I’ve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but I’ve never got bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had – when I was playing the cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was just exhausted – I obviously hadn’t. You could tell by the way I would grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later. Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasn’t, because that feeling is fucking great. It’s addictive. You might get sick of the travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that feeling will always keep you coming back for more. That, and the knowledge that even at the worst show – bad sound, dull audience, lousy venue – something amazing will always happen onstage: a spark, a flash of inspiration, a song you’ve played a thousand times that unexpectedly causes a long-forgotten memory to reappear in your mind.
So the music will always surprise you, but after fifty years you do start to feel as if nothing else that happens at a gig can. It’s easy to think that you’ve done pretty much everything it’s possible to do onstage except keel over and die. I’ve performed sober, I’ve performed drunk and I have – to my shame – performed high as a kite. I’ve done gigs that made me feel as elated as it’s possible for a human being to feel, and struggled through shows in the pits of despair. I’ve played pianos, I’ve jumped on pianos, I’ve fallen off pianos and I’ve pushed a piano into the crowd, hit a member of the audience with it and spent the rest of the night frantically apologizing to them. I’ve played with my childhood heroes and some of the greatest artists in the history of music; I’ve played with people who were so hopeless they had no business being onstage and I’ve played with a group of male strippers dressed as Cub Scouts. I’ve done gigs dressed as a woman, a cat, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, a Ruritanian general, a musketeer, a pantomime dame and, very occasionally, I’ve played gigs dressed like a normal human being. I’ve had gigs that were disrupted by bomb scares, gigs disrupted by student protests against the war in Vietnam and gigs that were disrupted because I flounced offstage in a huff and then came scuttling back shortly afterwards, contrite about losing my temper. I’ve had hot dogs thrown at me in Paris; I’ve been knocked unconscious by a hash pipe while wearing a giant chicken outfit in North Carolina – my band thought I’d been shot – and I’ve run onstage in a gorilla costume in an attempt to surprise Iggy Pop. That wasn’t one of my better ideas. It was 1973 and I had been to see The Stooges the night before. It was just the greatest thing I’d ever seen – 180 degrees away from my music, but incredible, the energy of it, the sheer noise they made, Iggy climbing all over the place like Spider-Man. So the next night I went to see them again – they were playing a week of shows at a club called Richards in Atlanta. I thought it would be funny if I hired a gorilla costume and ran onstage during their set – you know, just adding to the general mayhem and anarchy. Instead, I was taught an important life lesson, which is this: if you’re planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check first to see whether or not the person you’re surprising has taken so much acid before the show that they’re unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and an actual gorilla. I discovered this when my appearance was greeted not with gales of laughter but the sight of Iggy Pop screaming and shrinking away from me in terror. This was quickly followed by the realization that I was no longer on the stage but flying through the air at high speed. Sensing the need for decisive action, another member of The Stooges had stopped playing, picked me up and thrown me into the crowd.
You can see why I might occasionally think that I’ve covered the full panoply of live incidents, that there isn’t really anything left to do during a gig that I haven’t already done. But of course, when you do start thinking that, life has a habit of letting you know you’re wrong. Which brings us to the night in Las Vegas in 2017 when I found myself leaping up from the piano as the last chord of ‘Rocket Man’ died away and walking across the stage of the Colosseum, basking in the crowd’s applause, punching the air and pointing at fans who were going particularly wild. Nothing unusual in itself, save for the fact that, as I was walking across the stage, basking in the crowd’s applause and punching the air, I was also, unbeknown to the audience, copiously urinating into an adult nappy concealed beneath my suit. Pissing myself in front of an audience while wearing a giant nappy: this was definitely hitherto uncharted territory. There aren’t a huge number of positives about contracting prostate cancer, but at least it had enabled me to have an entirely new and unprecedented experience onstage.
My life is never quiet, but the preceding few years had been even more tumultuous than usual. Some aspects of them had been really positive. I settled into fatherhood far more easily than I would ever have expected. I loved doing everyday stuff with the boys – taking them to the cinema on a Saturday; going to Legoland and to meet Father Christmas at Windsor Great Park. I loved taking them to see Watford. They’re football-mad. I can spend hours talking about it with them, answering their questions about its history: ‘Who was George Best, Dad?’ ‘Why was Pelé such a great player?’ They came to Vicarage Road for the opening of a stand named after me, something I’m incredibly proud about; there’s a stand there named after Graham Taylor, too. Since then, they’ve been mascots at matches and they go to games all the time.
