The day Elton John stopped being just a promise

In 1971 Elton John was twenty-four years old, a talent already recognized but still poised between promise and consecration. When, on November 5 of that year, he published “Madman across the water“, no one could have known that that album would mark the turning point, the moment in which his artistic identity would stop looking for form and find it definitively. As often happens with the most complex works, time has revealed the specific weight of what it was not an immediate successbut a decisive piece in the construction of the legend.

“Madman across the water” was the fourth studio album released by Elton John, and it arrived after a year that told more than any adjective creative fury of that era. In April 1970 the Pinner musician’s second eponymous album was released, which among other things included “Your song“, his first hit and still among his most beloved classics. A few months later it was already the turn of “Tumbleweed connection“, which came as the third proof of the strength of the partnership between Elton John and Bernie Taupin. In the wake of the creative fervor of that period, between February and August 54 years ago, it was recorded at Trident Studios in London a more introverted, more orchestral, more ambitious workfor which a large number of session musicians were involved, while Paul Buckmaster orchestrated the string arrangements. In that time and space, nine songs found their reason for being, none superfluous, all dilated in time and structure, far from the form of the immediate and radio-friendly single.

Even though it didn’t establish itself as a resounding success at the time of its release – stopping at forty-first place in the British charts, and only rising to eighth place in the US charts – the album contained some of the songs that later became among the most enduring pieces of Elton John’s repertoire. “Tiny dancer”, the opening track, would become an absolute classic and one of the workhorses in concerts, destined to enter the canon of pop music, while the following piece “Levon” consolidated the musician’s fame as a composer of the first magnitude. In conclusion, there is “Goodbye”, a sober and melancholy farewell that seems to seal a chapter. Although the artistic result was remarkable at the time Elton didn’t seem too thrilled of the result: “I’d say I got rid of three years of crap“, declared John in an interview for Sounds given in early 1972: “It may seem a harsh statement, but there are three years of songs and old material that we finally left behind. I would have liked to have made a more stripped-down album when we recorded Madman, but in the end we recorded it because we had to. It was a painful process, carried out under pressureand I find it extraordinary that it turned out really well”. To better frame the thoughts expressed by the musician from Pinner at the time, it should be remembered that in the only nineteen months that passed from the beginning of the sessions for his eponymous album to the start of work on “Madman across the water”, Elton had completed three tours in the United States and three in the United Kingdomfinding himself sandwiching the work at Trident Studios in 1971 between 61 concerts in America, Japan, Australia and England.

The intense live activity ended up draining the time and energy dedicated to writing, so much so that Elton John and Bernie Taupin had now almost completely exhausted their stock of songs accumulated in the first three albums, and that year they managed to compose just eight new songs, working separately for the first time. Two pieces already recorded, “Honey roll” and “Can I put you on”, were diverted to the soundtrack of the film “Friends”, while travels and experiences overseas began to filter into Taupin’s lyrics, who translated into music the suggestions he absorbed while accompanying his trusted collaborator on tour. “Tiny dancer” then became a sort of love letter to the climate, the atmosphere and, above all, the women of California, while “Indian Sunset” investigated a deeper understanding of the condition of Native Americans.

Although the writing and recording of the album were influenced by the chaos of that periodyou can’t say that “Madman across the water” didn’t hit the mark anyway. And over the next half century, the record has consolidated itself in the hearts of fans of all ages and of Elton John himself. In addition to including three songs from the 1971 album in the “Farewell yellow brick road tour” (here our story of the date at the San Siro Stadium in Milan in 2022), in his 2019 autobiography “Me”, Sir Elton wrote: “I love ‘Madman across the water’. It was much more successful in America at the time than in Britain: it made the Top Ten there, but only reached number 41 at home. It’s not a particularly commercial record; there were no big hit singles, and the songs were much longer and more complex than what I had written previously. Some of Bernie’s lyrics resembled a diary of the past year. One song, ‘All the nasties’, was about me wondering out loud what would happen if I came out publicly: ‘If they ever ask me – what would I say? Would they criticize me behind my back? Maybe I should let them do it.’ No one, literally no one, seemed to notice what I was singing about.”

The title, “Madman across the water”, still resonates today the spirit of a time when Elton John wasn’t afraid to experiment. He was a musician who wrote with the piano as if it were an orchestra and who sought in the collaboration with Taupin a language capable of uniting theatre, introspection and rock. That audacity, which to many seemed like a gamble, was actually the first sign of John’s full maturity, marking the transition from the promise of English song to a figure capable of expanding the boundaries of pop. This is where his true artistic self is born, not yet the glittering character who will fill stadiums, but the auteur who knows how to blend form and vision, intimacy and grandeur. After this album, arrived in May 1972 “Honky Château”the “Rocket man” album, the studio project that finally brought Elton John at the top of the chartsplacing second in the British chart and reaching the top overseas. Subsequently, on January 26, 1973, “Don’t shoot me I’m only the piano player” was released and as part of the promotion of the record, in August of that year Elton John and Bernie Taupin heard from the US edition of “Rolling Stone”, “The general critical response to ‘Don’t shoot me I’m only the piano player’ was that it represented the end of Elton John’s three-year period of rise, fall and rebirth. Do you think that’s a fair judgement?” The two musicians then returned to “Madman across the water” in the response. The voice of “Tiny dancer” explained: “Everyone has made up this myth of ‘the fall’. Maybe they’re referring to ‘Madman across the water’. It didn’t make the Top Ten or Top 20 in England, but it still sold 65,000 copies, which isn’t bad at all. I think because we didn’t release singles for a year and a half, people thought we were finished, but the album actually did very well everywhere in the world. That, if you like, was our ‘fall'”.