For the previous 5 a long time, Bernie Taupin has remained principally silent whereas his larger-than-life songwriting accomplice, Elton John, informed their unbelievable saga from his personal perspective, together with within the pages of his 2019 autobiography Me. That’s going to vary on Sept. 12 when Taupin releases his personal e-book, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, And Me.
“It was by no means my intention to write down a standard A to Z autobiography,” Taupin says in an announcement. “I started a couple of years again composing essays and observations on my life that finally gained momentum and began to appear like a e-book. From then on, it turned an extended, arduous activity that was each exhilarating and liberating. It was additionally numerous enjoyable and immensely useful in blowing the mud off numerous what I’d forgotten about. Hopefully, there’s one thing in it for everyone. It’s contemplative, self-assessing, and makes an attempt to remain off the overwhelmed path in not regurgitating what’s already been written. Nonlinear, it’s an exploratory journey bouncing backwards and forwards alongside the a long time.”
The e-book will soar throughout time and contact upon key moments in Taupin’s life and profession. “Readers go to Los Angeles with Bernie and Elton on the cusp of world fame,” reads a press launch. “We spend time in Australia at an notorious rock ‘n’ roll resort in an countless blizzard of medication and spend late-night hours with John Lennon, Bob Marley, and Frank Sinatra. And past the world of fashionable music, we witness memorable encounters with writers like Graham Greene, painters like Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, and scores of notable misfits, miscreants, eccentrics, and geniuses, identified and unknown. And naturally, even when they’re not well-known in their very own proper, they’re stars on the web page, and we uncover how they impressed the indelible lyrics to songs equivalent to ‘Tiny Dancer,’ ‘Candle within the Wind,’ ‘Bennie and The Jets,’ and so many extra.”
Courtesy of Hachette Books
Taupin met John in 1967 when a file govt handed the singer an envelope of his lyrics and urged they may make a very good crew. It’s one of the crucial enduring partnerships within the historical past of fashionable music, although the 2 males reside radically totally different existence since John is commonly on the street and Taupin is a homebody. “I couldn’t reside his life,” Taupin informed Rolling Stone in 2015. “I might relatively drill myself within the head with a nail gun than do what he does. And it’s what retains him younger. It’s what retains him going. I’m positive he will get very drained at occasions. It’s obtained to run him down, however he doesn’t play to make a residing. He performs as a result of he likes to do it. He likes to be in entrance of that crowd. The extra they offer him, the extra he provides again. That’s the drug he’s on proper now.”
They haven’t launched a group of recent songs since 2016’s Fantastic, Loopy Night time, although Taupin has given John lyrics for an album they hope to file after the conclusion of the Farewell Yellow Brick Street tour. When Taupin spoke with Rolling Stone in 2020, he mentioned there was no motive the 2 wouldn’t proceed to write down songs collectively into their eighties. “I’m chomping on the bit to do it,” Taupin mentioned. “It goes all the way in which again to Day One. I’m in all probability equally passionate about working now as I used to be again then. Again then, there was at the back of my thoughts the plain probability that perhaps this wasn’t going to work out. I believe I mentioned, ‘I’ll do that for a few months, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll go into promoting.’ The keenness degree has not gone down one iota. I’m simply raring to go.”