“I just go mad”: How Elton John led the fight against noise restriction laws in Leeds
In 1973, the city council of Leeds passed a measure that would legally restrict the level of noise a musical act could produce when performing at any licensed venue in the city, not Leeds, Alabama, by the way, but the substantially larger one in the north of England, where rock concerts had already become vital to the finances and culture of the two large universities in town.
Students at both the University of Leeds and Leeds Polytechnic (now known as Leeds Beckett) understandably made a big stink about the new restrictions, telling the council they’d struggle to book any major acts in 1974 if the rule went into effect. Their best supporting evidence was a direct quote from arguably the biggest rock star of that moment, a pre-Sir Elton John, who said he would “refuse to play” his scheduled tour stop in Leeds unless the limit was lifted.
Maybe Elton John doesn’t seem like the sort of artist who’d be particularly handcuffed by a bit of health-conscious noise control; Led Zeppelin or The Who would make sense, and even Deep Purple, who apparently owned the Guinness Book of Records title at the time for the loudest concert, reaching 117 decibels in 1972. Surely, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ didn’t need to hit the same dBs as ‘Smoke on the Water’?
It’s important to remember, though, this was 20 years before the Disney-approved ‘Circle of Life’ Elton came along, and he was, during his initial rise to stardom, a long way away from easy-listening, especially when it came to his live shows.
“Everybody here was expecting to see me as a quiet person,” John said after a 1971 gig at New York’s Fillmore East, “I just go mad. I take on another sort of personality when I perform. The Pete Townshend of the piano is the only way I can describe myself. I lose all my cool out there.”
John said he was usually desperate to set his piano on fire at the end of a set, so the last thing he wanted to worry about was keeping his noise output to a low roar. If you think the Leeds situation was an isolated incident, however, and that Disney-era Elton would almost certainly have changed his position on these noise ordinances, you’d be wrong again.
In 1997, John was booked to perform a stadium gig in Hong Kong to mark the end of British rule in the region, with a noise restriction in place at the 40,000-seat venue, limiting performers to an output of 70 decibels, a fair bit stricter than the old Leeds rules.
Elton asked the organisers to reconsider, but their solution was to suggest that concert-goers could listen to the show through earphones, like a silent disco of sorts. His agent at the time, Simon Prytech, told the press that Elton wasn’t down with that idea. Waiving the noise-level rule was “instrumental to negotiations,” he declared, “It will therefore be impossible to stage the concerts”, and sure enough, John cancelled his involvement.
When Elton John wants to rock, no situation is of great enough geopolitical importance to turn his dial down.
