🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿　Chapter 2 | Hell and Rebirth: Addiction, Recovery, and the Road to "Sir Elton"　〜 | Sixteen Years With Cocaine — And the Morning The Lion King Was Born

At the end of Chapter 1, Elton John was at the top of the world.

"Your Song," "Rocket Man," "Crocodile Rock," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" — hit after hit, stadium after stadium filled. But the top of the world is also where the fall begins.

Chapter 2 is the story of that fall, and of a miraculous return.

🌑 Loneliness and Shadow — The Other Side of Success

Elton John, one of the most famous rock stars on earth, stepped off the stage each night into something close to complete isolation.

Onstage, in those outrageous costumes at the grand piano, he was more alive than anyone in the room. Offstage, he went home to vast, empty houses. "I was incredibly confident onstage because that's where I loved to be," he told NPR. "But offstage there was no balance."

The problem was that success had made the loneliness worse. Surrounded by yes-men who agreed with everything he said and granted everything he demanded, Elton lost contact with reality. He once called his manager from a London hotel to complain about the wind outside. "Robert, it's far too windy here. Can you do something about it?" By his own account, he was living entirely beyond the reach of ordinary consequence.

In 1974, during the recording of the album Caribou, he walked into a backroom at the studio and encountered cocaine for the first time. It was the beginning of sixteen years of addiction.

💊 Sixteen Years With Cocaine — "The Worst, Best Friend"

The most striking passage in Elton John's autobiography ME, regarding his addiction, is characteristically blunt: "If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can't recommend cocaine highly enough."

At first, cocaine gave Elton something he had never had offstage: ease with other people. Naturally shy, constitutionally unable to relax in social situations without the piano as a buffer, he found that the drug dissolved what he thought was missing. He could talk. He could connect. He felt, for the first time, that he belonged in the room.

Then it reversed. By the late 1980s, cocaine had shut him down completely. He spent weeks in a London apartment unable to leave. "I would have an epileptic seizure and turn blue, and people would find me on the floor and put me to bed, and then 40 minutes later I'd be snorting another line," he said. Cocaine led to alcohol. Alcohol led to bulimia — bingeing and purging. For sixteen years, he lived in what he called "a drug-fueled haze."

The addiction damaged his music too. "Some artists can write great songs on drugs," he told NPR. "Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones. But I didn't write my best songs on drugs. Because you're completely delusional."

He has said that he still dreams about cocaine at least twice a week — not out of desire, but the vivid, upsetting memory of the drug's presence, arriving in sleep as a kind of warning.

🎭 A Suicide Attempt — The Night of the Pool

At the darkest point of his addiction, Elton attempted to take his own life.

He swallowed sixty Valium pills and jumped into his swimming pool in front of his mother and grandmother, saying he was going to die. The attempt failed.

Twenty-four hours later, he was back onstage. His management had sent him out to perform. That fact — that no one in his immediate circle had the standing, or the will, to stop him — says everything about the environment that had formed around him during those years.

In 1976, Elton came out publicly as bisexual in a Rolling Stone interview. The disclosure damaged his commercial standing in America. Album sales fell. He faced criticism from conservative quarters. Wounded, he retreated further into cocaine.

The 1980s were commercially diminished relative to his 1970s peak. Creatively, he was still capable of good work — but the sustained run of masterpieces from the early decade was gone.

💔 Throat Surgery and a Failed Marriage — Wandering in the Dark

In 1987, Elton underwent throat surgery.

Years of substance abuse had taken a serious toll on his voice. After the operation, his voice changed permanently. The high-pitched, soaring quality that had defined recordings like "Your Song" and "Rocket Man" did not fully return. Elton has attributed the change, at least in part, to sustained physical damage from his addiction.

Around the same time, the question of his marriage came to a painful reckoning. In 1984, he had married Renate Blauel, a German recording engineer. The marriage lasted four years and ended in divorce in 1988. Elton has acknowledged, in ME and in various interviews, that he knew he was gay when he entered the marriage. His account of this period is candid: "I was not honest with Renate. That was the greatest injustice I could have done to her."

In 1988, Sotheby's in London held an auction of Elton's personal property — thousands of items including costumes, art, furniture, and memorabilia. The sale raised more than forty million dollars. It was read by many observers as evidence of financial disorder as much as a conscious attempt to clear the past.

But the real turning point had not yet arrived.

🌅 July 29, 1990 — The Day of Recovery

The person who brought it was a boy from Indiana.

Ryan White had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion at age thirteen. His case, in which he was excluded from his school and ostracized by his community, became a defining public event in the American AIDS crisis — proof that the disease was not limited to the gay community, and that the stigma surrounding it was destroying lives.

Elton had supported the White family, helping them move to a new home after neighbors forced them out. On April 8, 1990, Ryan White died. He was eighteen years old.

"His death made me realize how out of whack my life was," Elton told NPR. "I was just in and out of a drug-fueled haze in the '80s. I did nothing to help people with AIDS. I was a gay man who sat on the sidelines."

On July 29, 1990, Elton checked into a hospital in Chicago.

In rehabilitation, his cravings were, in his own word, "inconceivable." He was withdrawing simultaneously from cocaine, alcohol, food, and sex. He wrote a letter to cocaine: "To my worst, best friend."

July 29, 1990 is Elton John's other birthday. For more than thirty-five years since that date, he has remained clean. He still dreams about cocaine regularly — not with desire, but with the vivid, upsetting taste of it in the back of his throat, waking him up. "At least it's a wake-up call," he told NPR in 2012.