And I loved how having kids rooted me in the village nearest to Woodside. I’d lived there since the mid-seventies, without ever really getting to know anyone locally. But when the boys started nursery and school, they made friends, and their friends’ parents became our friends. They didn’t care about who I was. A harassed mum at the school gates is less interested in asking you how you wrote ‘Bennie And The Jets’, or what Princess Diana was really like than in talking about uniforms and packed lunches and the difficulty of assembling a costume for the nativity play at forty-eight hours’ notice – which was fine by me. We ended up with a whole new social circle we never would have had when David and I were just a famous, jet-setting gay couple.
I had opened a new Vegas show, The Million Dollar Piano, in 2011. It was less controversial than its predecessor, but just as spectacular and successful. I brought Tony King in to act as creative director – he’d been working for The Rolling Stones for years, travelling around the world with them on their tours – and he did an incredible job. He’s been part of my organization ever since: his official job title is Eminence Grise, which just fits Tony perfectly. The following year, I made Good Morning to the Night, an album unlike anything I had done before, that went to Number One. Or rather, I didn’t make Good Morning to the Night: I handed over the master tapes of my seventies albums to Pnau, an Australian electronic duo that I loved, and told them to do whatever they wanted with them. They remixed different elements from old songs into entirely new tracks, making me sound like Pink Floyd or Daft Punk in the process. I thought the results were fantastic, but I didn’t understand the process they used; there was an album with my name on it at Number One and I had no idea whatsoever how it had been made. We played together at a festival in Ibiza, which was fantastic. I always feel nervous before a gig – I think the day you stop feeling nervous is the day you start phoning it in – but this time, I was genuinely terrified. The crowd were so young; they could theoretically have been my grandkids, and the first part of the show was just me and a piano. And they loved it. There’s something incredibly gratifying about seeing an audience that’s completely different from the people who normally come to see you enjoying what you do.
Pnau weren’t the only people I collaborated with. I worked with all sorts of different people: Queens of the Stone Age, A Tribe Called Quest, Jack White, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I love going into the studio with artists people wouldn’t ordinarily expect me to play with. It reminds me of being a session musician in the late sixties: that challenge of having to adapt your style and think on your feet musically is still really exciting to me.
I was in the studio with Clean Bandit when I was called to the phone: apparently Vladimir Putin wanted to speak to me. There had been a lot of publicity about a couple of gigs I’d done in Russia, where I spoke out about LGBTQ rights onstage. I’d dedicated a show in Moscow to the memory of Vladislav Tornovoi, a young man who had been tortured and murdered in Volgograd for being gay, and in St Petersburg I’d talked about how ridiculous it was that a monument to Steve Jobs in the city had been taken down when his successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, came out. It turned out to be a prank call, by two guys who’d done the same thing to all sorts of public figures, including Mikhail Gorbachev. They recorded the whole thing and broadcast it on Russian TV, but, fuck it, I wasn’t embarrassed at all, because I hadn’t said anything stupid to them; I’d just said how grateful I was and how I’d love to meet face to face to discuss civil rights and provision for AIDS treatment. Besides, the real Vladimir Putin rang me at home a few weeks later to apologize and said he wanted to set up a meeting. The meeting hasn’t happened – I’ve been back to Russia since, but my invite to the Kremlin seems to have got lost in the post. But I live in hope.
You don’t achieve anything by cutting people off. It’s like when I played at the wedding of the right-wing talk show DJ Rush Limbaugh in 2010. I was surprised to be asked – the first thing I said onstage was ‘I expect you’re wondering what the fuck I’m doing here’ – and I got really hauled over the coals in the media: he said some incredibly stupid things about AIDS, how can you possibly perform for him? But I’d rather try and build a bridge to someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall. And in any case, I donated my fee for the performance – and I assure you that, as a wedding singer, I don’t come cheap – to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. So I managed to turn a right-wing talk show DJ’s wedding into a fundraising benefit for AIDS.
