A review by mrdashwood
Captain Fantastic: Elton John's Stellar Trip Through the '70s by Tom Doyle

3.0

Elton John provides interesting transatlantic companion to Jimmy Hendrix. Both were perceived as immensely talented musicians, but held back by flaws. In Hendrix' case, it was a kind of waywardness that sat uncomfortably with the discipline required of a performing artist. Elton John was universally regarded is too short and plain to be a pop star. Both also found success outside their homelands, John in the US and Hendrix in Britain, but were initially at least underachievers in their own countries. Jimmy Hendrix, however, never enjoyed the fame and wealth that John did while he was alive. John became immensely wealthy, even for a pop-star, at the time. For Doyle, John was one of the artists who blazed the trail that made these sorts rich as Croesus.

Doyle's book is a solid contribution to understanding how the transatlantic pop culture of the 1960s-80s worked. The author never loses sight of the career, and I can imagine some readers will be put-out by there being too much about the career and not enough about the personal life. He perhaps skates over the wider implications of John's to-ing and fro-ing between the United States and Britain too superficially for the reader to understand why John really broke through in the 'foreign' country before he did at home. It's quite a lively read, too.

Recommended for those interested in Elton John and 1970s pop culture generally.