“It’s like the perennial ballad ‘Your Song’, which has got to be one of the most naïve and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music, but I think the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time. That was exactly what I was feeling. I was 17 years old and it was coming from someone whose outlook on love or experience with love was totally new and naïve.”Bernie Taupin (668)

“I’ve always said that number sounds like a song about a 17-year-old guy who’s desperate to get laid. Which at the time it was. So naive.”Bernie Taupin (667)

“There’s a song on the Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy album called ‘Writing’, which I think does a very good job summing up that period of time. It’s about honing your craft, about discovering each other’s working patterns. And it was unusual. In the early dates, when we were writing those first initial songs, we were living at Elton’s mother’s apartment in Northwood Hills just outside of London, and it was very much like two young songwriters honing their craft. I mean, we were discovering the way each other worked. It was funny, I’d be in the bedroom writing lyrics and he’d be in the living room at the stand-up piano, and I’d bring him lyrics and go back to the bedroom and write some more. It was very childish.”Bernie Taupin (668)

“The original lyric of ‘Daniel’ had another verse, which basically explained what the song was about. But because it was too long, we left it out and, of course, to this day people are still wondering what that song is about. It’s basically about a young boy whose older brother is a Vietnam vet who comes home to the farm, and he can’t find any peace, so he flies off to Spain where he can hopefully find some. It’s written from the boy’s point of view as he watches him fly away.”Bernie Taupin (668)

“The first song we wrote again together was a song called ‘Two Rooms At The End Of The World’, which was about us coming back together [Taupin and Elton had stopped working together after the Blue Moves album and only got back together in 1979 – Ed].”Bernie Taupin (668)

“A very sexual song about a 40 year old who’s gone through the pain of failed marriage and failed sexual conquests.”Bernie Taupin (667)

“Nobody but Elton could have sung that line from ‘Rocket Man’ about being as high as a kite without getting banned from the radio. It was a drugs song!”Bernie Taupin (667)

“And what about that number about a lesbian, ‘All The Girls Love Alice’ [from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Ed]. Nobody minded that. The freedom is great for me.”Bernie Taupin (667)

“So much of my imagery at that time came from my childhood. ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ totally recalls when I was 14/15 going to all these places in the North of England like the Meccas, Ballrooms, Boston Gliderdromes and that’s what happened. Too much beer and, bang, somebody would start a fight. It was all over the place. It’s steeped in the days of the Mods and Rockers and all the confrontations. It was just a straight forward Saturday night’s alright for drinking, fighting and getting screwed up.”Bernie Taupin (1120)

“I’d always loved the phrase. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called Candle In The Wind and Clive Davis used it as a term to describe Janis Joplin and I just kept hearing this term and I thought what a great term to describe somebody’s life. To be quite honest I was not that enamored with Marilyn Monroe. What I was enamored with was the idea of fame or youth or somebody being cut short in the prime of their life. Basically the song could have been about Jim Morrison, James Dean, Montgomery Cliff, anyone whose life is cut short at the prime point of their career and how we glamorize death and how we immortalize people and that’s really what that song is about. Nobody is allowed to die an honorable or quiet death. We can’t leave it alone, we always have to find something to keep it alive. All those elements are encompassed in that song.”Bernie Taupin (1120)