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Elton John: My Top 20 Faves

Twenty tracks from one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in history. Elton John wrote the music; Bernie Taupin wrote the words; they mostly did it apart.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

The partnership is the story. Elton John and Bernie Taupin answered the same 1967 advertisement in a music paper and have written together for nearly sixty years using a method that should not work: Taupin writes complete lyrics and hands them over; John sets them to music, often in under an hour, frequently without asking what they mean.

What that produced, particularly between 1970 and 1976, is one of the great runs in popular music — seven consecutive number one albums in America, and a body of songs that has proved almost indestructible.

John is also a considerable pianist with a gospel and boogie-woogie foundation, and his commitment to AIDS research and to championing other artists — he has been an unusually generous public advocate for younger musicians — is a substantial second legacy.

What to listen for

"Your Song" is the one that started it, and Taupin was seventeen when he wrote the lyric — which explains its slight awkwardness and is exactly why it works.

"Rocket Man" and "Bennie And The Jets" are the two that show the range of the partnership: one a study in loneliness, the other a piece of glam-rock theatre with a fake live audience dubbed on.

"Someone Saved My Life Tonight" is the most autobiographical thing they made — about John's near-marriage and a friend's intervention — and is the best song here.

"Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" live with George Michael at Wembley is the version most people know, and it went to number one.

"Candle In The Wind" is complicated: written about Marilyn Monroe, rewritten for Princess Diana's funeral, and in that form one of the best-selling singles ever released.

"That's What Friends Are For" with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder raised millions for AIDS research at a moment when very few public figures would touch the subject.

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" is the Beatles cover, with John Lennon playing guitar on it.

Go deeper

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) is the album, and Tumbleweed Connection (1970) — a set of songs about the American West written by two Englishmen who had never been there — is the cult favourite.

Bernie Taupin's contribution is routinely underweighted; reading the lyrics separately is instructive.

And the piano playing is worth attending to — the debt to Leon Russell and to gospel is obvious once you listen for it.

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