(Credits: Alamy)
Sun 22 June 2025 16:30, UK
If Elton John actually remembers anything of salience from the height of the 1970s, then he deserves every award going for him. That isn’t meant as an insult or to sound condescending, but it’s purely for the fact that the decade was filled with such hedonism and decadence for him that he came to the brink of losing himself down a completely cataclysmic spiral.
Of course, John bolted out of the blue in the earliest part of his career as a flamboyant, enigmatic, and blazing persona. That was all well and good, but the trouble was that he had to keep it up, and for a young boy hailing from the working-class streets of London, that task was easier said than done. Subsequently, his descent into the tightest grip of a drug and alcohol dependency was terrifyingly swift, to the point that it almost became synonymous with his brand.
A quick shot of vodka or the odd joint soon became the least of his worries, however, as the addiction quickly deepened into something far more intense and sinister. “The drugs were the worst thing,” he once said. “The drink was really to come down off the drugs, but there’s no denying that I was an alcoholic as well [as a drug addict] because I needed to drink a bottle-and-a-half of scotch at night to come down.”
Even at the darkest points of John’s life, given that he was music’s most blazing export at the time, the facts of his existence in that moment were regularly glossed over and glamourised in the name of sex, drugs and rock and roll. But the reality was far less pretty. “This is how bleak it was: I’d stay up, I’d smoke joints, I’d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I’d stay up for three days and then I’d go to sleep for a day and half,” he explained in 2010, painting the real picture that the lavish lifestyle and proclivities of fame were no longer a rags to riches tale, but the very thing that nearly pushed him off the edge of a cliff.
Elton John’s terrifying spiral into drugs and alcohol
In short, the answer is that John was higher than you could ever imagine throughout much of the course of the ‘70s, also leading to addictions in other forms than substances, such as his battle with bulimia. It all came to a head in 1975 when he suffered a cocaine overdose during his ‘Elton Week’ string of performances in Los Angeles, meaning it was hardly surprising when he announced his retirement from touring not two years later.
This is, however, obviously not an entirely bleak tale in the sense that John managed to get his life back on track by the 1980s, with comeback single ‘I’m Still Standing’ resonating in both a literal and metaphorical sense. He’s been sober and teetotal for the best part of three decades since, which is, of course, to be applauded – but that doesn’t mean the memories of what could have been in the 1970s don’t still haunt him.
“I still dream, twice a week at least, that I’ve taken cocaine and I have it up my nose,” he admitted to NPR in a 2012 interview. “And it’s very vivid and it’s very upsetting, but at least it’s a wake-up call.” As such, although the hallucinogens and highs no longer physically course through his system, mentally, they will forever be the demon he has to fight against in order to remain on top.
The 1970s were the decade that made, but equally almost nearly broke, Elton John. It was natural, given the severity of his addiction, that people would doubt his future trajectory at times – but then, when you’re someone so famously flamboyant, ebullient, and charismatic, would you ever want the naysayers to have the final word? As he said himself: ‘The Bitch is Back’.
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