Never Too Late follows Elton John on his recent Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert tour and looks back on his 55-year career. Photo / Getty Images
A new Disney+ show, Elton John: Never Too Late, looks back on the star’s 55-year career, but does it beat 1996’s Tantrums & Tiaras?
The glossy Elton John: Never Too Late follows the musician on his recent Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert tour and looks back on his 55-year career. But observers with long memories may recall an earlier documentary that became the water-cooler talking point after it aired on ITV in July 1996. For jaw-dropping moments, Never Too Late can’t beat Tantrums & Tiaras.
The latter film was made on a shoestring budget with a handheld camera, and followed John on his Made In England tour of 1995. Tantrums & Tiaras showed the singer losing his rag with alarming regularity and ferocity, including – famously – when he became distracted during a game of tennis on holiday and smashed his racket before trying to book a flight home, declaring: “I’m never coming to the South of France again.”
Then there was the scene in which John discovered that an unwitting flunky had left a bag of clothes in a car before a video shoot. He exploded like Mount Vesuvius in an expletive-laden outburst and refused to film the video (he eventually relented). You saw his team cowering like helpless Pompeiians as the first sparks flew. John was also extremely, deliciously, catty. On spotting a flower arrangement he didn’t like, he suggested the flower arrangers should be shot.
Equally memorable were the excesses. John toured with a vast wardrobe, lugging dozens of suits, jackets and silk shirts around the world with him. His touring shoe collection would have put Imelda Marcos to shame, and he had drawer upon drawer of glasses (plus two tiaras, hence the title). “I never know what to wear and I like to have choice,” was his frank justification.
The extraordinary film left a lasting legacy. Despite a running time of just 75 minutes and a late Sunday night broadcast slot, the Bafta-nominated documentary arguably spawned the entire genre of celebrity-based reality television shows that has dominated our airwaves in the years since.
Without Tantrums, there’d probably have been no The Osbournes and no Keeping Up With the Kardashians (or, indeed, Meet the Rees-Moggs, the soon-to-launch Discovery+ documentary about former MP Jacob and family). A US reality series about child beauty pageants that ran from 2009 to 2013 was even called Toddlers & Tiaras. In fact, John himself acknowledged the connection, writing his 2019 memoir. “There’s a sense in which Keeping Up With the Kardashians might ultimately be my fault, for which I can only prostrate myself before the human race and beg their forgiveness.”
The film’s reverberations are still felt today. More recent celebrity documentaries such as Netflix’s Beckham and Harry & Meghan, or Amazon Prime’s The Greatest Love Story Never Told, about Jennifer Lopez, have taken the verité template of Tantrums & Tiaras and run with it.
But celebrity documentaries these days are far tamer beasts. They may look slicker and last longer but they are almost universally less candid. Culture has moved on: subjects’ fear of being cancelled and viewers’ ability to share clips (good and bad) on social media mean that films are less controversial. Stars hold back or self-edit.
In the Beckham documentary, for example, tabloid controversies involving the ex-footballer’s private life were skated over. Even John’s new film Never Too Late is an example of how documentaries have changed. Wider in scope and more disciplined than Tantrums & Tiaras, it’s a wonderful celebration of John’s life. But there’s not a raised voice or a smashed tennis racket in its 102 minutes.
Sir Peter Bazalgette, the former Endemol and ITV chairman and the man who brought Big Brother to the UK, says the “authentic” Tantrums & Tiaras worked so well because of its unfettered access to John. Back then, such access was unheard of. With just four linear terrestrial TV channels and no mainstream internet, platforms for up-close-and-personal exposure didn’t exist.
Plus it was directed by David Furnish, John’s now-husband but back in the mid-1990s his relatively new boyfriend. “It was most influential because it was produced by his partner David Furnish and therefore he had complete access to one of the world’s biggest pop stars [who] exposed himself and his personal life rather bravely, including when he was p***ed off about things,” Bazalgette says.
