“I can’t tell you how good it feels to have a hit single at 75,” says Elton John, as his famous grin flashes at the stadium crowd gathered for his last ever shows in Sydney. He’s in the midst of his final tour of Australia, in the city that has long been his home away from home, going back to the 1980s.
“Hit single” might be somewhat underselling the globe-conquering ubiquitousness of Cold Heart, a reimagining of several of his classic songs seamlessly combined into a wholly unreasonable banger by Australian producers Pnau, who get a shout-out from the stage. “Things are really good in my life,” he says from where he is seated at the piano, playfully conducting everyone’s dancing in a manner that can only be described as adorable. This is the start of the final encore, and he is wearing a diamante-embroidered kimono over a tracksuit bearing his name. Elton John can, does and always has done exactly what he wants; and if you think that time may have even slightly wearied him, you would be very, very wrong.
For the previous two-plus hours, John and his band of fellow virtuoso journeymen musicians have raucously stomped and wailed through one of rock’s most hit-riddled catalogues, almost without pause. Perhaps so as not to upstage the sartorial magnificence of their leader, the rest are dressed in black suits and skinny ties, like the world’s jauntiest Reservoir Dogs. The core trio of Elton John, Nigel Olsson and Davey Johnstone remain, and play together with the osmosis that more than 40 years of shared musicianship will bestow. Augmented by a small orchestra of percussion and additional keys, the absolute racket they are making is ungodly. Bringing the audience to heel with that opening chord of Bennie and the Jets, straight off the bat there will be no dilly-dallying! If you’re going to start a show with that minor little smash, then stick around: they’ll kill the fatted calf tonight.
Australia has housed a huge Elton John fanbase for decades – the only places he has played more often are the US and UK. In recent years he likes spending his family Christmas here, he tells us – but there’s much more to it than that. He had career-saving throat surgery in Sydney in the 1980s; launched a record there at the Hilton hotel; delighted in the offerings of Harry’s Cafe de Wheels; and in Melbourne, produced a truly bonkers – even for him – documentary about a gig with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
These were his years of unfettered excess (which would eventually land him in rehab), during which he made the video for the cuttingly brutal breakup anthem I’m Still Standing on the French Riviera with Australian director Russell Mulcahy. That production could well have been powered by the pure, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine he writes repeatedly about using in his memoir (someone stole Elton’s car on the shoot – and that was before Duran Duran showed up). Then there was the time, as detailed in Me, that – while supremely wasted – he bought a tram in Melbourne that had to be delivered to his British estate by Chinook helicopter, the details of which he does not precisely remember. If one is to be a rock star, that’s how to do it properly.
Those hellion days long in the past (now sober, happily married and a father of two), Elton John is before us on this stage as rock’s last true survivor. The band tear through a set list of mostly his golden era 70s material, when he was giving some of the loudest prog and glam rock bands of the time a good run for their money with psychedelic wig-outs such as Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding (played to its full, rock-opera 10 minutes), Levon, and the very deep cut, Have Mercy On the Criminal. His downshift in vocal range sees some new arrangements for Tiny Dancer and Rocket Man – during the latter of which his immensely powerful reverberating baritone fills the bowels of the arena and lodges itself firmly in the listener’s chest.
These songs have soundtracked my entire life since childhood: Philadelphia Freedom, Candle in the Wind, Someone Saved My Life Tonight, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me. These are the sounds of my parents’ kitchen, as familiar to me as any nursery rhyme. They feel part of my DNA, staying with me right up until these two nights. What it is, to be a fan.
By the time Your Song comes around as the second-last of the night, the emotions are spilling out of the crowd. Your Song, if you don’t know the story, was, like almost every Elton John song, written in only about 10 minutes. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics were penned when they were two very young men of 23, working their guts out in the hope of becoming successful songwriters. Living together in a tiny London flat, its words of such pure sentiment – but not sentimentality – are transformed by the knowledge that in the intervening 50 years, this song has gone on to become one of the most enduring paeans to love of all time. He glances briefly up from his piano as he sings, “And you can tell everybody, that this is your song,” as the roar becomes deafening. I still have tears on my shirt.
With this we know that for the very last time, this man of incredible, generous, irreplaceable genius will never play this stage for us again. “Be kind to each other,” he says, thanking his fans for staying his course. On his second night in Sydney (yes, I went to both), the floor crowd is being covered in sheets of rain lit by the lights of the stage as if it were a deliberate part of the show. Something like this can only end on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and as the final harmonies between he and his band ring in the air, Elton John walks off the stage and into the next phase of his life, as we walk away into the night, saturated, knowing why the man perhaps least likely to have become an international megastar was always destined to be just that.
So here’s to you, Sir Elton Hercules John, Reggie Dwight, Captain Fantastic, Sharon (to Rod Stewart), the Royal Academy of Music’s most flamboyant graduate, Nasa’s number one Rocket Man – your like will never come around again.
Elton John’s final Australian tour concludes at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane on 21 January, followed by dates in New Zealand and Europe
