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21 " I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die. "
― Elton John , Me
22 " As everyone knows, fame, especially sudden fame, is a hollow, shallow and dangerous thing, its dark, seductive powers no substitute for true love or real friendship. On the other hand, if you’re a terribly shy person, desperately in need of a confidence boost – someone who spent a lot of their childhood trying to be as invisible as possible so you didn’t provoke one of your mum’s moods or your dad’s rage – I can tell you for a fact that being hailed as the future of rock and roll in the LA Times and feted by a succession of your musical heroes will definitely do the trick. "
23 " When we toured America, all the legendary groupies from that era – the Plaster Casters and Sweet Connie from Little Rock – would turn up backstage, to the evident delight of the band and road crew. I’d think, ‘Hang on, what are you doing here? Surely you’re not here for me? Surely someone’s told you? And even if they haven’t, I’ve just been carried onstage by a bodybuilder, while wearing half the world’s supply of diamanté, sequins and marabou feathers – does that not suggest anything to you? "
24 " It’s hard to see how I could have been given a clearer warning that this was a bad idea unless it had started raining brimstone and I’d been visited by a plague of boils. "
25 " back then, even talking about rock and roll at the Royal Academy would have been sacrilege, like turning up to church and telling the vicar that you’re really interested in worshipping Satan. "
26 " I’ve played pianos, I’ve jumped on pianos, I’ve fallen off pianos and I’ve pushed a piano into the crowd, hit a member of the audience with it and spent the rest of the night frantically apologizing to them. "
27 " How boring does your sex life have to be for a blow job to count as the height of unimaginable depravity "
28 " There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. I was twenty-four, successful, settled and in love. "
29 " Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God. "
30 " The only problem was that I was incredibly houseproud, so they’d end up having sex on the snooker table with me shouting, ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’ which tended to puncture the atmosphere a bit. "
31 " There aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it. "
32 " It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then. "
33 " And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top. "
34 " I’m sure the music at Boy would have sounded as wonderful as ever, but there does come a point where, in that environment, you start to feel like the dowager duchess at the debutantes’ ball, peering down your pince-nez at the latest arrivals. "
35 " There’s times in my life when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. "
36 " For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened. "
37 " The next morning found me pacing around the house, trying to work out what was the earliest you could call someone who’d been out the previous night at a Halloween party, without looking like the kind of person they’d eventually have to get a restraining order out against. "
38 " was eleven years later, my life had changed beyond recognition, and yet here I was, still desperately trying to act normal, while the world around me appeared to have gone completely mad. "
39 " And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it. "
40 " But the fact that he never expressed it instilled in me a desire to show him that I’d made the right decision. It made me driven. I thought the more successful I got, the more it proved him wrong, whether he acknowledged it or not. Even today, I still sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and he’s been dead since 1991. "