In April 1984, Elton John took his seat in Wembley Stadium for the FA cup final. As the crowd lifted the roof with Abide With Me, Elton wept. Watford FC, the club he had taken from the 4th to the 1st division in four years (there was no premiership in those days) went on to lose. But that didn't matter.
Money and global celebrity was as nothing compared to this. "It was," he said, "the happiest day in my life."
The curious marriage of fame and football reached its apogee last Wednesday night as Candle In The Wind rippled out across the hallowed Wembley turf before England's postponed world cup qualifier against Moldova. They might have played God Save The Queen as well, but that was mere form. The new religion was giving voice to the new national anthem, and it's a pound to a penny there wasn't a dry eye among the 75,000 the stadium.
Elton John writes songs that make grown men weep and his genius for melody goes straight to the emotional jugular, cutting across class and musical tastes. Yet his place in Britain's psyche is as much to do with who he is as what he writes. Like Cilla or Cliff - before them Vera Lynn and Harry Secombe - Elton John had achieved the status of national treasure long before last Saturday. He has been pop person laureate since 1971 when he played at Princess Anne's 21st party and even had a bop with the Queen.
Because, in spite of his outrageous appearance and bizarre lifestyle (this is someone who has two florists on his permanent staff responsible for up to 240 flower arrangements a week, with blossoms tumbling from every possible aperture) there is something essentially non-threatening about a chubby man with specs and ecothreatened hair, no matter that he's dressed in spangles and spandex. For all the boozing and bingeing you know he would be nice to your granny - as he was to the Queen Mother when they took the floor in a Scottish reel, rolling up the rugs to dance Slattery's Mounted Foot one impromptu evening at Windsor Castle.
Elton Hercules John (he changed his name by deed poll just before his first album was released) was born Reginald Dwight on March 25th 1947 in suburban north London. (Incidentally, he is the second favourite crooner, after Sinatra, of that other Reggie - Reggie Kray.) Dad was in the RAF, but before the war he had been a professional trumpeter with a first division dance band called Bob Miller and the Millermen. Young Reggie inherited his father's musical ear. By the time he started formal music lessons at six, he could already knock out popular songs he heard on the radio. When he was 11 he got a part-time junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, but he was never a virtuoso or interested in being one. His only hero of classical music was Liberace, the first glitz pianist, the brilliance of whose costumes was matched only by that of his teeth.
Musically his mentors were Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Even before he was old enough to drink, he was boosting his pocket money thumping out standards and cover versions of top ten hits in a nearby pub.
Reg Dwight was not obvious pop star material. Quite apart from the name there was his hair - already receding when he was a teenager. Although he always wanted to perform, the big break came when answered an ad for songwriters in the New Musical Express. He could write tunes, he said, but not words. He was put together with another young hopeful who could write lyrics but not music and one of the most successful song-writing partnerships of the century was born.
Although both have written with other collaborators (Elton John won the Oscar for Lion King with Tim Rice), their best work has been together with Bernie Taupin's often dark, troubled lyrics in perfect dramatic tension with Elton's soaring romanticism. Success didn't come immediately, but once they got the formula right, it never stopped. Thirty albums and 25 years on the style hasn't really changed. They give the people what they want - individual tracks that have narrated our lives: Your Song, Take Me To The Pilot, Rocket Man, Daniel, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Bennie And The Jets, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me. And of course Candle In The Wind.
Elton John started his career in the days of glam rock, of David Bowie and Marc Bolan. But they were handsome, Elton was not. Pouting and posing, which they did for real, he did for fun. Out came the hats, the platforms, the rhinestone glasses. The more ludicrous the better. (He owns more spectacles than Imelda Marcos has shoes and travels with several dozen wherever he goes.)
But while Gary Glitter snarled and snaked his hips, Elton John - stuck behind a piano - was as dangerous as fake fur slippers.
The British have always found vulgarity strangely reassuring, and Elton's ostentation, his total lack of anything that could be said to resemble taste in his houses, his personal jet and his clothes, was something they admired. He had money and he spent it. In 1988 2,000 items of memorabilia went under the hammer at Sotheby's. The ultimate in bad taste was his 50th birthday party on April 6th of this year. The crowd waiting on the pavements gasped as an 18th-century dandy emerged from a moving van, wearing a three-foot high powdered wig topped by a galleon in full sail. He descended from the red-plush interior, complete with gilt mirrors, on a hydraulic lift. The birthday bash at the Hammersmith Odeon - complete with the Welsh Come Dancing team and sit-down supper for 540 guests (ranging from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Des O'Connor to his mother dressed as the queen) is said to have cost u £500,000.
Yet for all his outward success, Elton John was not a happy man. On St Valentine's day in 1984, he surprised just about everyone when he married Renate Blauel, a German sound engineer. Although he had never discussed his sexuality it was generally assumed he was gay. In fact he was bisexual (he had been engaged but broke it off when he was 20). The marriage, Elton admitted later, was an attempt to deny his homosexuality. It lasted just a few months, and in its aftermath followed the standard pop litany of drink, drugs, eating disorders and therapy.
In 1990 he cleaned up, joining Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Over-eaters Anonymous. In 1988 he won damages of u £1 million after allegations in the Sun that he had a relationship with a rent boy. Four years later he won damages of u £350,000 (later reduced to £75,000) from the Sun newspaper, which had claimed he was still bulimic. "They can say I'm a fat old sod. They can say I'm an untalented bastard. They can call me a poof. But they mustn't lie about me."
In 1985 he became involved in the Aids campaign, which was how he met Diana.
Not surprisingly perhaps, they bonded immediately and her family would have been aware of the depth of the friendship when they asked him to perform in Westminster Abbey. Earlier this year they had a major falling out over Rock And Royalty, the Versace/Avedon high camp book of nudes and royals, when Diana claimed to have been misled about its explicit content. Elton was throwing the launch party and Diana was to have been guest of honour.
This blip in their friendship was forgotten, however, in their shared grief at Gianni Versace's murder and Diana's very public support of her friend at the memorial service. Over the years Elton and Bernie's method of working has remained much the same. Bernie writes the words, Elton puts music to them. Bernie Taupin now lives in LA while Elton's home is near Windsor, where he lives the life of a country squire with his partner David Furnish and his dogs. Their collaboration now is mainly by fax. Taupin has always written quickly, so the re-write for Candle In The Wind presented few problems, except those of taste. There are all sorts of ironies in the use of an elegy to one 36-year-old woman being used for another.
The original bitter sweet words, so typical of Taupin, were even more appropriate to Diana. Too appropriate: "Even when you died the press still hounded you," and "You had the grace to hold yourself while those around you crawled". But, as in all Elton John's songs, it is above all the melody that moves us, and within that melody the memory of the original song lives in parallel.
Elton John is a rich man. Diana's estate of u £40 million is nothing compared to his. He earned u £39 million last year alone and his personal fortune is estimated at around u £180 million. Candle In The Wind, out today, will be number one tomorrow, and in all probability the biggest seller ever. Not that he will make any money from it. But for him, as for Diana, what he longs for is to give and to belong, to football and the world.