Elton loves being Mr Clean

ELTON John is a changed man as you can tell from the clean-cut baby face peering out of his new album Made In England. For most of his 28-year career, apart from his sexuality, John has been known for three things: drugs, booze and his outrageous stage costumes. Now, he has said his final goodbye to all three. When he auctioned off the contents of his closet last February, it was perhaps one of the most symbolic moves that he had ever made - casting off his high life for a more subdued one. 'Yes [it was symbolic] . . . but also basically I hadn't got room for anything else in my house. There was no room to sit down,' he says. '[But] it was very cleansing for me to do it. I thought, like a drug addict, that if I got rid of it, I would feel different. 'You get to a certain age where you don't want to parade in 54-inch heels or ridiculous costumes anymore. After 28 years or more, there's a big danger of just becoming a parody of yourself and, really, I'd done that whole thing to death.' Sure, he still comes out in flamboyant red suits and royal blue PVC trousers, but give the man a break, it is still a far cry from his days of spectacularly huge glasses, sequinned jackets and big boots. 'No, I don't think it's appropriate to wear those sparkling glasses anymore. I just don't feel like that,' he says with a laugh. But fashion still remains very much a part of the 47-year-old rocker's life, which has been fuelled by a close friendship with Italian designer Gianni Versace, whom John unrestrainedly calls 'a genius'. Despite popular belief, though, John categorically denies that he 'only ever wears Versace'. 'I mostly wear Versace because I think he's a genius and he's my friend. I wear other things too. I like a lot of those things that are made for skinny people so I tend not to buy them,' he explains. 'I'm quite a flamboyant person and Gianni's very flamboyant. There's no sitting on the fence with him, you either like it or hate it.' And Versace has returned his compliment by using John's songs on the catwalk for the Pret a Porter shows, which the latter finds quite thrilling. 'Those runway shows with those girls are more exciting than going to any rock show because those girls are so beautiful. I'd be a groupie to go and see those girls walking down a catwalk anytime. I think they're just brilliant.' And brilliant is just about how you would describe John's career in the past two years. He is now top of the pops again with both Grammy and Oscar awards for his songs from the Walt Disney animation The Lion King - which helped make him the highest earning musician in Britain last year. He has played a concert tour with Billy Joel, which he may take further afield this year. And, of course, there is his new album Made In England, which John says 'has got 150 per cent Elton on it'. 'It wasn't easy at first because I was so insecure . . . because of my indecisiveness, [producer] Greg Penny had a bit of a rough ride in the first two weeks,' he says. 'But this is the first album, apart from Single Man and maybe 21 On 33, that I can really say I co-produced.' Yet his recent successes have not come without difficult years of 'restructuring' his life, and battles with denial: denial that he had a drinking problem, denial that he was a drug addict, denial he was a homosexual and, even denial that he had a weight problem. All of it, he now admits. 'Bernie [Taupin] would always go nuts but you don't realise when you're so mucked up. You think everything's OK but you're so unreasonable and irrational about everything,' he says. 'I was always trying to hide my weight with these preposterous costumes which made me look even fatter. I was always trying to hide me. Everything about me; the dark glasses, the costumes - everything.' But the opposite happened and John says while he thought he was more outrageous - and therefore more interesting - his camp costumes actually revealed himself as 'more pathetic and more sad'. The cocaine he took every chance he got did not help. '. . . You're shaped in your life as a child. All your insecurities, all your character traits are decided from the age of one to 15; then you're left to deal with my weight. I was very insecure,' John says. 'I became this huge 'Elton John' character. I was having a great time on stage. I was being flamboyant. But off-stage I was still the same person and I couldn't deal with confrontation. I just couldn't deal with life and any problems. 'I was very timid. So, eventually, I started taking drugs. Basically to join in with the crowd because I thought, 'I'm always being left out. I'll try it, I'll try it, it can't be bad for me'. ' And for the next 16 years, John turned a blind eye to the fact that what couldn't 'be bad' was actually destroying his life to the point that even his mother was forced to leave the country because she 'couldn't deal with it anymore'. 'I've learnt through my drug addiction I'm the sort of person that can't have one record, one CD, one car, one pair of shoes . . . I've got a compulsive, addictive pattern to my life. So instead of having one line of coke, I'd have one gram. It didn't start off like that but it ended up in four and five-day binges,' he says. 'If I went to bed and I knew there was still a gram of coke in the drawer, I'd have to do that gram before I went to sleep. I'd just move to the stage I couldn't leave it there. You become such a liar and so deceitful because drugs are all about lying and pretending you haven't taken them. It's 'ooh no, I'm not on drugs, no'. Your life becomes even more of a cesspit.' For most of those cocaine-filled years, more often than not, John found himself in sexual situations without any protection. The AIDS epidemic was growing and starting to affect a lot of people in his life. 'But like everything else that was bad, I tried to block it out,' he says. 'And I think that's why my drug habit increased - because I was trying to hide from it.' Likewise, even though John had his first sexual experience when he was 23, he tried to hide from his homosexuality. The first steps out of the closet were tentative for him - he admitted only to being a bisexual and promptly married Renate Blauel. 'It was easier to say [I was a bisexual]. I suppose it was a cop-out, but at the time I thought, 'let's be diplomatic about it'. ' And, although he still insists that he did love Blauel, and vice-versa, he admits that he 'got married for the wrong reasons'. 'I was very muddled about my sexuality, and I felt that she could help me. I thought a high level of intimacy with a woman, especially Renate, would help bring out my heterosexual side and save me,' he adds. 'But the basic truth of the matter was that I didn't address the real problem in my life, which was I was a huge drug addict. That's the thing with drug addicts and alcoholics, they'll do anything but address the truth. Today I would say that I am 100 per cent gay, but I'm still working on being 100 per cent fit.' John reckons that he was lucky to get out of those years of sexual promiscuity HIV-negative. 'I used cocaine basically for sex. My sexual fantasies were all played out while I was on cocaine,' he says. 'When I was fighting my drinking problems I wasn't safe. I'm very lucky I don't have AIDS . . . I've lost a lot of friends because of AIDS and I know many people who are either HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS.' It was not until his lover at the time sobered up and checked himself into a rehabiliation centre that John himself came to his senses and said the three magic words: 'I need help'. It has been almost five years since John purged the cocaine from his system. 'I can't believe I actually did that, but I did. To get it out I had to write all my history down. I look in it now because I know I don't want to go back there. I don't know how I functioned during it. I don't know how I made albums and ran a football club.' John feels his newfound self has shown itself in positive ways in his music, especially in the new album. 'It comes from feeling so positive about myself and positive about things in general. There are some very wistful melodies on it but nothing really sad. 'Now I can be me and I don't have any fears about being me. 'I don't have to hide from anything anymore. This is who I am and I'm quite happy with myself. It's taken me 47 years to get here but it's all right.'