Peter Viney's Blog

Rocketman

Written by Lee Hall
Directed by Dexter Fletcher

Produced by Elton John and David Furnish

Taron Egerton as Elton John
Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin
Richard Madden as John Reid
Stephen Graham as Dick James
Bryce Dallas Howard as Sheila, Elton’s mother
Gemma Jonesas Ivy, Elton’s grandmother
Steven Mackintosh as Stanley, Elton’s father
Tom Bennett as Fred, Sheila’s boyfriend
Charlie Rowe as Ray Williams
Matthew Illesley- child Elton
Kit Connor- teenage Elton

I once vowed not to review DVDs, but I tried to see this Elton John biopic all summer, and failed, so am reviewing it right after the DVD release on Monday. The theatrical release still has a life on the secondary community cinema circuit.

The script by Lee Hall was instigated by Elton John, and approved by him, and Elton and husband David Furnish are the producers, and the film is released by their Rocket Pictures company.  So we must accept that it tells an internal truth about his life which he finds important. They do say in advertising “Based on a true fantasy” after all.

Elton at AA

The story starts, frequently comes back to, and ends with Elton at an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting where he cheerfully admits his addiction to alcohol, a wide range of drugs, sex, food and shopping.  He arrives there right off stage in his full Rocketman costume. Yes, there is a serial effect of an addictive personality which can be explored. An old friend who had similar issues told me that once he’d got sober and started going to the gym, he found he was increasing his amount of exercise every day, and realized he was getting hooked on the endorphins produced by exercise. So those Lycra clad cyclists racing around at high speed pedalling like hamsters on a wheel are addicts.

I had heard only good about the film and the first fifteen minutes are encouraging. It’s a powerful start, then we flashback to his childhood in Pinner. His father’s an unloving monster, his mum’s idea of recreation is apparently screwing her boyfriend in a car outside the house in broad daylight. Neither of them show him love.

It’s a semi-musical. Elton’s songs play behind scenes, with Taron Egerton singing, either on or off camera. The street scene (with I Want Love) has the street in muted washed out 50s colours, with the Reg Dwight (or Elton) figure as Rocketman in full colour, and the whole street breaking into dance.

I Want Love … best thing in the entire film and it comes VERY early on

At this point, I’m into ‘Phew! This is going to rate alongside Across The Universe’ (I have no higher praise for a semi-musical than that). Young Reg begins his piano lessons at the Royal Academy of Music by proving that he can play the teacher’s complex Bach piece by ear on first hearing. Reg starts singing in pubs, and we have a second fabulous dance / fight scene (to Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting)  and the film is really motoring …

Then I start to have problems with the story. We have to accept that as backing to the narrative, any of Elton’s songs can appear at any point and there is no biographical  / historical chronology to the selections. OK. Then we move into his rock career. We only see Bluesology as a pub band (I saw them a couple of times later when they were college / ballroom circuit, NOT a pub band, and no, like everyone else, I have no specific recall of Reg on stage, but I do recall they were way above the average). The first six years of his musical career are compressed into a few months at most. Bluesology backed American acts, such as Major Lance, Patti Labelle & The Bluebelles and The Drifters around the UK. That bit’s good, the acts are not named, though I assume it’s Major Lance who kisses the young Reg Dwight on the mouth, recognizing what no one including Reg knew.  That’s not because Major Lance was known to be gay, but because the actor looked like him. Reg’s time with Long John Baldry (another time I must have seen Reg Dwight play piano) is eradicated entirely, and Long John is a much more likely candidate for the mouth kiss than the American soul singer.

Reg is discovered by Ray Williams, who puts him together with lyricist Bernie Taupin. Ray Williams in the film works for Dick James. Not true, as I immediately knew. He was the first A&R man when the US label Liberty opened its London offices in 1967 and advertised for artistes, among whom were Reg, Bernie, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and The Idle Race (with Jeff Lynne). I have their Liberty debut LP. So the story is compressed. Reg and Bernie were working together as songwriters back in 1967, while Reg continued his day job (or night job) as a keyboard player. Philip Normans Elton biography notes song titles: Regimental Sergeant Zippo and Year of The Teddy Bear. 

Dick James in his earlier incarnation as a crooner … the real one

Dick James is a marvellous creation on this screen played by Stephen Graham as a legendary effing and blinding East End cockney manager … think Don Arden or Peter Grant. In the film this pantomime rock impresario is fun. As those who knew him have raced to point out, Dick James wasn’t anything like that. He was a music publisher, old school dance band / sheet music era. His luck came when Brian Epstein knew no one in the business, and so approached Dick James to deal with The Beatles music publishing, and his empire soon included Gerry & The Pacemakers and the Hollies. Mr 10% is what they called managers, even if 20% was the norm by that time. Because no one realized the money in the “music publishing” copyrights, Dick James was Mr 50% on that side of things. Philip Norman’s Elton biography records that young Reg was so impressed by Dick James because he was the guy who sang the Robin Hood TV theme back in 1955. To my generation that was major status. A~s a vocalist, he also charted with Garden of Eden (UK #18). He worked well with Elton in the early days because he was avuncular rather than confrontational. People who rob you with a fountain pen (Dylan’s line) often are.

Anyway, the initial success of Elton John led to DJM Records (Dick James Music). Again in the film, Elton borrowed his first name from sax player Elton Dean. He decides on “John” from a picture of The Beatles on Dick’s office wall. It is in even the shortest Elton bios that he chose John  from Long John Baldry.

Then Bernie Taupin hands him pages of lyrics including songs like Daniel from six years in the future. Through gritted teeth, I mutter, ‘Song chronology is irrelevant. It’s a psychological journey.’ They bond on a love of country and western, and Reg Dwight’s real life audition piece was Jim Reeves’ He’ll Have To Go, though here they discuss Streets of Laredo. They agree they like ‘cowboy music’ though nowhere is it noted that Tumbleweed Connection was inspired by their love of The Band. (Note also Levon from Madman Across The Water.)

