‘Bulimia, drugs, alcohol. It made him completely irrational’: Bernie Taupin on his delirious decades at the top with Elton John

In 1973, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics for Elton John’s music for “Candle in the Wind”, a ballad that was a eulogy to Marilyn Monroe. It reached number five in the charts and became one of Elton’s defining songs. Then, in 1997, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, he rewrote the words in 30 minutes. It became the bestselling single in UK and US chart history.

And what can he recall of the updated words? Not a syllable. “If you put a gun to my head right now and threatened to kill me if I didn’t recite the lyric, I’d be a dead man,” Taupin writes in his new memoir Scattershot (Life, Music, Elton and Me). Is that really true?

“Well, you have to remember it was only performed a couple of times,” begins Taupin, 73, video-calling from his home in smalltown southern California. One of those times, notably, was at her funeral, watched by somewhere between 2 and 2.5 billion people worldwide. “Once Elton performed it at Westminster Abbey and then recorded it with George Martin the same day and it was released, I never heard it. I know it got played constantly on the radio, but I didn’t really listen to the radio, so I never got to hear it.”

In fact, Elton’s songwriting partner – appropriately exceedingly wealthy, going 50/50 on the pair’s decades of hits – can’t remember the words or even the creation of a fair few of their songs. Early in the courtship of his current, fourth wife, the couple were watching, in a Fort Worth hotel room, an episode of US game show Jeopardy! “The category was Elton John lyrics. There were six and I only got three right,” he admits, unabashed. “I’d be going: ‘Ooh, ooh, I know that!’ My memory for things like that is a little tarnished.”

“Rocket Man”, “Your Song”, “Tiny Dancer”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “I’m Still Standing”: these are indelible global hits all, full of vivid, relatable (and also occasionally obtuse) imagery, songs that sounded like they came straight from the heart of the man singing them, even if they’re less indelible to their lyric writer.

Lincolnshire born and bred but transatlantically accented, Taupin first landed in the US with Elton on 21 August 1970, for now-storied, career-igniting shows at Los Angeles’ Troubadour club – and the Wild West-obsessed 20-year-old barely left American soil again, except to tour with Elton. But the longer we talk, the more his vowels flatten, in defiance of his five-decade Stateside domicile.

Our conversation is peppered with me reminding him of brilliant songs he co-wrote, about which his memories are spotty and/or his opinions are mixed. Case in point: “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”. That 1976 duet with Kiki Dee gave Elton his first UK Number One and his sixth in the US, and won Taupin/John the Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. It took a half-cut Taupin 10 minutes, dunking his head in an ice bucket to try to clear away the alco-fog. He was at the time in the middle of a drinking session (another one) in Barbados, his Caribbean base for many a boozy escapade in the 1970s.

“Well, I still don’t think that’s a class A lyric,” this hale and hearty, baseball-capped father of two teenage daughters tells me with a sanguine shrug. “It certainly fits the song. It’s not ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, you know?” Taupin says of the 11-minute-plus 1966 epic by Bob Dylan. He’s one of the English farmer’s lad’s songwriting heroes, although still not someone about whom he’s above being waspish in his sharply-written autobiography – Dylan is “a man who has never concerned himself with losing out in order to remain contrary”.

“It does the job,” Taupin continues of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, which has over 650 million plays on Spotify. “I try to present the best thing I possibly can. But I subscribe to what Duke Ellington said, ‘The thing I like best is the thing I’m gonna do tomorrow’.”

Taupin and the artist formerly known as Reg Dwight met in late 1967, in the London offices of music publisher Dick James. The book-loving, poetry-breathing son of the soil from the village of Owmby-by-Spital, 17, and the melodically-gifted piano player from Pinner, 20, had individually responded to an ad in NME: the record label Liberty “wants talent – artists/composers, singer-musicians, to form new group”.

Their separate meetings at Liberty in Mayfair had now sent them here, to a small studio at the back of James’s offices – “palatial” on account of his being The Beatles’ publisher. A door opens, and in walks destiny. “Enter Reg Dwight, asking if there might be a Bernie Taupin in the room,” writes Taupin, a self-confessed country bumpkin alarmed by what he’s seen of Swinging Sixties London fashion. “I don’t know Reg, but I love him already. He’s refreshingly square, chunky with Buddy Holly glasses and a kind face. More so, imperative to my dignity, he is unadorned by embroidery and crushed velvet.”

And they were off, simpatico musical partners and best friends. The pair’s success was practically out-of-the-box, their material prodigious, the quality staggering. Second album Elton John (1970) opened with “Your Song”. It was followed six months later by third album Tumbleweed Connection. A year later, Madman Across the Water (the one with “Tiny Dancer”). Six months later, in January 1972, Honky Chateau, rocket-powered by “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be a Long, Long Time)”.

