“Mellowed but, crucially, not softened.” Elton John: The Captain and The Kid (2006)
Sequel albums in pop are usually an undignified business. For a start, it’s never the records you want to see revisited that return for seconds. Blur have stubbornly refused to make Modern Life Is Still Rubbish; and Van Morrison’s refusal to reunite with the groovy Bostonian jazzers who played on Astral Weeks gets a little more upsetting with every rubbish new album he does release. Instead, the pop sequel has become an act of commercial desperation. Mike Oldfield now supplies tubular bells on demand. Having dimly remembered that there was a “concept” knocking about in his platinum-selling Night & Day opus, 2001 saw Joe Jackson cold-call popular demand with another one. Last year, even Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb were at it, clinching for old times on the sleeve of Guilty II. It’s surely a matter of time before Paul Young returns with Actually, Yes Parlez!
Had Elton John attempted a similar trick ten years ago, you would have surely suspected similar motives. Back in 1996, he and Bernie Taupin were attempting to arrest their creative decline with The Big Picture – an album that Taupin now describes as “abysmally cold and technical.” But a summit in 2000, which saw John and Taupin resolve to take a more pride in their work, has yielded 2001’s Songs From The West Coast and the patchier successor Peachtree Road (2004). In retrospect it’s easy to see for what both of those albums – with their meditations on lessons learned and crises weathered were groping for.
Here it is. Precisely three decades separate Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy and this one. The former flowed from a knackered superstar sailing to Blighty from a New York where radio stations were fighting each other to pronounce themselves “your number one Elton John station.” The Captain & The Kid emerged similarly fully formed over a 20 day period. Both are dense with autobiography – the difference being, according to Sir Elton, that “we were dealing with failure on the first one. The new album’s all about dealing with the fucking success”.
In fact, the distinction isn’t quite so clear. Some of Taupin’s best lyrics address the transition between the two. Old 67 could, in fact, have appeared on either album – as does the vintage honky-tonk of Just Like Noah’s Ark. “The long and lonely climb” to success detailed on Captain Fantastic’s eponymous title track has already begun to get weird on Postcards From Richard Nixon – the song which opens The Captain & The Kid. The president requires some good PR from the UK’s hottest pop export to “mask the evil that men do.” Hammering at the ivories with irresistible brio, Elton sings, “After years that were long and lean/We’re finally on our way.”
On our way to what, exactly? For anyone not up to speed on Elton’s cocaine period, And The House Fell Down summons a surreal Titanic house band ambience thoroughly appropriate for words like, “With a rolled up note/I’m hovering on that line/three days on a diet of cocaine and wine.” Benefiting from a chorus as big as its composer’s wardrobe, Tinderbox is better still, blithely detailing the gulf which opened up between himself and Taupin during the years when a new-found fondness for dressing up as Minnie Mouse for his shows threatened to dilute the emotional impact of tunes like Your Song and Rocket Man.
Underpinning these performances is a musical authority that couldn’t be further removed from their singer’s other persona as the 21st Century’s Best Known Befriender Of Other Celebs. As if to remind us that he also likes people who don’t live in OK! Magazine, an otherwise affecting memorial Blues Never Fade Away sees its composer humbly declare, “He wasn’t famous but I surely loved him.” Punctuated by some lovely harmonic upswells, Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way is a far kinder paean to New York than you would expect – especially given the mauling John and Taupin’s vampire musical Lestat recently received there.
Mellowed but, crucially, not softened, Elton John’s judgement hasn’t seemed quite so sharp in decades. And he knows it. “You can’t go back and if you try it fails,” he sings on The Captain & The Kid’s eponymous closer. In this case, the exception is more than a match for the rule.