🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿　Chapter 1 | Piano at Three, Royal Academy Scholarship at Eleven: The Story of How the Rocket Man Was Born　〜 | "Your Song" Was Born at the Breakfast Table: The Miracle of Elton and Bernie's Collaboration　

The moment "Crocodile Rock" starts playing, something shifts inside.

That bouncing piano, that la-la-la chorus — timeless, undimmed by the decades. When I first heard it, I didn't yet fully appreciate who Elton John was. I just thought: what a joyful song.

Later, learning the life behind the music, I came to understand what a complicated and turbulent existence lay beneath that cheerfulness. Overwhelming musical talent. Global success beyond imagining. And a long, brutal struggle with addiction. That gap — between the joy on the surface and the darkness underneath — is at the heart of what makes Elton John endlessly fascinating.

His autobiography ME, written with music journalist Alexis Petridis, tells all of this in his own words: with humor, self-deprecation, and above all, a pure and undimmed love for music. This chapter follows ME as a guide — tracing Elton John from his birth to the golden age of the 1970s.

🎹 Reggie Dwight — The Quiet Boy from Pinner

March 25, 1947. Pinner, Middlesex, England.

A boy was born named Reginald Kenneth Dwight. The man who would eventually fill the world's largest arenas began here, in a modest and constrained setting.

His father Stanley was a Royal Air Force officer — strict, emotionally remote, and certain that his son should become a bank clerk. Pop music was banned in the Dwight household. Even as the world outside was going mad for rock and roll, the family patriarch refused to allow it through the door.

But his mother Sheila was different. She smuggled in records by Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Little Richard, and played them for young Reggie. Something electric ran through the boy when he heard those records — a feeling, he has said many times, that he never lost. His father banned it; his mother kept it alive. That tension would shape everything that followed.

Elton started playing piano at three, picking out melodies by ear. Formal lessons began at seven. At school he gained a reputation for playing in the wild, flailing style of Jerry Lee Lewis at school functions — the quiet, unassuming boy who became somebody completely different the moment he sat at the keyboard. That was the first sign of the transformation that would define his career.

In 1958, at eleven years old, Reggie won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. This was not a modest achievement. The most prestigious music conservatory in Britain had recognized a working-class boy from the suburbs. The scholarship allowed him to study classical piano on weekends for five years, receiving rigorous formal training — Bach, Chopin, Beethoven — while continuing regular school.

During this same period, his parents' marriage deteriorated and eventually ended in divorce. His father remarried and started a new family. Reggie spent time with grandparents, moving between households in the instability that often marks a child whose parents have separated.

The loneliness of those years would eventually find its way out through music.

🎓 Between the Royal Academy and Jerry Lee Lewis

Throughout his Academy years, two things were fighting inside Reggie.

On one side: the discipline and respect for classical music instilled by his teachers and his own serious study. On the other: the irresistible energy of rock and roll, which he had absorbed through his mother's contraband records and which lived in his body in a way that no formal instruction could dislodge.

He never chose classical performance as a career path. At seventeen, with A-level examinations approaching, he left school to pursue music professionally. His father remained opposed. Reggie did not waver.

He has said that his outrageous stage costumes and performances were his way of releasing what had been suppressed during a constrained childhood. Those extraordinary glasses, the feathered suits, the platform shoes — they were not simply entertainment. They were a declaration from the boy who had been told to sit quietly and study for the bank: I am here, and I did not become what you wanted.

The classical training, meanwhile, became the permanent foundation of his musicianship. Everything that followed was built on it.

🎸 Bluesology — Learning on the Job

After leaving school, Reggie joined a band called Bluesology.

From 1962 to 1967, they worked the clubs and hotel lounges — rhythm and blues, jazz, soul, whatever the room required. This was the real education: not a classroom but a stage, night after night, playing to audiences who would tell you immediately, by their response, whether what you were doing was working.

By 1966, Bluesology was serving as the backing band for Long John Baldry — a well-known British R&B singer who would later be credited with discovering Rod Stewart. The work was steady but limiting. Baldry's musical direction was moving toward commercial pop, and Reggie knew it wasn't where he needed to be.

In 1967, he left Bluesology and tried to build a solo career. The obstacle was clear: he could write music, but not words. Melody came easily. Poetry did not.

