‘Bulimia, drugs, alcohol. It made him completely irrational’: Bernie Taupin on his delirious decades at the top with Elton John

‘Rocket Man’, ‘Your Song’, ‘Tiny Dancer’, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, ‘I’m Still Standing’... Bernie Taupin has written the lyrics for so many Elton John classics he can barely remember half of them. That may have something to do with his boozy Caribbean escapades in the 1970s — and the addiction support he was giving his lifelong friend and songwriting partner, he tells Craig McLean

Music-Books-Bernie Taupin (AP)

In 1973, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics for Elton John’s music for “Candle in the Wind”, a ballad that was a eulogy to Marilyn Monroe. It reached number five in the charts and became one of Elton’s defining songs. Then, in 1997, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, he rewrote the words in 30 minutes. It became the bestselling single in UK and US chart history.

And what can he recall of the updated words? Not a syllable. “If you put a gun to my head right now and threatened to kill me if I didn’t recite the lyric, I’d be a dead man,” Taupin writes in his new memoir Scattershot (Life, Music, Elton and Me). Is that really true?

“Well, you have to remember it was only performed a couple of times,” begins Taupin, 73, video-calling from his home in smalltown southern California. One of those times, notably, was at her funeral, watched by somewhere between 2 and 2.5 billion people worldwide. “Once Elton performed it at Westminster Abbey and then recorded it with George Martin the same day and it was released, I never heard it. I know it got played constantly on the radio, but I didn’t really listen to the radio, so I never got to hear it.”