Back at home in the autumn of 1976, and theoretically retired from live performance, I set about getting Woodside renovated. There has been a house on the same site in Old Windsor since the eleventh century – it was originally built for William the Conqueror’s physician – but it kept burning down; the latest version was built in 1947 for Michael Sobell, who made a fortune manufacturing radios and televisions. It was built in a mock-Georgian style, but when doing it up, I decided to eschew Regency or Palladian decoration in favour of a style known among interior design specialists as Mid-70s Pop Star On Drugs Goes Berserk. There were pinball machines, jukeboxes, brass palm trees, memorabilia everywhere. There were Tiffany lamps next to the pair of four-foot-high Doc Marten boots I’d worn while singing ‘Pinball Wizard’ in The Who’s film Tommy. On the walls, Rembrandt etchings jostled for space with gold discs and stuff fans had sent me. I had a five-a-side football pitch installed in the grounds and a fully equipped disco built just off the living room, complete with lights, mirrorball and DJ booth, and a pair of enormous speakers. One room housed a replica of Tutankhamun’s state throne. I had speakers rigged up outside the house, linked to the stereo in my bedroom. When I woke up, I’d play a fanfare through the speakers, to let everyone in the house know I was coming. I thought this was hilarious, a camp joke, but for some reason, visitors who weren’t prepared for the fanfare tended to react to it with a thoughtful expression, as if considering the possibility that success might have gone to my head.
In the grounds there was an orangery that had been converted into a separate flat with its own garden, which I moved my grandmother into. Her second husband Horace had died and I didn’t like the thought of her living on her own in her seventies. She spent the rest of her life there until she passed away in 1995. I thought there was a beautiful circularity about that. I was born in her house, she died in mine, although her life there was very self-contained. She was always an independent woman, and I didn’t want to take that away from her. She was behind the gates of Woodside, so I knew she was safe, but she lived her own life, had her own friends. I could drop in to see her whenever I wanted, but I could also keep the madness of my life away from her, protect her from all the excess and stupidity. And she seemed really happy there, pottering around in the garden. She was weeding her borders when the Queen Mother came to Woodside for lunch – we’d got on well when I met her at Bryan Forbes’s house, and I’d been invited to the Royal Lodge in Windsor for dinner. She was really good fun. After the meal, she’d insisted that we dance to her favourite record, which turned out to be an old Irish drinking song called ‘Slattery’s Mounted Fut’: I think Val Doonican recorded a version of it.
So, having enjoyed the surreal experience of dancing with the Queen Mum to an Irish drinking song, there seemed no harm in inviting her to lunch. She told me she had been friends with the family who had lived at Woodside before the war, and I thought she might want to see the house again. When she accepted, I decided it would be hilarious not to tell my grandmother in advance who was coming. I just called her over: ‘Come here, Gran, there’s someone who wants to meet you.’ Unfortunately, my grandmother didn’t see the funny side of it. All hell broke loose when the Queen Mother left.
‘How could you do that to me? Standing there talking to the Queen Mum in my bleedin’ wellies and gardening gloves! I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life! Don’t ever do that to me again!’
I employed some staff to look after Woodside. A guy called Bob Halley was my chauffeur at first, and his wife Pearl was the housekeeper: a lovely woman, but, as it turned out, useless at cooking. There were a couple of cleaners and a PA called Andy Hill. He was the son of the landlord of the Northwood Hills, the pub where I’d played the piano as a kid, and I’d employed him largely because I had a crush on him; when that wore off, I realized he wasn’t right for the job. There was a lesson in there somewhere. Eventually I gave Bob Halley the PA role.