🦁 The Lion King — The Creative Explosion After Recovery

After 1990, Elton's music found a new quality.

Freed from the fog of addiction, he described being able to connect more directly with his own emotions — and the music showed it.

The most significant creative achievement of his post-recovery career came in 1994, when Disney invited him to compose the songs for The Lion King. Working with lyricist Tim Rice in a new partnership, Elton wrote "Circle of Life," "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," and "Hakuna Matata."

"Can You Feel the Love Tonight" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. "Circle of Life" won a Grammy. The Lion King soundtrack became one of the best-selling film soundtracks of all time.

More remarkable still was what happened when the story moved to the stage. The Broadway production of The Lion King opened in 1997. By 2014, it had grossed more than six billion dollars — surpassing The Phantom of the Opera to become the highest-grossing entertainment title in history, across both stage and film. The show that Elton's songs powered had become one of the most financially successful pieces of popular entertainment ever created.

Recovery had not diminished him. In some ways, it had freed him.

❤️ David Furnish — A Love That Has Lasted

In 1993, at a dinner party at his home in Windsor, Elton met a man who would change his life.

David Furnish, a Canadian filmmaker from Toronto, had been brought to the gathering by a mutual friend. Elton later described him as "well-dressed" and "shy." They felt an immediate connection, and the following evening had dinner together. That dinner was the beginning of a relationship that has lasted more than thirty years.

On December 21, 2005, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership at Windsor Guildhall — one of the first days it was legally possible to do so in England. In 2014, when same-sex marriage became legal in England and Wales, they married.

Together they have two sons. Zachary was born in 2010; Elijah in 2013. Both were born via surrogacy. Their arrival transformed Elton's sense of purpose in ways he had not anticipated.

"I want them to be proud of their father," he said when announcing the Farewell tour in 2018. "I want to be there for them — for school plays, for sports days, for all of it." The man who had once demanded that the wind outside his hotel window be stopped had found, in David and their sons, something more grounding than any stadium.

In 2015, Elton announced on Instagram the twenty-fifth anniversary of his sobriety — a photo of a cake with the number 25 and the words "One day at a time." He marked it as one of the best days of his life.

🎗️ The AIDS Foundation — A Mission Beyond Music

In 1992, Elton established the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

What Ryan White's death had awakened in him became a lifelong commitment. "I was a gay man and I sat on the sidelines during the AIDS crisis," he said. "I needed to make up for that."　

In the decades since, the foundation has raised more than six hundred million dollars for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and advocacy. It operates in more than fifty-five countries and is recognized as one of the most effective non-governmental HIV organizations in the world.

The annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Party — held every Oscar night in Los Angeles — has become one of the most significant charity fundraising events in Hollywood. Elton has personally donated more than £153 million to the foundation from the proceeds of this event alone.

His activism has extended to individuals as well as institutions. He became Eminem's AA sponsor. He helped get Rufus Wainwright into rehabilitation. He was asked by Dionne Warwick to intervene with Whitney Houston — an attempt that did not succeed.

"Music gave me so much," Elton has said. "It was time to give something back."

👑 Sir Elton — The Knighthood

In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Elton John a knighthood.

At the investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace, he became Sir Elton John, CBE — recognized for his contributions to music and to charity. For the boy from Pinner whose father had banned pop music from the house, who had left school at seventeen, who had spent sixteen years in the grip of addiction, the moment at which a queen touched a sword to his shoulder was as improbable as anything in his career.

In 2004 came the Kennedy Center Honor. In 2013, the inaugural BRITs Icon Award. And in 2024, a Grammy nomination for his collaboration with Brandi Carlile, combined with the Emmy Award for the Dodger Stadium farewell broadcast, completed his EGOT — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony — one of the rarest distinctions in the entire history of entertainment.

More than fifty albums. More than three hundred million records sold worldwide. Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, Tony Awards, and now EGOT. The numbers no longer contain the achievement.

🚀 "Farewell Yellow Brick Road" — The Final Journey, and Beyond

In January 2018, at Gotham Hall in New York City, Elton announced the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour.

He was clear about his reasons. "I have Zachary and Elijah. Zachary is eight, Elijah is five. I want to watch them grow up. I want to be at home. I want to be a hands-on dad."

The tour ran from 2018 to 2023 — five years, more than three hundred shows across every inhabited continent, the highest-grossing concert tour in history at the time it concluded. The final performance took place in Stockholm on July 8, 2023.

On December 31, 2023, a concert at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles was broadcast live on Disney+. That broadcast won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live) in 2024 — completing his EGOT.

But Elton does not use the word "retired."

"I'm retiring from touring," he has said. "I'm not retiring from music." In 2025, a collaborative album with Brandi Carlile debuted at number one in the UK and in the Top Ten in the US. He continues to record, to work with his foundation, and to be present for his family.

He has faced serious health challenges in recent years, including a significant loss of vision in his right eye in 2023. He spoke about this publicly with characteristic directness: "I can just about see out of it, but it's been very difficult. I'm always feeling lucky, because it could have been worse."

The boy born in Pinner in 1947 spent sixteen years with cocaine, jumped into a swimming pool, nearly lost his voice, and in 1990 wrote a farewell letter to his worst, best friend.

After that, he wrote The Lion King. He found David. He had two sons. He achieved EGOT. He poured six hundred million dollars into the fight against AIDS.

The la-la-la of "Crocodile Rock" still plays somewhere in the world today.

Hearing it, now knowing the full story of the man at the piano — the song carries a different kind of light. 🎹