One of the first songs Elton John wrote for Who Believes in Angels?, his new album with the country singer Brandi Carlile, was called Your Bum is a Magnet. It didn’t make the record. In fact, during their first few weeks in the studio together, he wondered if there would even be a record.
“I was getting really wound up. I wasn’t feeling very well. I was shattered after the [2018-23 farewell] tour, but I couldn’t walk away from three other people that are committed to this.”
These other people were Carlile, an artist from Washington State of whom John is a huge fan, his long-time lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and Andrew Watt, the hit-whispering producer whose previous collaborators include the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam and Justin Bieber.
As anyone who saw the 1997 documentary Elton John: Tantrums & Tiaras will recall, pop’s original rocketman is no stranger to a strop or three. For Who Believes in Angels? he made the extraordinary decision to allow cameras in the studio: they capture an artist for whom throwing the mother of all wobblers is all part of a day’s work.
In one clip John is seated at a piano in a one-piece designer tracksuit, his face twisted into an expression of toddler-like frustration as Watt calmly explains he’s there not to get on the singer’s nerves but to serve his vision as a musician.
“Dude … I’m just trying to make the song as best as it can be,” Watt protests as John whips off his headphones in rage. “You’re so impatient, [so] angry.”
“Sometimes it’s painful trying to get to the place you want to get to when you can’t get there,” the singer admits. “I was frustrated at the beginning because I didn’t think I was doing enough to justify the lyrics that I was getting [from Taupin]. Eventually, we all came together with the first track on the album, the song about Laura Nyro, [The Rose of Laura Nyro,] who was one of my heroes, and we put that down. After that we were just rolling.”
The two collaborators are on stage at the London Palladium earliers this week – the ashes of the song-and-dance man Bruce Forsyth are buried under the stage – where they are being interviewed for a television special by the Schitt’s Creek actor Dan Levy, a lifelong Elton John fan. (His parents named him Daniel after John’s 1973 hit.)
It’s launch night for Who Believes in Angels?, and many of John’s famous friends are out in support, among them the Gen Z rock star Sam Fender, the Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, the musicals kingpin Andrew Lloyd Webber and the actor Lily James. Later, after their public interview with Levy, whose gushing can border on sycophancy, John and Carlile will return with a band that includes Watt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith to preview material from the new LP.
They won’t overdo it, however. In his 2019 autobiography, Me, John recalls with great pain a concert at Wembley in the mid-1970s where he played the entirety of his new album even though it had yet to be released. He immediately sensed the audience’s indifference and boredom as he pummelled them with unfamiliar material – a mistake he was determined never to repeat.
To that end, the Who Believes in Angels? party soon throws off its cape to reveal its true, more fabulous guise of a pocket-sized Elton John greatest-hits performance – great fun even if it does mean skipping the best song from the new collection, the aforementioned Rose of Laura Nyro. It’s a richly operatic number that harks back to the John classics Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Rocket Man in its reach and ambition. It was also the composition that convinced John that his collaboration with Carlile had legs after all, as he explains to Levy.
“We went in with nothing, and we came out with three weeks later with an album,” he says. “So once it got rolling it was really like a freight train going a long, long way along that line. It was just roaring. And then, of course, after I’ve seen some of the [footage of the tantrums] ... I’m glad it’s there, because it’s painful making music.”
As with many great pop stars, Elton John is full of contradictions. His cantankerous streak is a matter of public record – in his biography he explains that he has inherited his short fuse from his parents but also notes that other artists, such as his dear friend John Lennon, could be difficult too. Perhaps it’s just part of the eternal struggle for greatness.
But he has also gone above and beyond in supporting a younger generation of musicians. On stage in London, Carlile recalls John giving her an expensive guitar and urging her to compose louder, rockier songs. He’s also an advocate for Irish up-and-comers – he has interviewed the Irish-language rappers Kneecap on his Apple Music radio show and described Fontaines DC as “the best band out there at the moment”.
[ Elton John: Legalising cannabis is one of the greatest mistakes of all timeOpens in new window ]
“It’s so wonderful, because I like to look ahead – I know the past – and I like to encourage an artist,” he says. “If I like them I like to phone them up or have them interviewed on [the radio] show, and keep in touch and encourage them. You know, sometimes it takes a little while for someone like Chappell Roan to happen – six years, in fact. And for someone like Sabrina Carpenter, you made six albums. Charli XCX has been around for a long time.”