I got my mum to come and manage the house, which turned out to be a dreadful mistake. She was very good at the accounts, but she ruled the place with a rod of iron. I’d noticed a change in the way she was behaving. She was still happy with Derf, but somehow seemed to be slipping back into the way she had been before she met him: moody and difficult and argumentative, nothing ever good enough. I thought getting her to work with me might bring us closer together again, like we had been in Frome Court when Bernie and I were starting out. But no. It was as if the pleasure she had taken in my early success had worn off. She seemed to hate everything I did. There was a constant drizzle of pissy criticism from her – about what I wore, about my friends, about the music I made. And there were a lot of arguments about money. I suppose she’d lived through the war and rationing and had that frugal, waste-not-want-not outlook ingrained in her. But, as I think we’ve established quite thoroughly by now, that’s not really my attitude to spending. I got sick of having my every purchase queried, having to have a row with her every time I bought someone else a gift. It felt like there was no escape from her, no privacy. You get up in the morning after you’ve slept with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: ‘Why have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?’ It’s just weird. It really takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss. Worse, she had a habit of being absolutely foul to the rest of the staff at the house, treating them like shit, like she was the lady of the manor and they were her servants. I was always having to patch things up after she’d lost her temper and screamed at someone. Eventually the situation just became too claustrophobic and tense. She and Derf moved down to the south coast, which frankly came as a relief.
I was in bed alone at Woodside one Sunday morning, half watching television, when a guy with bright orange hair suddenly appeared on the screen and called Rod Stewart a useless old fucker. I hadn’t really been paying attention, but now I was suddenly riveted: someone slagging Rod off was clearly too good to miss. His name was Johnny Rotten, he was wearing the most amazing clothes and I thought he was hilarious – like a cross between an angry young man and a bitchy old queen, really acidic and witty. He was being interviewed about the burgeoning punk scene in London by a woman called Janet Street-Porter. I liked her, too; she was gobby and bold. In absolute fairness to Rod, Johnny Rotten appeared to hate everything – I was fairly certain he thought I too was a useless old fucker. Nevertheless, I made a mental note to ring Rod later, just to make sure he knew all about it. ‘Hello, Phyllis, did you see the TV this morning? This new band were on called the Sex Pistols and, you’ll never believe this, they said you were a useless old fucker. Those were their exact words: Rod Stewart is a useless old fucker. Isn’t that terrible? You’re only thirty-two. How awful for you.’
I didn’t really care what they thought of me. I loved punk. I loved its energy, attitude and style, and I loved that my old friend Marc Bolan immediately claimed he’d invented it twenty years ago; that was just the most Marc response imaginable. I didn’t feel shocked by punk – I’d lived through the scandal and social upheaval that rock ‘n’ roll provoked in the fifties, so I was virtually immune to the idea of music causing outrage – and I didn’t feel threatened or rendered obsolete by it either. I couldn’t really imagine Elton John fans burning their copies of Captain Fantastic in order to go to the Vortex and spit at The Lurkers. And even if they did, that was out of my hands: it wasn’t a musical trend I was interested in chasing. But I thought The Clash and Buzzcocks and Siouxsie And The Banshees were fantastic. I thought Janet Street-Porter was fantastic too. The day after the show I got hold of her on the phone and invited her to lunch, and that was that: we’ve been lifelong friends ever since.
Even if punk didn’t affect me directly, it felt like a sign that things were changing. Another sign that things were changing. There were a lot of them around. I’d stopped working with Dick James and DJM. My contract with them ran out just after Rock of the Westies was released. They were entitled to put out a live album called Here and There, which I hated – it wasn’t that the music on it was bad, but it was made up of old recordings from 1972 and 1974, and it seemed to exist only in order to make money. And that was it. I declined to sign another contract with them and moved to my own label, Rocket. John Reid was muttering darkly that Dick had been ripping us off for years. He thought the contracts Bernie and I had signed with Dick in the sixties were unfair; that the royalty rates we received were too low; that there was something fishy about the way our foreign royalties were worked out. By the time DJM, its administrators and foreign subsidiaries had taken their cut, Bernie and I were only getting fifteen quid each from every £100 we earned. It was just the standard music business practices of the day, but the standard music business practices of the day were wrong. It all ended up in a court case in the mid-eighties, which we won. I hated every minute of it, because I loved Dick; I never had a bad word to say about him personally. And yet I felt I had to: the industry had to change the way it treated artists. Dick had a fatal heart attack not long afterwards, and his son Steve blamed me for his death. It was really ugly, really sad. That wasn’t how the story of Dick and I was supposed to end at all.
