He Used To Be Good, Honest

This weekend I was lightly taunted by my step-daughter as she found a copy of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in my CD collection. You can understand that when an artist has produced nothing but crap for all of your lifetime (and more) then it can be hard to see that they ever did anything worthwhile. It’s hard to explain what a good song “Candle in the Wind” was before it was mutated into that terrible tribute to Diana (actually, it’s hard to even remember what a good song it used to be). My explainations were helped when I remembered that “Tiny Dancer” is in the soundtrack of Almost Famous (one of her favourite films).

But it’s incredible to think that Elton has produced almost nothing of value for almost thirty years. When I was first listening to him he was producing singles like “Daniel”, “Your Song” and “Crocodile Rock”. That now looks like a pitifully small percentage of his total output.

I remember reading something years ago which made a similar point about Rod Stewart. It claimed that in about 1975, Stewart had been abducted by aliens and replaced by a clone with no musical talent. Perhaps the same thing happened to Elton John. And at about the same time.

Hmm… thinking about it, several previously talented people took a bit of a nosedive at about that time[1]. Maybe the aliens were organising some kind of intergalactic rock festival. Can we have our artists back please?

[1] Personally I can’t listen to much that Queen released after Sheer Heart Attack.