Colm recently reviewed ‘Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me’, written by Bernie Taupin, for the literary section of The Irish Examiner. We’re glad to be able to re-publish a version of that piece here.
Bernie Taupin, the British-born lyricist, and songwriter, has spent the last twenty-five years on a large ranch in California, breeding and trading stock. But although the entertainment industry has long been a stalking ground for cowboys – hustlers and shufflers who talk big and present in wide-screen – Taupin is a real outlier, arguably the last of the high-profile wordsmiths that were once so prevalent within popular music.
Best known as Elton John’s co-writer and ‘spiritual boyfriend’ of over fifty years, he’s long rolled from city to city, forever running with the fast set. Creatively joined at his partner’s hip and yet set apart from him in almost every other key aspect, he’s now come out swinging. But in as much as ‘Scattershot’ is a rare old score-settler, it still wears the haunted look of the rock and roll morality tale.
One of the more curious music books of the year, at its core are a number of complicated personal relationships, some of them long lost. Taupin’s career-long search for certainty and emotional sanctuary leads him far and wide: from a childhood spent in rural Britain, obsessed with westerns and American jazz music, he eventually finds a home on the range. ‘I’m just a country kid who got lucky,’ he writes, and with uncharacteristic modesty.
Song-writing partnerships feature prominently throughout the history of popular music. Leiber and Stoller, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Pomus and Shuman and even Bono and The Edge are among the many double-acts who melded their unique gifts for powerful critical and commercial returns. Elton John and Bernie Taupin don’t spring to mind in such company as instinctively as they might and although Taupin’s credit appears on some of the biggest-selling records of all time, he enjoys a rare privilege for someone operating at elite level: anonymity. By contrast, his partner’s flamboyant carry-on has long been a source of fascination, speculation and innuendo.
Presenting his credit card at a restaurant in El Centro after a day on the rodeo circuit, Taupin’s name is remarked on by the staff, after which one of his number outs him as Elton John’s co-writer. ‘The owner, taking in the dusty cowboy before her, smiled benignly and with a sarcastic snort said, ‘Yeah right, you wish.’
Taupin famously answered a newspaper ad – another lost cultural tradition – during the late 1960s that resulted in a creative marriage with a young, classically-trained songwriter known as Reg Dwight. From humble origins, Reg became Elton and Elton became one of the biggest draws in international entertainment, his enormous commercial success matched only by the scale of his lavish live routines and excessive off-stage preening. But his behaviour, much of it amplified by years of addiction, shouldn’t detract from the quality of his output, in particular several excellent elpees released in the 1970s.
This point isn’t lost on Taupin who, in the book’s more clear-eyed passages, acknowledges his partner’s rare gift for melody and his ability as a musician, as well as his propensity for spectacular self-combustion. Neither does ‘Scattershot’ spare the rod in evaluating some of the duo’s more flatulent material, of which there’s been plenty.
The book honours its title and lurches loosely from memoir to good food guide to confessional, much of it nicely gossipy. By his own admission, Taupin struggles to remember the origins of much of his work and, in one memorable scene, finds himself in a hotel room with a girlfriend, unable to answer questions on a television quiz show segment about the lyrics of Elton John. He has no such issues, though, recalling the many memorable meals he’s put away or the numerous bars he’s frequented which, as ‘someone who doesn’t like restaurants who don’t take reservations,’ is probably par for the course.
Inevitably, the book’s more striking aspects involve Taupin’s long relationship with Elton John, the frequent insanity of the recording and touring processes and a series of observations on the seedier aspects of the music industry. An inveterate name-dropper, he’s especially strong on the illicit and clearly criminal elements of what were once accepted as ‘industry norms’ during the 1960s, 70s and beyond. The references to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco nightclub in Los Angeles – ‘an unhealthy mix of children and men that over the years has cast a dark shadow over the advantages taken by some of the top tier rock gods of the era’ – are particularly sobering.
The book’s most interesting sub-text, though, is the author’s regret at several lost friendships and broken relationships. Married four times, ‘Scattershot’ can be read at times as a series of apologies to those who once occupied his orbit but who’ve been lost over-board during the last five decades. Drug and booze dependent for years, Taupin paints a complex portrait of his friendship with the vaunted rock and roller, Alice Cooper, and is candid also about a lost relationship with the author, Eric Van Lustbader. And he belatedly acknowledges – three marriages in – that he’s had ‘commitment issues.’
Fixated from an early age with American jazz music and the wild west, Taupin is incisive on counterculture in the U.S. – shops, clubs, drugs, and sex – in Los Angeles during the 1970s. But he is less forthcoming on the schism that sundered his creative relationship with Elton during the mid-seventies, or indeed Elton’s marriage to the German sound engineer, Renate Blauel in 1984, at which he served as best man.
It is Elton John’s formidable presence that casts the longest shadow on the book, and unsurprisingly so: the relationship between him and Taupin extends back to the late 1960s when the lyricist moved into John’s mother’s London flat. Then sharing bunk beds with his writing partner, one of the duo’s best-know compositions, ‘Your Song,’ is written in ten minutes while breakfast is being prepared in a small kitchen. Indeed, one of their initial promotional trips to America – where they were exposed to the wonderment of the great wide open – took place while hot water in the housing complex in which they lived was being rationed. All of which makes for fine, vivid and meaty fare.
Where ‘Scattershot’ is less assured, though, is when Taupin veers away from the music: the further he drifts from Elton – in every respect – the lumpier it becomes. But for all its inconsistencies and what is often just random riffing, it’s not without its merits either. As a celebration of a dying craft and of a species under threat – the lyric and the lyricist – it serves a clear purpose. And for that alone, it’s worth its weight.
A version of this review first appeared in The Irish Examiner on December 8th, 2023.
The Blackpool Sentinel 
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