But a lot of awful things happened in those years, too. Bob Birch, who had played bass in my band for over twenty years, committed suicide. He had been unwell since a car accident in the mid-nineties – a truck had hit him in the street before a gig in Montreal, and he never really recovered from his injuries – but I don’t think I fully grasped how much pain he was in or the psychological toll it was taking on him. He seemed incredibly resilient – at first they told him he would never walk again, but he was back on tour within six months. His playing never faltered and he never complained, even when he had to perform sitting down. But then, during the summer break in our 2012 touring schedule, his injuries got worse until it must have become unbearable. I got the phone call from Davey at six o’clock in the morning in Nice, telling me Bob had shot himself outside his home in Los Angeles. I wished he’d reached out; I wished he’d said something. I don’t know what I could have done, but I couldn’t stop the thought haunting me after his death that he had suffered in silence.
Then Ingrid Sischy died. She’d had breast cancer before, in the late nineties: she’d called me up in tears in Nice, asking if I could help her get an appointment with a top oncologist called Larry Norton, the same doctor that had treated Linda McCartney. The cancer went into remission but, from that point, Ingrid was terrified of it returning. She was so paranoid about it, looking for signs that it had returned in the most bizarre places, that it became a running joke between us.
‘Elton, look, my hands are shaking, do you think I have cancer of the hand?’
‘Oh, yeah, Ingrid, you’ve got cancer of the hand now. You’ve probably got cancer of the teeth and the hair as well.’
It seemed funny at the time, because I couldn’t imagine her actually dying. I’d never met anyone with that much vitality; she was always doing something, a million projects on the go at once. And she was so present in my life: I would literally ring her every weekday, Monday to Friday, for a chat and gossip and to ask for her opinions, of which she had an apparently fathomless supply. When someone has that much life force inside them, when someone takes up so much space, it just seems impossible that life could be snuffed out.
Until it was. The cancer returned in 2015 and she died very suddenly – so suddenly that I had to race from Britain to America to see her before she passed away. I just made it. I got to say goodbye, which hadn’t happened with a lot of my friends who had died. In a way, I was pleased it was so sudden: Ingrid was so scared of cancer, so scared of dying, and at least she didn’t have to spend weeks or months facing death. But it wasn’t really any consolation. I’d lost Gianni; now I’d lost another best friend, another almost-sibling. I never stop thinking about her: there are photos of her all over my houses, so she’s always there. I miss her advice, I miss that intelligence, I miss her passion, I miss the laughs. I miss her.
And then there was David. I can’t say I hadn’t noticed he was drinking a lot more, maybe too much. He started coming to bed most nights with a glass of wine and would sip it while he was reading and chatting. Or he’d stay up much later than me, and the next morning, I’d see the empty bottle by the kitchen sink. Sometimes two. A couple of times when we were on holiday at the house in Nice, he didn’t come to bed at all. I’d find him in the morning, spark out in front of his computer, or on the sofa in the living room. But I honestly didn’t think he had any issues. Regardless of what had happened the previous evening, he would be up at seven and off to work. There were times when we were out, and he’d get drunk – after a joint birthday party I had with Sam Taylor-Wood, I remember having to grab his arm and guide him very firmly to the car, so he didn’t weave about in front of the paparazzi – but he never made a fool of himself. Given that, after a few vodka martinis, I had been capable of anything from verbal abuse to violence to displays of public nudity, you can understand how I failed to notice David had a serious problem.
I didn’t realize he was propping himself up with booze. I always thought David had slipped into Elton John World with remarkable ease and confidence, but it turned out that a lot of things I was completely used to living with, that I just saw as a fact of life, made him anxious. He didn’t like being photographed all the time, or being under press scrutiny, or public speaking at AIDS Foundation events. He was always a nervous flyer, but, in my life, hardly a week goes by when you don’t set foot on a plane. He found it all easier to deal with after a few drinks. Plus, there was the fact that we were often apart – I was away all the time doing gigs, and he was back at home. I don’t want to make him sound like a kind of rock and roll touring widow – he had plenty going on in his life – but after a while, he got lonely and bored, and one way of feeling less lonely and bored is cracking open a bottle of nice wine or knocking back a few vodkas. And on top of everything else, there were the kids. As any new parent will tell you, however much you love it, there are moments when you feel shaken by the responsibility of it all. David wouldn’t have been the first parent in history to race to the fridge after bedtime, in urgent need of a glass of something cold, alcoholic and relaxing. Obviously, we had help, but it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got the best nannies in the universe: every new parent who cares about their children has points where they feel overwhelmed by the idea of bringing new humans into the world and ensuring their lives are as good as they can be.