A hit-rate like that meant that, despite Taupin’s best efforts, even he was dragged into the spotlight. That February ’72, a writer from Beat Instrumental witnessed an Elton show at Fairfield Hall in Croydon: “Bernie was mobbed as he left the dressing room. Crowds of girls rushed towards him and called ‘Bernie! Bernie!’ In his own words, he wasn’t ready for that.”

“I have no recollection of that whatsoever!” laughs Taupin of a show early in a career-long concert tally that, this summer, as Elton John finally completed his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, topped out at over 5,000 gigs. “Being mobbed by a bunch of teenage girls? I think I’d remember something like that.”

Certainly in the decades following, Taupin avoided any kind of mobbing, retreating in the Nineties to a life as a Californian rancher (the Brown Dirt Cowboy to Elton’s Captain Fantastic) and competitively riding rodeo horses. What he didn’t avoid were the high-flying indulgences of the era. In his book he holds up his hands to his excesses with alcohol and cocaine. But while he managed to knock the latter on the head in the 1980s, his musical partner, infamously, had a much more torrid time of it. In Scattershot, Taupin writes of the autumn ’89 North American leg of Elton’s Sleeping with the Past tour.

“He was definitely in the worst depth of addiction at that particular time,” he tells me. “Bulimia, drugs, alcohol. It made him completely irrational.”

For Taupin, it was both horrible and emotionally draining to see his friend in such a state. But back then interventions were “not prevalent”, and equally those around Elton were “not in the depth of addiction in the way that he was, but we had our own crosses to bear.

“Luckily, he found a way into rehabilitation. He was his own hero. He did the heavy lifting and got to a point where he realised he had to do something, or possibly die… I was just the benefactor of his redemption after, and was the first one there to congratulate him and say: ‘It’s going to be OK’.” That scene, in Chicago, played out in 2019 biopic Rocketman, in which Jamie Bell played Taupin to Taron Egerton’s Elton. “Hopefully that’s where I came in as a true friend and someone who encouraged him and pointed him in the right direction.”

Elton, for sure, concurs. “When I saw that scene, I cried,” the singer said recently. “I realised that without him, my life was miserable… He was the glue that held me together.”

One close friend of the pair has his own take on that sentiment. Speaking to the unmatched longevity of their collaboration – one which is currently kicking into gear again, now that the touring-free Elton has more recording-studio time available – Paul Gambaccini observes that “they have a unique quality in their partnership which is that there is a single authorial voice. It doesn’t occur to anybody listening that Elton didn’t write the words. Because they sound so legitimately Elton-ish.”

As pointed out by the broadcaster and music historian – who’s interviewing Taupin on stage at three UK events next week – “somehow it sounds as if the songs are coming from inside Elton. How is this possible? Part of it is because Bernie knows Elton so well – but also because Elton knows Bernie so well. One thing you learn reading Scattershot is that some of Elton’s biggest hits were actually cris de coeur from Bernie about his life situation at that point.”

He cites 1983 smash “I’m Still Standing”. “Everybody’s always thought that that was Elton, defiant to the world, after a period where he wasn’t as successful as he had been,” says Gambaccini. “And he comes back with a great album, Too Low for Zero. No: it was about Bernie’s personal life. Even I didn’t know that.”

Taupin is a man who will plead ignorance or amnesia concerning some of his greatest moments. Who will blithely downplay his songwriting achievements – away from Elton, he also co-wrote Starship’s “We Built This City” and Heart’s “These Dreams”, hugely lucrative radio staples but a pair of tunes about which he’s at best ambivalent. So I ask him: is it exposing to have the truth about some of his lyrics now out there?

“Not at all,” he says coolly. “Yeah, ‘I’m Still Standing’ was a kiss-off to a former girlfriend which I now completely regret because we’re very good friends. But you can’t turn back time. So I much prefer that people think of it as an anthem for Elton’s will to survive and come back stronger than ever.”

What about a recent Guardian headline: “Even after 300 million album sales, why is Elton John’s lyricist still underrated?” – how would Bernie Taupin answer that? He stiffens ever-so-slightly before settling back into this default, not-bothered setting.

“I don’t think I’m underrated. If people want to believe that… Am I regarded in the same breath as people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen? I write different songs.

“I don’t spend my off-time worrying about whether I’m appreciated or not. We’ve sold enough records to prove that we’re pretty well-appreciated. I don’t think about those things. It’s not important to me. I do what I do, I tell stories. If people appreciate them, that’s fine. But I’m not interested in being in somebody’s top 10.”

He writes the songs the whole world sings. So what if he can’t remember them all? Everyone else can.

‘Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me’ is out now in hardback