Glorious: Elton John’s farewell tour, at the O2 Arena, reviewed
You’ll never get the chance to see him do this again – unless he changes his mind, like everyone does
Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Why there? Because it’s a hop and a skip from the small town of Lititz in Amish country, where scores of the big arena shows are built – it’s the real rock’n’roll capital of the world. Since then, with breaks for Covid and other health worries, he has played roughly 300 shows, grossing north of $800 million as of January this year – this is the most commercially successful tour ever.
Retirement, or the threat of retirement, has always been a canny career move: Frank Sinatra played more than 1,000 concerts and recorded ‘Theme From New York, New York’ after he quit the business in 1971. For more than 40 years the Rolling Stones have attracted concert-goers keen not to miss their last chance to see them. They’ve now had more chances than a wicketkeeper standing up to Muttiah Muralitharan. It’s certainly one reason why I finally turned out for Elton – another tick on the ‘legendary artists wot I have seen list’.
I’ve never shelled out for an Elton record but when he played ‘Rocket Man’ tears welled in my eyes
For Elton, this was the ninth of ten shows at the O2, with its seating maximised to pack ’em in, and it followed two big outdoor London shows last summer, which brought in 100,000 punters between them. Given those numbers, this is not a show that messes about with new songs or runs of deep cuts. You want hits? You’ve got ’em – hit after hit after hit after hit, songs that have insinuated themselves into the consciousness in a way that only very few artists have managed. I’ve never shelled out for an Elton record, but when he played ‘Rocket Man’ there were, inexplicably, tears welling in my eyes – nostalgia for a time I don’t remember, for events I never participated in, for a world that was not mine. These songs are part of your life whether or not you wish them to be.
For a lot of the show I was reflecting on the relationship between Elton and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. Lots has been written about it and it was the centrepiece of the biopic Rocketman, presented as an up-and-down love affair between two men – one gay and one straight – who needed each other to reach apotheosis. I was thinking less about that, though, than how weird it must have been for both of them. On the one hand, you’ve got Taupin knowing his words only matter when sung by his best friend; on the other, you’ve got Elton having to live with the knowledge that scores of people, even knowing Taupin wrote the words, can’t help assuming they reflect Elton’s own thoughts. I don’t think there’s any other significant artist whose career is so entirely dependent on the lyric-writing of just one other person.
The melodies, of course, are all his own, which is the other mind-blowing thing. What must it be like to have that facility with a tune, to be able to summon something that lodges so completely in the heads of others? Is it like being a top-class footballer, where you actually can’t explain how you are able to make the complex calculations necessary to pass a ball to the foot of someone else, 50 yards away, running at full pelt? Is it just something he knows how to do? So many of these songs, even the lesser ones, have a melodic invention that startles. Maybe it’s because I was a kid when it was a hit, but ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’ has an ease and simplicity that, despite it not being a song with the depth of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, astonishes me. When melodies come so easily, how do you even know which are the good ones?
I strongly suspect the reason for the huge and ongoing public affection for him, despite all the years of cocaine-driven twattery, lies in the fact that despite giving himself the middle name Hercules (probably the funniest thing any rock star has ever done), he never stopped being dumpy, insecure Reg from Pinner, and everyone could see it. Unlike Keith Richards, who was probably born smoking and telling the midwives to piss off, Elton John seemed more like the results of a bizarre experiment in which your next-door neighbour was transformed into a globe-straddling superstar.
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There were parts I could have lived without: ‘Have Mercy on the Criminal’ was an early-1970s blues-rock waltz, and the early-1970s blues-rock waltz is the single least- appealing musical style ever devised. And ‘Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’ might be the apotheosis of serious Elton, but the heavier he got, the less appealing he was to me. But come on, it was Elton. It was glorious. And you’ll never get the chance to see him do this again. Unless he changes his mind, like everyone does.
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