Elton and me
Marcus Berkmann
Arecord collection, once it grows beyond a certain size, can acquire a life of its own and swiftly leave its so-called owner behind. For instance, I like Elvis Costello as much as the next man, which is to say a bit but not that much. So how come I have nine Elvis Costello albums? A couple of years ago I also bought the double-CD compilation that came in the wake of 'She', Costello's stirring version for the film Notting Hill. You may know the compilation, because it has anything that anyone would want that Elvis Costello ever recorded. I remember thinking at the time that this would give me the chance to get rid of all those dreary old albums that were clogging up the place. I'm sure I can even remember taking them to the charity shop. And yet here they all are in my house, all nine of them, correctly filed between the Bs and Ds and laden with dust. Did they come back of their own accord, like abandoned pets?
Costello is beaten in the Beckmann collection, however, by Elton John, of whom I'm astonished to discover I have 12 albums. This may constitute an even greater mystery. Costello, after all, was once intensely fashionable. Gloomy undergraduates 20 years ago were required by statute to buy his records. But Sir Elton hasn't been fashionable in living memory. Even then it was only in America, before they found out he was bisexual (i.e. homosexual) and really called Reg. Oddly enough, those early albums haven't lost their impact. Madman Across The Water is positively rough-edged compared to some of his later work, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road may be the best album he ever made. The new one, Songs From The West Coast
(Mercury), has been widely greeted as a return to the form and techniques of those days. It's his 40th album, for God's sake. Perhaps I should be glad I've got only 12 of them.
We buy the albums — and millions of us do every year — because, by and large, they are pretty good. I have only one stinker among the dozen, 1988's Reg Strikes Back, when the knight-to-be was, by his own account, snorting cocaine with the energy and single-mindedness of an industrial vacuum cleaner. Each of the rest has at least one outstanding song; often there are several. And this from a man who for the first eight years of his career was contracted to record two albums a year; who then, after the contract expired, continued to record an album a year until the early 1990s. It's strange that, while pseuds and bores such as George Michael are taken fantastically seriously, Sir Elton is always regarded as a slightly comic, end-of-thepier figure who's always good for a few laughs on Parkinson. True, he hasn't helped himself in this regard. For years he hid behind silly glasses. Now he conceals himself under a comedy wig. But while George preens, Elton works, and loves working. It probably helps that he writes songs incredibly easily, but you wouldn't record 40 albums of them unless you genuinely enjoyed the process. He also, unusually for a rock star, seems to appreciate the work of others. Songs From The West Coast is dedicated to the young American singer/songwriter Ryan Adams. whose Heartbreaker album seems to have been much played in the various John/Furnish households. Rufus Wainwright, another young pretender, turns up on backing vocals. At heart Elton John remains a fan, and his songwriting art remains alive years after most of his contemporaries stopped bothering.
That said, Songs From The West Coast is a fairly blatant attempt to recapture critical credibility. It's noticeably less smooth than his recent albums: the vocals have been pushed back in the mix and you even hear electric guitars from time to time. (As if to confirm the old-school nature of this project, many of these guitars are played by Davey Johnstone, the straggly-haired blond wreck who played with Elton for most of the 1970s.) The actual songs, though, are
much the same as usual mainly midtempo, piano-fuelled, sometimes effortlessly tuneful, other times a little dull. I'm not sure the album is any great advance on the rest of his 1990s output, and for all the back-to-roots talk, studio artifice must count for something; on Parkinson the other week Victoria Beckham was the one to sing her new single live while Elton mimed his. Still, his vocals are better than they have been for a while — less mannered, more to the point. Elton's 40th album, then, and my 13th, which is a slightly worrying precedent to set. Reg strikes back, yet again.
Previous page