If you treat your anxieties with booze, it usually works, at least while you’re drinking: it’s the next morning that you find yourself feeling more anxious than ever. And that’s what happened to David. It all came to a head in Los Angeles in 2014, two days before I was due to start a US tour. I was leaving that night for Atlanta: Tony King was flying in, and I was looking forward to catching up before the tour began. David was feeling low and wanted me to stay the extra night with him. I said no. We had a huge row. I went anyway. The next morning, David called and we had a row that made the previous day’s row look like a light-hearted disagreement over what to have for lunch: the kind of argument where you come off the phone teary and reeling, where things are said that make you wonder whether the next time you communicate, it’ll be through lawyers. In fact, the next time I heard from David, he had checked himself into a rehab clinic in Malibu. He told me that after he had come off the phone, he had lain in bed. He could hear Elijah and Zachary playing just down the hall, but he was too depressed and anxious to get up and see them. That was it: he contacted the doctor, told her he had had enough, that he needed help.
I was pleased he was getting treatment. I felt bad that I hadn’t noticed things had got as out of hand as they had: once I did, I just wanted David to get better. But I was also weirdly nervous. The world doesn’t have a bigger advocate for getting sober than me, but I also know that it’s a huge undertaking: it can change people completely. What if the man I loved came home a different person? What if our relationship changed – the way my relationship with Hugh had changed when we got sober – and became unworkable? It was enough to keep me up at night, but when David came back, he didn’t seem that different, although he had more energy and more focus, and he was dedicated to working on his recovery in a way that affected me. I started going to AA meetings again. I hadn’t been since the early nineties and I only went to keep David company and show support, but when I got in there, I found I really enjoyed it. You always hear something inspiring; you always come out with your spirits lifted. We started hosting a meeting at home, every Sunday, inviting friends who are also in recovery, like Tony King. I suppose it’s a little like going to church – just being thankful for your sobriety. I always come out bouncing.
David seemed to be bouncing, too. Not long after he got sober, I parted company with Frank Presland, who’d gone from being my lawyer to my manager. I’d had a succession of different managers since John Reid, but none of them had really worked out. I thought about different options, then found myself wondering if David couldn’t do it. Before we had met, he was a hot-shot advertising executive. He oversaw huge campaigns, worked with budgets – the skills you needed to do that didn’t seem so different to the skills you needed in rock management. There were obviously reservations about having a business relationship with your partner, but I liked the idea of us working together: we had kids, it would be like a family business. David was nervous about taking the role on, but eventually he agreed.
He really ran at the task: never underestimate the zeal of the newly sober. He streamlined the company and made financial savings. He started changing things to suit the way the music business was changing: taking streaming into account, and social media. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. I’ve never owned a mobile phone. As you might expect, given my collector’s mentality, I’m not really interested in streaming music: I like to own albums, lots of them, preferably on vinyl. And, having taken into account both my temper and my impressive track record of expressing what you might call robust and forthright opinions, I realized that my going anywhere near something like Twitter was likely to end in complete bedlam, at best.
