“The England I remember doesn’t really exist any more. He has now lived in America for almost 40 years, and it is 10 since he was last in Britain. “When I got here,” Taupin says, “it really was a case of thinking 'I’ve come home’.” Frontier and Civil War imagery had infiltrated his lyrics even before he first set foot in the country, when Elton made his American debut at the Troubador in Los Angeles in 1970. As a child, growing up in the Lincolnshire village of Owmby-by-Spital he was obsessed with cowboy movies his first serious musical love was Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Ballads. There is a sense in which Taupin has always felt more American than British. “But I’ve got them all on DVD and watch them every month or so.” “I was living in the wrong place and too young to see them,” he says, sounding genuinely peeved.
On the wall are photographs of Howlin’ Wolf, taken on the European folk and blues tours in the early Sixties. On a coffee table there are copies of vintage albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Junior Wells – in clear plastic sleeves. Selected items are brought down to the large living room to play on his hi-fi. He has 50,000 albums filed and boxed upstairs in his home. Elton, ever fastidious, would sheath his albums in clear plastic sleeves and file them alphabetically in shelves ranged along the bedroom wall. In the early days of his partnership with Elton John, when Taupin was living at Elton’s mother’s house in Pinner – when he was earning £5 a week, and Elton £10, “because he sang” – the two friends were both in the habit of spending every available penny on albums. It is a matter of principle for Taupin that all the music he plays is from his own collection. And from a small study above his studio – decorated with a poster for The Wild Bunch, a fine pencil drawing of a young Taupin by Don Bachardy, and a photograph of Leonard Nimoy signed “to a fellow Rocket Man” – produces a weekly programme, American Roots Radio, for the American satellite station Sirius, playing an eclectic mixture of the traditional blues, country and rock ’n’ roll that has always been his abiding musical obsession. At his ranch in the hill country above Santa Barbara in California where he has lived for the past 20 years, Taupin spends most of his time pursuing other passions.
After more than 40 years as one half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in British musical history, Bernie Taupin says that he now considers writing lyrics simply as “a hobby”.
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