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(Credits: Alamy)<\/p>\n
Sun 22 June 2025 16:30, UK <\/p>\n
If Elton John<\/a> actually remembers anything of salience from the height of the 1970s, then he deserves every award going for him. That isn\u2019t meant as an insult or to sound condescending, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> was terrifyingly swift, to the point that it almost became synonymous with his brand.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cThe drugs were the worst thing,\u201d he once said. \u201cThe drink was really to come down off the drugs, but there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Even at the darkest points of John\u2019s life, given that he was music\u2019s 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. \u201cThis is how bleak it was: I\u2019d stay up, I\u2019d smoke joints, I\u2019d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I\u2019d stay up for three days and then I\u2019d go to sleep for a day and half,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Elton John\u2019s terrifying spiral into drugs and alcohol<\/p>\n In short, the answer is that John was higher than you could ever imagine throughout much of the course of the \u201870s, 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 \u2018Elton Week\u2019 string of performances in Los Angeles, meaning it was hardly surprising when he announced his retirement from touring not two years later.<\/p>\n