When Did David Furnish And Elton John Get Married
Elton John and David Furnish began dating 25 years ago in 1993.
In May 2005 Elton popped the question at a dinner party in one of their homes in Old Windsor.
The pair entered into a civil partnership in December of that year with the ceremony taking place in Windsor.
After the legalisation of gay marriage in 2014, the pair retroactively converted their civil partnership to a marriage.
The ceremony was held in Windsor on their ninth anniversary on December 21, 2014.
Elton John Was 24 Hours From Death After Prostate Cancer Surgery
Singer says he developed rare complication following successful operation in 2017
Sir Elton John has revealed he was 24 hours from death after contracting an infection following treatment for prostate cancer.
The singer, 72, was diagnosed in 2017 and opted for surgery rather than chemotherapy because he did not want the disease hanging over his family.
John wrote in his memoir, Me, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail, that the surgery in Los Angeles was a complete success but he noticed something was not right 10 days later.
It turned out that I had a rare complication from the operation. He spent 11 days in a London hospital after lying awake at night wondering if I was going to die.
It encouraged his decision to retire from touring so he could spend more time with his husband, David Furnish, and their sons, Zachary and Elijah.
In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, Id prayed: please dont let me die, please let me see my kids again, please give me a little longer, he wrote.
In a strange way, it felt like the time I spent recuperating was the answer to my prayers: if you want more time, you need to learn to live like this, you have to slow down.
Elton Johns Past Struggles With Drugs And Alcohol
The singers substance abuse was spiraling out of control until a dying teen inspired him to get sober and make a difference.
Almost three decades clean, Elton John wears his badge of sobriety proudly. He took to Instagram in 2015 to announce the 25th anniversary of his being dry with a picture of a cake topped by the number and the phrase One day at a time.
But his past addictions still have a hold on him.
I still dream, twice a week at least, that Ive taken cocaine and I have it up my nose, the performer told NPR in 2012. And its very vivid and its very upsetting, but at least its a wake-up call.
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His Opulent Million Dollar Piano
Elton John is nothing if not a flamboyant performer, so it makes sense that his preferred instrument is equally theatrical. Most artists might be happy with the fact that they’re playing the grand piano, but John has managed to take this already impressive instrument and glam it up several notches. As the BBC describes, one of his more showy instruments was the “red piano,” which was precisely what it says on the tin a bright red grand piano that he used for a series of concerts at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Yamaha also produced 30 red Elton John Signature Series Limited Edition Grand Pianos, which can be played like a normal grand piano but which also features hidden speakers and an electronic system for uploading and downloading music files, so the piano can essentially play itself.
Somehow, the red piano isn’t even the most absurdly amazing grand piano the artist has played. That honor goes to the “million dollar piano,” the instrument he played during his second Las Vegas residency. Its manufacturer, Yamaha, describes it as a custom-built grand piano that has an array of LED monitors embedded in a clear, acrylic case. The LED screens mean the piano can be a seamless part of the light show, allowing the instrument to transform and change its appearance while its clear, triangular legs work as light-reflecting prisms.
Drug Addiction And Bulimia
Earlier health problems were down to addiction issues.
In a 2010 TV interview with Piers Morgan, John spoke openly about more than a decade of drug use in the 1970s and the 1980s. He also shared that his addiction led him to become bulimic.
“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 a half, get up, and because I was so hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything, I’d binge and have like three bacon sandwiches, a pot of icecream and then I’d throw it up, because I became bulimic and then go and do the whole thing all over again,” he told Morgan.
At the height of his addiction problems, the musician swallowed Valium, dived into his Bel Air mansion’s swimming pool in front of his family members and screamed: “I’m going to die!”
In an interview with NBC’s Harry Smith he revealed the death of his friend Ryan White in 1990 was a wake-up call. White died after contracting Aids.
The Grammy-award winner became sober six months later and created the Elton John Aids Foundation in 1992.
“It nearly destroyed my soul,” the singer explained.
“My soul was black, like a charred piece of steak until I said, ‘I need help’.”
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Elton John: My Biggest Regret Is Taking Drugs
“I had complications as a result of that, which is very unlucky, and I was in great pain,” he said. “I came back to England and straight into the hospital because I was shaking with fever, and I picked up a really strong virus down there, which nearly killed me.”
John spent 11 days in a London hospital being treated for the infection.
