One of the many things I love about Bernie is that he’s someone who feels no compunction about telling you the last album you made together – an album which sold millions, went Top Ten around the world and spawned a string of hit singles – was a disaster of unimaginable proportions that required an immediate crisis meeting to ensure nothing like it ever happened again. Bernie and I had been on a commercial roll. We’d made two new albums, Made in England in 1995 and The Big Picture in autumn 1997, and they’d both done great: gone platinum everywhere from Australia to Switzerland. But The Big Picture was the problem, as far as Bernie was concerned. He hated everything about it: the songs, his lyrics, the production, the fact that we’d recorded it in England and he had to travel from the US for the sessions. The end result, he opined, as he sat on the terrace of our house in Nice three years later, was a load of clinical, boring, middle-of-the-road shit. In fact, he continued, clearly gathering steam, it was the worst album we’d ever made.
I wasn’t a huge fan of The Big Picture myself, but I thought that was laying it on a bit thick. I certainly didn’t think it was as bad as Leather Jackets, which in fairness wasn’t saying much. Leather Jackets, you may remember, wasn’t an album so much as an exercise in trying to make music while taking so much cocaine you’ve essentially rendered yourself clinically insane. But even that feeble defence cut no mustard. No, Bernie insisted, The Big Picture was even worse than that.
I didn’t agree, but Bernie was clearly pissed off: pissed off enough to fly all the way from his home in America to the south of France to talk about it. And there definitely was something in what he said. I’d been listening to Ryan Adams’ album Heartbreaker a lot. He was a classic country rock singer-songwriter, really – I could imagine him onstage at the Troubadour in the seventies. But there was a toughness and a freshness about it that did make The Big Picture sound weirdly dated and staid. Perhaps I had taken my eye off the ball when it came to my solo albums. Ever since the success of The Lion King, I’d become more and more interested in film and stage music. I’d written the soundtrack for a comedy called The Muse, and an instrumental piece for Women Talking Dirty, a British comedy-drama that David had produced. I wasn’t writing songs, I was writing proper instrumental scores, where I had to sit watching the film and come up with thirty or sixty seconds of music to fit each given scene. I thought it would be boring, but I really loved it. When you get it right, it’s incredibly inspiring, because you literally see the effect music can have: a little snatch of it can totally change how a scene feels, or how it works emotionally.
And Tim Rice and I had done the songs for the DreamWorks animation film The Road to El Dorado – the movie I’d promised Jeffrey Katzenberg I would make – then written another stage musical, Aida. That had been much harder work than The Lion King. There were problems with the set, the directors and designers were changed, and I stormed out of one of the Broadway previews midway through the first act, when I realized they hadn’t changed the arrangements of a couple of the songs as I’d asked them to. If they weren’t going to listen to me asking nicely, perhaps they would listen to me stomping up the aisle and out of the theatre. But the hard work – and indeed the stomping out – paid off. It ran on Broadway for four years, we won a Grammy, and a Tony Award for Best Score. And I already had another idea for a musical bubbling. We had been to see Billy Elliot at the Cannes Film Festival and I’m afraid I made rather a spectacle of myself. I had no idea what the film was about. I just assumed it was going to be a nice little British comedy with Julie Walters in it. I was completely unprepared for how much it was going to affect me emotionally. The scene where his father sees him dancing in the gym, and realizes that his son is really gifted at something, even though he doesn’t understand it; the finale, where his dad goes to see him perform and feels proud and moved; it was just too close to home. It was as if someone had taken the story of me and my dad and written a happy ending for it, instead of what had actually happened in real life. I couldn’t handle it at all. I was so upset that David literally had to help me out of the cinema. If he hadn’t, there’s every chance I would still be sat there now, heaving with sobs.
I pulled myself together enough to attend the reception afterwards. We were talking to the film’s director Stephen Daldry and the writer Lee Hall, when David mentioned that he thought it would make a good stage musical. I thought he had a point. So did Lee, although he wanted to know who was going to write the lyrics. I told him he was: it was his story, he came from Easington, where the film was set. He complained that he’d never written a lyric in his life, but said he’d give it a go. I couldn’t believe the stuff he came back with. Lee was a natural. I never had to change a single word that he’d written, and, better still, they were completely different from any words I’d worked with before. His lyrics were tough and political: ‘You think you’re smart, you Cockney shite, you want to be suspicious – while you were on the picket line, I went and fucked your missus.’ There were songs about wishing Margaret Thatcher dead. There was a song that didn’t make it into the final play called ‘Only Poofs Do Ballet’. It was another completely new challenge. Perhaps the thought of recording a twenty-seventh Elton John album did seem a little routine by comparison.
