Bernie Taupin’s favourite Elton John song | CPT PPP Coverage

It was the poems of Bernie Taupin. Elton must’ve felt somewhat comforted by his endearing words, and now over 50 years later, so have half the world over the course of the 30 albums they gave collaborated on. This is the sort of sweet, triumphant narrative that they might ironically turn into one of their songs. With an easy style that seems to tap into the best of humanity, their tracks have always proved as transcendent as the story behind their cosmic collaboration. But which does Taupin think is their finest?

“You probably never want to hear it again because you’ve heard it so much,” Taupin told CBC Radio, “but ‘Candle in the Wind’, I think, is probably, it could be the closest the closest we’ve come to a perfect song”. The fact that the 1997 version is the second-biggest selling single of all time (behind Bing Crosby’s White Christmas’) is perhaps testimony to this. Although you can’t judge class by commerciality, the song has certainly woven its way into the fabric of society at large, exulting itself beyond a mere pop song.

Elton instantly connected with the lyrics and wrote the music in a heartbeat, with Taupin describing it as a “perfect marriage of lyric and melody”. Perhaps this is because Elton related the words and the concept of flickering amid a whirlwind so well.

As Taupin said of the song: “I think the biggest misconception about ‘Candle In The Wind’ is that I was this rabid Marilyn Monroe fanatic, which really couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not that I didn’t have respect for her. It’s just that the song could just as easily have been about James Dean or Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. I mean, it could have been about Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf. I mean, basically, anybody, any writer, actor, actress, or musician who died young and sort of became this iconic picture of Dorian Gray, that thing where they simply stopped ageing. It’s a beauty frozen in time.”

The stresses caused by the industry and media pressure meant that Elton often felt lucky to be with us, so with grace and elegance, he mustered up a melody to marry Taupin’s vows of iconographic praise. That, in Taupin’s book, is perfect, even if it did prompt Keith Richards amid a bitter feud to scathe that Elton’s “writing is limited to songs about dead blondes.”