Sir Elton John has released the first song he wrote with Bernie Taupin in celebration of his 74th birthday.
The track, Scarecrow, began his long partnership with the musician in 1967 and has been made available on streaming and digital formats for the first time, along with five other songs and b-sides.
The duo first met after both answering an advert in the NME looking for songwriters, when Sir Elton, then Reg Dwight, was 20 and Taupin was 17.Taupin had already written the lyric but Scarecrow marks the first time Sir Elton put his music to Taupin’s words, marking the start of their long and fruitful collaboration.
Bernie told TIME magazine of their early songwriting days: “When we started it out it was really just me and him.
“It was very much a sort of stream-of-consciousness. I would write whatever I felt, and he would jerry-rig it into a song.”
When they started out, they slept at Elton’s mother’s flat, but soon their luck began to change.
Sir Elton’s music began to be heard by important people, and despite starting out as the piano player and songwriter, he was soon thrust into being the frontman.
While he and Bernie continued to write together for a long time, it was not all plain sailing.
In fact, the pair started to grow distant as Elton’s stage persona became more and more bombastic.
Bernie said: “He knew that there were certain elements of his stage persona that I didn’t think were necessary.
“There’s no secret that the reason he became that outlandish character is simply because it was rebelling against a childhood and a very domineering father who wouldn’t let him even wear Hush Puppies.
“Bernie was one of the people who tried to tell me to stop doing drugs.
“I wouldn’t listen until years later, but he stuck by me, he never gave up on me, and he was so relieved and happy when I finally got help.”
“I could definitely sympathise with that. I just thought there were times—wearing a Donald Duck suit in Central Park—where it sort of went over the top.”
While the Elton biopic Rocketman shows him and Bernie falling out, Elton has said this was never the case, despite them taking a break in the mid-1970s from their working relationship.
According to both Bernie and Elton, their two-year break was due to their intensive working relationship, rather than any acrimonious fallings-out, but they came back together by 1976.
Sir Elton told The Observer: “We’ve had arguments – you don’t want to get him started on the subject of some of my more outlandish stage costumes, or indeed the subject of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a song he’s loathed from the minute it was finished and continues to loathe to this day – but we’ve never fallen out, despite all the ridiculous crap we’ve been through.
“Outside of my husband and children, it’s the most important relationship in my life, we really love each other and the film captures that.
