Elton John and his husband David Furnish at Cannes in 2019.
In an interview with Time magazine celebrating his latest honorific as the legacy publication’s “Icon of the Year”, legendary pop star Elton John mused on his 60-year career in show business, how he hopes he’ll be remembered, the comforts of home after giving up touring in 2023, and what convinced him to go into drug rehab after becoming addicted to cocaine.
While John is recovering from near total blindness, he’s still writing music, lately for two Broadway shows in what he calls “a third act” in his career. John, who is now 77, says he prefers to spend his time discovering.
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“I’ve never lost the excitement of buying a new record, a new book, a new photograph,” he shared, saying that if he had to choose between never playing music again and never listening to it again, he’d opt to keep listening. “I just think that’s kept me going,” he says.
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John, his husband David Furnish and their two children call a three-story red-brick Georgian pile in the English countryside home. The property of the Knight Bachelor — a title awarded to John by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to music and charitable services” — has been owned by him for more than 50 years. However, it sat mostly vacant during his five-year “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour.
From the garden of his estate, the Queen Mother once remarked that it provides a good view of the British monarchy’s ancestral home.
John’s genteel life in the country is the latest chapter in what he called “an incredible” “hell of a life,” and “a slog.”
The singer racked up 57 U.S. Top 40 hits over his career, the majority in his “wild child” youth. From 1970 to 1975, he released 13 albums, seven of which went platinum. He was the first artist ever to have an album debut at Number 1 on American charts, and he performed more than 4,500 concerts over half a century before stepping off the road last year.
A new documentary from Furnish and RJ Cutler, called Elton John: Never Too Late, bookends John’s career with his meteoric first five years on tour in the U.S. and his final roadshow which ended at Dodger Stadium in 2023.
In between the start and end of his touring career, John confronted drug addiction, loneliness, and the scourge of AIDS.
In the midst of those “wild child” days, John says he was introduced to cocaine by his ex-lover and then manager John Reid, and he took to it. The drug freed him of his crippling shyness, he says, but eventually took over his life.
“You make terrible decisions on drugs,” he says. “I wanted love so badly, I’d just take hostages. I’d see someone I liked and spend three or four months together, and then they would resent me because they had nothing in their life apart from me. It really upsets me, thinking back on how many people I probably hurt.”
His longtime writing partner, Bernie Taupin, has said that the period in John’s life was “absolutely horrible” and affected their working relationship.
“I was terrified for him,” Taupin says. “A lot of the work that we did in the times when he was at his worst wasn’t the best of both of us.”
It was his experience with Ryan White, the teenager diagnosed with AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, which helped John turn his life around. Spending time with White, who used his last years advocating for people with AIDS as he was dying from the disease, showed John how selfishly he was living.
When White died, he was at the hospital with him.
“It all came to a climax, really, at the Ryan White funeral in Indianapolis — a really sad and emotional week — and I came back to the hotel thinking I’m just so out of line,” John says. “It was a shock to see how far down the scale of humanity I’d fallen.”
Six months later, he checked into rehab. Two years later, he started the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
As for his legacy, John says, “If people remember that we tried to change the world a little bit, we were kind, we tried to help people,” that would be enough. He added, “and then, apart from that, there was the music.”
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