If all Elton John had ever done was bash out 30-odd years' worth of hits, his career would be remarkable enough, but of course there's much more. Like a character from classic fiction, John has soared through a lurid parabola of excess and remorse, tragedy and farce, each phase of his career clearly signposted by fantastic changes of costume and daring experiments in hair technology. Currently, he is enjoying a wallet-fattening creative surge, sharing a number one single with Blue and with his Greatest Hits 1970-2002 perfectly placed to exploit the Christmas frenzy.
His two shows at Shepherds Bush were charity events for the Elton John Aids Foundation, and were a rare opportunity to get a close-up view of an artist normally glimpsed surrounded by royalty and Oscar-winners, or half a mile away through binoculars. The audience teemed with lissom model types and young males who shared a profound fascination with personal grooming, and wouldn't have looked out of place at London Fashion Week.
The star himself was demurely dressed in a crimson suit with sparkly diamante arm-bands, and led his five-piece band (still featuring long-serving drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone) through a sprawling set that sampled every phase of his career. An old showbiz hoofer to the core, John didn't waste the opportunity to include a hefty chunk of material from last year's by-no-means-disagreeable Songs From the West Coast, including the moody, broody I Want Love and the blues-powered This Train Don't Stop There Any More. And there was Original Sin, which he introduced as his favourite song from the album.
The length of his career, and the fact that he is, as he puts it, "still standing", gives him a bottomless reservoir of options, allowing him to flash back across decades like a historical newsreel. From 1971, there was the raucous and gospelly Levon and an extended vamp on Rocket Man. Older still was the funky knees-up of Take Me to the Pilot, while he had revisited 1973's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to polish up the rarely heard Harmony and All The Girls Love Alice. The long and winding saga of Someone Saved My Life Tonight was a reminder that even John nearly got sucked into prog rock in 1975.
But mostly he has managed to remain a song-and-dance man and keep pretension to a minimum. "I remember when rock was young," he sang in Crocodile Rock, "my old todger had so much fun." Imagine the memoirs it could write.