Or maybe there was a way of changing that routine. In Nice, Bernie had started talking wistfully about the way we made albums in the seventies: how we used to record things on analogue tape, without too many overdubs, and with my piano at the front and centre of the sound. It was funny – I’d been thinking about the same thing. Perhaps it had to do with seeing Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous, which was a kind of love letter to early seventies rock, personified by a fictional band called Stillwater. One scene uses ‘Tiny Dancer’: the band start singing along to it on their tour bus. In fact, that scene turned ‘Tiny Dancer’ into one of my biggest songs overnight. People forget that when it came out as a single in 1971, it flopped. It didn’t make the Top Forty in America, and the record label in Britain wouldn’t release it at all. When it turned up on the soundtrack of Almost Famous, I think a lot of people had no idea what it was, or who it was by. I think the film subconsciously put some ideas into my head, about the kind of artist I’d been back then, about how my music was made and how it was perceived, before I became absolutely huge.
It wasn’t that I wanted to turn the clock back. I didn’t have any interest in doing something retro. I think nostalgia can be a real trap for an artist. When you reminisce about the good old days, you naturally see it all through rose-tinted spectacles. In my case in particular, I think that’s forgivable, because I probably was literally wearing rose-tinted spectacles at the time, with flashing lights and ostrich feathers attached to them. But if you end up convincing yourself that everything in the past was better than it is now, you might as well give up writing music and retire.
What I did like was the idea of recapturing that spirit, that directness, the same thing that I heard in Ryan Adams’ music: stripping things down, just focusing on making music rather than worrying whether it was going to be a hit; going backwards to go forwards.
So that was how we made the next album, Songs from the West Coast. It came out in October 2001 and got the best reviews I’d had in years. Bernie wrote powerful, simple, direct lyrics: ‘I Want Love’, ‘Look Ma’, ‘No Hands’, ‘American Triangle’, which was a very harrowing, angry song about the homophobic murder of Matthew Shephard in Wyoming in 1998. We used a studio in LA, where we hadn’t recorded for years, and a new producer, Pat Leonard, who was best known for working with Madonna, but was absolutely steeped in seventies rock. It was hilarious: he was the guy who co-wrote ‘Like A Prayer’ and ‘La Isla Bonita’, but he was completely obsessed with Jethro Tull. He’d probably have been happier if Madonna had played a flute while standing on one leg.
It ended up being a very Californian-sounding record. It’s just different writing there, rather than making a record in London when it’s pissing with rain every day. It’s as if the warmth gets into your bones and relaxes you, and the sunlight somehow glows in the music you make. I loved the results, and I’ve used the same approach on a lot of albums I’ve made since then: thinking about what I’d done in the past, taking an idea and developing it differently. The follow-up, Peachtree Road, was the same: digging into the country and soul influences on Tumbleweed Connection and songs like ‘Take Me To The Pilot’. The Captain and the Kid was a sequel to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, with Bernie writing about what had happened to us after we went to America in 1970: everything from that stupid double-decker bus they picked us up from the airport in, to the way our partnership temporarily broke up. The Diving Board was me playing with just a bassist and drummer, the same as the original Elton John Band, but doing things I’d never done before, improvising instrumental passages between the songs. On Wonderful Crazy Night, I suppose I was thinking a little more of the pop side of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I recorded it in 2015, and the news was just relentless misery: I wanted something light and fun, a sense of escape, lots of bright colours and 12-string guitar.
Those albums weren’t flops, but they weren’t huge commercial successes either. It’s always frustrating at first when that happens to an album you think is brilliant, but you have to take it on the chin. They weren’t commercial albums, they didn’t have big hit singles built in; The Diving Board in particular was incredibly dark and depressing. But they were albums I wanted to make, albums I thought you would be able to play in twenty years’ time and still feel proud of. Of course, I would have loved it if they’d gone to Number One, but that wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I’ve had my moment selling zillions of records, and it was fabulous, but from the second it began, I realized it wouldn’t last forever. If you believe it will, you can end up in terrible trouble. I honestly think that’s one of the things that tipped Michael Jackson over the edge: he was convinced he could make an album bigger than Thriller, and was crushed every time it didn’t happen.