In addition to leaving DJM, Bernie and I had agreed to take a break from working together. There was no huge row, no big falling-out. It just seemed like the right thing to do. We had been tied to each other for ten years, and it was good to stop before our partnership felt like a rut we were stuck in. I didn’t want us to end up like Bacharach and David, who worked together until they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. The only thing Bernie had really done without me was make a solo album – he’d read some of his poetry over a musical backing provided by Caleb Quaye and Davey Johnstone. Dick James released it, then called a completely ludicrous meeting at which he kept insisting I should use Bernie as a support act on a forthcoming American tour: ‘He can read his poems! People will love it!’ I couldn’t imagine why Dick thought this was a good idea, unless he’d secretly taken out a life insurance policy on Bernie and was hoping to make a swift financial return by getting him killed onstage. American rock audiences in the early seventies were many things, but prepared to listen to a man read poems about his Lincolnshire boyhood for forty-five minutes wasn’t one of them, however wonderful said poems were. I pointed out that it was hard enough to get Bernie to come onstage and take a bow at the end of a show, let alone perform an experimental spoken-word support set, and the idea was mercifully dropped.
Now, however, Bernie had really struck out on his own. He’d made an album with Alice Cooper, a big concept work about Alice’s alcoholism and recent stay in rehab. He got our old bass player Dee Murray involved, and Davey Johnstone on guitar. It was a good album. I was impressed. So why did I feel so odd when I looked at the songwriting credits and saw Alice Cooper’s name next to Bernie’s instead of mine? Actually, there was nothing odd about how I felt. It was very straightforward. I hated admitting it to myself, but I felt jealous.
I put it out of my mind. After all, I had a new writing partner, Gary Osborne, who I’d first met when he wrote the English lyrics for ‘Amoureuse’, the French song that had finally given Kiki Dee a hit. It was the opposite of working with Bernie – Gary wanted me to write the music before he started the lyrics – but we came up with some really good songs together: ‘Blue Eyes’, ‘Little Jeannie’, a ballad called ‘Chloe’. And we became very close friends. So close that it was Gary and his wife Jenny that I called on Christmas Day in tears, when my then boyfriend mysteriously failed to fly in from LA as arranged. A catastrophic choice of partner even by my standards, this one had decided he wasn’t gay after all and had run off with an air stewardess who worked on the Starship. Not that he told me any of this. He just vanished. His plane arrived at Heathrow, he wasn’t on it, and I literally never heard from him again. Perhaps I should have seen it coming but, in fairness, he didn’t seem very straight when he was in bed with me. I was in a terrible state, sitting at home alone with only a load of unopened presents and an uncooked turkey for company: anticipating a quiet romantic Christmas, I’d given everyone who worked at Woodside the week off. Gary and Jenny changed their plans and drove down from London to stay with me. They were a lovely couple.
And there were definitely other advantages to not working with Bernie. I could experiment with music in ways I never had before. I flew to Seattle to record a few songs for an EP with producer Thom Bell, the man who had made the Philadelphia soul records that had inspired ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. He made me sing lower than I previously had and wrapped the songs in luxurious strings. Twenty-seven years later, one of the tracks we recorded, ‘Are You Ready For Love’, went to Number One in Britain, which tells you something about how timeless Thom Bell’s sound is. After that I wrote some great songs with the new wave singer Tom Robinson. One was called ‘Sartorial Eloquence’, a title that my US record company decided Americans were too stupid to understand: they insisted on renaming it ‘Don’t Ya Wanna Play This Game No More’, which really didn’t have the same poetic quality to it. Another of Thom’s tracks, ‘Elton’s Song’, was very different from anything Bernie would have done, a melancholy depiction of a gay schoolboy with a crush on one of his friends. I wrote with Tim Rice, who had spent the seventies breaking records and winning awards with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, musicals he had written with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only one song we wrote was released at the time – ‘Legal Boys’, which came out in 1982 on my album Jump Up! – but decades later, it ended up being one of the most important musical partnerships of my career.
And, just occasionally, I wrote completely alone for the first time. One Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, I wrote an instrumental that fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: ‘Life isn’t everything’. The next morning I found out that a boy called Guy Burchett who worked for Rocket had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy’. It was like nothing I’d ever done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a single – I was furious – but it became a colossal hit in Europe. Years later, when I first met Gianni Versace, he told me it was his favourite song of mine. He kept saying how wonderfully brave he thought it was. I thought that was a bit over-the-top; it was certainly different, but I wouldn’t have described it as brave. After a while it became apparent that Gianni thought it was wonderfully brave because he’d misheard the title and was under the impression I’d called it ‘Song For A Gay’.
