Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin sets release date for ‘Scattershot’ memoir

Bernie Taupin, the lyricist behind some of Elton John’s biggest songs, has set a release date for his upcoming memoir, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me. 

• READ MORE: Elton John: “I’m not interested in the past – not even Elton John’s past”

The memoir, published by Hachette Books, is said to detail Taupin and John’s lifelong creative partnership, dating back to the singer’s 1969 debut album ‘Empty Sky’. Since then, Taupin has gone on to write the lyrics for John’s biggest hits, including ‘Rocket Man’, ‘Tiny Dancer’, ‘Candle in the Wind’, and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, among others.

Scattershot is due for release on September 12. A statement from the publisher describes the memoir as “an exciting, multi-decade whirlwind told in a non-linear yet grounded narrative”. In his own statement, Taupin promised anecdotes about John Lennon, Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra, and said that authoring the book was “a long, arduous task”.

“Hopefully, there’s something in it for everybody,” Taupin added. “It’s contemplative, self-assessing and attempts to stay off the beaten path in not regurgitating what’s already been written”. Prior to Scattershot, Taupin and John’s relationship was documented both in the 1991 documentary Two Rooms, and the 2019 John biopic, Rocketman.

Elaborating on the book writing process, Taupin said he “began a few years back composing essays and observations on my life that ultimately gained momentum and started to look like a book… It was also a lot of fun and immensely beneficial in blowing the dust off a lot of what I’d forgotten about.”

In 2018, John recalled first meeting Taupin “through an ad in the back pages” of NME magazine. The following year, the Taupin-penned lyrics to John’s track ‘Your Song’ sold at auction for £180,000. John recounted Taupin’s role in curbing the singer’s cocaine addiction, saying in 2020 that “Bernie was one of the people who tried to tell me to stop doing drugs and I wouldn’t listen, but he stuck by me and never gave up on me.”

In 2021, Taupin was among those to recreate a decades-old photo of himself, John, Alice Cooper and the late comedian Paul Lynde, at the lyricist’s 70th birthday party in Los Angeles. Head here to pre-order Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me.

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