Quotes

[on Elton John] As you can tell by looking at his great oeuvre with Bernie, his songs cover a wide range of styles, from hard rock to beautiful ballads, a bit of country influence, blues influence, so he's able to take a lyric and do lots of different things with it.

Nowadays, I think most composers, if it's a team, if it's A and B, one doing music, one doing lyrics, it would tend to be the music would come first, and with nearly everybody I've worked with that's been the case. The one great exception is Elton, who will only write a tune if he's got a lyric, so all those wonderful hits he's written with Bernie Taupin, they all came from Bernie first.

We are chronically short of original musicals, and if there are original musicals, great ones like Matilda or Billy Elliot, they're often written by people like Sir Elton who've been around for quite a while, and what we need is new, young composers.

I think any song, to become a standard, i.e. a song that will be sung by lots of different people in different styles, I think you've got to have a good lyric as well as a great tune.

[on Tony Christie] Tony has a timeless voice. If he has a song that tells a story, there's no one better really.

I don't think I realized how big a name The Lion King (1994) is. It is a huge name. It's just one of those things, like 'My Fair Lady', that everybody's heard of.

It doesn't really matter whether or not you consider Elton John a great rock artist, which he is. He is an expert tunesmith. He writes beautiful melodies.