Some of my experiments, however, should probably have stayed in the laboratory. Pop videos were still a new thing in early 1978, and I decided to jump in feet first. Of course I did: I was going to make the most incredible, expensive, lavish pop video of all time, for a song called ‘Ego’. We spent a fortune on it, hiring the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It was shot like a movie. There were dozens of actors involved, stage sets, flaming torches, murder scenes, flashbacks shot in sepia. Such was my commitment to the project, I even agreed to take my hat off onscreen at one point. We hired a West End cinema for a premiere, overlooking the fact that if people turn out for a film premiere they expect the film to last longer than three and a half minutes. As it ended, there was some hesitant applause and an unmistakable air of ‘is that it?’ filled the room, as if I’d invited the audience to a black-tie dinner and then given them a Twix. So I made them show the whole thing twice, which succeeded in changing the atmosphere quite dramatically: ‘is that it?’ was swiftly replaced by the equally unmistakable air of ‘not this again’. Better yet, no one would show the bloody thing – this was years before MTV started, and there weren’t really the outlets for a video on TV shows – so the single flopped. If nothing else, this gave John Reid the opportunity to go on one of his celebrated rampages through the office personnel, firing people for their incompetence, then having to hire them again shortly afterwards. I’ve hated making videos ever since.
And then there was the disco album, an idea I think was partly inspired by the amount of time I was spending at Studio 54. I went there every time I visited New York. It was astonishing, different from any club I’d been to before. The guy who ran it, Steve Rubell, was blessed with the ability to create an amazing environment, full of gorgeous waiters in tiny shorts and other extraordinary characters. I don’t mean the celebrities, although there were plenty of them. I mean people like Disco Sally, who looked about seventy and always seemed to be having a whale of a time, and Rollereena, a guy who dressed up like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and went around the dance floor on roller skates. More impressive still, Steve Rubell could create this incredible environment while seemingly permanently out of his mind on Quaaludes. You got the feeling that Studio 54 was a magical space in which anything could happen and sometimes did. Rocket once threw a party there, and at one point, I spotted Lou Reed and Lou’s transgender lover Rachel locked in conversation with, of all people, Cliff Richard. While it was nice to see people with what you might tactfully describe as having differing outlooks on life getting along so famously, the mind did boggle a little at what on earth they were actually talking about.
There was a basement downstairs where celebrities could go and snort coke off a pinball machine. It was certainly an experience going down there – one night I was interrupted by a visibly zonked Liza Minnelli, who wanted to know if I would marry her – but the thing that really attracted me to the club was the thing that no one ever mentions about Studio 54: the music. Well, the music and the waiters, but the waiters were a dead loss. I’d try and chat them up, but they didn’t get off work until 7 a.m. Of course, I’d happily hang around until 7 a.m., but by that point, the evening’s excesses had usually taken their toll on me and nothing would come of it. It’s hard to conjure up a seductive mood when your eyeballs are pointing in different directions and it takes you three attempts to successfully navigate your way through the exit.
So the lure really was the music. I loved disco as much as I had when I first heard it in LA’s gay clubs. That was the whole reason I’d had a disco built at Woodside: so I could DJ when people came to stay, impress them with my extensive collection of 12-inch singles. But, I was forced to admit, the DJs at Studio 54 had a better collection than me, and a sound system at their disposal that made the speakers I’d had brought in specially from Trident Studios in London sound like a transistor radio with its battery running out. They could make anyone dance, even Rod Stewart, which was quite a feat – for some reason, Rod used to carry on as if dancing was against his religion. He always needed a little encouragement to actually get on the floor, which is where the bottles of amyl nitrate I used to bring along came in handy. Poppers had become a big thing in gay clubs in the seventies: you sniffed it and it gave you a brief, legal, euphoric high. The brand I had was called, I regret to inform you, Cum, and it seemed to have a particularly transformative effect on Rod. I offered some to him, and suddenly – after hours of refusing to budge from his seat – he was up and dancing for the rest of the night. The only time he stopped was when he was after another sniff: ‘’Ere, you got any more of that Cum, Sharon?’