Just before we started working on The Captain and the Kid, I got asked to do a residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. They had built a huge new theatre, the Colosseum. Celine Dion was playing there, and they wanted me to do a show as well. My immediate thought was that I didn’t want to do it. In my head, Las Vegas was still linked to the cabaret circuit I’d escaped in 1967. It was The Rat Pack and Donny and Marie Osmond. It was the Elvis I’d met in 1976 – seven years on the Vegas strip visibly hadn’t done him much good – and performers in tuxedos talking to the audience: ‘You know, one of the wonderful things about showbiz…’ But then I started wondering if it was possible to do something completely different with a Vegas show. The photographer and director David LaChapelle had directed a great video for one of the singles from Songs from the West Coast, ‘This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore’. It featured Justin Timberlake lip-synching to the song, dressed as me backstage in the seventies, complete with a John Reid figure in the background, beating up a reporter and knocking a cop’s hat off. I loved it and contacted him about getting involved with designing a whole show. I told him to do whatever he wanted, let his imagination run riot, be as outrageous as he wanted to be.
If you know anything at all about David’s work, you’ll realize this isn’t a sentence you say to him lightly. He’s brilliant, but at that stage in his career he couldn’t take a holiday snap of someone without first getting them to dress up as Jesus and stand on top of a giant stuffed flamingo surrounded by neon signs and muscular boys in snakeskin jockstraps. This is a man who photographed Naomi Campbell as a topless wrestler stamping on a man’s face in stiletto-heeled boots, while a crowd of masked men with dwarfism looked on. One of his fashion shoots featured an immaculately dressed model standing next to the corpse of a woman who’d been killed by an air-conditioning unit falling from a window, her head splattered into a bloody mess on the pavement. He somehow managed to convince Courtney Love to pose as Mary Magdalene, with what looked like Kurt Cobain’s dead body draped over her knees. For my Vegas show, he designed a set full of neon signs and inflatable bananas and hot dogs and lipsticks: you didn’t have to have a filthy imagination to notice that every last one of them looked remarkably like an erect penis. He directed a succession of videos for each song, arty and wild and unapologetically gay. There was a reconstruction of my suicide bid back in Furlong Road in the sixties – it was quite literally a dramatization in so far as it made my suicide bid look hugely dramatic rather than pathetic in the extreme. There were blue teddy bears ice-skating and feeding homoerotic angels honey. There were films of people sniffing cocaine off a boy’s naked bum. There was a scene which featured the transsexual model Amanda Lepore naked, in an electric chair, with sparks flying out of her vagina. The show was called The Red Piano, an innocuous enough title given what it actually contained.
I thought it was all confirmation that David LaChapelle was a genius. I knew we’d got it right when I spotted a few people walking out in disgust, and when my mother told me she hated it. She came to the first night, expressed her aversion to what was happening onstage by theatrically putting on a pair of dark glasses after about five minutes, then came backstage afterwards with a face like thunder, telling everyone that it was so awful it was going to end my career overnight. Sam Taylor-Wood was there too – David and I knew her through the art world. I loved Sam’s photography: I had bought her version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and got her to direct a video for another single off Songs from the West Coast, ‘I Want Love’. She couldn’t believe my mum’s reaction – ‘I felt like taking my shoe off,’ she said, ‘and hitting her over the head with it’ – but in fairness, she didn’t know my mum that well. The drizzle of criticism that had started in the mid-seventies had continued pretty much unabated ever since: the woman didn’t like anything. I’d got used to tuning it out, or laughing it off, but other people seemed to get a shock when they came into contact with it.
Some people hated The Red Piano because they hadn’t got what they expected, which was the whole point. But what they expected proved they hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of my career. The whole thing had been founded on live performances that were outrageous and over-the-top. The Vegas residency worked because it fitted my character, and the way I’d presented myself in the past. It wasn’t just a load of shocking visuals grafted on for effect, it was another form of going backwards to go forwards, an updated version of the seventies shows where I’d been introduced onstage by famous porn stars and brought Divine out in full drag. Despite the occasional angry letter to the management and Mum’s dire imprecations, they were enormously successful shows, and I think they might have been groundbreaking, too. Maybe they changed the image of Las Vegas a little, made it seem less showbiz, a bit more edgy; it became a place where Lady Gaga or Britney Spears or Bruno Mars could perform without anyone raising an eyebrow.
