Elton John, the retired showman whose failing eyes reversed how he writes songs

Elton John

Photo: Raph_PH / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 25, 1947 Pinner, Middlesex, England
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, pianist and composer
Known for	Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The Road to El Dorado, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
Awards	2 Academy Award · Tony Award · Emmy · Grammy · BRIT Award · Kennedy Center Honors · Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

For almost his entire career, Elton John has started from somebody else’s page. Bernie Taupin wrote the words first, finished, and the pianist set them to music fast, often in under half an hour, throwing out any lyric that refused to yield a tune quickly. Now it has flipped. An eye infection has left him blind in his right eye with only limited vision in the left, and, as Taupin explained this summer, “he can’t read lyrics if they’re on the piano”. For his next album he wrote the instrumental tracks first and handed them to his lyricist to finish.

The other contradiction sits on the concert calendar. He walked away from the road with a farewell tour that ran for five years and ended in Stockholm, saying his priorities were now his husband and sons. Since then he has headlined Rock in Rio and filled Mexico City’s biggest stadium on consecutive nights under the banner of a “final farewell”. Retirement, for him, has meant fewer shows chosen one at a time, not none.

The habit of making music from other people’s material goes back to Pinner, north-west of London, where Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born on 25 March 1947. At 11 he won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, though he was never a diligent classical student. At 15 he was playing Jim Reeves and Ray Charles songs four nights a week at the Northwood Hills Hotel pub. His band Bluesology later backed the singer Long John Baldry, and the stage name he adopted came from two of those bandmates: the saxophonist Elton Dean and Baldry himself.

The partnership began with an envelope. In 1967 he answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express placed by Ray Williams of Liberty Records, who handed him a sealed packet of lyrics written by a teenager from Lincolnshire who had answered the same advert. After two years writing easy-listening songs for other singers at Dick James’s DJM label, the pair broke through with “Your Song”, his first hit as a performer. In August 1970, a debut American show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles turned a session pianist into a headliner.

Honky Château (1972), the album that carried “Rocket Man”, was his first American number one, the start of seven consecutive chart-topping albums in the US. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) became his double-album statement, and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975), about the two writers’ lean early years in London, was the first album ever to enter the Billboard 200 at number one.

The private life was coming apart behind it. He told Rolling Stone in 1976 that he was bisexual; in 1984 he married Renate Blauel, a German recording engineer, in Sydney, and they divorced four years later. “I was living a lie,” he said afterwards. From the late 1970s he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and he has been sober since 1990, the year “Sacrifice” finally gave him his first solo number one in Britain. In 1992 he set up the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised more than £300 million. He also chaired Watford, his boyhood football club, through its climb to the top flight.

The 1990s pulled him towards the theatre. With Tim Rice he wrote the songs for Disney‘s The Lion King (1994) and won the Academy Award for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”; the stage version later out-grossed every film and show in box-office history. Aida earned him a Tony in 2000, and Billy Elliot the Musical (2005), written with Lee Hall after he saw the film and decided the boy dancer was “like me”, won four Olivier Awards in London and the Tony for Best Musical on Broadway. In 1997 he rewrote “Candle in the Wind” for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the single remains the best-selling chart single of all time. He was knighted the following year.

The reputation and the records do not line up as neatly as the honours suggest. Since the 1990s his biggest hits have come from stage scores and duets with younger stars, not from his own studio albums. The Lockdown Sessions (2021) made him the first solo artist with UK top-ten singles in six different decades, largely thanks to “Cold Heart”, his reworking with Dua Lipa. Even the farewell was elastic: around 330 shows and close to $940 million in ticket sales, a record until Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour passed it, followed by a steady trickle of one-off dates.

The tour closed at Stockholm’s Tele2 Arena on 8 July 2023, two weeks after he headlined Glastonbury. The 2019 biopic Rocketman had already brought a second Oscar, shared with Taupin, for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again”. In 2024 an Emmy for the special Elton John: Farewell from Dodger Stadium made him an EGOT winner. That July, an infection picked up in the south of France took most of his sight. In April 2025 he released Who Believes in Angels?, a duet album with Brandi Carlile made in 20 days with the producer Andrew Watt; it reached number one in the UK and was nominated for a Grammy. The Devil Wears Prada, with his score, is booking at London’s Dominion Theatre until September 2027.

This year has been busy. In August he turned up on Turnstile’s Never Enough: Versions, on a reworked “Seein’ Stars”. On 7 September he headlined Rock in Rio’s main stage for the first time, playing 24 songs over two and a quarter hours and reviving “Skyline Pigeon”, a song from his first album; he told the crowd he had felt “kind of mean” that Brazil was left off the farewell tour. On 2 and 3 October he played Estadio Banorte in Mexico City, his first concerts in the country in 14 years.

His husband, the Canadian filmmaker David Furnish, has been his partner since 1993 and is now also his manager. They formed one of Britain’s first civil partnerships on 21 December 2005, the day the law came into force, married in 2014, and have two sons, Zachary and Elijah. In July 2026 the couple were among seven claimants, Prince Harry among them, whose privacy case against the publisher of the Daily Mail was dismissed at the High Court.

Taupin says the next Elton John album, made again with Watt and a few other co-writers, is due early next year. It will be the first record built from the piano up, the envelope routine of 1967 run in reverse, and a test of what a melodist who always worked from someone else’s words does when the music must come first.

Selected Recordings

Empty Sky (1969)
Elton John (1970)
Tumbleweed Connection (1970)
Madman Across the Water (1971)
Honky Château (1972)
Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player (1973)
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)
Caribou (1974)
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)
Sleeping With the Past (1989)
The Lockdown Sessions (2021)
Who Believes in Angels? (2025)

Tags: singers, pop, Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Brandi Carlile, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

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