One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs for it – I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort. Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible – if the title track had come on at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it – but making an album in bad faith like that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.
As I suspected the moment I’d announced it onstage at Madison Square Garden, retiring from live performance wasn’t a plan I could stick to. Or at least, sometimes I couldn’t. I was unable to decide whether it was the smartest move I’d ever made, or the stupidest. My opinion changed all the time, depending on my mood, with predictably demented results. One day, I would be perfectly happy at home, telling anyone who’d listen about how wonderful it was not being shackled to the old cycle of touring, delighting in the free time that allowed me to concentrate on being chairman of Watford FC. The next, I’d be on the phone to Stiff Records, a small independent label that was home to Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, offering my services as a keyboard player on their upcoming package tour, which they accepted. My sudden urge to get in front of an audience again was bolstered by the fact that I had a crush on one of their artists, Wreckless Eric – sadly, he was nowhere near wreckless enough to get involved with me.
Then I assembled a fresh set of backing musicians, based around China, the band Davey Johnstone had formed when I said I wouldn’t tour anymore. We spent three weeks frantically rehearsing for a fundraising concert at Wembley that I had committed to because I was involved with the charity behind it, Goaldiggers. During the rehearsals, I started making vague noises about going back on the road with them. Then I decided on the night that the whole idea was a terrible mistake and announced my retirement onstage again, this time without telling anyone first. John Reid was furious. The full and frank discussion between us that took place backstage after the gig could apparently be heard not just throughout Wembley but most of north London.
Eventually, I realized that if I was going to play live again, it had to be different, a challenge. I decided to tour with Ray Cooper, who I’d known since before I was famous. He’d played in a band called Blue Mink, who were part of the scene around DJM – their singer Roger Cook was also a songwriter signed to Dick James’s publishing company, and virtually every member of Blue Mink had ended up helping out on my early albums. Ray had been the percussionist in my band on and off for years; but these shows would be just me and him, playing theatres rather than stadiums. We had done a few shows like that before, a couple of charity concerts at the Rainbow in London, the first of which had been enlivened by the presence of the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra. She had sat politely through the performance, then come backstage, and got the conversation off to a flying start by smiling sweetly and asking, ‘How do you have so much energy onstage? Do you take a lot of cocaine?’
It was one of those moments where time appears to stand still while your brain tries to work out what the hell’s going on. Was she incredibly naive, and didn’t really understand what she’d just said? Or, worse, did she realize exactly what she’d just said? Jesus, did she know? Had news of my gargantuan appetite for coke – already quite the hot topic around the music business – actually reached Buckingham Palace? Were they all discussing it over dinner? ‘I hear you had lunch at Elton John’s house and met his nan, Mother – have you heard he’s an absolute fiend for the old blow?’ I managed to collect myself enough to mumble a shaky denial.
Still, the Rainbow shows had been really exhilarating, unexpected enquiries from members of the Royal Family about my drug habits notwithstanding. They were terrifying in the best possible way – if it’s only you and a percussionist onstage, you can’t switch off for a moment and let the band take the strain. You have to concentrate every second, and your playing has to be razor-sharp. And when we went on tour, it really worked. The gigs got fabulous reviews and, every night, I felt that perfect cocktail of apprehension and excitement, exactly how a performer should feel before they go onstage. It was freeing and challenging and fulfilling, because it was completely different from anything I’d done before: the songs we performed, the way it was presented, even the places we played. I was keen to go to countries I hadn’t previously visited, even if I wasn’t that well known there: Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Israel. And that’s how I ended up flying out of Heathrow, flat on my back with my legs in the air, heading for Moscow.
I was flat on my back with my legs in the air because we were flying Aeroflot, and the moment we took off, it became apparent that the Russian state airline didn’t stretch to actually bolting the seats to the floor of the plane. Nor, I couldn’t help noticing, did there seem to be any oxygen masks in case of an emergency. What the plane did have in abundance was a very distinctive smell: antiseptic and sharp, it reminded me a bit of the carbolic soap my grandma used to wash me with when I was a kid. I never found out exactly what it was, but it was the smell of Russia in 1979 – every hotel had it too.
