With 300 million records sold and a 10th UK number one album earlier this year, Elton John has survived innumerous trials and tribulations, tantrums and tiaras. An iconic figure, he’s still inspiring fellow artists.
“From the moment he stomped onto the world stage, he changed everything,” Jess Robinson enthuses. The musical impressionist’s Fringe show, Jess Robinson: Your Song, celebrates the 78-year-old pop star’s perpetual reinvention – “my niece loves the Dua Lipa ‘Cold Heart’ remix and Britney Spears’ ‘Hold Me Closer’, while I love his theatrical queer joyousness, his grit and resolve” – as she reinterprets his greatest hits through the esteemed female singers in her repertoire.
Collaborating with Frisky and Mannish pianoman Matthew Floyd Jones, Robinson’s “love letter to Elton and my female heroes, plus Britney”, includes Kate Bush approaching ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’; Barbra Streisand performing ‘I’m Still Standing’ with a nod to Yentl; Billie Eilish’s ‘Candle In The Wind’ via the Barbie soundtrack and Spears’ interpretation of ‘Bennie And The Jets’.
Gently tweaking melodies and lyrics, Robinson is connecting, for example, John and Amy Winehouse’s addiction struggles in ‘Tiny Dancer’, adding elements of ‘Stronger Than Me’ and ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’.
“Female voices change the emotional temperature,” she suggests. “Performing ‘Rocket Man’ as smoky jazz in the style of Billie Holliday, you get more sense of the wife left at home, because Katy Perry hadn’t invented female astronauts by that point. It’s a new lens. But it also shows how adaptable and universal his music is.”
Henry Naylor hails John as a “phenomenal” campaigner for gay rights and AIDS research.
But for the acclaimed playwright, whose 2004 play Hunting Diana critiqued the media’s role in spreading conspiracy theories around the death of John’s friend Princess Diana, the singer’s battles with the press symbolise a struggle for the soul of UK journalism.
In 1987, John sued The Sun for libel after the tabloid published scurrilous headlines about the musician participating in orgies with underage rent boys. Monstering The Rocketman presents the story from the perspective of a rival journalist at The Mirror, with Naylor also portraying John.
“He refused to be lied about, putting his wealth, reputation, health and sanity on the line, fighting for what was right,” Naylor explains. “The Sun‘s homophobia was jaw-dropping at that time. It’s a hugely important case, because, after he defeated them heavily, the newspapers had to be kinder in their language towards minority groups.”
The Sun subsequently disgraced itself covering the Hillsborough disaster though. And Naylor, who wrote for Spitting Image when it characterised Fleet Street hacks as pigs in fedoras, reckons the seeds for phone hacking and other British press scandals were sown at this time.
The late Mirror owner Robert Maxwell “was in a dick waving contest with [The Sun‘s] Rupert Murdoch and the papers abandoned truth in search of profit,” he argues. “It’s vitally important we get back to a popular press that is respected and trusted.”
Referencing John watching Winehouse singing, “his face alive with joy and admiration”, Robinson calls her hour “the silliest and campest I’ve done.” But it’s also “the richest, without pressure on me to always be funny. I’m allowing moments of pathos and poignancy.”
Naylor, likewise, is playfully weaving the lyrics of Bernie Taupin, John’s greatest collaborator, through Monstering, while parodying The Sun‘s personal problems feature Dear Deirdre. “You’ve got to give the audience a few laughs,” he says. However, his abiding message is more urgent.
“Objective truth is vital right now,” he maintains. “When Trump accuses Zelensky of starting a war, that is empirically not true.” That approach “can be traced back to the Thatcher era, when news barons started owning multiple papers and simply switched their political allegiances for financial advantage. As opposed to their core job of providing a public service.
“The public never wanted them going after Elton, their circulation dropped whenever they attacked him. Readers were kinder than they thought and deserved a paper reflecting that.”
Jess Robinson: Your Song, Assembly George Square Gardens, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 11), 6.05pm
Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome, 30 Jul-24 Aug, 4.10pm