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Oh. My. God. If you are at all interested in Elton John as a person, or his views on anything and everything, you really, really need to go read his extensive profile/interview in The Telegraph. It’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and read a long interview with him, but he’s a really fascinating, wonderful man. This piece is so interesting! Elton talks about his borderline-OCD, his years of drug and alcohol abuse, what rehab, AA, and NA was like for him, plus he talks extensively about art, photography, his personal collections, interior design… it’s all like porn for me. I love this sh-t. Here are some highlights:
Elton on technology: At his home in Windsor Elton’s archive of 70,000 CDs is stored in a room beside the gym, the ‘newer stuff’ in the music room. (He sold his vinyl collection, including every 45 released in Britain since 1954 – acquired from a BBC producer – for £250,000 in 1992, when he set up his Elton John Aids Foundation.) He does not own an iPod, nor a computer – nor even what he calls ‘a portable phone’. He is the only person he knows, he says, who can remember telephone numbers. ‘Everybody else puts them into their phone. I feel like a grumpy old man, but I’ve made the choice not to join in with all that.’
Elton’s properties and interior design: Elton John has homes in Nice, Atlanta and Venice but his principal residence is in Windsor: a Queen Anne-style house with eight bedrooms, standing in 37 acres, that he bought in 1975 for £400,000. Through the 1970s and 80s this was furnished in a style that might be called ‘High Rock’n’Roll Empire’: the obligatory jukeboxes and pinball machines; Tiffany lamps and art deco nymphs; red leather sofas; the odd Rembrandt etching; a disco; a replica of Tutankhamun’s state throne – booty acquired in what he once described as his ‘looting expeditions’. When, in 1988, he decided to refurbish the house and sell everything, the Sotheby’s staff who were called upon to catalogue its contents for auction expressed astonishment that anyone could have found the room to actually live there. The catalogue ran to four volumes, and the four-day sale raised almost £15 million. Now, the man who once asked his friend the actor and director Bryan Forbes, ‘How do I acquire taste?’ seems finally to have found it. Through the electronic gates, a gravelled drive lined with white rose bushes leads you to the front door, where a manservant is waiting to greet you. In the sitting-room there are capacious sofas – an aura of Aubusson, cut moquette, damask – and deep carpets. There are vases spilling with flowers, elaborately carved tables, every surface covered with exquisite porcelain – one of his obsessions. Outside, fountains play in the garden.
On aging: Elton John is 63, but feels, he says, ‘like a 20-year-old’. The pacemaker that he had fitted a few years ago was replaced last year. ‘I’m like turbo-bunny.’
Quickies: He is an engagingly lively conversationalist, quick to make jokes, often at his own expense, only occasionally becoming heated at something that he finds particularly irksome: pop videos (‘I f***ing hate them’); D-list celebrities (‘I loathe celebrity. I can’t stand it’); and Fabio Capello (‘I cannot believe – and I hope you print this – that we employ a manager who still cannot speak English’).
Elton on how he’s just a bloke: Pondering his place in the nation’s affections, he likes to describe himself as ‘the acceptable face of homosexuality, because I’m quite blokey. And I’m very happy with that. That’s why I love being in this country, because people are always very honest with me and very kind and have a great sense of humour, and you still get the wolf whistles walking along the street and stuff like that.’
On AA and NA: Elton once estimated that in his first few years of sobriety, in the early 1990s, he attended a total of 1,500 meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, finally stopping when he realised that the meetings were threatening to become an addiction in themselves. He no longer has therapy or goes to meetings, although he remains close friends with his AA sponsor in Chicago – a former garbage-truck driver who now works as a counsellor – and is godfather to his son. Yet Elton, whose candour once prompted someone to remark that he was a man who threatened to invade his own privacy, still seems compelled to talk of his problems and his recovery – the touchstone that all conversation circles around and eventually returns to. ‘You have to be honest,’ he says. ‘And talking about it helps me, actually; it reminds me of what a mess I was.’
On drugs and bulimia: ‘I know people who can do a line of coke once a month,’ he says. ‘Well, I can’t.’ His consumption of the drug and of alcohol quickly assumed gargantuan proportions. There is a period in his life – quite a long period – which he now remembers only as ‘a complete and utter blur… The self-loathing I had…’ He sighs. ‘Walking around the house, not bathing for three or four days, staying up watching pornography all the time, drinking a bottle of scotch a day. And I was bulimic as well, so I wouldn’t eat for three days, then gorge on six bacon sandwiches and a pint of ice cream and throw it up. And then have a shower and start the whole procedure all over again. There was no self-respect there whatsoever. It was just f***ing horrible. You look back and think, how on earth could I have done that? But I did.’
On AIDS and Elton’s AIDS Fondation: Elton says that one of the most important turning points in his recovery was meeting Ryan White, a haemophiliac who in the late-1980s became a cause célèbre in America after becoming infected at the age of 13 with HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion. Ryan’s family were obliged to wage a lengthy legal battle in the face of a campaign by teachers and parents to ban him from school. His ordeal made Ryan, who died in 1990 at the age of 18, a figurehead for Aids education and research. Elton became a close friend and supporter of Ryan and his family. He spent the last week of Ryan’s life at the family home, ‘making the coffee and fielding telephone calls’, and he was a pall-bearer at his funeral. ‘And what I learnt from them in that one week was that my life was so out of kilter,’ he says. ‘These people gave me an incredible example of how to lead one’s life as a Christian – forgiving, wonderful, not bitter; handling tragedy with such dignity, humility and generosity of spirit. And here I was complaining about the wallpaper in a hotel suite. What? What an absolute c*** you are. It made me think, you’ve got to make a change here, son.’ Ryan White’s death became the catalyst for the Elton John Aids Foundation, which has raised more than £150 million since it was set up in 1992, and for Elton’s increasingly active role as a spokesman on gay issues.
On performing at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding: Earlier this year he caused outcry among the gay community when he performed, for a reported fee of $1 million, at the wedding of the splenetic right-wing American commentator Rush Limbaugh, a man who has been accused of being a homophobe, and who has described Aids as a ‘hyped’ disease and claimed ‘there was never any evidence’ that it could be transmitted heterosexually. ‘When he asked me to play at his wedding, my agent said, “Well, of course you won’t be doing it,” ’ Elton says. ‘But I said, “Well, let me think about that first.”’ Limbaugh, he says, is against gay marriage – ‘But then so is President Obama. But Limbaugh’s not anti-civil partnerships, so maybe I can have a dialogue about that. I’ve put my foot in the water and so has he. I got on with him very well, got on very well with his wife. I don’t have the same politics, but that doesn’t really matter. And I think this year I can start to put things in motion by trying to get him on my side.’
On Eminem: The tide can change, he says. He faced similar criticism in 2001 when he joined Eminem on stage at the Grammy awards, ignoring the controversy about the rap singer’s allegedly homophobic lyrics. Eminem has now come out in support of gay marriage. ‘For our civil partnership present he gave David and me two diamond-encrusted c-ck-rings.’
[From The Telegraph]
Wait… Elton John doesn’t believe in gay marriage? And neither does Pres. Obama? And yet Eminem is pro-gay marriage?! You’ve got to love that. I also like that Elton doesn’t discuss his part in helping Eminem get sober and clean – because Eminem has already spoken about that, and how much Elton’s help and advice has meant to him. For Elton to talk about it, it might sound cheap, I think.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
