Bernie Taupin

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the show in which the world's leading creative people reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is lyricist Bernie Taupin, one half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of all time. For more than 50 years, Torpin has written the lyrics for Elton John's songs, and together they've sold more than 300 million albums globally.

1:00And I think it's gonna be a long, long time So touchdown brings me round again to find Born in Lincolnshire, Bernie Taupin has lived in the States since the mid-1970s and he became an American citizen in 1990. With the publication of a memoir called Scattershot, he made a rare visit to the UK to look back at his life in lyrics.

1:24Bernie Taupin, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. You were born in 1950, born and raised in rural Lincolnshire, where your father worked, I believe, as a farm manager. What are your earliest memories of home life growing up? The house that I was born in was very isolated because people say sort of where were you born in Lincolnshire? And there's really not a town to reference because I was literally born in the middle of nowhere. my father was working as a stockman for a local agricultural company. And for some unknown reason, they put us in this very grand sort of manor house.

2:05So we went from this very dilapidated sort of rural farmhouse into this quite grand. It was called Rouston Manor, and it was in a village called Rouston. So I don't know how we ended up in there. But that was when I really started to develop an interest in the arts in general, because my mother's father used to come and visit us. And between my mother and my grandfather, I really started to get into narrative poetry because my grandfather would recite it to me. I remember when you're talking about earliest memories, one of them was I remember sitting on my grandfather's knee and him reciting Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, especially Horatius.

2:51I think even before I was 10 years old, I could recite most of it. I still remember passages of it. Go on, give it a try. OK. L 'asphosina of Closunium, by the nine gods he swore that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more. By the nine gods he swore it, and he named the tristing day, and he bade his messengers ride forth east, west, and north to summon his array. And then there's up spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate, to every man upon this earth death comes soon or late. And how may a man die better than facing fearful odds by the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?

3:30and those are the only two bits that I remember. That's not bad. It's not bad, is it? But it's interesting. Those were the things that really instilled my imagination and then there were things like Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman, Walter Scott's Lock and Varr. But this is narrative poetry, as you say. It's storytelling, isn't that interesting? Well, it was storytelling and that's what I loved. It was very hard trying to get any friends that I made to incorporate in my games because they hadn't got a clue what I was talking about. Your game, so you were acting out the poems? I was acting out things like that.

4:05Yeah, I'd be riding around being lock and var, wielding my sword, and there was, when we moved later on to a village called Omby by Spittle in Lincolnshire, in our back field there was this little six-foot bridge that stretched over a stream, and that's where I'd act out my Horatius. I would be defending the bridge. That's performance. What about writing it down? When did you start writing songs or lyrics? Oh, well, that didn't come till much later on. There was no writing at a young age? No, not really. You see, the manor house at Rouston, where I lived for a few years, I think we left there when I was about eight years old, and that was when we moved to Omby by Spittel, and we went back to an archaic way of living.

4:52There was an incredibly dilapidated farmhouse there that my father had bought because he wanted to go into business for himself. And the thing that he decided to invest himself in was battery house chickens and eggs. And that was when I sort of started listening to music then. That's when music really, or popular music, came into my life. Famously, you left Lincolnshire at the age of 17 when you answered an advert in the NME, placed by a record company looking for new musical talent. Reg Dwight from Pinner in Middlesex also answered the same ad. What was your first impression of the man who would later become Elton John?

5:33Well, the impression was really good because after we'd independently answered the ad in the NME and met with this gentleman called Ray Williams, who was the guy that had put the ad into the NME looking for talent, I'd independently sent in what I supposed was a sort of pastiche of current trends I was really fobbing it because I had no idea how to write songs I mean I didn't know what the construction of a lyric meant I knew nothing about sort of verse and chorus and possible bridge And these were your first attempts? These were my first attempts and they were very free form and just rambling and so I'd written them all down, shoved them in an envelope and sent them off to London.

6:22And Elton at the same time, or Reg Dwight as he was then, had done an audition, but the thing is that he didn't have any songs to sing, so that didn't go down too well. But Ray, being a kind soul, saw something in him, so Ray independently gave him my envelope of lyrics. I'm not sure how many people had sent in just lyrics, But Elton assures me there was a stack of envelopes there and Ray had just given him mine, which kind of kismet in itself, I suppose. And so he'd taken those away and was inspired by them. And I then came to London to meet him and Ray had formulated a meeting for the two of us at Dick James Music on New Oxford Street.

