Elton John could be ‘horrible and difficult’ on tour, says Bernie Taupin

Bernie Taupin and Elton John shared six decades of musical success, but they didn’t always get along.

The lyricist behind the vast majority of John’s songs discussed their partnership in a new interview with The timesand he didn’t hesitate to answer a question about John’s “diva moments” on tour.

“When we were hitting the road, and it could be really horrible and difficult, I would just roll my eyes because if you intervened, it would make it worse,” Taupin revealed. “And he knew which outfits made me want to kill him, like when (in New York in 1980) he dressed as Donald Duck in Central Park.”

The majority of Taupin’s remarks about John have been overwhelmingly positive, however, including his thoughts on the duo’s first partnership. “He said I was the brother he never had,” Taupin recalled. “When I first came to London, people treated me like I was an English hillbilly, but Elton always saw the best in me.”

Taupin and John’s first collaboration occurred when they were hired to write songs for other musicians.

“We were signed on to write material for middling singers like Cilla Black and Engelbert Humperdinck and we were terrible at it,” Taupin said. “We were in (the publishing house) Dick James Music, where all these old guys, relics of the music hall days, were in little booths, smoking and talking, and I had no musicality. I was just copying the style that was fashionable at the time and stealing the stories from the books I was reading.”

The songwriter admitted he had no idea what he was doing when he started. “You have to understand I was flying by the seat of my pants,” Taupin said. “I didn’t know how to write a song. I was just trying to get out of my rut in the north of England, because I left school at 15 and I wasn’t qualified for anything other than manual labor. I still wake up and think I dodged a bullet there.”

John retired from touring in 2023 and Taupin is unsure if they will write more songs together in the future. “You can never say it, and it’s a little late, but you should never say never,” he thought. “He calls me pretty regularly and he seems to know what I’m doing before I even do it. When I told him I’d be doing a speaking engagement in Nashville, he said, ‘Oh yeah, with Brandi (Carlile).’ I had just found out about it myself.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates and what to watch with our EW Dispatch Newsletter.

Taupin recently released his fourth solo album, The sea has no mercy. “I’m 76 years old. A lot of the album is about an old man pissed off with life,” he explained. “But there’s a lot of good stuff in there, too.”