When Sir Elton Hercules John CBE swans onto the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival on Sunday night, it will mark the end of one of the greatest, most colourful, and certainly most successful eras in British pop.
Over five years since setting out on his 350-date Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour, the 76-year-old singer of such classic hits as Your Song, Rocket Man, I’m Still Standing and Candle In The Wind, will perform his final British show in front of 100,000-plus fans and a TV audience 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 will be surprise guests too.
Rumours are it could be Dua Lipa, who Elton duetted with in 2021 on their Number 1 hit Cold Heart.
Or perhaps Kiki Dee, who he sang with back in 1976 on the chart-topping classic Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.
Other names bandied around include Ed Sheeran, whom Elton also had a Number 1 hit with, and Billy Joel, an old friend whom the star has toured with.
Elton feels the timing for his final UK show “couldn’t be more perfect”.
Farewell Yellow Brick Road, which concludes in Sweden in July, was originally scheduled to end in 2021.
But delays from lockdowns and emergency hip surgery conspired to give him the chance to go out in style at the country’s most cherished music festival. “I’ve never even been to Glastonbury,” he confessed recently. “I admit I’m a little bit intimidated.” By another twist of fate, it will be exactly 50 years ago this week that Elton’s raucous 1973 hit, Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting, exploded into the UK Top 10.
A landmark moment, it represented the transformation of earnest singer-songwriter Reginald Kenneth Dwight into Elton John.
Ditching the denim-and-dandruff image, Elton re-emerged in red eight-inch platform boots, a silvery jumpsuit with shirt undone to the waist and an enormous pair of costume glasses.
Two months later came the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Elton John’s fate was sealed.
The record was his biggest seller. Number 1 here and in America, it has since sold over 30 million copies. The cathedral-like title track was another huge hit single, but the next two hits took on unexpected lives of their own.
In America, surprise interest in Bennie And The Jets from certain R&B radio stations saw it go to Number 1.
In Britain, however, 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 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who Elton had befriended, long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin changed Goodbye, Norma Jean to Goodbye, England’s rose, along with four new stanzas.
Elton sang Candle In The Wind 1997 at Diana’s funeral to a TV audience of 2.5 billion people. It instantly went to No.1 in Britain, selling 658,000 copies on its first day of release.
In America it sold three million and was No.1 for 14 weeks. It is now the biggest-selling single in history.
Back in 1973, however, on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road US tour, Elton John was 26 and flying…literally.
He liked to travel in the infamous Starshi, a private Boeing 720B that Led Zeppelin had toured America in that summer. Elton enjoyed the lounge seats and dinner tables, the stocked bar and the TV lounge.
Fast forward half a century and Elton has enjoyed many more highs.
He got clean and sober in the 90s, married David Furnish and parented two sons, Elijah and Zachary.
On Sunday night, as he gazes for the last time over the vast Glastonbury crowd, with its happy banners and friendly flares, its boho bonhomie and campfire goodwill, doubtless with a tear in his eye, Sir Elton will be able to reflect on over 50 years of an extraordinary life.