7:09and so I was very shy, very shy, fish out of water, sort of doing my Dick Whittington bit and I sort of came into the studio and there were a lot of very, very elegant Byron-esque kind of characters in there and I didn't really know where Elton was and I looked up and there was a TV monitor with a guy playing a piano in the studio down the hall and I inquired of somebody next to me, would that be Reg Dwight? And they said, yes, he's doing an overdub. I had no idea what an overdub was. I mean, it was just foreign language to me. And just as I was sort of stammering, well, I'm supposed to meet Reg Dwight, Reg came in the door.

7:55I loved the fact that he wasn't sartorially outfitted. I mean, he was sort of chunky. You know, he had Buddy Holly kind of glasses on. He wasn't cool. He just looked like, he wasn't cool, no, which I loved the fact that he wasn't cool, and neither was I. And that was the bond, didn't you? Well, that was the initial sort of, you know, I love this guy already. And then obviously we just, we went off and we went around the corner to a place called the Lancaster Grill. And we bonded immediately because we both had an absolutely mad passion for music. Can you see me, Scarecrow? Can you still be free?

8:35For are you not a Scarecrow and will you still be there tomorrow? Well, we'll return to your songwriting partnership throughout this programme, but let's look at the first of your formative creative influences. Your first choice for this cultural life is a 1959 album by the American singer-songwriter Marty Robbins. is called Gunfighter Ballads and Trails Songs. To the town of our free road, a stranger one fine day The first album you ever owned. So what led you to Marty Robbins? Well, when we moved to the village of Ownby by Spittle, we actually had a radio, which we hadn't had before. Obviously, rock and roll was the most predominant thing at that point in time, but in between that, You occasionally would hear American sort of country music, people like Johnny Horton, occasionally Johnny Cash.

9:33I remember hearing Johnny Horton's The Battle of New Orleans, which immediately I loved because it told a story. We looked down a river and we see the British come And there must have been a hundred of them beating on the drum They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring We stood beside our cotton bales and didn't say a thing Things like North to Alaska, too. They were like narrative poetry, but they were set to music. And that really instinctively pricked my ears up. But then I heard this song called El Paso by Marty Robbins. Out in the West Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl By then I was wanting to write stories.

10:20and that really sparked my imagination and it was the first record that I ever bought. I had to wait until we could make a trip to the nearest big city, which was Lincoln. They didn't really have record stores. You bought records at appliance stores and they would have a little counter in the back of the store. You know, they'd have radiograms, washing machines and all kinds of home items. But there'd always be this little place in the back of the store where they'd have current singles. And I remember ordering this album, Gunfighter... Wait. Gunfighter Ballads and Trails Songs. Gunfighter Ballads and Trails Songs.

11:00That's the first time I'd forgotten the title. Anyway, so I ordered it, and I didn't stop playing it for months. It was sort of my blueprint for everything that came after. It was early in the morning when he rode into the town He came riding from the south side, slowly looking all around He's an outlaw, loose and running, came the whisper from each lip And he's here to do some business with a big iron on his hip He was telling stories. Was it something also about the tone of the stories themselves? Because Marty Robbins, huge country star, but he was also a pioneer of what became known as the outlaw country style.

11:45Exactly. Well, I'll tell you what really I loved about it was that at the same time on television, westerns were very popular, but it was people like The Long Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers. And while I enjoyed them, I didn't buy the reality behind them. They were sanitised versions. Yeah, it was a very sanitised version of the American West. And what happened with Marty Robbins' songs, they sounded realistic. They sounded like they came from the real West. You could sort of taste the dust in your mouth. And they had a sense of realism to them that really made me want to investigate further.

12:29They'll bury flow tomorrow, but they're hanging me tonight. So when you heard Marty Robbins and then some of those other outlaw country stars, Did that prompt you to start writing your own lyrics? It prompted me to take an interest, a real interest in the American West, but it really remained in my background because when I ultimately went to London, I couldn't write songs like that because they weren't in the popular canon of the time. That's why the earliest things that Elton and I wrote were sort of pastiches of what was currently popular, very much drawn from mythology and science fantasy.

13:16It was all this culminating in psychedelia, probably, is the correct word for it. They're all throwing coins in a velvet fountain Missing on stars and floating on air A kaleidoscope mine, but nobody cares So anything country-based and had a storyline to it with a Western theme was very not currently in favour. So thematically, stylistically, the songwriting changed, but right from the outset, the division of labour was there. Elton did the music, you provided the words. Right, right. But are you musical? Do you play anything? Well, I didn't back then. I was completely non-musical. I didn't know how studios operated.