In Britain, the law around gay partnerships was changing. At the end of 2005 it became legal for same-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships: marriages in all but name, a couple of minor technical differences aside. David and I talked about it and decided we wanted to be first in line. We’d been together for over ten years, and it was an incredibly important piece of legislation for gay couples. As a result of AIDS, I’d seen so many people lose their partner, then discover they had no legal rights whatsoever as a couple. Their late boyfriend’s family would come steaming in, cut them out of the equation entirely – out of greed, or because they never liked the fact that their son or brother was gay – and they would lose everything. Although we had discussed it very soberly and sensibly, I still managed to spring a surprise on David. I proposed to him in the middle of a dinner party we were hosting for the Scissor Sisters at Woodside. I did it properly and got down on one knee. Even though I knew he would say yes, it was still a really lovely moment. We had the rings we’d bought for each other in Paris – the weekend I thought I could remain incognito while wearing the entire Versace spring/summer menswear collection at once – re-blessed.
The new law came in at the start of December, and there was a statutory fifteen-day waiting period. The first day we could legally become civil partners was 21 December. There was a lot to do. The ceremony itself was to be held at the Guildhall in Windsor, the same place Prince Charles got married to Camilla Parker Bowles. That was going to be a private, intimate event: just me and David, Mum and Derf, David’s parents, our dog Arthur, Ingrid and Sandy and our friends Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood.
The original idea was to have a huge reception in the evening at Pinewood Studios, but the planner involved somehow managed to come back with a budget that even I thought was ridiculous, a not unimpressive feat in itself. I can remember looking at it and thinking, ‘I could go mad in the Old Masters department of Sotheby’s for that kind of money.’ We couldn’t find anywhere else to host our reception – it was just before Christmas, everywhere was already booked – so we decided to have the party at Woodside. We erected three interlinked marquees in the grounds: the first was a reception room, the second a dining room and the third housed a huge dance floor. There was going to be live entertainment: James Blunt was going to sing, and so was Joss Stone. There were six hundred guests, and David insisted on doing the seating plans himself. He was really meticulous. One of his pet hates is the kind of party where everyone is thrown together at random and you end up sitting next to a complete stranger. Besides, we needed to exercise a degree of caution, because the guest list was about as eclectic as it was possible to get: there were people invited from absolutely every area of our lives. I was quite proud of the fact that we were having a party where members of the Royal Family had been invited alongside a selection of star performers from the gay porn studio BelAmi, but it seemed perhaps best to ensure they weren’t actually sitting together. So David very carefully arranged everything around what he called tribes: there was a table for the sports stars who were coming, a table for people from the fashion world, a table for the former Beatles and their associates. And then I put my own personal mark on his painstaking efforts by ruining them.
There is a popular theory among psychologists that a person cursed with an addictive personality can get addicted to virtually anything. It was a theory I spent a lot of the early noughties attempting to prove with the aid of a paper shredder we’d bought for the office at Woodside. I’m not sure how my obsession with it began. Partly it was founded on a need for security: we had, after all, had our bank statements plastered all over the front pages of the press because some idiot in John Reid’s office had thrown them out intact. But mostly it was because there’s something incredibly, indefinably satisfying about using a paper shredder: the sound it makes, the sight of the paper slowly vanishing into it, the tendrils of shredded paper emerging from the other end. I loved it. I could sit in a room filled with priceless works of art and find none of them as compelling as the sight of an old tour itinerary being decimated.
But if I don’t know where my obsession began, I can tell you exactly when it ended. It was about two minutes after I saw the state of the room in which David was working on the seating plan – there were sheets of paper all over the place – and decided that here was a great opportunity both to help him out by tidying up a bit and to feed my burgeoning passion for turning old documents into confetti. I can’t remember how many pages of David’s meticulously arranged seating plan I managed to feed through the shredder before he wandered back into the room and started shouting. I’d never heard him shout like that in my life: David was never a man for volcanic explosions of temper, but it appeared that over the course of our twelve years together, he’d been quietly taking notes from a master of the art and waiting for the right moment to put what he’d learned into action. He began wildly depicting scenes of unmanageable social disaster, in which the BelAmi stars ended up discussing their work on Boys Like It Big 2 with his mum or my auntie Win. He was shouting so loudly you could hear him all over the house. You could certainly hear him very clearly upstairs in our bedroom. I know this for a fact because that’s where I decided to hide, carefully locking the door behind me as a precaution. I didn’t really think he was going to smash the paper shredder over my head, but all the same, the noise coming from downstairs suggested it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility.
