This article appears on The Observer's web site. It is reproduced here for the time it is no longer available from the original source.
Either when God was giving out attention spans he mistook me for a flea, or Elton John's 25-song show at the Glasgow Scottish Exhibition Conference Centre was far too long. Halfway through, I started wishing that I had brought along some knitting, or a large jigsaw. Nearer the end, as yet another of Elton's epochal piano solos chewed another great chunk out of my allotted life span, I had to actually make a conscious effort not to clamber on to my seat, and wave a white flag. Sure, Elton John is a big talent, with a big back-catalogue to get through, but that doesn't mean his sets have to last longer than Hanson's combined puberty. I thought that this tour was meant to be for Christmas, not for life.
To make matters worse, I arrived in such high spirits.
I have always had a soft spot for Elton John. An affection that somehow survived the myriad twists and turns of my musical tastes over the years. A lazy eye might class this as just another dubious hangover from my parents' record collection, but there was more to it than that. For a start, Elton's love songs (elegantly scripted by lyricist Bernie Taupin) always seemed infinitely superior to the padded hearts and helium balloons of standard chart fare.
Songs like Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me, Song For Guy, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road might have been aural comfort food, but they also trod the fine line between emotion and sentimentality with an ease that must have made Bacharach spit. Indeed, Elton's genius is that, when he is on form, his music can make you feel that past hurt is just future joy in disguise. Bearing that in mind, likening him to lesser, more cynical talents such as George Michael is so inaccurate as to be insulting. Like comparing a beautiful, raw love letter to a rushed fax finalising divorce arrangements.
On quite another note, there always seemed to be a delicious irony in the fact that a homosexual man could provide the soundtrack to the average heterosexual courtship. At any point during the last three decades you would be able to find homophobics beating up ‘poofs' in the street. These very same men would then think nothing of smooching with their women to Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.
More recently, of course, another of John's songs, horribly bastardised, would feature at a famous funeral. For all the mawkishness surrounding Candle in the Wind, it had to be progress of sorts that an old queen could sing at a young princess's funeral without anybody batting an eye.
At Glasgow, Elton heroically promised us "Some really old numbers, some fairly old numbers, and some new ones", and that is what we got… at great length with monogrammed knobs on. Note-perfect as ever, he sashayed through the show like a young bride determined to do things by the book: dispensing the old (Daniel, Bennie And The Jets); the new (cuts from his new album, The Big Picture: If The River Can Bend, and the lamentable new single Something About the Way You Look Tonight - which sounds like Bobby Brown having his feet rubbed); the borrowed (Elton, where did you get that hair?); and the blue (The Last Song, which he dedicated to those living with HIV and Aids).
The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, the show drags on so. The acoustics in the SECC–a dirty, draughty cowshed, with seats so hard I came away with an aerodynamic bottom – don't help, making every song sound as if it is competing with a ghostly dustbin-lid solo. Moreover, Elton's backing band are scary. The guitarist in particular looks like he has surfed straight on to the stage from an Old Spice advert.
Perhaps Elton chose him specifically to drag attention away from the fact that he isn't looking his best. In fact, with his blue suit, and a jawline that reminds one of a beach ball with air hissing out of a very small puncture, Elton resembles less a pop star than he does a supermarket under-manager who has become disappointed in middle-life.
Occasionally, one could see the very point where Elton John ends and his alter ego Reg Dwight begins. (While Elton would rock out, Reg would scowl at the piano like someone had just urinated all over the keys). At those times when Reg took over, poor Elton would end up looking like a Teletubby losing it completely at an office Christmas party.
However, even if the show was tediously overlong, there were compensations. If, like me, you think that a talent for playing the piano is proof positive that God has favourites, Elton is up there with the cosseted best. Not only can he play the piano brilliantly, he can play it brilliantly lying on the floor, with his back to the keyboard, and even, at one notable point, with one leg stuck up in the air as if it had been caught in an invisible stirrup.
I left as Elton and crowd were warbling Your Song to each other. A beautiful moment for cigarette-lighter manufacturers everywhere. Clearly, the Queen Mum of Pop does not need that obituary just yet.
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