Watch Chappell Roan and Elton John perform ‘Pink Pony Club’ duet at Oscars viewing party

3 March, 2025

Elton John and Chappell Roan

Chappell Roan and Elton John performed a duet of ‘Pink Pony Club’ at his Oscars viewing party – watch footage below.

Back in January, the ‘Rocket Man’ singer took to social media to share the line-up for his annual Academy Awards viewing party in support of the Aids Foundation, enlisting Roan as the event’s sole performer for this year’s edition.

Ahead of the performance, hosts Sheryl Lee Ralph and Neil Patrick Harris touched on raising funds and removing stigma, with Harris noting the Trump administration had stopped funding UNAIDS, the UN’s HIV/AIDS programme that serves communities in Africa and other parts of the world.

Before Roan began, John introduced her with a speech, in which he reflected on hearing her work for the first time. “I just freaked out when I heard her. I interviewed her and fell in love with her and the album,” he said. “She’s so kind to do this. She’s one of the biggest stars in the world right now. Not only does she speak with her voice on stage but off it.”

Only the night before, Roan had used her voice to dedicate her BRIT Award win “to trans artists, to drag queens, to fashion students, sex workers, and Sinead O’Connor,” and prior that made headlines after using her Best New Artist speech at the 67th Grammy Awards to take aim at record labels and share her past experience as a struggling new artist.

At John’s fundraising event, she took the stage for a full set that included more duets with John for ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ and ‘Your Song’, which she covered on YouTube five years ago before finding mainstream fame.

As well as performing ‘The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess’ hit ‘Pink Pony Club’, she sang ‘Naked in Manhattan’, ‘Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl’, ‘Femininomenon’, ‘Hot To Go’ and ‘Good Luck, Babe!’.

“Thank you so much for believing in me. You made it so I could be the artist I could be,” Roan told John onstage, after adorning him with a sparkly pink cowboy hat, and admitted it was “scary” taking on John’s classic ‘Your Song’, “in front of the person who wrote it”.

Elsewhere in the evening, she invited the crowd to “free the nipple” during ‘Hot to Go’, and dedicated ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ to “all the future ex-husbands in this room”, saying: “The second I walked on this stage they said ‘Wait a second, I like girls.’”

The pair struck up a quick friendship as Roan reached meteoric levels of fame last year, which invited criticism that had a wealth of musicians and icons like John standing up for her.

Roan has been vocal about the unsavoury side of her sudden fame, venting about the normalisation of extreme fan behaviour, including “stalking”, “talking shit online” and people “yelling at you in public”.

John has since revealed that he’s spoken to her on Facetime several times and shared some words of advice with her: “Chappell was a little overwhelmed with her sudden success—although she’d been writing for a long time, it really kind of ballooned very quickly.

“I just try and calm her down and say, ‘Listen, it’s fine. It’s fine. Do what you want. Don’t listen to anybody. Walk at your own speed. Do not listen to the record company saying, ‘We want another album, we want another album.’ Do it when you’re ready to do it.'”

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