(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 24 March 2026 18:30, UK
For as many classic hits that Elton John has had over his career, it’s insane to think that he didn’t consider himself a singer.
He could bend his voice into any shape that he wanted, depending on what song he was singing, but when he and Bernie Taupin first started making music, the goal was to find other singers to sing their tunes rather than throwing out their own records with John singing over them. But even if they weren’t destined to be entertainers when they first began, some of their favourite artists had the complete package before they had even reached their 30s.
But when you listen to what John and Taupin were putting together at the time, there’s no reason not to think that they had been writing for years. ‘Your Song’ was the kind of pop tune that any Tin Pan Alley songwriter would have been proud to call their own, and even on some of their low lights, there are more than a few deep cuts that even manage to garner praise from Bob Dylan when the duo made their first trek across the pond to America.
John did eventually have a bit more flash to his performance when he started working on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but by that time, his voice had grown immensely as well. In his early days, he was hoping to do whatever he could to get the right texture out of his voice, but he practically runs the gamut of what a pop singer could do on his double album, from gripping ballads to fierce rockers to the strange twang that turns up midway through the song ‘Roy Rogers’.
The British piano man was the archetype for what any singer should aspire to be, but when the 1980s kicked into gear, things had started to change. MTV had become the biggest station in the world, and while John’s lavish stage outfits fit right in on the channel, it also meant flooding the market with teenyboppers as well. But whereas most of those acts were clearly flashes in the pan, John knew that he was looking at a true talent when he heard George Michael singing ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’.
WHAM! definitely didn’t look the part as rock stars by any stretch of the imagination, but even if they were bubble-gum pop to many, there was a lot more going on underneath the surface. Michael had clearly studied the greatest pop singers of the past decades on Make it Big, and even when moving onto his solo career, anyone else would have been happy to have a song as beautiful as ‘One More Try’ to their name on their first solo album.
And even though John and Michael had their ups and downs relationship-wise, John felt that there was no one else who could have possibly had that kind of voice when he heard of his friend’s passing, saying, “He was probably one of the most brilliant songwriters this country’s ever produced, and certainly one of the best vocalists ever, one of the best in the world.” And it’s not that easy to argue his point when you look at the track record Michael had.
Although he was limited to a handful of solo albums, every single one of them saw him trying out different spaces within his voice at every turn. Faith was his chance to make songs that were more focused on soul and R&B, but by the time he hit Older and Patience, he had started to blend everything from rock to pop to soul to even electronica into his sound while still sounding absolutely pristine whenever he hit a note.
But John’s main focus wasn’t only about someone being able to shatter windows whenever they sang their masterpieces. It was about relating to the person underneath all of the glossy production, and even if Michael only had one microphone and a piano, he would have still been able to leave his audience absolutely gutted every single time he played tunes like ‘Careless Whisper’.