I’d suggested playing in Russia to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith almost as a joke. I never thought it would happen. Western rock music was more or less forbidden under communism – tapes of albums got passed around like contraband goods – and homosexuality was illegal, so the chances of them agreeing to be entertained by an openly gay rock star seemed almost non-existent. But Moscow was scheduled to host the Olympic Games in 1980, and I think they were looking for some positive advance publicity. They didn’t want the Soviet Union to be seen as a monolithic, grey state where fun was banned. Harvey made a request via the Foreign Office and the Russians sent an official from the state music promoter to see a gig Ray and I played in Oxford. Having established that we weren’t the Sex Pistols, and deeming us no great threat to the morals of communist youth, they gave the green light to the tour. I took my mum and Derf, a handful of British and American journalists and a film crew, fronted by the writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, to make a documentary. It felt hugely exciting, a genuine journey into the unknown, albeit one that could end at any moment with death by suffocation if the plane lost pressure.
We were met at Moscow Airport by a group of dignitaries, two girls who were going to act as our translators and an ex-army guy called Sasha. I was told he was going to be my bodyguard. Everyone else in our party automatically assumed he was spying on us for the KGB. I decided he could spy on me to his heart’s content – he was extremely good-looking, if disappointingly keen on telling me about his wife and children. We boarded a sleeper train bound for Leningrad. It was hot – I’d dressed for winter in the Siberian steppes, only to find Moscow in the grip of a sweltering heatwave – and it was uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the Russians’ fault. It was down to the fact that, through the thin wall, I could very clearly hear John Reid, in the next sleeper cabin, apparently doing his persistent best to seduce a reporter from the Daily Mail.
The hotel in Leningrad didn’t look terribly promising. The food was indescribable: fifty-seven varieties of beetroot soup and potatoes. If this was what they were serving in the best hotels, what the hell were ordinary people eating? Every floor was guarded by a stern-faced old woman, a proper Russian babushka, on the lookout for any kind of Western impropriety. But it turned out to be quite the swinging spot. The first morning we were there, the road crew turned up for breakfast looking dazed and delighted. They had learned that being from the West and having any connection to rock and roll, even carrying the speakers, made you sexually irresistible to the chambermaids. They would turn up in the room, start running a bath in order to distract the ears of the ever-vigilant babushkas, then take all their clothes off and jump on you. The hotel bar seemed to be a non-stop party, filled with people who’d travelled from Finland with the specific intention of getting as pissed as possible on cheap Russian vodka. The stuff was lethal. At one point, someone sidled up to me and, to my disbelief, handed me a joint. Here, in the middle of repressive, communist Russia, the road crew had somehow managed to source some pot. They seemed to be having all the luck. Perhaps it was rubbing off – not long afterwards, Sasha showed up and suggested we go up to my room. I was so taken aback, I brought up the subject of his wife and children unprompted. No, he said, it was fine: ‘In the army, all the men have sex with each other, because we don’t see our wives.’ So I ended the evening drunk, stoned and having sex with a soldier. I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting from my first forty-eight hours in Russia, but this definitely wasn’t it.
I still would have fallen in love with Russia even if one of its citizens hadn’t taken me to bed. The people were impossibly kind and generous. Weirdly, they reminded me of Americans: they had that same sense of instant warmth and hospitality. We were shown the Hermitage and the Summer Palace; Peter the Great’s log cabin and the Kremlin. We saw collections of Impressionist art and Fabergé eggs extraordinary enough to take your mind off what you’d be having for lunch. Everywhere we went, people tried to give us presents: bars of chocolate, soft toys, things that they must have had to save up to buy. They would press them into your hands in the street or push them through the windows of your train as it pulled out of the station. It made my mum cry: ‘These people have got absolutely nothing, and they’re giving things to you.’