But David worked it all out. He built up a great team. He seemed genuinely interested in areas of the music industry that I couldn’t have been more bored by. He started really pushing to get a biopic made of my life. The idea had started years before, with the films David LaChapelle made for The Red Piano shows in Vegas: if a film was going to be made about me, I wanted it to look like them. They were gritty, but they were fantastical and surreal and over-the-top, and my career’s been fantastical and surreal and over-the-top, so they fitted perfectly. We got Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, to write the screenplay, which I loved, but it took years and years to get it off the ground. Directors and lead actors came and went. David LaChapelle was supposed to direct it initially, but he wanted to concentrate on his fine art career. Tom Hardy was going to play me, but he couldn’t sing, and I really wanted whoever was going to be me to perform the songs, rather than lip-synch them. There was a lot of wrangling with studios over budgets and over the content of the film. People kept asking us to tone the gay sex and drugs down so it would get a PG-13 rating, but, you know, I’m a gay man and a recovering addict: there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in making a sanitized film about me that leaves out the sex and the coke. There was a time when I didn’t think it was going to happen, but David kept plugging away, and eventually it did.
And he had some radical new ideas. I discovered just how radical one morning in LA, when he presented me with a sheet of paper. He had written down a load of dates relating to Zachary and Elijah’s school life – when each term would start, how long the holidays were, the years they would be moving up from infants to juniors and then secondary school, when they would be sitting exams.
‘How much of this do you want to be around for?’ he asked. ‘You can work your tour schedules around it.’
I looked at the sheet of paper. It effectively mapped out their lives. By the time they reached the final dates on it, they wouldn’t be children anymore, they would be teenagers, young men. And I would be in my eighties.
‘All of it,’ I said finally. ‘I want to be there for all of it.’
David raised his eyebrows. ‘In which case,’ he said, ‘you need to think about changing your life. You need to think about retiring from touring.’
It was a huge decision. I’ve always thought of myself as a working musician, just as I was when Bluesology were going up and down the motorway in the van that Arnold Tendler had forked out for on our behalf. That’s not false modesty. Fairly obviously, I’m not exactly the same as I was in the sixties – I can assure you it’s a very long time indeed since I arrived at a gig in the back of a transit van – but the underlying philosophy, if you like, has never changed. Back then, if you got a gig, you went and played it: that’s ultimately how you earned your living; that’s how you defined yourself as a musician. I prided myself on the fact that my schedule now wasn’t that different from my schedule in the early seventies. Bigger venues, obviously, more luxurious accommodation and travel arrangements, and less time spent locking myself in the lavatory backstage to avoid the attentions of female groupies. Even the most ardent among them had long ago got the memo regarding the improbability of Elton John being swayed by their charms. But I played roughly the same number of gigs: 120 or 130 a year. However many shows I did, I wanted to do more the following year. I kept a list of countries I still wanted to play – places I hadn’t visited yet; countries like Egypt, where I’d thus far been banned from performing because I was gay. I was fond of saying I would be happy to die onstage.
But David’s list of school dates had thrown me. My kids were only going to grow up once. I didn’t want to be in Madison Square Garden, or the Los Angeles Staples Center, or the Taco Bell Arena, Boise, while it happened, much as I loved the fans who came to see me there. I didn’t want to be anywhere other than with Zachary and Elijah. I’d finally found something that matched the lure of the stage. We started making plans for a farewell tour. It had to be bigger and more spectacular than anything I had done before, a big celebration, a thank-you to the people who’d bought albums and tickets over the years.
The plans for the farewell tour were already underway when I found out I had cancer. They discovered it during a routine check-up. My doctor noticed that the level of prostate-specific antigens in my blood had gone up slightly, and sent me to an oncologist for a biopsy. It came back positive. It was strange: I wasn’t as shocked at hearing the word ‘cancer’ as I had been back in the eighties, when they thought I had it in my throat. I think it was because it was prostate cancer. It’s no joke, but it’s incredibly common, they had caught it very early, and besides, I’m blessed with the kind of constitution that just makes me bounce back from illnesses. I’d had a couple of serious health scares before, and they didn’t really slow me down. In the nineties, I was taken ill en route to David and Victoria Beckham’s wedding. I felt faint that morning when I was playing tennis, and passed out in the car on the way to the airport. I missed the wedding, went to the hospital, they monitored my heart and told me that I had an inner-ear infection. The next day, I was playing tennis again, when David came thundering down from the house yelling that I had to stop immediately. My feelings about being interrupted while I’m playing tennis are a matter of public record – you may recall the incident in Tantrums and Tiaras where I announced I was leaving France immediately and never coming back, because a fan had waved at me and shouted ‘yoo-hoo!’ while I was trying to serve. I had just begun telling David to fuck off in no uncertain terms, when he shouted that the hospital had called; they had made a mistake – I had a heart irregularity and I had to fly to London immediately to get a pacemaker fitted. I was only in the hospital for one night and, rather than feeling debilitated, I thought the pacemaker was fantastic. It seemed to give me more energy than before.
