 Me, by Elton John. Read by Taran Egerton with Elton John. This book is dedicated to my husband David and to our beautiful son Zachary and Elijah. Special thanks to Alexis Petridis, without whom this book would not have been possible. Prologue. I was on stage at the Latino Club in South Shields when I realized I couldn't take it anymore. It was one of those supper clubs that were all over Britain in the 60s and 70s, all virtually identical. People dressed in suits, seated at tables, eating chicken and a basket, and drinking wine under bottles covered in wicker. Fringe lampshades and flock wallpaper. Cabaret and a compere and a bow tie. It felt like a throwback to another era. Outside it was the winter of 1967 and rock music was shifting and changing so fast that it made my head spin, just thinking about it. The Beatles' magical mystery tour and the Mothers of Invention, The Who Sell Out and Axis Boulder's Love, Dr. John and John Wesley Harding. Inside the Latino, the only way you could tell the swinging sixes had happened, at all, was because I was wearing a kaftan and some bells on a chain around my neck. They didn't really suit me. I looked like a finalist in a competition to find Britain's least convincing flower child. The kaftan and the bells were long John Boulders' ideas. I was the organ player in his backing band, Bluezology. John had spotted all the other R&B bands going psychedelic. One week you'd go and see Zoop Money's big role-band playing James Brown songs. The next you'll find they were calling themselves Dantallion's chariot, wearing right robes on stage and singing about how World War III was going to kill all the flowers. He decided we should follow suit, sartorially, at least. So we all got kaftans. Cheaper ones for the backing musicians, while John's was specially made at Take Six in Carnaby Street. Or at least he thought they were specially made until we played a gig, and he saw someone in the audience wearing exactly the same kaftan as him. He stopped in the middle of a song and started shouting angrily at him. Where do you get that shirt? That's my shirt! This I felt rather ran contrary to the kaftans' association with peace and love and universal brotherhood. I adored Long John Bouldery. He was absolutely hilarious, deeply eccentric, outrageously gay, and a fabulous musician, maybe the greatest twelve-string guitarist the UK had ever produced. He'd been one of the major figures in the British blues boom of the early sixties, playing with Alexis Corner and Cyril Davis and the Rolling Stones. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues, and just being around him was an education. He introduced me to so much music that I'd never heard before. But more than that, he was an incredibly kind, generous man. He had a knack of spotting something in musicians before anyone else could see it, then nurturing them, taking the time to build their confidence. He did it with me, and before that he'd done it with Rod Stewart, who'd been one of the singers in Steampacket, John's previous band. Rod, John, Julie Driscoll, Brian Orger, they were incredible, but then they split up. The story I heard was that one night after a gig in Saint-Tropez, Rod and Julie had an argument, and Julie threw red wine over Rod's white suit. And I'm sure you could imagine how well that went down. And that was the end of Steampacket. So Bluesology had got the gig as John's backing band instead, playing hip soul clubs and blues cellars all over the country. It was great fun, even if John had some peculiar ideas about music. We played the most bizarre sets. We'd start out doing really hard driving blues, times getting tougher than tough, Hoochie-coochie-man, and the audience would be in the palm of their hand. But then John would insist we played the threshing machine, a sort of smutty, West Country novelty song, the kind of thing rugby players sing when they're pissed, like Twas on the Good Ship Venus or Eskimo Nel. John would even sing it in an UR accent. And after that he'd want us to perform something from the Great American Songbook. It was a very good year, or every time we say goodbye, which enabled him to do his impersonation of Delores, the American jazz singer. I don't know where he got the idea that people wanted to hear him playing the threshing machine or doing an impersonation of Delores, but bless him, he remained absolutely convinced that they did, in the face of some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. You'd look out on the front row, and people who'd come to hear blues, legend Long John Bullery, and just see a line of mods all chewing gum and staring at us in complete horror. What the fuck is this guy doing? It was hilarious, even if I was asking myself the same question. And then, catastrophe struck. Long John Bullery had a- Sample complete. Ready to continue?