They collaborate on Border Song get chucked out of his landlady’s house (again, fiction – standing in for a real girlfriend) and have to move in with Elton’s mum where they write Your Song. Elton admits to Bernie that he is homosexual.

Elton at home. Bernie (Jamie Bell) in the doorway

What they miss entirely, apart from his being a member of Long John Baldry’s band, is his session work over several years. Philip Norman says he is one of the backing voices on Tom Jones’ Delilah. He recorded around fifty cover sessions for the budget labels, such as Avenue EPs and Hallmark’s Top of The Pops LPs, and some of these have been collected on CD. I know this well because I had to don a dirty mac and balaclava and buy the hated Daily Express who issued them as cover discs:

The covers are the hits of 1969 to 1970 so go right up to the release of the Elton John album. Young, Gifted and Black and Love of The Common People may not be his natural genre but he does a great job of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Travelin’ Band and Up Around The Bend.

The story is that Elton was so grateful to Avenue for years of work, that he helped them out. Your Song was a hit and Avenue were complaining they had no one to do a budget cover, so Elton slipped into the studio and covered himself.

Elton (Taron Egerton) and Bernie (Jamie Bell)

Well before they made the Empty Sky LP Elton and Bernie were writing commercially, and Lulu recorded one of their songs I Can’t Go On Living Without You for the Eurovision Song Contest. She later said she loathed the winner, Boom Bang-A-Bang and had assumed Elton and Bernie’s song would be the winner.

When Elton gets sent off to the Troubadour in Hollywood to launch his American career in the film, someone (Ray?) says they have put together a band for him. Hang on, I found that particularly far off the mark. After six years gigging and session work, Elton knew a lot of musicians. In an early DJM session in 1969, he backed Roger Hodgson’s pre-Supertramp single Mr Boyd as Argosy, along with Caleb Quaye and Nigel Olsson.  Elton’s band was put together in April 1970 with Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums, and the Troubadour gig was August 1970. Davey Johnstone joined the band two years later in 1972 and was NOT at the “real” Troubadour gig, but then Neil Young and The Beach Boys weren’t there in reality either … just in the film script. I’m certain Elton would have hand-picked his band and that they deserve more prominence in his story. At the 1970 gig he performs Crocodile Rock (1972). At this point Karen is demanding that I STOP noting the chronology and watch the thing.

OK, Bernie gets off with a beautiful dancer at Mama Cass’s party and goes off with her  … and in spite of the girl being particularly tall, Elton is inspired to write Tiny Dancer – the song that is so fantastic in the context of the film Almost Famous. Much later, Elton cites this as Bernie, like his mum and dad, abandoning him.

Elton gets off with John Reid, soon to be his manager and sleeps with him. Same party (actually it was a Motown Christmas party in the UK).  They get back together to Take Me To The Pilot. 

Elton (Taron Egerton) and John Reid (Richard Madden)

John Reid is the one who gets Elton on the downward slippery slope to drugs, excess, debauchery. Clearly Reid is to blame for it. The character is a total bastard and Richard Madden brings it off superbly.  Reid also managed Queen in the early years and also appears in Bohemian Rhapsody, 2019’s other rock biopic. He reappears in Elton’s life as Elton is recording Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with Kiki Dee. (According to Wiki, Reid made £73 million from his association with Elton up to 1998)

We go into the flamboyant lifestyle mansion era, with Elton visiting his dad and stepbrothers, and admitting to his mum that he is gay. She had known for years. We get the famous temper tantrums and alienation of people and increasingly bizarre stage costumes … such as a pantomime dame. He tries to kill himself and gets rushed out of hospital to sing Rocket Man. He falls out with everyone … Bennie & The Jets marking the depths of debauchery. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road leads him into rehab. He ends, obviously, with I’m Still Standing and a credits note that he has been sober for 28 years.

Elton John not only has a signature voice but one SO signature that its signed with a Sharpie at least, but more likely a broad board marker. Taron Egerton imitates it very well in a Barron Knights sort of way,  though he often gets minimal weak backing and has not the flat out vocal confidence of the original. I wouldn’t dream of buying the soundtrack album, but did dig out Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water and Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player the next day.

The lyrics carry the story, ignoring that most of them were written by Bernie Taupin. I’m sure it’s how Elton sees his story.

After writing most of this, I turned to Wikipedia on Rocketman and they list the deviations from fact at the end. It is a long, long list many of which I’d already noted. It includes irrelevancies (arguing that the Troubadour show was Tuesday, not Monday … who cares?) but more tellingly Caleb Quaye … who was there … saying that Dick James never cussed, wasn’t a cockney and was an old-school gentleman. More important psychologically, his step-brother recalls that Elton’s dad took young Reg to Watford FC football matches, creating his love of the team in him, and bought Reg’s piano in 1963. His widow showed Philip Norman the receipt.

Taron Egerton is highly engaging. He exudes vulnerability and likeability … and whatever his tantrums, Elton John is clearly hugely likeable as we see from the number he has befriended from Princess Diana and her sons to The Beckhams. Taron Egerton gets that aspect.

However, in the end, the whole film shouts out I WAS A VICTIM! Or in other words. ‘Infamy! Infamy! Everybody’s got it in for me!’ … Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar  from the film Carry On Cleo. Yes, his mum, his dad, Bernie, Dick James, John Reid … they’re all to blame for everything. I found myself humming Adam Faith’s song Poor Me …

SEE ALSO: TOPPERMOST on ELTON JOHN (Rob Millis & Peter Viney)