“I didn’t really know how close to death I was. I was ill because I kept saying, ‘Please let me get well. I want to see my kids.’ But I had tubes coming out of every part of my body, and it took me seven weeks to recover from that when I went home.”
He Refuses To Wear Backstage Passes
Sir Elton John’s concert rider can get fairly elaborate. The maestro is not happy with merely specifying the color of tablecloths and types of flower arrangements he requires for his hospitality quarters though, to be fair, he definitely does specify both and is decidedly not a fan of chrysanthemums. As Smoking Gun points out, John gets a lot more specific, especially in one particular aspect of hectic backstage life: He refuses to wear a backstage pass.
John’s rider specifically points out that the artist is not accustomed to wearing any of those pesky laminated badges that allow the busy venue crew to see that the person is allowed to be there at a quick glance. Instead, it demands that the staff is “to be briefed to whom these people are.” The words “these people” are imperative, here, as they raise two possibilities. Either John extends his “no backstage passes” thing to the rest of his personal entourage, forcing the hapless venue workers to memorize tons of faces at the whim of a single star artist … or his official rider refers to the artist with a majestic plural. Either way, it’s hard not to be at least a little impressed with the sheer diva antics.
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Meeting Aids Patient Ryan White Helped John Get Sober
During the 1980s the AIDS epidemic surfaced, but growing fear over the then unknown illness failed to curb his drug use. In an interview to publicize his 2012 memoir Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS, John talked about his denial. You know, I was having people die right, left and center around me, friends. And yet I didnt stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction, he said. When you take a drug and you take a drink and you mix those two together, you think youre invincible. I came out of this HIV-negative. I was the luckiest man in the world.
The singer credits meeting Ryan White, the American teenage hemophiliac who contracted HIV through a contaminated blood transfusion, with providing the impetus for his start on the path to sobriety. I had the luck to meet Ryan White and his family, he said during a Harvard University talk in 2017. I wanted to help them, but they ended up helping me much more. Ryan was the spark that helped me to recover from my addictions and start the AIDS foundation. Within six months I became sober, and clean, and have been for 27 years.
Ryan White and Elton John
His Bet With John Lennon
Sir Elton John is one of the few people in history who has measured his pop music insight against a Beatle … and won. In 1974, the artist joined forces with another titan of the entertainment industry: The one and only John Lennon. As Ultimate Classic Rock describes, Elton featured on two of Lennon’s songs and was particularly certain that the piece called “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” would be a #1 hit. Lennon was more skeptical because strangely, at that point he was the only Beatle whose solo songs had never reached the top spot in the charts. Yes as amazing as it seems, Lennon’s highest-ranking U.S. single at that point was “Imagine,” which reached the #3 spot, while even Ringo Starr had topped the chart with not one but two singles.
Undaunted, John made a bet with Lennon: If “Whatever” made it to the top spot, Lennon would join him onstage at Madison Square Garden to play a few songs as the coolest surprise guest in history. The song topped the charts, Lennon honored the bet, and on November 28, 1974, the pair proceeded to rock the socks off the audience. The performance ended up being even more important than anyone could have thought at the time, as it was the last time Lennon performed in a concert before Mark David Chapman gunned him down in 1980.
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He Once Played A Concert Dressed As Donald Duck
Sir Elton John’s dress sense is famously on the glitzy and glamorous side, so it’s easy to see the artist as a fairly refined, if decidedly over-the-top Liberace type. While most images you’ll ever see about the artist will confirm that this is certainly true, there’s also another side to the man: He’s not afraid to poke fun at himself and his audience. As Ultimate Classic Rock describes, this penchant for comedy was on full display in 1980 when he played a massive concert at New York’s Central Park. Some artists would have used that huge visibility by dressing in tight leather pants and custom-made shirts. Others would have donned expensive suits. Elton John, however, decided to flaunt his lighter side. During his encore, he treated the audience of 400,000 to a full-sized Donald Duck costume, which he wore during the climax of the concert.
This wasn’t just a weird Halloween costume he happened to have lying around. The duck suit was lovingly designed by Bob Mackie, the man who provided Cher with her most outrageous stage apparel. It was also surprisingly difficult to get into, and an assistant had to literally shove the Rocket Man into the costume in what the artist later described as “the longest costume change in history.”
His Gig At Rush Limbaugh’s Wedding
Despite the fact that his style seems better suited for arenas, stadiums, and opulent Las Vegas casino shows, Sir Elton John has been known to take the occasional smaller gig. As the Guardian describes, he played a particularly strange one in 2010, when he performed at the wedding of Rush Limbaugh, the controversial right-wing radio host who has been accused of homophobia and AIDS denialism .
