday in June; whether he’ll return to our shores is unclear.)
Second was the muscular musicality of John’s band. All of these players are longtime accompanists to the frontman – some stretching as far back as the 1970s – and their synergy was never less than impressive.
Third was the sheer dexterousness of the man himself at the black-and-white keys, banging out powerful chords and fluid melodic runs for more than two hours comprising 25 songs.
Nobody would blame him if he stepped back from playing lead piano, but evidently he remains a pure musician to his very core, and John seemed to revel in his ability to play material he had first composed and recorded decades earlier.
Lastly, the image burned into my memory is how he rose from his piano stool at the end of every song, not to bask in the applause, but to acknowledge the audience’s enthusiasm for what he and his band were playing.
It was a wonderful, repeated gesture, and it ensured an ebullient mood dominated the room from the first chord of Bennie and the Jets until the final encore, when he disappeared from our sight at the end of – what else? – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
There on full display was that “love-fest, between me and them” to which he referred in the Dodger Stadium pre-show footage. Nothing about it felt forced; it could not have come across as more genuine, and his respect for his fans was wonderful to witness.
I’ve seen concerts where the performer whose name is on the ticket outright ignored the audience; Bob Dylan is the worst offender in this regard, and when I saw him in 2018, he and his band played at all times as if there was a sheet of glass between them and the 10,000 or so people who had paid to be there. That Dylan gig was at the same venue as where I saw John, but the experiences were night and day – or, perhaps more aptly, ice and fire.
That warmth, that enthusiasm and that love for sharing songs with other humans is precisely why I’ll be among the masses this month, rejoining John and his fabulous group of musicians to see them again, for what has become a very long farewell, but one richly deserved.
Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour visits Newcastle (January 8 and 10), Melbourne (Jan 13-14), Sydney (Jan 17-18) and Brisbane (Jan 21).
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