The gigs were in Leningrad and Moscow, and they turned out to be fantastic. I say turned out, because they always started badly. All the best seats were given to high-ranking Communist Party officials, to ensure that the reaction was nothing more exciting than polite applause. The people who actually wanted to see me were crammed at the back. But they had reckoned without Ray Cooper. Ray is a fabulous musician, who plays the most inconspicuous instruments in the most conspicuous way imaginable. He’s like the Jimi Hendrix of the tambourine, a born frontman trapped in a percussionist’s body. And in Russia, he played as if every other wildly flamboyant performance he’d given over the years was merely a warm-up. He would goad the audience into clapping along, or run to the front of the stage and scream at them to get on their feet. It worked. The kids at the back ran down the aisles to the front. They threw flowers and asked for autographs in between songs. I’d been told not to sing ‘Back In The USSR’, so of course I did. If the KGB had been spying on me, they clearly hadn’t been spying closely enough to learn that one of the quickest ways to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it.
After the Moscow show, there were thousands of people crowded around the venue, chanting my name – far more than could possibly have been at the show. From the window of the dressing room, I threw the flowers I’d been given back to them. My mum looked on. ‘You’d be better off throwing them a tomato,’ she said, the memory of our most recent feast of beetroot soup and potatoes still fresh in her mind. ‘They’ve probably never bleedin’ seen one.’
As a PR exercise for the Soviet Union, my visit was a waste of time. Six months later, they invaded Afghanistan, and whatever international goodwill they’d built up by letting me sing ‘Bennie And The Jets’ didn’t count for much after that. But for me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Russia and with Russians. I’ve never stopped going back there, even when people have said I shouldn’t. If anything, things are worse for gay Russians under Vladimir Putin than they were in 1979, but what would I achieve by boycotting the place? I’m in a very privileged position in Russia. I’ve always been accepted and welcomed, despite the fact they know I’m gay, so I’m not afraid to speak out while I’m there. I can make statements that get reported; I can meet with gay people and people from the Health Ministry and promote the work that the Elton John AIDS Foundation does over there. I never saw Sasha again, but I later learned he was one of the first people to die of AIDS in Russia. Today it has one of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world. That isn’t going to change without negotiation, without sitting down and talking. And the debate has to start somewhere. So I keep going back, and every time I do, I say something onstage about homophobia or gay rights. Sometimes a few people walk out, but the vast majority applaud. I owe it to the Russian people to keep doing that. I owe it to myself.
If the shows with Ray Cooper taught me anything, it was that I belonged onstage. My private life was still the usual chaos of different boyfriends and drugs – at one point I was rushed from Woodside to hospital with what was reported as a heart problem, but in reality had nothing to do with my heart and everything to do with electing to play tennis against Billie Jean King in the immediate aftermath of yet another coke binge. Victim of Love aside, my albums were selling OK – its follow-up, 21 at 33, went gold in America in 1980 – but they clearly weren’t selling like they used to, even though I’d started working with Bernie again, albeit tentatively, just a couple of songs each time. Sometimes the lyrics he gave me seemed quite pointed. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out what he was driving at when he sent me a song called ‘White Lady White Powder’, a portrait of a hopeless cocaine addict. I had the brass balls to sing it as if it was about someone else.
But onstage, everything else melted away for a couple of hours. After 21 at 33 was released, I headed out on a world tour. I had re-formed the original Elton John Band – me, Dee and Nigel – and augmented them with a couple of stellar session guitarists, Richie Zito and Tim Renwick, and James Newton Howard on keyboards. For the shows with Ray, I had dressed down, leaving the theatrics to him, but now, I decided to go to town again. I contacted my old costumier Bob Mackie and a designer called Bruce Halperin and told them both to do their worst: the flares and platforms were obviously gone, in keeping with changing fashions, but Bruce came up with something that resembled a military general’s uniform covered in red and yellow thunderflashes and arrows, with lapels that looked like a piano keyboard and a peaked cap to match.
The gigs were bigger than ever. In September 1980, I played in front of half a million people in Central Park, the largest crowd I’d ever performed to. For the encore, Bob had made me a Donald Duck costume. It was a fantastic idea in theory, but the practicalities of it left a little to be desired. First of all, I couldn’t get the bloody thing on properly. I was backstage, with one arm through the leg hole and my leg through the arm, crying with laughter while everyone around urged me to get a move on: ‘There’s 500,000 people out there and they’ll think there’s no encore! They’ll think the gig’s over and go home!’ When I eventually got onstage it struck me that I should probably have had some kind of dress rehearsal to see how the outfit might work. Had I done that I might have discovered that there were two minor problems. First, I couldn’t walk in it – it had huge duck feet, like divers’ flippers. And secondly, I couldn’t sit down in it either – it had an enormous padded bum that meant the best I could manage was perching gingerly on the piano stool. I attempted to play ‘Your Song’, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Every time I caught Dee’s eye – wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as ridiculous as ever – I had a fit of the giggles. Once again, Bernie’s tender ballad of blossoming young love was decimated by my choice of stage wear.