But everything else in the run-up to the ceremony went remarkably smoothly. Our friend Patrick Cox threw us an incredible joint stag party at a Soho gay club called Too 2 Much. It was hilarious, a full cabaret performance. Paul O’Grady hosted the whole thing and sang a duet with Janet Street-Porter. Sir Ian McKellen came dressed as Widow Twankey. Bryan Adams sang and Sam Taylor-Wood did a version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’. There were video messages from Elizabeth Taylor and Bill Clinton in between performances by the famous New York drag act Kiki and Herb and Eric McCormack, who played Will in Will and Grace, and was an old schoolfriend of David’s back in Ontario. Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters got so overexcited he ended up taking all his clothes off and demonstrating the pole-dancing skills he’d learned working in New York strip clubs before the band became successful. It was quite a night.
On the morning of the ceremony we woke up to a beautiful winter’s day, sunny and crisp. There was a sort of magical Christmas Morning atmosphere in the house, amid all the bustle. We had guests staying with us: David’s family had arrived from Canada; my old schoolfriend Keith Francis had flown all the way from Australia with his wife. Outside, there were people putting finishing touches to the marquees and checking the fairy lights in the trees. The night before, we had watched the TV news about the first civil partnerships to take place in Northern Ireland – there was a shorter registration period there – and how the couples had faced protests outside their ceremonies, evangelical Christians bellowing at them about ‘sodomite propaganda’, people throwing flour bombs and eggs. I was genuinely worried – if that was what was happening to everyday people, what kind of reception would a really famous gay couple get? David assured me everything would be OK: the police were fully aware of the threat and had set up an area for protesters, where they couldn’t ruin the day. But now, the news from Windsor was that there were crowds lining the streets and a party atmosphere. No one wanted to attack us: instead, people had turned up with banners and cakes and presents for us. There were news trucks from CNN and the BBC parked outside, reporters doing pieces to camera.
I turned the TV off and told David not to watch anything either. I just wanted us to stay in the moment, together, without any distractions. I’d been married before, of course, but this was different. I was truly being myself, being allowed to express my love for another man in a way that would have seemed beyond comprehension when I realized I was gay, or when I first came out in Rolling Stone – partly because no one ever talked about gay marriage or civil partnerships in 1976, and partly because, back then, I seemed no more capable of ending up in a long-term relationship than I did of flying to Mars. And yet here we were. It felt intense: not just personal, but historic, too, like we were part of the world changing for the better. I was as happy as I could ever remember being.
And that was the moment my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath.
The first sign that there was something wrong was when she wouldn’t get out of the car. She and Derf had arrived at Woodside as planned, but then point-blank refused to come into the house. Despite various entreaties to join us, they just sat there, stony-faced. David’s family had to troop out to say hello through the car window. What the fuck was the matter with her? I didn’t get a chance to ask. The security arrangements for the ceremony were that everyone was supposed to be travelling together to the Guildhall in a convoy of cars. But Mum announced that she wouldn’t be joining the convoy, and nor would she be coming to the private lunch we were having at Woodside after the civil partnership, and suddenly drove off.
Oh, great. The most important day of my life and one of Mum’s moods appeared to be upon us, the ones I’d lived in terror of when I was young. I’d inherited some of her capacity to sulk myself. The difference was that I snapped out of it quickly: I would realize what I was doing – shit, I’m not just behaving like an idiot, I’m behaving like my mother – and rush around issuing desperate apologies to everyone concerned. Mum never snapped out of it, never seemed contrite, never appeared to think she was in the wrong or behaving badly. The best you could hope for was a terrible argument – in which, as ever, she had to have the last word – followed by an awkward smoothing over, a shaky truce that lasted until she went off again. As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff. I’m exaggerating only slightly. We’re talking about a woman who didn’t speak to her own sister for ten years as a result of an argument over whether Auntie Win had put skimmed milk in her tea or not. A woman whose dedication to sulking was such that, at its height, it literally caused her to pack her entire life up and leave the country. It happened in the eighties; she fell out with me and one of Derf’s sons from his first marriage at the same time and, as a result, emigrated to Menorca. She would rather move to a foreign country than back down or apologize. There’s not an enormous amount of point in trying to reason with someone like that.
