What was the song of the summer in 1976?
Being a chart-topping musician in the 1970s really was as good as it got.
A surge to the top of the leaderboard meant genuine financial benefit; the physical cost of a record fairly represented the work put into it, and so, despite the bureaucratic hurdles of money-hungry label executives, musicians would be remunerated handsomely for their work. It was a time when icons lived like icons.
In that decade, there was perhaps no one more iconic than Elton John. While the public didn’t yet know just how badly fuelled by drugs it was, he was living the life of a high-rolling rock star, enjoying the fruits of all his labour. Nights would be spent stumbling between cocktail parties, while summers saw him dotted on various sun loungers in the world’s most prestigious holiday destinations.
So it was only right that one of his biggest ever hits was penned from that very spot. But not from Elton himself, no, from his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, who too was enjoying the fruits of his creative labour.
“I was in Barbados one evening in 1976 when Elton called from Toronto to play me a backing track he’d just cut with the band,” Taupin remembered. “Half cut myself by this point, the afternoon’s poolside cocktails having muddied my brainwaves, I listened and took note. Elton was in need of a lyric that could be done as a duet. I told him I would give it a shot, hung up, and stuck my head in the ice bucket. In 10 minutes, I’d thrown something together that was simplistic without being overly trite, and that is how ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ came about.”
It was a relatively simple and catchy hook, not known as one of Elton’s most profound, but ultimately, the source of its inspiration makes sense of all that. It was a feel-good, sun-kissed hit that Taupin helped Elton finish, and subsequently became the official summer song of ‘74, holding the top spot for the longest during the warmer months.
It was always destined to be a hit, though. Both Elton and his duet partner Kiki Dee wanted to pen a hit that evoked that sense of warm Motown fun, pioneered by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. They noticed that a fun-loving approach to duelled vocals hadn’t really been tapped into as music turned into the wildly experimental ‘70s, and so wanted to give something of that ilk to fans, who could play it through the summer and bask in the joy of this triumphant era of music.
Originally, the pair were going to record a cover version of the Four Tops’ ‘Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever’, but after Elton had built the crux of the song’s melody, he realised he could create something of his own. All that was left was to phone up his creative partner Taupin and request that he inject a tropical chorus line into the lyrics in order to solidify his chart-topping hit and bag himself the song of the summer in ‘74.
