If you are really lucky, at least once in your life you’ll be in the presence of a true legend. Given how long it takes to become a legend, however, the stars will probably be past their prime by the time this happens. Not so with the 76-year-old Elton John, whose voice and piano-playing virtuosity are as dazzling on his retirement tour as they were when I first saw him live in 1982.
That epic concert beneath the St. Louis Arch doesn’t feel like it was 41 years ago. But Elton’s made a lot of music and lived a lot of life since, which combined to make this concert a very different experience. Thanks to the remarkable ephemera you can find on the internet, I can tell you than Elton played only 10 songs at that early concert. If memory serves, the short set was because much more was unendurable outdoors on a shade- and air-conditioning free stage beneath a reflective hunk of stainless steel in the brutal heat and humidity of a St. Louis summer. Four of the 10 songs were, and remain, unfamiliar. Half a lifetime later at the 02 the setlist was up to 20 with a two-song encore, and every tune was familiar. Much of the night was a communal sign-along.
Elton’s hits have had a way of embedding themselves in your life, so that a heavily middle-aged crowd wasn’t just saying Farewell to the Yellow Brick Road … they were travelling down their own Memory Lane. By this point the Elton John songbook is so rich, in fact, that even with more than two hours of almost constant performance there were still plenty of classics he couldn’t fit in. You could feel the love tonight, but Lion King fans weren’t going to get to hear that one.
A fabulous video montage of career highlights behind the triumphal and now-autobiographical chorus of I’m Still Standing reminded you of the missing melodies and other highlights across an immense and spectacularly diverse career. It also reinforced the kindness and humour that’s flowed through his life, from his charitable foundations and support of younger artists to his willingness to reveal difficult times in Rocket Man and his hilarious comic turn in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
As you’d expect, video and production values were an integral part of the show, bringing depth to the songs and providing a remarkable sense of intimacy despite the reality of 20,000 people squinting to see one guy at a piano. Elton also spends plenty of time talking to the audience, and there’s a real sense of coming home. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will include more than 300 gigs by the time it wraps in Stockholm this July, but here he’s playing within the M25 that also embraces his birthplace in Pinner, and a car will whisk him home to David and the kids near Windsor after the show. Elton has always been a proud Englishman and good neighbour … I never ran into him when I lived in the next village, but local stories of his generosity and good nature were abundant … and in London those qualities somehow seemed to shrink the arena to something more intimate. This was a friend, saying goodbye to the friends who’d helped him survive and ultimately thrive. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the end.
But there was a lot of fun to be had on the way to that teary farewell. Like the perfect wedding DJ, Elton’s set majored on numbers that had the audience on its feet dancing and singing along. That included some of the classics re-worked at a different tempo, including Rocket Man, and most notably the Cold Heart remix from 2021. (Who’d have thought I’d have a pop No. 1 at the age of 75, he mused.) Slower numbers like Levon and Candle in the Wind cut in to give everyone a chance to rest and sway, still singing along, before the next rise of pace got you back on your feet.
The encore and farewell was the most perfectly pitched piece of the evening. After several minutes of requisite darkness in which the crowd roared for more, Elton returned in his third costume change of the night. An elegant dressing gown replaced the sequinned jackets, amusingly paired with the “curfew 22:15” notice on the tickets. This would not be a late night, and the now famously tea-total Elton is well beyond his years of wild excess. Instead, he sat down and gave us Your Song, changed from a standard of romantic love to a sincere thank you to his fans for their love and support. And then, as expected given title of the tour, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. At the end, he left the piano and stepped onto a platform that slowly lifted him up the stage and swallowed him into a star field that turned into the Yellow Brick Road album cover, with the older Elton who’d just left us disappearing over the horizon. It was the 21st century equivalent of one of those remarkable Baroque assumptions of the saints into heaven, and it left an emotional and exhausted audience in a similar state of reverent awe.
And that is the kind of experience legends can deliver. Thank you, Elton. May your retirement be long, healthy, and full of love.
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