The joke that cost Rod Stewart his friendship with Elton John: “I certainly didn’t feel like I needed a lecture”
Rod Stewart and Elton John are two people you’d love to see in a full-on fight. Get the inhalers and defibrillators at the ready.
Of course, anyone who knows the pair will be aware that they’ve had what could only be called a rollercoaster relationship over the years. They have had almost six decades of these so-called frenemy battles, where as soon as one stoops low, the other stoops lower. Or, indeed, in their case, it’s more about bringing out the feathers and the glitter at ever more exorbitant costs, to try and upstage each other.
Stewart spoke a few years ago in an interview about one 1970s Christmas when he bought his friend and foe a £600 fridge from Harrods – “a lot of money” back then, as he correctly pointed out. It had steam, lights, a bottle of champagne: the full works. But what did he get in return? Only a Rembrandt painting.
John certainly had the last laugh when it came to that particular incident, but this was a trope that continued to transcend the decades, yet as the years wore on, something changed. Faux animosity turned real, silly jibes started to have a little more edge, and eventually, the pair were at loggerheads. They were both well into their seventies by this point, bear in mind.
But as they have both respectively proved time and time again throughout each of their careers, we’ll never be able to class things as truly over until one of them is firmly in a grave. After all, the most recent and bitter blow came seemingly at a high point, as John kept extending his yellow brick road and making his farewell tour longer and longer.
Underneath the veneer of emotion and prestige, Stewart felt he could see the cracks. Perhaps a little salaciously, he told the tabloids in 2018 that he thought the premise of John’s farewell tour was “dishonest” and “stinks of selling tickets”. Sure, they’d shared a lifetime of practical jokes, but the Rocketman clearly had a fire lit beneath him when he heard that one.
“I certainly didn’t feel like I needed a lecture on the feral spirit of rock and roll from someone who’d spent most of the last decade crooning his way through the Great American Songbook and ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’,” John searingly sneered in his autobiography, Me. It was handbags at dawn, and the claws were truly out.
In years gone by, that definitely would have been more than enough to set John off in a fury that only his most flamboyant and gregarious antics could express. By comparison, in the late 2010s, he may have been slightly irked, but things were at least a lot more tempered – probably with no small thanks to the age of social media and the fear of being cancelled.
And yet, by a few years later, once they had climbed back down from their high horses, Stewart was free to admit that “we love each other, that’s what counts,” not without likely giving each of their managers a few more grey hairs than they should have. Whether there were elements of the feud that were truly real is difficult to say, but if one thing is certain, you’d be hard-pressed to find two men who like a show more than them.