More recently, I’d managed to play nine gigs, take twenty-four flights and perform with Coldplay at a fundraising ball for the AIDS Foundation with a burst appendix: the doctors told me I had a colon infection and I felt exhausted, but I just kept going. I could have died – normally when your appendix bursts it causes peritonitis, which kills you within a few days. I had my appendix out, spent a couple of days in hospital on morphine, hallucinating – I’m not going to lie, I quite enjoyed that part – and a few weeks in Nice recuperating, then went back on the road. It’s just how I am. If I hadn’t got the constitution I have, all the drugs I took would have killed me decades ago.
The oncologist told me I had two options. One was surgery to remove my prostate. The other was a course of radiation and chemotherapy that meant I would have to keep going back to hospital dozens of times. I went straight for the surgery. A lot of men won’t have it, because it’s a major operation, you can’t have sex for at least a year afterwards and you can’t control your bladder for a while, but effectively my kids made the decision for me. I didn’t like the idea of cancer hanging over me – us – for years to come: I just wanted rid of it.
I had the surgery done in Los Angeles, quickly and quietly. We made sure that news of my illness didn’t reach the press: the last thing I wanted was a load of hysterical stories in the papers and photographers outside my house. The operation was a complete success. They discovered that the cancer had spread to two lobes in my prostate; targeted radiotherapy wouldn’t have caught that. I had made the right decision. I was back onstage at Caesar’s Palace within ten days.
It wasn’t until I arrived in Las Vegas that I noticed something wasn’t right. I woke in the morning feeling a little uncomfortable. As the day progressed, the pain got worse and worse. By the time I was backstage at the gig, it was indescribable. I was in tears. The band suggested we should cancel the show, but I said no. Before you start marvelling at my bravery and nonpareil professionalism, I should point out that I didn’t agree to play out of any show-must-go-on stoicism or sense of duty. Weirdly, getting onstage seemed preferable to sitting at home with nothing to do in exactly the same pain. So we went on. It sort of worked. At least the gig gave me something else to think about other than how ill I felt, not least at the aforementioned moment when I realized that the radical prostatectomy’s after-effects on my bladder were making themselves known.
That was pretty funny – if only the audience knew – but nevertheless, if pissing yourself in front of 4,000 people constitutes the highlight of your day, you’re clearly in a bad way. It turned out that I was suffering a rare and unexpected complication from the operation: fluid was leaking from my lymph nodes. I had it drained at the hospital and the pain went away. The fluid built up again and the pain came back. Fabulous: another thrilling evening of agony and incontinence onstage at Caesar’s Palace. The cycle went on for two and a half months, before they cured it by accident: a routine colonoscopy shifted the fluid permanently, days before my seventieth birthday.
My party was at the Red Studios in Hollywood. David brought Zachary and Elijah over from London as a surprise. Ryan Adams, Rosanne Cash and Lady Gaga performed. Prince Harry sent a video, wishing me all the best while wearing a pair of Elton John glasses. Stevie Wonder played for me, having either forgotten about, or forgiven me for refusing to come out of my bedroom the last time he’d tried to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, on board the Starship, forty-four years previously. And Bernie was there, with his wife and two young daughters in tow – it was a kind of dual celebration, because it was fifty years since we’d first met, in 1967. We posed for photographs together – me in a maroon suit with satin lapels, a shirt with a ruff and velvet slippers; Bernie dressed down in jeans, his hair cropped and his arms covered in tattoos. We were as much a study in opposites now as we had been the day Bernie first turned up in London from Owmby-by-Spital. Bernie had ended up back in the countryside, on a ranch in Santa Barbara: he’d half gone back to his roots and half turned into one of the Old West characters he loved to write about, like something off Tumbleweed Connection. He literally won competitions for roping cattle. I collected porcelain, and the Tate Modern was staging an exhibition drawn from the vast selection of twentieth-century photography I had amassed: one of the star exhibits was the original Man Ray photograph Bernie and I had bought a poster of when we were trying to decorate our shared bedroom in Frome Court. We were worlds apart. I don’t know how it all still worked between us, but then, I never understood how it worked in the first place. It just did. It just does.
