“Every lyric on “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” was about Bernie and me, about our experiences of being able to make songs and make it big. I cry when I sing this song, because I was in love with Bernie, not in a sexual way, but because he was the person I was looking for my entire life, my little soulmate. We’d come so far, and we were still very naive. I was gay by that time and he was married, but he was a person that, more than anything, I loved, and the relationship we had was so odd, because it was not tied at the hip. Thank God it wasn’t tied at the hip, because we wouldn’t have lasted. That relationship is the most important relationship of my entire life. In a way, years later, I ended up being Captain Fantastic and he ended up the Brown Dirt Cowboy: Here, I’m living my fabulous lifestyle, collecting paintings, and Bernie is interested in horses and bull riding and shit like that. We became those characters. Who was to know?”Elton John (141)

“Bernie [Taupin – Ed] and I were very close. We were like brothers and I loved him very dearly. I desperately wanted, as a kid, to have brothers and sisters. I was the only child and I was extremely jealous of Bernie. His family was so close-knit. He had two brothers, and he adored his parents and he was always going on about his glorious childhood. Whereas my family had been in ruins. When Bernie and I lived together I grew very attached to him and ‘We All Fall In Love Sometimes’ is about how we tried for so long to write things which had a spark in them and then we did. Something happened, and we thought, ‘Oh Jesus, we’ve gone through all that bloody rubbish together. Isn’t it great, something’s going to happen.’ The song is about that kind of closeness. Bernie and I are still very close but we’ll never be as close as we were then. I love him dearly, but he’s married and we don’t see as much of each other as we used to. He loved me. We hit rock bottom together so many times, and at that point in my life he was the only person I could really call a friend. We found a spark together and a way of writing which is still with us.”Elton John (664)

“Those first five years with me and Bernie were just the best. We were young and on the up, naive, and it all felt so wonderful. That album [Captain Fantastic – Ed] was about the two of us, the things we’d been through together and what it all meant thus far. We wrote most of it on the last voyage of the SS France sailing to New York, and it felt so good to be writing songs that I not only understood the lyrics but was a complete part of. Before I was singing stuff that perhaps didn’t directly relate to me. It’s just a beautiful fucking love song. But it’s not, as has been suggested elsewhere, about sexual love but the kind of love that can exist between two people that is, in so many ways, above plain sexual love or lust. Bernie showed me things and ideas that I had never encountered; he was the big brother I never had. In most ways we were so completely different, but we had the kind of relationship that if he liked something I thought there must be something in it. For instance, I’d listen to Dylan because Bernie thought he was the greatest writer ever. I hear that song now and listen to the lyrics, and I can cry because I remember the closeness that we had then.”Elton John (666)

“It was about me.”Elton John (140)

“[The new single from the album, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ is dedicated “with thanks” to Long John Baldry – Ed]. I’d met this girl and it was the first time I’d ever fallen in love, and I thought it was fantastic. At the time she was going out with a midget disc jockey – he drove a mini with special pedals and everything. But he used to beat her up. Then, when I lived with her. She used to beat me up. I couldn’t understand it. But we got this flat in Islington and for six months I was in love and idyllically happy. But I was under her thumb, as it were, and she hated my music and wanted to marry me. My mother and Bernie thought I was mad. But because it was the first relationship of my life, I defended it and clung to it. When you’re wrong, there’s nothing worse than somebody else telling you so. If you actually know you’re wrong and nobody says it, you can own up easier. Well, we were all down at the Bag o’ Nails. The wedding was in two weeks’ time, and John Baldry was going to be best man. Then, out of the blue, he said to me, ‘Why are you getting married?’ And he was the first person to bring it home to me. I respected his opinion because he had no reason to tell me I was wrong, other than he really liked me. So, I went home at four o’clock in the morning and I told her the wedding was off. I was sued for breach of promise and it was a horrible experience to go through. It was a fiasco. I tried to commit suicide and Bernie and I couldn’t write for six months.”Elton John (664)

“That was a kind of double entendre about Elton’s almost getting married [to Linda Woodward, in ’68 – Ed] and about his simultaneous attempted suicide. He’d only turned the gas on to low and he’d left the kitchen window open. And he’d even thought to take a cushion to rest his head on too.”Bernie Taupin (667)

“”Elton’s Song” is so beautiful, and Tom Robinson’s lyric is so beautiful. It reminded me of the film If  . . . ., by Lindsay Anderson. It was very homoerotic. I could imagine the boy that I wanted to be, on the parallel bars, swinging with his tight little outfit on and his bare feet. It was the first gay song that I actually recorded as a homosexual song. Rather than “All the Girls Love Alice,” it was the first boy-on-boy song I wrote – because Tom, of course, is a gay man, and we became great friends.”Elton John (140)

“It’s like you talking to somebody saying, “I see what you’re doing, you’re not necessarily doing that right. I don’t want to tell you what to do but it’s a long way from happiness, it’s a long way from doing what you should be doing to make it right for yourself”.”Bernie Taupin (141)

“That’s a song about jealousy and envy and about seeing people being successful while you’re not. I was always desperate to become a success, and I was envious and very bitter and very narrow minded about anybody who was successful. At the time ‘Meal Ticket’ is written I’d put down anybody who was making it, just because we weren’t. I think a lot of artists go through a stage like that.”Elton John (664)

“You know I’ve never rejected one of his [Bernie Taupin – Ed] lyrics before but some of the stuff he did for ‘Blue Moves’! I said Taupin, for Christ’s sake, I can’t sing that.’ They were just plain hateful three or four of them. His lyrics have always been a bit down-in-the-mouth. Even Yellow Brick Road, which is regarded as a jovial album, has only one up lyric or it, ‘Harmony’. He’s naturally like that but it’s got worse. His life’s been going through a strange turmoil. He didn’t know which country he was living in, going through the old Bermuda-one-day Nottingham-the-next. He’s gotten out of that now but it didn’t make him any happier when he was writing ‘Blue Moves’. You know even the B-side of ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ was really hateful. ‘Snow Queen’ it’s called and it’s about somebody. I didn’t realise who until I’d started to record the vocal. “Allo, ‘allo,’ I thought. It’s Cher.’ It was so cutting I had to tell her in advance and apologise in advance. She was okay about it. [Taupin and Cher allegedly dated in 1973 – Ed].”Elton John (665)

“I don’t think it was about disillusionment of fame, I think it was more about this battle I had about being the country kid coming to town, being originally a little out of my depth. A slightly Dick Whittington tale, you know the country kid going to the big city but, at the same time, yes I think it could have been the all encompassing world of fame. It could be rock ’n’ roll, is it everything it’s cracked up to be? Possibly not.”Bernie Taupin (1120)

“Danny Bailey is John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd or Clyde Barrow. He’s my composite gangster, I just love creating characters.”Bernie Taupin (1120)