But the duck costume aside, it was a fantastic show: perfect New York autumn weather, audience members climbing the trees to get a better view. I played ‘Imagine’, and dedicated it to John Lennon. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. He’d really gone to ground after Sean was born – probably the last thing he wanted to be reminded of was the boozy madness of 1974 and 1975. But after the gig there was a big party on the Peking, a ship that had been converted into a floating museum on the East River, and he and Yoko showed up, completely out of the blue. He was as hilarious as ever, full of excitement about making a new album, but I was too exhausted to stay long. We said we’d meet up again next time I was in New York.
The tour moved on, crossing America, then heading down to Australia. Our plane had just landed in Melbourne when a stewardess’s voice came over the tannoy, saying that the Elton John party couldn’t disembark; we had to stay onboard. It’s strange, the moment they said it, my heart sank; I just knew it meant someone was dead. My first thought was that it was my grandmother. Every time I went away and popped into the Orangery to say goodbye to her, I wondered if she’d still be there when I came back. John Reid went to the cockpit to find out what was going on, and came back in tears, looking completely bewildered. He told me John Lennon had been murdered.
I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the fact of his death, it was the brutality of how it happened. Other friends of mine had died young: first Marc Bolan in 1977 and then Keith Moon in 1978. But they hadn’t died the way John died. Marc had been killed in a car crash and Keith had basically died from an incurable case of being Keith Moon. They hadn’t been murdered, by a complete stranger, outside their home, for no reason whatsoever. It was inexplicable. It was inconceivable.
I didn’t know what to do. What could you do? Rather than flowers, I sent Yoko a huge chocolate cake. She always loved chocolate. There was no funeral to go to, and we were still in Melbourne when the memorial Yoko had asked for took place on the Sunday after his death. So we hired the city cathedral and held our own service at exactly the same time people gathered in Central Park. We sang the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, everyone crying: the band, the road crew, everyone. Later, Bernie and I wrote a song for him, ‘Empty Garden’. It was a great lyric. Not mawkish or sentimental – Bernie knew John too, and knew he would have hated anything like that – just angry and uncomprehending and sad. It’s one of my favourite songs, but I hardly ever play it live. It’s too hard to perform, too emotional. Decades after John died, we put ‘Empty Garden’ in one of my Las Vegas shows and used beautiful images of him given to us by Yoko on the screens. I still used to tear up every time I sang it. I really loved John, and when you love someone that much, I don’t think you ever quite get over their death.
A couple of years after John died, I got a phone call from Yoko. She said she needed to see me, it was urgent, I had to come to New York right away. So I got on a plane. I had no idea what it was about, but she sounded desperate. When I arrived at the Dakota, she told me she’d found a load of tapes with unfinished songs John had been working on just before he died. She asked me if I would complete them, so they could be released. It was very flattering, but I absolutely didn’t want to. I thought it was too soon; the time wasn’t right. Actually, I didn’t think the time would ever be right. Just the thought of it freaked me out. Trying to work out how to finish songs John Lennon had started writing – I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. And the idea of putting my voice on the same record as his – I thought it was horrible. Yoko was insistent, but so was I.
So it was a very uncomfortable meeting. I felt terrible after I left. Yoko thought she was honouring John’s legacy, trying to fulfil his wishes, and I was refusing to help. I knew I was right, but that didn’t make it any less depressing. (In the end, she put the songs out as they were, on an album called Milk and Honey.) In search of something to take my mind off it, I went to the cinema and watched Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I ended up laughing my head off at Mr Creosote, the disgusting man who eats until he explodes. Then I thought how funny John would have found it. It was exactly his sense of humour: surreal and biting and satirical. I could almost hear his laugh, that infectious cackle that always used to set me off. That was how I wanted to remember him. And that’s how I do remember him.