Why I constantly distance myself from the people I care about the most. I’ve spent a lot of years of my life trying to understand certain qualities about myself. "We played it to Gus the next day who was never very complimentary let alone about an Elton track that he didn't produce and he loved it.Katz says of the track, “This song is very important to me. Clive and I nearly died anyway from relief."Įpps said: "What did happen was that this instrumental grew in atmosphere with every other instrument that went on it into a brilliant track. As the last chord died away the tape ran out. "Just as it looked like I was dead he played an outro and the last chord. "The take-up reel was looking like it only had a few feet left on it and Elton wasn't showing any signs of stopping," he said. The piano track was sounding really good and a drop in or edit wouldn't be acceptable." "In fact, I would probably save Elton the trouble and kill myself. If the extremely unthinkable happened and I ran out of tape before he finished my life wouldn’t be worth living. "This was the first time Elton had got this far without a mistake. "Elton was now four minutes in and still playing verse after verse with middle bits and all sort," he said. "He would get a minute in and then make another error, which was now really annoying him."Īs they got two minutes into another take, Epps realised to his horror that his tape reel was running awfully low, and Elton was still going. It was quite unusual and had a few changes and Elton kept making mistakes. "I put on a spare piece of multitrack tape and Elton started recording the piece. Gus had a rhythm box and Clive and Elton set up a pattern to fit the song. "We finished late but Elton said it wouldn’t take long to put the part down. "During one day of recording Elton kept playing a bit of a piano piece and saying that he wanted to record it at the end of the session," Epps remembered in a post on his website. The song was produced by Elton and Franks, and engineer Stuart Epps tells a remarkable story about how the track was nearly lost. While much of Elton's work on A Single Man is loaded with instruments and backing vocals, 'Song For Guy' is much more stripped back.Īs well as Clive Franks on bass and Ray Cooper on wind chimes and shakers, it features Elton on all the other instruments – piano, Mellotron, Polymoog, ARP String Ensemble and those very few vocals. "After while it became apparent that Gianni thought it was wonderfully brave because he'd misheard the title and was under the impression I'd called it 'Song for A Gay'."
"I thought it was a bit over the top! It was certainly different, but I wouldn't have described it as brave. He kept saying how wonderfully brave he thought it was. "Years later when I met Gianni Versace told me it was his favourite song of mine.
I was furious But it became a colossal hit in Europe. He added: "It was like nothing I'd done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a single.
"The next morning I found that a boy called Guy Burchett who worked for Rocket had died in a motorbike crash, virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it 'Song For Guy'."
"One Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, I wrote an instrumental that fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: 'Life isn't everything'," Elton also confirmed in his memoir Me (whose audiobook was read by Rocketman star Taron Egerton).
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