It was a magical evening. I can usually live without the kind of event that revolves around everyone telling me how wonderful I am – I’ve never been good at taking a compliment – but I was in a fantastic mood. I was cancer-free, and pain-free. The operation had been a success. The complications had been fixed. I was about to go back on tour, down to South America to play some shows with James Taylor. Everything was back to normal.
Until I nearly died.
It was on the flight back from Santiago that I started feeling ill. We had to change planes in Lisbon, and by the time I got on board, I felt feverish. Then I felt freezing cold. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wrapped myself up in blankets and felt a little warmer, but something clearly wasn’t right. I got home to Woodside and called the doctor. My fever had subsided a bit, and he advised me to take some rest. The next morning I woke up feeling worse than I ever had in my life. I was taken to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London. They gave me a scan and noticed that something was terribly wrong. I was told that my condition was so serious, the hospital didn’t have the equipment to cope with it. I had to be moved to the London Clinic.
I arrived at midday. My last memory is of hyperventilating while they were trying to find a vein to give me an injection. I have really muscular arms, so it’s always been difficult, compounded by the fact that I hate needles. Eventually they brought in a Russian nurse, who looked like she had just changed into her uniform after a morning’s training with the Olympic shot put team, and by two thirty I was on the operating table: there was more lymphatic fluid leaking, this time in my diaphragm, and it had to be drained. For two days afterwards, I was in intensive care. When I came round, they told me I had contracted a major infection in South America, and that they were treating it with massive doses of antibiotics, intravenously. Everything seemed to be fine, and then the fever came back. They took a sample of the infection and grew it in a Petri dish. It was much more serious than they had first realized; they had to change the antibiotics, up the dosage. I had MRI scans and God knows how many other procedures. I just lay there feeling terrible, being wheeled here and there, having tubes stuck in me and taken out again, not really taking in what was going on. The doctors told David I was twenty-four hours away from death. If the South American tour had gone on for another day, that would have been it: brown bread.
I was incredibly lucky – I had a fantastic team around me and the best possible medical care – although, I have to say, I didn’t exactly think of myself as terribly lucky at the time. I couldn’t sleep. All I can really remember is lying in bed, awake all night, wondering if I was going to die. I didn’t know the details, didn’t know how close I really was to dying – David had very wisely kept that information to himself – but how ill I felt in itself was enough to get me thinking about mortality. This wasn’t how or when I wanted to go. I wanted to die at home, surrounded by my family, preferably having lived to an enormously advanced age first. I wanted to see the boys again. I needed more time.
After eleven days I was allowed to leave. I couldn’t walk – there were shooting pains down my legs – and the sheer quantity and power of the antibiotics I had to take wiped me out completely, but at least I was home. I spent seven weeks recuperating, learning to walk again. I never left the house unless it was to see a doctor. It was the kind of forced leisure that would ordinarily have driven me up the wall – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent this long at home – but, as ill as I felt, I found I really enjoyed it. It was springtime, and the gardens at Woodside looked beautiful. There were far, far worse places in the world to be trapped. I settled into a kind of domestic routine, pottering around the grounds and enjoying the garden during the day, waiting for the boys to come home from school and give me their news.
In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, I’d prayed: please don’t let me die, please let me see my kids again, please give me a little longer. In a strange way, it felt like the time I spent recuperating was the answer to my prayers: if you want more time, you need to learn to live like this, you have to slow down. It was like being shown a different life, a life I realized I loved more than being on the road. Any lingering doubts I might have had about retiring from touring just evaporated. I knew I had made the right decision. Music was the most wonderful thing, but it still didn’t sound as good as Zachary chattering about what had happened at Cubs or football practice. I couldn’t carry on pretending I was twenty-two anymore. Pretending I was twenty-two was going to do what drugs and alcohol and cancer had failed to achieve, and kill me. And I wasn’t ready to die yet.