He answered an advertisement. Liberty Records was looking for songwriters. He went for an interview and was handed a set of lyrics to work with — written by another applicant, a seventeen-year-old from Lincolnshire named Bernie Taupin.

✍️ The Morning Bernie Taupin Wrote "Your Song"

Bernie Taupin had grown up on a farm. He had come to London recently, full of ideas for lyrics and poems, with no ability to set them to music. Elton had the opposite problem. The two were an obvious match — and a remarkable one.

They began working almost by correspondence: Bernie posted lyrics, Elton set them to music. Eventually Bernie moved into the house of Elton's mother in Northwood Hills, and they began working in earnest together as staff songwriters for Dick James Music.

One morning in 1969, Bernie was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast. An idea struck him. He grabbed the nearest piece of paper — a grubby lined notebook sheet, by his own account — and rapidly wrote down the lyrics to what would become one of the most recognized songs in the history of popular music.

He handed the paper to Elton and went upstairs to take a shower.

Elton looked at the lyrics and felt it immediately. He went to the piano. Twenty minutes later, the song was done. "I remember Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, 'Oh my God, this is such a great lyric, I can't mess this one up,'" Elton told Rolling Stone. "It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in and we both knew."

The song was "Your Song."

"It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside" — the opening line, written by a seventeen-year-old who had little experience of romantic love and was imagining what it might be like. "It's got to be one of the most naïve and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music," Bernie said years later, "but I think the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time."

Who inspired it has never been revealed. Elton has said he always assumed it was about one of Bernie's girlfriends. Bernie's response, every time he's asked, is defensive: "No it wasn't!" And he leaves it there.

The original lyric sheet, complete with tea stains from the breakfast table, still exists.

"Your Song" was released in 1970 and became Elton's first American and British Top Ten single. It was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and named one of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Elton has performed it at the close of his concerts, almost without exception, throughout his entire career. "It's a perfect song," he has said. "It gets better every time I sing it."

🌠 "Your Song" — Why It Has Never Grown Old

"Your Song" was released on the album Elton John in January 1970 and as a single later that year.

For a song written in twenty minutes by a seventeen-year-old who had little experience of love, it has shown remarkable durability. It reached the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone named it one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. And Elton John has performed it, almost without exception, at the end of every concert he has given throughout his entire career — across more than fifty years of live performance.

Why has it lasted when so many songs from the same era have faded?

Bernie himself offered an answer: "It's naïve and childish. But that's precisely why it works. It was real. I was seventeen, and everything I felt about love was completely new, completely unguarded. There's no irony in it. No sophistication. Just the feeling itself."

That absence of irony — of the kind of knowing distance that creeps into writing as a person gets older and more guarded — is what makes "Your Song" feel, every time it plays, like it was written this morning. For the person listening to it for the first time, it is new. For the person who has heard it a hundred times, it is still new, because the feeling it describes is always new.

Elton has said: "It's a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it."

The original lyric sheet, with what Bernie describes as tea stains from the kitchen table that morning, still exists somewhere. The most enduring song of Elton John's career was written on a grubby piece of notebook paper while the kettle was still warm.

🚀 The Troubadour, August 1970 — The Night Everything Changed

"Your Song" was the beginning. But the moment that truly launched Elton John into the international stratosphere was a live performance.

August 25, 1970. The Troubadour club in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Elton's debut American show.

He sat down at the piano, and then he stood up. He kicked back the piano stool. He played standing up, leaning over the keyboard, playing harder and louder than the room expected. He channeled every Jerry Lee Lewis impulse that the Royal Academy years had not quite suppressed.

The audience included music critics, industry executives, and fellow musicians. By the following morning, every major music publication had a review. The reviews were unanimous: here was something extraordinary. The name Elton John spread from that club to every corner of the American music world within days.

"Your Song" climbed to number eight in the US and number seven in the UK. Elton John was described as "the most important new artist since the Beatles." The rocket had launched.

🎵 "Tiny Dancer," "Rocket Man" — Poetry and Music Dissolve Into Each Other

The 1971 album Madman Across the Water introduced "Tiny Dancer" — one of the most personal and lasting songs in the Elton-Bernie catalog.