14:07I was a complete fish out of water. Over time, obviously, I became more aware of how things worked to the point where, yes, when I was writing, I would play chords on a guitar, which I still do to this day. When you were writing for Elton. Right, yeah, but that happened much, much later on. Sure, but when you're writing those words then and you're playing a guitar at the same time, does that mean the song existed with a melody? Not really. I mean, I suppose in a way I've got a melodic sense of it in my head and I am singing it to myself but it's more to give a rhythmic feel to the lyric. This happened much, much later on.

14:47In the early days I just sat there and wrote. It was just words on a page. Words on a page or at a typewriter. But the songs that you've written with Elton always started first and foremost with the words. That's always been the case and Elton then sets those words to melodies. Has it ever happened the other way round? The only thing I can ever recall of that nature was a song called Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word. We were both living in California at the time, and I visited him one day, and he was sitting at the piano in the house, which is very unusual, because he hates playing the piano in the house.

15:24And he just had this kind of idea of an opening section, and I remember standing at the piano with him, and I thought, well, this is kind of unusual, because we're actually at the piano together. that's how the characteristic songwriters always used to work you know the the lyricist leaning on the piano with the cigarette and the ties loosened and you know going hey try this there and how's this but it's something you'd never we'd never ever done that we were both completely as we termed it later on two rooms at the end of the world so um yeah no he just played this riff and I came up with the title.

16:03I said, it just came into my head. Sorry seems to be the hardest word. But that was about as much of it that happened at that particular point. I went away and finished off a lyric, brought it back and it probably changed radically. And it started with that phrase, I presume. With that phrase. Because of the cadence of the melody. Right, exactly. Why can't we talk it over? Oh, it seems to me. The siren seems to be the hardest word And that's what happens when I'm creating a lyric. I sit with a guitar, but it's a bit like Linus's blanket, you know, in Snoopy. It's just a comfort zone. I've used the same guitar for probably 30 years.

16:52And there's never been a time when you've said to Elton, look, I've got these words, but I've also got this set of chords. No, I wouldn't do that. I've occasionally, if he's had trouble with a line and can't understand the cadence of it, I will maybe just say, well, it goes like this, and I'll probably sing it to him. But outside of that, no, that would be stepping on his toes, and he doesn't do that to me, and I don't do that to him, and that's the way it's worked, and if it ain't broke, you know, don't fix it. That's the mechanics of songwriting. What about the subject? I mean, so many of your songs, you're known for your narrative, songs there about fictional characters and stories.

17:32How many of them throughout the catalogue are written about Elton himself? Well, I like to think it's 50-50. I like to figure out what his point of view is on certain things. And occasionally, you know, he's asked me to maybe incorporate something about a particular subject matter. I like to throw a bit of everything into a particular lyric and throw in a curveball. But for instance, a song like I'm Still Standing,

18:05which was originally written sort of as a kiss off to a former girlfriend, but everybody thinks of it as an anthemic song about Elton's return to form after being in rehab. And I would like to think that that's the way it should be thought of because history changes and the kiss off is no longer a kiss off the particular person that song was written about is now a very good friend of mine she got a very good song out of it but I much prefer to think that he's stinging about himself Don't you know I'm still standing Better than I ever did Looking like a true survivor Feeling like a little kid That's the beauty of songs, though they are Open to interpretation Is it ever frustrating?

18:54And I think of one which people have often associated With a really dark time in Elton's life Somebody Saved My Life Tonight Someone saved my life tonight Sugar Bay Which a lot of people have said, oh, that was when famously he put his head in an oven and it was a cry for help. Well, it's a culmination of subject matter that. But you see, you've got to put that into perspective because that song came from the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album, which is a completely autobiographical album about the two of us. We can stretch our legs if we have a mind, but don't disturb us if you hear us trying.

19:35To instigate the structure of another line or two Some of the songs are completely about the two of us working together, songs like Writing and Bitter Fingers. But yes, Someone Saved My Life Tonight, I've written it from his point of view. But it's not just about the famous sticking his head in the gas oven and turning it on low, opening the windows and taking a pillow with him, which was a complete cry for help. Is that what happened? Yeah, I remember walking in and going, what are you doing? And then his fiancée walked in, just rolled her eyes and walked out. So, yeah, it was pretty much pantomime.

20:18But at the same time, that song's not just about that particular farce, I'll say. The someone who saved my life tonight is actually Long John Baldry, who Elton, up to a point, was playing keyboards for. And, you know, John was a famously gay man and was larger than life. And we went out with him at this particular point one night and he literally said, you know, what are you doing? You can't get married. You're a gay man. And Elton was like, I am? And he goes, yes, you are. And he goes, oh, I suppose I am. Did you know he was gay? Oh, yes, absolutely. Had he talked about it with you? Well, he made a pass at me originally, and it was kind of comical.

