Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

Writing in new memoir Me, Elton John has recalled an unlikely night spent partying with former Beatle George Harrison in the late 1980s.

“George Harrison had tried to talk to me at an insane party I’d held at a house I was renting in LA,” Elton recollects. “I’d had the garden strung up with lights… I invited everyone in town. By the middle of the evening I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognise walked into the party.”

This was not Harrison however, but Bob Dylan.

After initially mistaking one of the greatest songwriters of a generation for one of the staff, a “coked out” Elton welcomed Dylan, offering him a change clothing from his outlandish wardrobe.

Then, as a drug-addled Elton was attempting to usher a horrified Dylan out of his garden and into the house, he heard a voice.

“I heard the unmistakable sound of George’s mordant, scouse-accented voice calling out to me,” John shares. “‘Elton,’ he said. ‘I really think you  need to go steady on the old marching powder.”

“Bob,” he continues, “somehow managed to talk himself out of being dressed in my clothes, but the fact that one of the Beatles was publicly telling me to do something about my cocaine habit. I just laughed it off.”

Elton, of course, eventually did come to terms with his destructive relationship with drugs.

You can order a copy of Elton’s new book, where he also reminisces on his friendship with Geroge Harrison’s fellow Beatle John Lennon, here.