Elton John Quotes

Island girl,
What you wanting with the white man's world?
Island girl,
Black boy want you in his island world.
He want to take you from the racket boss,
He want to save you but the cause is lost.

`Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia Eagle Jacket freedom.
From the day that I was born I've waved the flag.
Philadelphia freedom took me knee-high to a man.
Yeah gave me peace of mind my daddy never had. Oh Philadelphia freedom shine on me, I love you.
Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind.
Shine a light, shine a light
Shine a light, won't you shine a light.
Philadelphia freedom I love you, yes I do.

No drugs, except maybe poppers.

It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know what’s around the corner. Maybe that gave me some real clarity about what was important to me about life. Why try and deny how you really feel, deep down, about something as fundamental as fatherhood?

And love lies bleeding in my hand.
Oh it kills me to think of you with another man.
I was playing rock and roll and you were just a fan.
But my guitar couldn't hold you,
So I split the band.
Love lies bleeding in my hands.

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.

It’s hard to see how I could have been given a clearer warning that this was a bad idea unless it had started raining brimstone and I’d been visited by a plague of boils.

For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened.

At first I stayed in a hotel – the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth, that I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true.

He was a typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character.

And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.

Either I was genetically predisposed to losing my rag, or I unconsciously learned by example. Whichever it was, it has proved a catastrophic pain in the arse for me and everyone around me for most of my adult life.

Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just happened.

Goodbye Norma Jean
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something more than sexual
More than just our Marilyn Monroe

It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then.