Off like a rocket! Elton John’s ultimate farewell at Glastonbury
When Sir Elton Hercules John CBE swans onto the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival on Sunday evening, it is going to mark the top of one of many best, most vibrant, and definitely most profitable eras in British pop.
Over 5 years since setting out on his 350-date Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour, the 76-year-old singer of such basic hits as Your Song, Rocket Man, I’m Still Standing and Candle In The Wind, will carry out his ultimate British present in entrance of 100,000-plus followers and a TV viewers of tens of millions.
“I’m starting the set with a song that I haven’t played on stage for about 10 years,” he revealed.
“It’s a different show to what people have been seeing on Farewell Yellow Brick Road.”
There shall be shock company too.
Rumours are it might be Dua Lipa, who Elton duetted with in 2021 on their Number 1 hit Cold Heart.
Or maybe Kiki Dee, who he sang with again in 1976 on the chart-topping basic Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.
Other names bandied round embody Ed Sheeran, whom Elton additionally had a Number 1 hit with, and Billy Joel, an outdated buddy whom the star has toured with.
Elton feels the timing for his ultimate UK present “couldn’t be more perfect”.
Farewell Yellow Brick Road, which concludes in Sweden in July, was initially scheduled to finish in 2021.
But delays from lockdowns and emergency hip surgical procedure conspired to present him the possibility to exit in type on the nation’s most cherished music pageant. “I’ve never even been to Glastonbury,” he confessed not too long ago. “I admit I’m a little bit intimidated.” By one other coincidence, will probably be precisely 50 years in the past this week that Elton’s raucous 1973 hit, Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting, exploded into the UK Top 10.
A landmark second, it represented the transformation of earnest singer-songwriter Reginald Kenneth Dwight into Elton John.
Ditching the denim-and-dandruff picture, Elton re-emerged in purple eight-inch platform boots, a silvery jumpsuit with shirt undone to the waist and an infinite pair of costume glasses.
Two months later got here the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Elton John’s destiny was sealed.
The report was his largest vendor. Number 1 right here and in America, it has since offered over 30 million copies. The cathedral-like title monitor was one other enormous hit single, however the subsequent two hits took on sudden lives of their very own.
In America, shock curiosity in Bennie And The Jets from sure R&B radio stations noticed it go to Number 1.
In Britain, nevertheless, it was merely the B-side to Candle In The Wind, a maudlin ballad ostensibly about Marilyn Monroe that hit the Top 10 in 1974.
Re-recorded in 1997 to mark the dying of Diana, Princess of Wales, who Elton had befriended, long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin modified Goodbye, Norma Jean to Goodbye, England’s rose, together with 4 new stanzas.
Elton sang Candle In The Wind 1997 at Diana’s funeral to a TV viewers of two.5 billion individuals. It immediately went to No.1 in Britain, promoting 658,000 copies on its first day of launch.
In America it offered three million and was No.1 for 14 weeks. It is now the biggest-selling single in historical past.
Back in 1973, nevertheless, on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road US tour, Elton John was 26 and flying…actually.
He appreciated to journey within the notorious Starshi, a non-public Boeing 720B that Led Zeppelin had toured America in that summer time. Elton loved the lounge seats and dinner tables, the stocked bar and the TV lounge.
Fast ahead half a century and Elton has loved many extra highs.
He bought clear and sober within the 90s, married David Furnish and parented two sons, Elijah and Zachary.
On Sunday evening, as he gazes for the final time over the huge Glastonbury crowd, with its pleased banners and pleasant flares, its boho bonhomie and campfire goodwill, likely with a tear in his eye, Sir Elton will be capable of replicate on over 50 years of a rare life.