“John called us and said he thought that we were the best stuff that he had heard since the Beatles… To hear that from John Lennon was like, ‘What?’ It was a wonderful compliment”: Davey Johnstone on Elton John’s smash-hit Beatles collab with John Lennon

Elton John, bare chested but wearing braces and custom sunglasses, performs with John Lennon at his Madison Square Garden Thanksgiving show in 1974. Lennon plays a Fender Telecaster Deluxe.

How strange it must have been to view ‘70s pop culture through the eyes of a Beatle.

Having done so much to steer rock ’n’ roll’s evolution through the cultural riptides of the ‘60s, it surely would have been bewildering to then gaze upon this new era of creative effervescence at a time when lawsuits and persistent appeals for the Beatles to reform were anchoring them in the past.