The Incredible True Story Behind Elton John’s Decades-Long Partnership With Bernie Taupin

Every Elton John needs their Bernie Taupin. In 1967, when the two songwriters met through a magazine advertisement, they had no way of knowing that their meeting would lead to a lifelong partnership. However, it so happened that when Elton John set out to write songs like “Rocket Man”, “Tiny Dancer”, and “Your Song”, Bernie would have just the right words for his melodies. 

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Before Bernie met Elton for the first time, they had both been visiting a guy by the name of Ray Williams, who’d thought Bernie’s aptitude for lyrics and Elton’s gift for melody would be a good match. In an interview with Chris Evans, Taupin described how meeting Elton was kind of like love at first sight.

“Elton came through the door and said, ‘Is there a Bernie Taupin in here?’ And it was like, ‘That’s me, sir,’” he shared. “‘You know… he just saved my life. I was immediately attracted to him as a human being… it was like, ‘Oh, you just pulled my feet out of the fire.’”

It was when they wrote “Your Song” together that they knew they had something truly special. Bernie recalls the moment in his memoir, Scattershot.

“I scribbled the lyric down on a lined notepad at the kitchen table of Elton’s mother’s apartment in the London suburb of Northwood Hills, breakfast time sometime in 1969,” he writes. “That’s it. Plain and simple.” 

“We’d kind of knew we’d hit the motherload,” he shared in another interview.

When Elton and Bernie Took A Break

John and Taupin did collaborate together for several years, until the pair decided to take a break from each other after the release of Elton’s double album Blue Moves. Taupin told the Associated Press that really, they needed a change after working so often together for that long.

“What people don’t realize is that we were joined at the hip at the beginning,” he shared. “It was sort of me and him against the world. But I think once that we gained a modicum of success, it was natural that we would sort of separate and find our own lives.”

So, from 1977 to 1979, Elton John and Bernie took a break, with the exception of the release of “Ego” in 1978. It was during those years that Elton collaborated with lyricist Glen Campbell on his album A Single Man, and Bernie worked with Alice Cooper. 

However, in 1983, the two reconnected and produced more hits with Elton’s album, Too Low For Zero.

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