21:06When you first met? We got that out of the way immediately. How did he make a pass at you? Oh, he just put his hand on my leg. But I kind of laughed it off, and it was like nothing. It was just, OK, we got that out of the way, that's good. We set the tone for the relationship. But I think it was also, he was very sort of conflicted at the time. I mean, because of his background and being very dominated by his father, I mean, this is the guy who wouldn't let him wear hush puppies. I think that's why he became so flamboyant later on, was because it was a blowback at being repressed as a child. But anyway, so we went out with Baldry.

21:44We got paralytically drunk. After Baldry had sort of done his gay Gettysburg Address, Elton sort of came back and delivered his Waterloo to his fiancée, and then things all went pear-shaped, and we moved out the next day and back to his mother's apartment in Northwood Hills. You almost had your hopes in me Didn't you, dear? You nearly had me roped and tied All about him that died Sweet freedom whispered in my ear Bernie Taupin, your next choice for this cultural life is the 1969 Sam Peckinpah. The Wild Bunch. The Wild West was pretty well tamed by 1930. But there were still a few trails for the kind who'd be called before they were tamed.

22:39They called them The Wild Bunch. A landmark Western which was renowned for its graphic violence. When did you first see it? Where were you? Funnily enough, pretty much around the same time as that incident happened in Furlong Road with Elton's attempt at suicide. and, as I say, his Waterloo, or her Waterloo, I suppose it was. But, yeah, one of the things we would do all the time was go to the local movie house. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about sort of gravitating from those narrative country songs that Marty Robbins was singing, the reality of them, and seeing all these westerns over time, even things like The Magnificent Seven.

23:25It was a good movie, but the characters were still a little glamorous. And what Peckham Parr's Wild Bunch did to me, when I watched that, it absolutely blew me away. I mean, I'd never seen anything like it, and to this day it's still my favourite movie ever. Is that because there's no romance to it? You could practically smell the characters. They were so unbelievably realistic. The immediate thing about the Wild Bunch that obviously everybody remembers is the violent aspect of it. But the thing is that over time, and believe me, I've seen it, I can't even imagine how many times. I think I know every line in the movie.

24:07But what ultimately I loved about it was a movie about men out of time. And I thought the camaraderie in it was extraordinary. And some of the dialogue is extraordinary. And the way that they interact with each other. It was just everything I wanted to see that I'd heard about in the songs. What in the hell's the matter with you, old man? Leave him alone! Who? He's going to get us all killed. I'm going to get rid of him. You cannot get rid of anybody. We're going to stick together just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that, you're like some animal.

24:47You're finished. We're finished. All of us. The Wild Bunch came out in 1969. The following year came the third Elton John album, Tumbleweed Connection. Here we have a copy of the album on the desk in front of us. Full of cowboys, outlaws and pioneers. So is this album very much informed by The Wild Bunch, do you think? It's The Wild Bunch, it's music from Big Pink, the band, it's Marty Robbins. Suddenly I realise, yes, I can write the things I want to do. I can tell the stories I want to tell, and then hence came Tumbleweed Connection. I pulled down the stagecoach times and I read the latest news.

25:32I tapped my feet and I'm surprised the calls I saw they knew. This album was written and recorded before we ever went to the States, so there was no inspiration from actually being there. That came along later on with Mad Men Across the Water. And the stories are played out here. I mean, just looking at the track listing, we have Ballad of a Well-Known Gun, we have Son of Your Father and Country Comfort, and particularly the song My Father's Gun, which starts with the line, from this day I own my father's gun, we dug his shallow grave beneath the sun. It could be the voiceover at the start of a Western movie.

26:12Is that the way you saw the film? Well, again, yeah, it's what I always aspired to do was tell stories in a cinematic sense. I take my horse and I ride the northern plain

26:27To wear the colour of the greys and join the fight again

26:36Oh, and I rest until I know The cause is falling one From this day on until I die I wear my father's gun I've always been uncomfortable with the term songwriter because I think I'm only part of what a songwriting team consists of. Even lyricist is a little too pompous for me. When people say, how do you like to be termed? I always think of storyteller. It's like being a cinematographer and conjuring up images like that. This album, Tumbleweed Connection, was definitely inspired by songs about the Civil War, obviously with My Father's Gun, things about the West Ballad of a Well-known Gun.