I watched Rocketman on Netflix last night and I have to say, it was worth wading through all the Wokesters’ whoppers to be able to enjoy such genius music and fantastic dancing! But one of the producers was David Furnish, Elton John’s husband, and it struck me how skilled they were in shapeshifting the life of a musical child prodigy, whose gifts opened the doors of opportunity into a life of great riches and fame, into a poor oppressed victim who was forced to be gay, take part in sex orgies and become addicted to cocaine because his white, narrow-minded, homophobic father never hugged him.
Seriously! I mean, my father never hugged me either. Practically nobody got hugs from their fathers back then, probably because many of them were suffering from untreated PTS from World War 2 … I know my Dad was. He would often awaken in the night screaming and in a cold sweat because he’d dreamt he was back in the prison camp that he’d been incarcerated in from 1940-45. It didn’t turn me gay though, because I’m not meant to be other than heterosexual. It’s in my biochemistry. People are born with different biochemistry … we don’t know why. If Elton John’s father was “homophobic” it was probably because he was just obeying the law of the times, which isn’t quite the same thing.
The age of consent for homosexual men was not reduced to 18 until 1994. Even so, being gay was your ticket into the music business in the Seventies, when Elton John was having his first hit with Your Song…for all I know, it still is. The managers of young boys desperate for fame and fortune were practically all raging queens, like Brian Epstein. Unless you were willing to take it up the rear fundament in the back alleys of Denmark Street, you couldn’t get so much as a gig, let alone a record deal with a spot on Ready Steady Go or Top of the Pops. And then you’d be passed on to the Kray Twins and other underworld luminaries, for their entertainment.
Elton John is a gifted musician and composer, but without the sublime poetry of Bernie Taupin, he would probably have never made it out of the back row of the studio session musicans. He definitely wasn’t boy band material. Off stage, he was geeky, bespectacled Reggie Dwight who descended into obesity and baldness quite early on in his career. That’s what all the elaborate costumes were about – with ever-fanciful, extraordinary head-dresses designed to hide the fact that his hair was fast disappearing – nothing to do with his father never hugging him.
Don’t get me wrong – I am very grateful for much of the John-Taupin output, which should stand in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame on its own merits. I will remember Elton John for all that …not for the subtext of this sorry hagiography, that he was the poor victim of a white, closed-minded, two-up two-down family in homophobic Pinner. I hope to the gods his poor parents have passed on now so that they don’t have to witness how the gifted son for whom they sacrificed so much has turned into such a narcissistic, self-entitled, whining little twat.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 