“We couldn’t stop”: The song Elton John called the hardest to live up to
For a young boy from Pinner, who in only the space of a few short years had transformed from a pub pianist into one of the biggest rock stars in the world, the journey to stardom that Elton John went on was all guns blazing, to say the least. In that respect, was it ever really much of a surprise that he quickly overindulged in the lavish lifestyle, the fame and the luxury, when it had all been thrown at him so suddenly? It’s food for thought.
But as much as acclaim and a bed of roses were obviously welcome distractions, it could never take away from the one niggling thought once he had started on the road of being a worldwide mega star – how do you keep getting bigger? Having bolted out so forcefully from the blocks, it would have been a travesty if John had simply disappeared into a one-hit wonder. Although this fear evidently remained nothing but a night terror in hindsight, it was always a thorn in his side regarding the breakout song he never felt he could live up to again.
That tune was, of course, ‘Your Song’, the naïve 1970 piano ballad that shot both John and his then-rookie songwriting partner Bernie Taupin into a land of fame and fantasy. But it was a strange entity in being John’s breakout single, as he claims he knew ahead of time that it would inevitably be a hit, unlike any other song over the course of the rest of his career.
“It was the first big hit I ever had and it’s probably still the best song I’ve ever written,” he told The Telegraph in 2018. But John also admitted the difficulties associated with ‘Your Song’, simply because it created such a mammoth task ahead of him. “It’s a hard song to live up to,” he reflected, “but once we wrote that, we couldn’t stop.”
He was right, because to many people, ‘Your Song’ represented the opening of a fresh chapter in British music history, with John at the front and centre leading the charge. All hopes were pinned on him to carry the beacon, and while that obviously carried the threat to crash and burn, the singer dealt with that load the only way he knew how – under the mantra that diamonds form under pressure.
Indeed, for the lineage of rock and roll, John’s appearance on the scene was a sigh of relief that there would be someone to carry the mantle, never better epitomised than when John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1975: I remember hearing Elton John’s ‘Your Song’, heard it in America—it was one of Elton’s first big hits—and remember thinking, ‘Great, that’s the first new thing that’s happened since we [The Beatles] happened.’ It was a step forward. There was something about his vocal that was an improvement on all of the English vocals until then. I was pleased with it.”
And with that, John soared into a legendary status from which he would never falter. His own insecurities and anxieties around it aside, ‘Your Song’ was merely a launch pad to greatness – not just the pinnacle of it – and there would inevitably be a litany of hits to follow. Whether that skewed him in a manner for better or worse is another matter, but there’s no denying that from the first moment he opened his mouth to sing the first line “It’s a little bit funny,” the fabric of music was forever changed.