He speaks with real emotion – and it becomes clear to Carlile that his feelings were close to the surface early in the making of Who Believes in Angels? Israel had just started bombing Gaza, and John was overwhelmed: with so much suffering in the world, recording an album felt so trivial. A conversation to that end inspired Carlile to write one of the collection’s emotional centrepieces, a bruised ballad called A Little Light, which celebrates the healing power of music.
If I speak out about governments, then what’s going to happen to the Aids money? I have an Aids foundation that depends on money. I will go there and fight for it as much as I can, but I cannot go out and say, ‘You’re an asshole’
“One particular morning, when we were making our record in October of last year, I went around to Elton’s, and he had his newspapers all over his plates and crumbs everywhere. He was in an awful state. And I sat down across from him, and he was upset by the goings on, and he said, ‘I just don’t think now is the time to make an album … What we’re doing, it’s too light for this. If we’re not going to write about this, if we’re not going to address this conflict, then I can’t see us doing anything.’ And I didn’t have a response right then. I went kind of quiet and inside, and then I walked away, and I wrote A Little Light.”
A Little Light was an invaluable gift to John: it told him it was okay just to write songs and bring joy to people. “It reminded me that I’m a musician. All I can do to heal anything is put music out in the world and bring people together. And that song we recorded that day, it’s such a joyous song, and it needed to be a joyous song. [It] proved to me that, ‘Yeah, forget it. You can’t do anything about this. Just make songs, please. Bring people together.’ That’s exactly what you do.”
John has never been explicitly political, on stage or off. That won’t change, despite his campaigning work for his charity, the Elton John Aids Foundation, and for the White House President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. With Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the US federal government, there are obvious concerns about Pepfar’s future, but John believes it is better to persuade than to condemn.
“I cannot speak out about government,” he says. “I’m a diplomat. If I speak out about governments, then what’s going to happen to the Aids money? What’s going to happen to Pepfar? I’ve got people’s lives to [protect]. I have an Aids foundation that depends on money. I will go there and fight for it as much as I can, but I cannot go out and say, ‘You’re an asshole. You’re an asshole.’
“That’s not what it’s about. You have to negotiate. You have to play the game. And, to be fair, all the governments, since [George W Bush] initiated Pepfar, including Donald Trump, have kept Pepfar going. It looks a little shaky now, but I’m going to go there and fight for it. If I have to go face to face [with Trump], I will.”
Who Believes in Angels? has many emotional moments. One of the most moving is You Without Me, in which Carlile writes about her daughters, aged seven and 10, and her complex feelings about watching them grow up. Introducing the tune at the Palladium, she says that she set out to capture the moment every parent comes to know eventually when their child hugs them or holds their hand for the last time. It’s about letting go – but also about watching with pride as your kid becomes their own person.
Elton John was riveted by Carlile’s insights into parenting. He and his husband, David Furnish, have two children, who are 14 and 10, and he speaks with huge joy about the rituals of everyday life: trips to Pizza Express and gossip with other parents at the school gates. He finds these experiences as rewarding as headlining Madison Square Garden or having a number-one record.
“The greatest gift that I ever had was my first son, Zachary, apart from David. Zachary was born on the 25th of December, 14 years ago, and he was my greatest gift ever. [When] David and I decided to have children we said, ‘What? What’s our life purpose? We have the Aids foundation. We are two affluent gay men going around the world for what? What do we leave the world?’
“And David said, ‘Let’s have children.’ We tried to adopt a boy in the Ukraine. It didn’t work. And I said, ‘That little boy told me that I could become a good dad.’ And we had our two children, and they are the greatest gifts I’ve ever had. It’s changed my life. It’s changed David’s life. It’s given me a new perspective on what life should be ... They teach me something every day, and all I want on my tombstone is nothing to do with Crocodile f**king Rock. I just want it to say ‘He was a great dad.‘”
The venue breaks into applause as he says this. Later, when the performance begins, one standing ovation follows another. At the age of 78, and two years after the conclusion of his farewell tour, Elton John is a long way from burning out. “I want to do something different,” he says. “I don’t want to coast. I knew I would find [Carlile] inspiring, and I knew she would find me inspiring.” He pauses to adjust his sunglasses. “I wanted this album to be special.”
Who Believes in Angels? is released on Friday, April 4th. An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile will be shown in the US, on CBS, on Sunday, April 6th, and in the UK, on ITV, on Saturday, April 19th
