Elton John Edinburgh Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Elton John in Edinburgh — FAQ

About Elton John

Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born March 25, 1947, in Pinner, north-west London, to a Royal Air Force father and a record-collecting mother who fed him a steady diet of American pop singles. He sat at the family piano from the age of three, and entered the Royal Academy of Music as a junior exhibitioner at eleven, attending Saturday classes for five years. The first working band was Bluesology, a London R&B outfit that backed touring American soul acts (Patti LaBelle, the Isley Brothers, Major Lance) on UK package tours through the mid-1960s. He took the stage name Elton John in 1967, borrowing the first name from Bluesology saxophonist Elton Dean and the surname from Long John Baldry. That same year he answered a Liberty Records advertisement looking for songwriters, was rejected as a vocalist, and was handed an envelope of unread lyrics by a Lincolnshire teenager named Bernie Taupin who had answered the same advert from a farmyard several hundred miles away. The two have collaborated continuously ever since on a writing-by-correspondence model — Taupin writes the lyric, sends it to Elton, Elton sits at a piano and sets it within roughly an hour, and the two rarely workshop or edit one another's contributions. The first hit was Your Song in 1970, from the self-titled second album, and Madman Across the Water in 1971 added Tiny Dancer and Levon to the canon. Honky Château in 1972 produced Rocket Man and Honky Cat, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player at the start of 1973 added Daniel and Crocodile Rock, and the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in October 1973 — Bennie and the Jets, Candle in the Wind, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, the title track — settled the cycle as one of the defining records of the decade. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in 1975 became the first album in Billboard history to enter the chart at number one. The eighties were rockier — substance issues, the well-documented retreat from songwriting partnerships — but the catalogue kept producing: I'm Still Standing in 1983, the Sacrifice number one in 1989, the Lion King soundtrack in 1994 (Can You Feel the Love Tonight took the Best Original Song Oscar), and the Diana, Princess of Wales tribute rewrite of Candle in the Wind in 1997 which became the best-selling single in UK chart history. He came out as bisexual in a 1976 Rolling Stone interview and as gay in 1988, entered a civil partnership with David Furnish on the first day they were legal in England in 2005, and the couple married in 2014. They have two sons. He has been sober since 1990 — a period that opened with the founding of the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992 — and the foundation has since become one of the largest non-governmental funders of HIV programmes in the world. The 2019 biopic Rocketman, with Taron Egerton in the lead, won the Best Original Song Oscar for (I'm Gonna) Love Me Again. He is the only artist to have a number-one single in the UK charts in six consecutive decades. He was knighted in 1998 and made a Companion of Honour in 2021.

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