I watched her car disappear down the drive and found myself wishing she was in Menorca now. Or on the moon. Anywhere but heading to my civil partnership ceremony, which I had a terrible feeling she was going to try her best to stink up. I hadn’t wanted her there in the first place. I had a nagging fear that she was going to do something like this, just as I had when I got married to Renate. That was one of the reasons I’d insisted on getting married so quickly, in Australia – I hadn’t wanted Mum there. But I had changed my mind a few weeks beforehand, reasoning that not even Mum was crazy enough to pull a stunt like this. It appeared I was wrong.
She didn’t – couldn’t – spoil the day. It was too magical, with the crowds outside the Guildhall cheering, and later, the cars arriving at Woodside and what seemed like everyone I knew and loved climbing out to join the party, like your life flashing before your eyes in the loveliest of circumstances: Graham Taylor and Muff and Zena Winwood, Ringo Starr and George Martin, Tony King and Billie Jean King. But, in fairness to Mum, she absolutely gave it her best shot. When David and I exchanged our vows, she started talking, very loudly, over the top of us: rattling on about how she didn’t like the venue and how she couldn’t imagine getting married in a place like this. When the time came for the witnesses to sign the civil partnership licence, she signed her name, snapped, ‘It’s done, then,’ slammed the pen down and stormed off. It was bizarre; my mood kept switching from complete euphoria to wild panic at what she was going to do next. Worse, I couldn’t do anything about it. I knew from experience that trying to talk to her would just be lighting the blue touchpaper on a huge row that would ruin everything, and, better still, could quite easily take place in front of the world’s media or six hundred guests. I wasn’t keen on the coverage of Britain’s most high-profile civil partnership featuring a section where Elton John and his mother entertained the nation by screaming at each other on the steps of the Windsor Guildhall.
At the party in the evening, she tutted and groaned and rolled her eyes during the speeches. She complained about the seating arrangements: apparently she wasn’t close enough to me and David – ‘you might as well have stuck me in Siberia’ – although it was hard to see how she could have been any closer without actually sitting in our laps. I avoided her as the evening wore on, which was easy – there were so many friends to speak to, who wanted to wish us well. But out of the corner of my eye I could see a steady stream of people going to speak to her, then coming away very quickly, wearing extremely long faces. She was vile to everyone, no matter how innocuous their attempts at conversation. Jay Jopling made the fatal mistake of saying to her, ‘Isn’t this a lovely day?’ which apparently counted as merciless provocation. ‘I’m glad you fucking well think so,’ snapped Mum in response. Tony King went to say hello – he’d known Mum and Derf for years – and, for his trouble, was informed that he was looking old. At one point, Sharon Osbourne sidled up to me as I was looking on.
‘I know she’s your mother,’ she muttered, ‘but I want to kill her.’
I didn’t find out what had provoked all this until much later. She told the press she was upset because she’d been told she wasn’t allowed in any of the photographs because she wasn’t wearing a hat, which was just nonsense. David’s mum had wanted a hat for the ceremony, he’d offered to take her and my mum shopping, but my mum had said she didn’t want one. Fairly obviously this wasn’t a problem at all, given that she was in all the family photographs. It turned out that David’s parents knew what the problem was with her all along, but they didn’t tell us before the ceremony, because they didn’t want to upset us. They had rung her as soon as they arrived in the UK, having always got on well with Mum and Derf. They’d even gone on holidays together. My mother had told them they all had to work together to stop the civil partnership going ahead. She didn’t approve of two men ‘getting married’, as she put it. She thought it was wrong that gay couples should be treated in the same way as straight couples. Everyone she had spoken to was horrified by the very idea. It was going to hurt my career. David’s mum told her she was nuts, that their kids were doing something amazing and she should support them. My mother put the phone down on her.
