(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 25 October 2025 7:00, UK
Few musicians enjoyed the opulent hedonism of the 1970s quite like Elton John.
“This is how bleak it was: I’d stay up, I’d smoke joints, I’d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I’d stay up for three days and then I’d go to sleep for a day and half,” he once proclaimed in 2010, and that’s describing a bender without his weapon of choice, which we all know was a bag full of cocaine.
Many have often wondered how he managed to get through the decade alive, let alone as one of the most decorated musicians of all time. But an answer to his enduring greatness during that time might just be to do with the fact that his premier album of the decade came in 1973, a year of relative sobriety that preceded the oncoming hedonism.
“I didn’t even know what a joint was when I made Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. That all changed when I made the next record, but in 1973, I was very naïve. And the naiveté is the most pleasant thing about this record, probably,” he once admitted.
What Elton may view as naiveté was profundity to the rest of the world. His songs on the record showcased the sort of human touch that his drug-addled ramblings couldn’t otherwise achieve, with ‘Candle In The Wind’, ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’ all displaying his and Bernie Taupin’s songwriting diversity.
Come the release, the pair felt outrightly on a hot streak. The lead singles had captured the attention of the entire world, who then dived head-first into the record. There was clearly an insatiable appetite amongst music fans, and Elton was somewhat keen to feed it, releasing more tracks from the album as standalone singles.
He explained the thought process: “We could have put out other singles like ‘Harmony’ and sold even more records. In those days, a record was off the radio after eight or nine weeks. These days, you look at the Adult Contemporary charts and it’s like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This record came out two and a half years ago!’ We could have kept going with singles, but we’d already finished Caribou by the time ‘Bennie and the Jets’ came out as a single. We were ready to move on.”
They were so prolific that they inevitably had to move on to the next project, keeping ‘Harmony’ as an album track, shifting focus onto a record that boasted compelling singles in ‘The Bitch is Back’ and ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’.
While that may have felt like an easy transition given the success of the latter single, it wasn’t until George Michael delivered a rousing rendition of the Elton hit that it became the acclaimed track we now know it as. In fact, it didn’t initially strike a chord with audiences and Elton himself labelled it one of his least favourite songs.
If you want to get a grasp of just how prolific Elton and Taupin were during this period, their dismissal of one of his most famous songs should just about do it.
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