Bernie wrote the lyric during a journey through California — the impression of women dancing in the California sunshine, the particular quality of early-1970s Los Angeles. Elton set it to a long, winding, genuinely beautiful melody. It did not become a hit immediately. Decades later, its use in Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous (2000) introduced it to a new generation. Now it is considered one of their finest works.

Then came "Rocket Man" in 1972.

Bernie's lyric imagined an astronaut journeying away from Earth, thinking of his family, feeling the particular loneliness of a person whose profession takes them away from everything they love. "And I think it's gonna be a long, long time" — the line carries something more than space travel. It carries the experience of anyone who has sacrificed personal connection for a professional calling.

Elton's melody gave the lyric its full emotional weight: not heroic, not triumphant, but quietly, deeply lonely. "Rocket Man" reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in the UK. It has since become one of Elton John's most recognized recordings.

🎸 "Crocodile Rock" — The First Elton Song I Ever Loved

Released in October 1972, "Crocodile Rock" gave Elton and Bernie their first US and Canadian number one.

The song is an affectionate tribute to the rock and roll of the 1950s and early 1960s — the music Elton had absorbed through his mother's contraband records, the music his father had tried to keep out of the house. Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Eddie Cochran — all of it is present in that opening piano figure.

The inspiration, according to accounts from the time, came partly from an encounter with the Australian band Daddy Cool and their hit "Eagle Rock" during a 1972 Australian tour.

Bernie Taupin later said of the song: "It's a strange dichotomy — I don't mind having created it, but it's not something I would listen to." Elton called it "disposable pop."

And yet here it is, more than fifty years later, still played at parties, still heard in shopping centers, still capable of making people who have heard it a thousand times tap their feet before they've consciously recognized what song it is.

"Crocodile Rock" was the first Elton John song I loved. That bouncing piano, that la-la-la — once heard, never forgotten. Songs, it turns out, don't always know what they are when they're being written. The listener knows.

🌟 "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" — The Peak, and the First Shadow

Released in October 1973, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is widely considered Elton's masterpiece — a double album recorded in a matter of weeks, in France, containing some of the finest work in the entire Elton John catalog.

The album went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic immediately upon release, remaining there for eight weeks. It has sold more than 31 million copies worldwide. It contains "Bennie and the Jets" — a US number one that earned Elton an invitation to perform on Soul Train, making him the first white British act to appear on the show — along with "Candle in the Wind," "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," "Funeral for a Friend," and the title track.

Elton later said: "This is before I started drugs and drinking. This was pure Elton."

That sentence — "before I started drugs and drinking" — marks the line that Chapter 1 approaches but does not yet cross. The shadow was beginning to arrive. The loneliness that came with being famous beyond anything he had prepared for, and the substances he reached for to manage it, were already present at the edges.

But what the first half of the 1970s produced — in its purity, in its creative abundance, in the sheer joy of a man finally able to do the only thing he had ever wanted to do — stands as one of the most remarkable runs in the history of popular music.

🕶️ The Costumes as Expression — And the First Shadow

Through the 1970s, Elton John's stage shows became the most spectacular in the world.

Feathered costumes, platform shoes, glasses in every conceivable size and shape — none of this was mere spectacle. It was the release of everything compressed inside the quiet boy from Pinner, the boy whose father had wanted him in a bank, the boy who had listened to Elvis records smuggled in by his mother.

"On stage I become someone else," Elton has said. "I get to escape."

A classically trained musician who was simultaneously the most extravagant rock star on earth. That contradiction is the center of who Elton John is.

And then, toward the end of the 1970s, the shadow began to arrive. Beneath the success, a loneliness was deepening. The dependencies that would eventually nearly destroy him were beginning to take hold.

That story belongs to Chapter 2.

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The quiet boy from Pinner won a Royal Academy scholarship at eleven, left school at seventeen, found Bernie Taupin, wrote "Your Song" in twenty minutes, tore apart the Troubadour with his bare hands and a piano stool, and spent five years producing some of the most beloved recordings of the twentieth century.

Every la-la-la in "Crocodile Rock" carries all of that journey.

Bouncing, dancing, laughing — played by a man with a more complicated soul than the song let on. 🎹

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