She repeated the same line to me a couple of years later, in the middle of a blazing row. It didn’t make sense. Mum had always been incredibly hard work, but she had never been homophobic. She was supportive when I told her I was gay and she had been unflappable when the press cornered her after I came out in Rolling Stone, telling them she thought I was brave and she didn’t care if I was gay or straight. Why would she suddenly decide she had a problem with my sexuality thirty years later? Maybe she had all along, and had somehow managed to suppress it until now. As ever, I think the real problem was that she hated anyone being closer to me than she was. She’d been cold towards most of my boyfriends, and cold towards Renate, but this was on a different level. She knew the boyfriends were never going to turn into a long-term relationship: I was too erratic, because of all the coke I was taking. Even though I married Renate, Mum believed deep down it wasn’t going to last, because she knew I was gay. But now I was sober and settled with a man I was deeply in love with. I’d found a life partner, and the civil partnership underlined that. She couldn’t cope with the thought of the umbilical cord finally being cut: that idea had become so all-consuming that she couldn’t see past it, didn’t care about anything else, including the fact that I was finally happy.
Well, that was her tough luck. I was finally happy, and I wasn’t going to change that for anybody, no matter how many moods they took. When she realized that, perhaps she would come round.
I had plenty to be happy about. Not just in my personal life: between the Vegas shows, Billy Elliot and the new albums, I was enjoying making music so much that my enthusiasm became infectious. David started getting interested in the stuff that had inspired me at the start of my career, artists and albums that he was a little too young to have experienced first-hand. He would make up iPod playlists of things I recommended to him. He took them with him to play in our hotel room when we went on holiday to South Africa, with our friends Ingrid and Sandy.
If you want an example of how a deep, lifelong friendship can be forged from the most unpromising start, Ingrid and I were it. I’d first met her when she was writing a profile about me for Interview magazine, which she edited. Or rather, I’d gone out of my way to avoid meeting her when she was writing a profile about me: I was in a foul mood and cancelled our interview. She rang back and told me she was coming anyway. I told her not to bother. She told me she was coming anyway. I told her to fuck off. She put the phone down and materialized at my hotel room door in what seemed like a matter of minutes. A matter of minutes later, I had fallen in love with her. Ingrid had balls. Ingrid had opinions. And Ingrid’s opinions were worth listening to, because Ingrid was clearly as smart as hell. She’d been made the editor of Artforum magazine when she was twenty-seven and seemed to know everything there was to know about – and everyone there was to know in – the worlds of art and fashion. She took no shit from anybody, including, it had now become apparent, me. She was incredibly funny. By the end of the afternoon, she not only had her interview, she had a commitment from me to write a column for her magazine, and I had the same feeling I had when I met Gianni Versace for the first time: if he had seemed like my long-lost brother, Ingrid was my missing sister. We rang each other all the time; I loved talking to her, partly because she was a fabulous gossip, partly because whenever you spoke to her you learned something, but mostly because she always told you the truth, even if the truth wasn’t what you wanted to hear.
Ingrid was originally from South Africa but had left when she was a kid. Her mother was in danger of being arrested for her involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, so the family moved first to Edinburgh then New York. But Ingrid loved South Africa, which is how she and Sandy ended up accompanying us on the holiday. One evening we were getting ready for dinner, with one of David’s early seventies iPod playlists providing the soundtrack. While he was in the shower, ‘Back To The Island’ by Leon Russell came on. It caught me completely off guard. It’s a beautiful song, but it’s incredibly sad: about loss and regret and time passing. I sat on the bed and I started to cry. Leon coming into the dressing room at the Troubadour, the tours I did opening for him, and Eric Clapton, and Poco: it all suddenly seemed a very long time ago. I’d played this song over and over when I lived on Tower Grove Drive. I could still see it in my mind’s eye. The dark wood of the interior; the suede on the master bedroom’s walls; the way the sunlight fell on the swimming pool in the morning. A crowd of people stumbling through the front door after the Whiskey or the Rainbow or Le Restaurant finally threw us out; the clouds of heady Californian grass and the glasses filled with bourbon, and the blue eyes of a guy I lured up to the games room, who said he was straight but whose smile suggested he was persuadable. Dusty Springfield arriving back after a night touring the city’s gay clubs and falling out of the car onto the drive. The afternoon Tony King and I tried mescaline and ended up with the screaming horrors, after someone in our party raided the kitchen and decided, in their altered state, that they’d invent a new kind of Bloody Mary, with a lump of raw liver on the side of the glass. Just the sight of it set us off.
