Released - April 1970
Genre - Rock
Producer - Gus Dudgeon
Selected Personnel - Elton John (Vocals/Piano/Keyboards); Alan Parker (Guitar); Caleb Quaye (Guitar); Brian Dee (Organ); Paul Buckmaster (Cello); Terry Cox (Drums); Lesley Duncan (Backing Vocals)
Standout Track - Your Song
These days, if people ask me who my favourite solo artist is, I generally reply with either Tom Waits or David Bowie depending on what mood I'm in. If people ask me what my favourite band is, I invariably reply with Supertramp or Marillion. It's not often these days that Elton John tops my list. Not that I've painstakingly prepared a numerical list of my top artists. Granted, it's exactly the sort of thing I'd do, but these days last.fm exists to do that for you - you can take a look at my profile here if you're interested (weirdo). Last.fm informs me that these days Sir Elton sits at a comfortable number 6, squeezed in between Marillion and Pink Floyd. This seems about right, but if the question were altered ever so slightly it'd be a very different thing - if somebody were to ask me which musical artist, of any kind, has meant the most to me for the longest time, the answer, without even a second for hesitation or uncertainty, would always be Elton John. It's an opinion that too often draws ridicule or disappointment from people who feel clued up on music, and it's a terrible slight to one of the greatest musical talents of the 20th century that he's so often dismissed as a purveyor of lurid, lightweight pop. It's sadly true that Elton's career has at times sunk lower than any other major artist, but at his peak (and still to this day, in fact, given that his work over the last ten years or so has seen a massive return to form) he was able to create some of the most hard-hitting, innovative, moving and downright entertaining music on offer. As a child, Elton John's Greatest Hits would be on a near-permanent rotation for nearly every car journey or family night in, and those songs became the soundtrack to the first twelve years or so of my life. It wasn't until uni that I started diving into his full discography properly and was richly rewarded by what I found. Last year I was lucky enough to see him live at Wembley Arena with a very dear friend of mine, and it still stands as the very best gig I've ever been to. In general, the bands I go to see live are bands I've only got into within the last seven or eight years or so, but to sit and watch the music you've listened to constantly for twenty-four years being played by the man who created it is a very special experience indeed. So it is that we start dipping into his work with his 1970 self-titled album.
Elton John is actually his second album, with the earlier Empty Sky having made little impact on either the charts or the cultural consciousness. Elton's solo career followed on from unsuccessful auditions to be the lead singer of bands such as King Crimson and Gentle Giant (the thought of what on Earth King Crimson would have sounded like if somebody with Elton John's pop sensibilities had been out front leading the band makes for bizarre reflection today), and a brief stint playing piano for an unknown singer named Roger Hodgson, who would go on to become one of the two creative nuclei of Supertramp, my aforementioned favourite band of all time. It was when Elton was employed as a staff songwriter for Liberty Records in the late 60s that the seeds of his solo work were sown. After being partnered with a lyricist named Bernie Taupin in 1967, Elton started writing music for his words that would then end up as songs for Liberty artists like Lulu. Gradually, the working relationship between John and Taupin, which has become the backbone of both men's careers ever since, became so fruitful that the logical next step was to write their own material (though I use the word "their" subjectively, of course, given that Taupin, despite his enormous significance in Elton John's career, has never actually performed on any one of his records). It's an odd arrangement, and I struggle to think of a similar creative partnership anywhere in musical history, certainly not one that's lasted so long. It also poses interesting questions for the notion of the "singer-songwriter" - does it count if the person singing isn't actually singing their own words? What does it mean for the person who wrote those words to have no input into the finished song itself, and what does it mean for the person singing to have no input into the creative process that ended up with those words? Whatever strange tensions it might create in the music, it's a partnership that's created some enormously powerful music for over forty years. Taupin's lyrics themselves are rarely autobiographical, either being ambiguous and general or specifically allegorical or narrative, and as such there's a kind of universality to them - what they mean to the singer might be wholly different to what they mean to the writer or the listener. It's as if this music has been primed for us to let it mean whatever we want it to, and it's all the stronger for it.
Musically, it's easy to forget just how unusual and radical Elton John was being in assembling a fairly traditional gospel-tinged rock album that was built around the piano rather than the guitar. Though in the 50s and early 60s the likes of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had begun to pioneer the use of the piano as a principal rhythm instrument in rock & roll music, it had fallen massively out of favour during the 60s as the guitar came to dominate all popular rock music. Up until the emergence of Elton John, nobody was really playing it as their primary instrument, and it still remained an oddity up until comparatively recently. It's also easy to forget just how good he is at it - the songs collected on his records tend to be fairly simple ballads or traditional rockers, and it's not often that they become bravura showcases for his simply virtuoso abilities on the keyboards, but there's definitely a sense that he knows absolutely what he's doing in every moment and has total control over the music and the instrument. That said, producer Gus Dudgeon (formerly the producer of David Bowie's debut album on the Deram label) is canny enough to not let things become too stagnant around the piano on its own, fleshing out the sound with sounds such as the stark, austere string arrangements of "Sixty Years On" and the like. While the strings and the odd gospel chorus periodically enriches the sound, the rest of the band is generally kept low in the mix, and this is very much built around Elton and little else.
Things kick off with one of the sweetest songs in his discography and one of the best love songs of all time (as well as being the closing number at the aforementioned Wembley Arena concert), the immortal Your Song. It's a song that's become so familiar to everyone it's hardly worth going on about, except to say that few songs obsessed me or moved me quite so much as a child, and it became a song I could listen to on rotation for a whole day without ever getting tired of it. I seem to remember that the majority of my youthful aspirations and opinions about love (most of which remain unchanged due to my insistence on still having the mind of a child) were first forged to the tune of that song, and it's simply wonderful. Almost as powerful is the incredible "The Greatest Discovery," which sees Elton's tender vocals and piano accompanied by the plaintive cello of Paul Buckmaster, narrating a story of a young child finding his brand new baby brother for the first time. Though the focus is principally on ballads, however, the album still finds time to rock out in its more grandiose moments, with the closing "The King Is Dead" building from a quietly portentous opening into a bombastic closing crescendo of gospel fire.
Elton's vocals are touchingly simple, here - they're not hugely distinctive, perhaps, and have yet to develop any of the trademark qualities they would go on to take, such as the falsetto squeals of his glam rock 70s peak, but there's a touching sincerity and plainness to his unadorned take on these songs. It's largely a quietly reflective album, generally sliding into a mood of mellow contemplation rather than fiery passion, but that's no bad thing, and it serves as a hugely promising showcase for someone who would clearly go on to become one of the great songwriters of the coming decade. It wasn't until three years later that Elton really hit the big time and achieved major global success, despite the success of "Your Song" as a single, but that career peak would see the start of a gradual decline in the quality of his work as it slid into the 80s. In fact, the most consistently brilliant period of his career was everything leading up to 1973's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, consisting of a number of albums totally unfamiliar even to a lot of Elton fans. They may not be brilliant, but they show him at his creative best, and this album acts as the first in a sequence of phenomenally brilliant albums that shouldn't be given a raw deal just because of his glitzy and lightweight reputation.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
1. Your Song
2. I Need You To Turn To
3. Take Me To The Pilot
4. No Shoe Strings On Louise
5. First Episode At Hienton
6. Sixty Years On
7. Border Song
8. The Greatest Discovery
9. The Cage
10. The King Must Die
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