Royal in everything but name

By PHILIP HOARE

He is England's alternative queen, pop aristocracy taken to the extreme. This, after all, is a man who rock and rolled with Her Majesty on her birthday, whose tribute to her deceased daughter-in-law is the best-selling single of all time, and whose expenditure reaches levels unseen since the days of Louis XV. He is, truly, royal in everything but name.

He is also pop's most unlikely icon: Reginald Dwight, a bespectacled schoolboy from Pinner who somehow became a global superstar. If he didn't already exist, Barry Humphries would have had to invent him.

He emerged out of the blues scene of the 60s; a serious, monochrome culture of musos. But by the early 70s, emboldened by the butterfly decade of glam rock, Reg had reinvented himself. He can write a musical in two weeks. That facility is the bedrock of his success and his plangent yet somehow affecting music secured him a place in the pop pantheon.

But it was the costumes that lodged in the mind. I remember one of the first rock concerts I attended at Southampton Guildhall, its dour, civic panelled chamber suddenly turned into glitter ball confusion. In silver lame and ridiculous platform boots, he stomped around the stage like a demented goose in foil, a bizarre but undoubtedly entertaining figure.

He was up there with David Bowie and Rod Stewart, a triptych of flame-haired and camped-up dandies. We didn't really wonder if he was gay - in the narcissistic stakes he was outshone by the alien perversity of Bowie or the dark suavity of Bryan Ferry. He was simply a figure of fun, a cartoon character who parodied himself. Captain Fantastic, indeed. But he was the one selling out Wembley Stadium.

Yet he remained disconnected. "I'm not the man they think I am at home", as he sang in Rocket Man. That lyric may have been a mask for his then undeclared sexual otherness, just as the assertion that I'm Still Standing bears testimony to a fierce ambition. Yet those songs which have provided the soundtrack for three decades are invested with a vicarious emotion, expressed in someone else's words. All John's lyrics are written by Bernie Taupin, who for many years has lived in California.

The two, once close, are less so now; and yet Taupin still writes to John's emotional crises. He wrote Someone Saved My Life Tonight as the soundtrack to John's sexual dilemma. Even now, on his latest (and unusually critically acclaimed) album, the lyrics to I Want Love ran "I'm dead in places other men feel liberated".

It was a bitter retort to the vicissitudes of late middle age which not even a pop star's millions can ameliorate while This Train Don't Stop Here Anymore painted an equally bleak, menopausal picture of desertion. Perhaps it is this creative dichotomy, rather than any spurious break-up with his partner David Furnish (patently untrue to anyone who knows the pair), that is "eating Elton" as one paper put it this month.

In the past decade, the pair have become a paparazzo's dream, clad in matching Versace or Robert Cavalli suits, beaming benignly for the flash lights, camping it up as as a gay version of Posh and Becks.

Yet the underlying tensions of John's life cannot make living with him easy. His previous addictions to alcohol, cocaine and sex, and bouts of bulimia are a hangover which makes him a stern figure nowadays. The only pills he takes now are handfuls of vitamins, washed down with a Diet Coke.

Almost in compensation, the parties have become more extraordinary, more ironic. At his 50th birthday party he appeared as the Sun King in a wig so tall he had to be delivered in a furniture removal van. His annual Black and White Balls, at his Windsor home, and Oscar night parties, in Hollywood, are events where the non-arrival of an invitation means social extermination.

How has he have survived? His modern renaissance can be traced back to 1997, and his timely rewriting of Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana's funeral. He has the knack of catching the national spirit. Diana's death came at a moment when their friendship was fractured after a row over a book of photographs. It was yet more ironic that their reconciliation came after the murder of their mutual friend, Gianni Versace, gunned down outside his Miami house.

For John, Versace's was reflection of his own flamboyant, high-spending lifestyle. Versace provided the costumes for the star's world tour in 1992. In Versace, the pop star had found a kindred spirit, a high-profile figure representing both excess and a vulnerability beneath the glittering carapace.

"Perhaps we have become especially close because he himself had an illness and has lately come increasingly out of his shell," John said in early 1997, referring to Versace's battle with cancer.

Later that year, at Versace's memorial service in Milan, Princess Diana put her arm around John, comforting the pop star as the tears rolled down his cheeks. No one could have predicted that, within weeks, John would be playing at her funeral.

That appearance, at a time of heightened national emotion, re-installed John in the public consciousness, and secured him a knighthood. Even though critical approbation has largely escaped him - or perhaps in spite of it - he has become a brand, like Louis Vuitton.

No fake Frank Sinatra farewells for Sir Elton: he loves working and never stops touring, displaying an energy which puts modern bands to shame. Yet he is never happier than sitting in front of the football on TV, eating fish fingers.

He hates his routine to be interrupted. The conflict at Taiwan airport is a case in point. The star was enraged because his usual swift transit from his private jet - sign a few autographs, then off to the hotel - was rudely interrupted by the authorities' insane insistence that he go through customs and immigration with everyone else.

In a way, he is a victim of his own love of publicity. He says things because he knows they will get in the papers. Hence his remarks about Madonna, and the Diana memorial fountain - "It's purely ugly, it looks like a sewer" - and Hear'Say - "the ugliest band I've ever seen".

No one who watched David Furnish's 1996 documentary Tantrums and Tiaras could be surprised at such reactions. In what was probably the most eye-opening private footage of a pop star shot, Sir Elton was complaining about the weather on the Riviera as if it were a calculated personal insult. Yet he is nothing if not self-aware.

When he saw Furnish's film, he said, "I looked at myself and thought, 'She's an absolute cow'." His use of "Mrs" for all his male friends (as in Mrs Jagger and Mrs Bowie) is a camp affectation, and in company he can be extremely funny.

With Furnish, John has evolved a new social set, one much predicated on modern celebrity. Elizabeth Hurley and the Beckhams are frequent guests in Nice, or at any one of his other four homes across the world. Brooklyn and Romeo Beckham are among his 10 godchildren and have been named in his will, along with Elizabeth Hurley's son Damian, and Sean Lennon, all standing to get a share of his fortune, rated around $460 million - although what will be left after another 30 or 40 years of high spending is another matter.

Yet the extravagance is somehow honest, childlike even: the boy in the sweetshop. And his charity work is unsurpassed: the Elton John Aids Foundation is the biggest Aids charity in Britain, and since 1991, fuelled by the profits from all his single releases, has raised millions for work in Russia, Africa and elsewhere. Tellingly, it runs on perhaps the smallest of all administration costs of such high-profile charities, at less than 5 per cent of its income.

He remains a paradoxical figure, emblematic of a celebrity-obsessed age - perhaps a victim of it, too. Stand him in a roomful of people at a strange venue, and he will recede into a dark corner. You may even turn your back on him; but there's always some odd, nervous tension in the air that tells you're in the presence of an extraordinary and unignorable man.

- INDEPENDENT