But my memories of LA in the seventies were filled with ghosts. All the old Hollywood legends I’d gone out of my way to meet there had died of old age. So had Ray Charles. I’d been the last person to record a song with him, for an album of duets, thirty-four years after he’d invited me to appear on American television for the first time. We sang ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’, sitting down – he was too weak to stand. I asked the engineers for a copy of the tape, not so much for the music, but just to have a record of us chatting between takes. I suppose I wanted proof that it had really happened, that a kid who’d dreamed of being Ray Charles actually ended up talking to him like a friend. But there were other ghosts, too, people who didn’t die of old age: people who AIDS took young, people who’d drunk or drugged themselves to death. People who’d died in accidents, people who’d been killed, people who’d died of the things that kill you in your fifties and sixties if you’re unlucky. Dee Murray, my old bass player. Doug Weston, who ran the Troubadour. Bill Graham. Gus Dudgeon. John Lennon, George Harrison and Harry Nilsson. Keith Moon and Dusty Springfield. Endless boys I’d fallen in love with, or thought I’d fallen in love with, on the dance floor at the After Dark.
When he came back from the bathroom and saw me in tears, David’s face fell.
‘Oh God,’ he sighed, ‘what’s the matter?’
By now bitterly experienced in dealing with my moods, his immediate thought was that I didn’t like some minor aspect of the holiday and was going to start yelling about how we had to leave at once. I said it was nothing like that: I was just thinking about the past. On the iPod, Leon was still singing: ‘Well all the fun has died, it’s raining in my heart, I know down in my soul I’m really going to miss you’. God, that man could sing. What had happened to him? I hadn’t heard anyone mention his name in years. I went to the phone and called my friend Johnny Barbis in LA and asked him if he could track Leon down. He came back with a Nashville number. I called it, and a voice answered. It sounded more gravelly than I remembered, but it was definitely him – that same Oklahoma drawl. I asked how he was. He said he was in bed, watching Days of Our Lives on TV: ‘I’m all right. Just about making ends meet.’ That was one way of putting it. Leon had made some bad business decisions, he had a lot of ex-wives, and times had changed. Now he was touring anywhere that would have him. One of the finest musicians and songwriters in the world, and he was playing sports bars and pubs, beer festivals and motorbike conventions, towns I’d never heard of in Missouri and Connecticut. I told him I was in the middle of nowhere in Africa, and I was listening to his music and thinking about the past. I thanked him for everything he’d done for me and told him how important his music was in my life. He sounded genuinely touched.
‘Well, that’s real nice of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’
After we’d finished talking, I put the phone down and looked at it. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t explain it, but I just knew that wasn’t why I had called him. I picked the phone up and dialled his number again. He laughed when he picked up.
‘My God, forty-five years I don’t hear from you and now twice in ten minutes?’
I asked him if he wanted to make an album, both of us, together. There was a long silence.
‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘Do you think I can do it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m really old.’
I told him I was pretty old, too, and if I could, he could, if he’d like to.
He laughed again. ‘The hell I would – yeah.’
It wasn’t an act of charity. It was more pure indulgence for me: if you’d told me in 1970 that I’d one day make a record with Leon Russell I would have laughed at you. And it wasn’t always easy. He had mentioned having some health issues on the phone, but I didn’t realize how sick Leon was until he arrived at the studio in LA. He looked like the ailing patriarch in a Tennessee Williams play: a long white beard, dark glasses and a cane. He struggled to walk. He would sit in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the studio for a couple of hours a day and sing and play. That was all he could manage, but what he did in those two hours was incredible. There were moments when I wondered if his contributions to the album were going to be released posthumously. One day, his nose started running: it was fluid leaking from his brain. He was rushed into hospital for surgery and treated for heart failure and pneumonia while he was there.
But we finished the record. We called it The Union and it went Top Five in the US. We toured together in the autumn of 2010, playing 15,000-seat arenas, places Leon said he’d never seen the inside of in decades. Some nights he had to come onstage in a wheelchair, but it didn’t make any difference to how he sounded. He killed it every time.
And Leon finally got his due as a result of that album. He got a new record deal and was made a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I was so pleased for him that I momentarily forgot my vow never to darken its doors again, and offered to give his induction speech. He made money and bought himself a new bus and toured around the world in bigger and better venues than he’d played for years. He was touring until the day he died in 2016. If you didn’t see him, I’m sorry: you missed out. Leon Russell was the greatest.