‘At my age, I can rant!’ Bernie Taupin on Elton John, hellraising vampires and competing in full-blown rodeos
Bernie Taupin has an interesting take on the strange brand of fame he enjoys. “I am,” he says, “what I call the credit card guy.” I’m sorry? You’re the what? “The credit card guy. I go somewhere, like a shop or a restaurant, and it’s fine. I can be me, no one notices. Then I pay with my credit card and they see the name and go” – he lets out a mock gasp – “‘You’re that guy!’ And I’m the luckiest man in the world in regards to that. I absolutely, positively, 100% love my anonymity, the fact I can walk down the street. I mean, even my contemporaries, people I know – I find I have to introduce myself to them. I was at the Americanafest in Nashville recently and Robert Plant was playing. I hadn’t seen him in years and he said he wanted to meet up. So I walked towards him and there’s that look: ‘Oh God, who the hell’s this?’ ‘Hey, Robert, it’s Bernie!’ ‘Oh my gosh!’ And the next night, we had dinner together.”
It’s a neat summation of the curious situation Taupin finds himself in. He is half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in history: not all the songs on the 300m records Elton John has sold feature Taupin’s lyrics, but the vast majority do. Furthermore, Taupin has never been an invisible presence in the duo. There’s a photo of him on the sleeve of virtually all of John’s most famous albums: on 1975’s Rock of the Westies, he’s resplendent in a quite extraordinary pair of fringed leather chaps and a shirt open to the navel.
Yet, somehow, he’s managed to maintain a certain invisibility, perhaps as an inevitable result of working with one of the most flamboyant, piquantly OTT performers of all time. “Elton’s probably one of the most recognisable people in the world,” he nods. “I understand why he has to have a security team, but I could not live like that. I live in a very very small community, near Santa Barbara: everybody knows me, I know everybody, nobody treats me in any way other than as a friend. I’ve gone way past being regarded as somebody remotely special and I love that more than anything.”
Today, he’s passing completely unnoticed in the autumn streets of London, despite the fact he was on TV just last night, giving an interview to The One Show about the solo album he has just released, The Sea Has No Mercy. Recorded in Nashville at the home producer Frank Liddell shares with his wife Lee Ann Womack (the multi-platinum-selling country star turns up on backing vocals), it’s an album that reveals Taupin has a fantastic voice: at 76, it’s developed a patina that seems to speak of hard-won experience, perfect for a set of songs that find him in reflective mood, at turns wistful, a bit grouchy and gruffly elated at his good fortune.
It isn’t the first time he’s struck out on his own, although his previous attempts were marked by a certain half-heartedness. Whatever slim commercial chances his 1971 album Taupin had – it featured him reciting poetry to a musical backing courtesy of Elton’s band – were probably scuppered by Taupin giving interviews in which he was wont to explain that he didn’t really like it.
Meanwhile, 1980’s He Who Rides the Tiger and 1987’s Tribe were game stabs at “a much more commercial, radio-oriented” sound, the latter made in the wake of his biggest John-less successes, co-authoring Heart’s US No 1 These Dreams and Starship’s similarly successful We Built This City (it is, he says, “a badge of honour” that the latter was subsequently voted worst song of all time in a US music magazine, “and it paid for one of my kids to be put through college”). Once again, one sensed his heart wasn’t in it: “I didn’t really want to be that guy – I made a couple of videos, but I didn’t really want to be on MTV.”
For a few years in the 90s, Taupin had what he’s jokily called “a midlife crisis band” called Farm Dogs, which he “enjoyed for a while, I suppose”. They split up after two albums. But The Sea Has No Mercy is different: for the first time, Taupin wrote not just the lyrics, but the music, a strange, dark, enthralling stew of folk, country, ambient textures and the occasional lunge in a deeply unexpected direction, best summarised by the growling, clanking Tom Waits-y din of Joker. “Oh, that’s a rant, basically, about how we live,” he smiles. “I mean, there’s a lot of ranting on this album, but I absolutely believe that, at my time of life, we’re allowed to do that. This album is a sort of late-life manifesto. It’s very much me at this point in time.”
While Taupin made his name putting words into someone else’s mouth, he occasionally saw their meaning change in the process: “I’m Still Standing was a sort of kiss-off to an ex-girlfriend, but I didn’t tell Elton that. I wanted him to do his own take and it sounded like Elton singing about himself because it was on our big comeback album, Too Low for Zero. So it felt like him talking about his own resilience.”
As for the new album, he says he was inspired to do “something 100% selfish” after writing his 2023 autobiography Scattershot, a book that contained some eye-popping showbiz stories and detailed Taupin’s lifelong love of the US. He was fascinated by its history as a kid growing up in rural Lincolnshire: before he’d even been there, he was writing sepia-toned tales of the old west – Ballad of a Well-Known Gun, Burn Down the Mission – for John’s 1970 album Tumbleweed Connection. Offered the opportunity to tag along while his partner toured the US, Taupin “immediately thought, ‘I could live here for the rest of my life.’ I moved there as soon as I could afford it, living very, very cheaply in places I rented that were pretty appalling. I just loved it. I never, ever, ever got homesick.”
As the duo’s success mounted, he threw himself into the rock star life of 1970s LA with quite some gusto, becoming the subject of the Eagles’ spectacularly snippy song New Kid in Town in the process. Alongside Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson and Alice Cooper, he was a member of the Hollywood Vampires, a notorious mid-70s drinking club that haunted LA’s Rainbow Bar.
There’s still a plaque in the venue commemorating their existence, although last year, another member, former Monkee Micky Dolenz, swore blind to me that the group’s reputation for hellraising was much exaggerated and they were mostly interested in playing golf, a suggestion that seems to tickle Taupin enormously. “Golf?” he boggles, incredulously. “None of those guys could play golf except for Alice. We tried to play softball once but we couldn’t get anybody out of bed on the day. Can you imagine Harry Nilsson or Keith Moon playing golf?”
Five decades on, Taupin no longer feels “even remotely” British, roots in Owmby-by-Spital or not: “I have no British tendencies whatsoever. None of my friends or people I interact with in the States think of me as British because I’m so assimilated into American culture.” Should you doubt him, it’s worth considering Taupin’s obsession with rodeo, which led him to compete professionally in cutting (using a horse to separate a cow from its herd) and co-own “a three-times bucking bull of the year called Little Yellow Jacket”. He smiles proudly. “My daughter is about to start working for the PBR – the Professional Bull Riders. She’s a rodeo star in Texas, she barrel races, she’s 100% cowgirl. You couldn’t pry her out of Texas with a crowbar.”
His ambitions for the album are modest – he’s agreed to play one gig to support it, partly because said gig is at Nashville’s legendary home of country music, the Grand Ole Opry, “and that’s a real feather in the cap”; and partly because he’ll be performing with his daughter Georgey, who sings on The Sea Has No Mercy’s closer, a meditation on mortality and parenthood called One Hundred Ways. He says he wants to make another album, but before that, there’s a career-spanning documentary to contend with, due at the end of the year.
No, he says, he isn’t worried that this late-stage burst of solo activity will impinge on his precious anonymity. “I really don’t think anything will change,” he smiles. “Had this happened earlier on, that night have been the case, but it’s much later in life. No, I don’t think anything will change on a visibility level.”
And with that, he slips out of his hotel – and to dinner with his fellow former Hollywood Vampire Alice Cooper – completely unnoticed.