Did David Bowie change the trajectory of Elton John’s career?
When a music career takes off, it can be easy to stick to your own principles. However, this can also blindside one from taking the course of action to propel you even further into stardom. Fortunately for Elton John, David Bowie was there to lend a helping hand.
Shortly after Bowie’s death in 2016, John noted that he would not have met his producers, Gus Dudgeon and Paul Buckmaster. John said the two arranged his “first three albums for me. Because when I heard ‘Space Oddity’, I thought it was the most incredible record I probably heard for a long time up to that point.”
Focusing on the amazing production of the tune, John said to his team: “Whoever did that, I really wanna work with them.” So John contacted Gus Dudgeon and Paul Buckmaster and “did the Elton John album together and many, many more albums.” Detailing further, he added: “So I’ve got David to thank for that. There have been so many incredible words said and written about him in the last couple of days. It’s so wonderful; we all know how inspiring he was. We all know what his music stands for; the music speaks for itself.”
Bowie was undoubtedly one of the most influential musicians to ever grace the earth, constantly evolving and believing in his own unique vision of what a musician should be. John was in great praise of Bowie’s chameleonic prowess. “He was innovative, he was boundary changing, and he danced to his own tune, which is really rare,” he said. “But what I loved about him towards the end was his incredible privacy during what must have been ten years of incredibly bad luck with illnesses, heart attacks, cancer, whatever. He made two albums without anybody knowing he was making them.”
Bowie’s final artistic statement was his last studio album Blackstar, which he admirably released just moments after his death. John said of the album, “That’s the way it should be in music and should be in any art form whatsoever. The dignified way he planned his death as a song on the track called ‘Lazarus’, on the new record Blackstar, is as if he wrote that song about his death, and he obviously did. It’s incredibly chilling when you hear it. That, to me, is a true artist; they don’t make them like that anymore. We’ve lost a huge, huge talent that influenced so many people. He influenced me with his humour.”
However, despite John’s evident admiration for Bowie, he admitted that in the years prior to his death, John was not on the best terms with Bowie. He said that in the early years, they had been good friends, hanging out with Marc Bolan in several gay clubs in London. But the two “drifted apart”.
John concluded: “He wasn’t my cup of tea. No, I wasn’t his cup of tea. But the dignified way he handled his death, I mean, thank God. I knew he’d had a heart attack on stage in Berlin years ago, but not about the cancer. Everyone else take note of this: Bowie couldn’t have staged a better death. It was classy.”