Filmmaker Mike Christie, who has made documentaries about New Order, Suede and Sir Alex Ferguson, says that plenty of pop star documentaries had been made before 1996. But they’d never been so raw as Tantrums & Tiaras. “It was ahead of its time. Everything before had quite a conceit to it,” says Christie. “Take the film In Bed With Madonna, which is quite a few years earlier [in 1991]. It felt massively produced. Part of the joy of the Elton doc was the fact that it felt like home movie footage. It did feel entirely candid.”
Outbursts aside, Tantrums & Tiaras is funny. John drops gentle zingers about his fellow rock stars. “I don’t know how Mrs Jagger does it” he said of Mick Jagger when complaining about all the interviews he has to do.
There are moments of huge sadness. At one point John’s mother Sheila tells him that she doesn’t think his late father Stanley liked him very much. John’s beloved grandmother dies. We see him visit her at home for what turns out to be the last time and the audience only learn of her death when he dedicates his Oscar for Can You Feel The Love Tonight (from The Lion King) to her. And in one extraordinary segment, Furnish makes John watch a video of him and the singer’s therapist discussing John’s shortcomings (which John rightly describes as like “two vultures picking [over] a corpse”).
It’s this sadness that makes the viewer forgive John for his rages, says documentary-maker Jane Mingay, who has made films about Paloma Faith and the recent Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story. “Elton’s kind of flawed but you still love him. It doesn’t matter how badly he behaves because he needs to be loved. Any criticism is constantly undermined by the fact that he’s vulnerable and kind,” she says. In Tantrums, John is vocal about his homesickness at the end of a long tour (108 shows in a year). His answers to camera can be almost childlike in their naivety and delivery. Rather than raise our eyebrows when he’s upset that his latest single, Believe, fails to make the Top Ten, we feel his disappointment.
“I think it’s really pioneering. If you look at D A Pennebaker and those early pioneers of observational filmmaking, they weren’t getting as close. With Bob Dylan in [Pennebaker’s 1967 film] Don’t Look Back, he always wants to look cool,” says Mingay. “Whereas here, Elton doesn’t have to look cool. He doesn’t really care.”
But we will never see the like of Tantrums & Tiaras again. Social media has changed everything. John was, in Bazalgette’s parlance, one of the first celebrities to “mediate his own media”. He showed his true self. Everyone professes to do it now, largely via Instagram and TikTok, and most content is “sheer bloody narcissism”, Bazalgette says. Glimpses into stars’ lives, whether they’re dancing around their kitchens or taking their kids to school looking dishevelled, can be edited, curated and filtered by the subjects so it’s hard to know what’s truly authentic any more.
This wasn’t the case with Tantrums & Tiaras. Furnish (who also co-directed Never Too Late) met John less than two years before he started filming it, and you get the feeling that he used the process as a means of better knowing his partner himself. For instance, in the film, Furnish probes his partner about his work-life balance, and asks him whether he ever felt trapped by his fame. “A bit,” replies John, before adding “but I love it”. The dialogue feels utterly genuine.
Christie, who remembers watching Tantrums & Tiaras “slack-jawed”, says it was “just the most extraordinary risk” on John’s part. “I’d worked a little bit with Elton on some projects and I’d definitely seen the tantrums. It was the absolute shock of it all,” he says of the programme. These days, most musicians would be warned off such projects by their management, Christie says.
The celebrity landscape has changed. Pre-smartphone straightforwardness is over. There’s a bit in Tantrums & Tiaras when John says: “I don’t want a sycophantic [documentary], I just want people to see how I am.” He succeeded there. But today, too many stars seem to want the opposite: they don’t want people to see how they are, they just want a sycophantic documentary.
Never Too Late partially reflects this change. While by no means sycophantic, it’s a far more polished film than its predecessor. And the unwitting architect of this celebrity culture in the first place? Step forward, Mr Elton John.
Elton John: Never Too Late will be available in New Zealand on Disney+ from December 13.
Frank: Stories from the South, episode 8 – High on Culture.