When we listen to Elton John we also listen to Bernie Taupin. “I’m not the man they think I am at home…” “I remember when rock was young…” “And it seems to me that you lived your life…” Melodies from a flamboyant showman; words from a sphinx. Hiding in the shadows these 50 years, Elton’s lyricist at last presents Scattershot, a memoir which should answer all and any questions.
We begin in Lincolnshire, where Taupin grew up on a chicken farm. Leaving school at 15, his young mind flooded by the sounds of America, he answered an NME ad for songwriters which soon paired him with a squat pianist from Pinner called Reg. “We believed in tomorrow,” he recalls touchingly, “because we believed in each other.” They write bad songs, better songs, then Your Song, and the reader is primed for the story of one of pop’s great partnerships.
Yet at this still early juncture the narrative simply collapses. Indelible classics are created, drugs binged on and tantrums thrown, but hazily, inbetweenishly. A thirsting reader can’t claim they weren’t warned when even the title promises aimlessness. “Writing songs and making music,” Taupin muses, “is always either partly cloudy or completely unrecollectable.”
About halfway in, after the author has at some length recollected good times had with his chauffeur, his deep-sea fishing instructor and his waterski coach, you sigh and accept that there will be no chapter and verse on the inner workings. Taupin seems defiant about this. Why dwell on ancient lyrics he dashed off in ten minutes? He didn’t even care about Marilyn (or Diana), so there.
No, this messy chronicle is not about how Taupin made his money. It’s about how he spent it. Enter the barflies, the cowboys, the long-legged women – if not two of the four wives, whom he ungallantly disdains to name. “Certain parties,” he fumes, “have and remain [sic] living high on the hog from my poorly executed moves.” There are stellar cameos – “celebrity entwinement”, he calls it – for John Lennon and Princess Margaret, plus a truly toe-curling tête-à-tête with Graham Greene. But as often as not he’ll introduce “my old friend” Billy Connolly or Leonard Nimoy or Kirk Douglas and then say nothing more about them.
It’s unclear if Taupin can’t remember, or won’t. Binges are revisited in coy code (“Things took a distinctly debauched turn… a day that will live in infamy… I won’t go into detail”). When he does go into detail, there is a crushing rockfall of verbiage about properties, horses, painting and the band he fronted/bankrolled. But Taupin’s incuriosity about the songs that made him rich isn’t the book’s greatest frustration. The more striking calamity is his tin ear for prose. Consider “Your Song”. The lyrics were written, he writes, as Reg’s mother “fried up a couple of eggs slotted in some toast”. That jumbled image might work in a song. It doesn’t in a memoir.