Since John is a leading AIDS activist, it may seem weird that he agreed to play at the wedding reception of a shock jock who has been known to actively downplay the disease. However, there’s a pretty good chance that the singer knew perfectly well what he was doing and that he had the last laugh. After all, John reportedly charged Limbaugh $1 million for the performance and every last cent of the profits went to … the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
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His Strange Relationship With Bernie Taupin
It’s impossible to talk about Sir Elton John’s career without mentioning Bernie Taupin. As Biography tells us, Taupin has been John’s songwriting partner for over 50 years, and they are described as absolutely crucial to each other. And they only met because of a complete coincidence. In 1967, the two men both happened to answer a job advertisement that Liberty Records had placed to find singer/songwriter talent. John was a prodigious pianist and could write a mean tune, but he struggled with lyrics. Since Taupin happened to be a competent and prolific lyricist, Liberty decided to pair the two. As a result, they wrote about 20 songs before they even met for the first time.
John and Taupin work in an odd but highly effective way. Taupin writes the lyrics first, and John almost auto-composes the song based on the text. Their process is remote, to the point where they’ve only ever worked on a song in the same room a couple of times. The way they’ve handled the fame and fortune their songs have brought them has been equally peculiar because while John has embraced the limelight and been, well, Elton John, Taupin has managed to dodge the kind of celebrity that usually follows when you write dozens of iconic songs and sell 255 million records. Of course, during the early years of their partnership, Taupin actually led a wilder lifestyle, so maybe he just got it all out of his system up front.
His Biggest Vice Is His Massive Photo Collection
It probably comes as no surprise that Sir Elton John is a noted patron of fine arts, but his particular passion is both surprising and incredibly specific. As Fine Art Multiple notes, John used to collect paintings, but he sold his large collection at a Sotheby’s auction in 1989. Six months later, he managed to kick his long-standing drug and alcohol addiction and started to collect modernist photography. Initially, he knew very little of the art form, but was attracted to the way a good photograph makes your imagination come alive. Over time, his expertise grew, as did his collection . Today, it’s considered one of the largest private collections in the world and contains works from famed photographers such as Man Ray, as well as legendary photographs such as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.”
John is so serious about this hobby that he happily admits that he kicked his former addictions only to get hooked on rare modernist photography instead. PetaPixel estimates the size of his collection at around 8,000 prints, which are normally on proud display in his homes, such as the massive apartment in Atlanta, where the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with these works. He has been known to occasionally loans small selections for exhibitions such as the “The Radical Eye” at London’s Tate Modern.
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Elton John Opens Up About Sobriety
John had made the decision to have his prostate removed rather than treated after he was diagnosed with cancer.
“I said, ‘I don’t care, take it out,”’ he told Smith. “I’ve had enough sex to last me a lifetime. I have children. I want to see them. I want to grow up with them. It was a very easy decision to make.”
John also writes in his autobiography about his family, his cocaine addiction and his special friendships with luminaries like Princess Diana, John Lennon and Elizabeth Taylor.
John performed an emotional version of his song “Candle in the Wind” at Diana’s funeral in 1997 after she died in a car crash. He also has become close with her son, Prince Harry, who vacationed this summer at John’s home with wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and their baby son, Archie.
John also knew a side of Diana that the public rarely glimpsed.
Elton Johns Challenges With Eating Disorder
Some of these challenges included eating disorder behaviors, specifically bulimia nervosa, which he received treatment for. In a 2010 interview with Piers Morgan, John describes some of these behaviors as he details this chaotic period of his life where he reports he lost complete touch with reality .
John has been sober for 30 years and states, of this time in his life, I vowed when I did change my life that that would never happen again . Although the world refers to him as many things, in an interview with Variety magazine, John spoke about how he views himself, stating I am a survivorIve survived a lot of things. Life is full of pitfalls, even when youre sober. I can deal with them now because I dont have to run away and hide.
Elton John provides a unique and valuable look at an LGBTQ+ man that struggles with disordered eating and is openly and authentically talking about it.
In a 2019 interview with the New York Times, John shared, Ive always tried to be as honest as I can, since I got sober. I think theres no point in sugarcoating anything this is what happened, this is how I behaved, this is a real sad story of someone who was trying to get to grips with his past .
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