Sitting in a dressing room on his final tour, surveys the possesions surrounding him as his thoughts turn to his own mortality.
The 77-year-old pop legend says poignantly: “I wonder what is going to happen to all of this stuff when I finish? This is the latter time of my life. I don’t know how much time I have left.
“You think about that more when you get to my age.
“You think about life and, er, and death. You think, ‘Well, I just want to be where I want to be now.””
Sir Elton speaks candidly about his life, and what the future may hold as he gets older, in a new TV documentary.
He chats in the dressing room of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, 47 years after he first played there in front of 110,000 fans. Sir Elton’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour concluded in Stockholm in July last year after 330 concerts worldwide.
He added: “I don’t have to work after this. I will work and do records and putting radio shows together but travelling takes so much out of you.
“It is very tiring. I am used to it. I am a veteran at it but this is where you start to think about mortality.”
The documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, was seen for the first time by fans at BFI London Film Festival, on Thursday.
Sir Elton has sons Zachary, 13, and Elijah, 11, with husband David Furnish. He told how the boys also think about his mortality. Sir Elton added: “They worry as they know how old I am. Not so much David but me. They love their Daddy so they want me to be around forever.
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“I want to be around forever. I want to see them have children, get married but I don’t think I am going to be around for that. Who knows? You never know.
“So that is why I want to make the best of my time while I am around. Our time together is so wonderful and so precious.” . Sir Elton said: “I don’t have tonsils, adenoids or an appendix. I don’t have a prostate. I don’t have a right hip or a left knee or a right knee.
“In fact, the only thing left to me is my left hip. But I’m still here.”
After his knee replacements he was seen struggling to walk at the , which he hosted in March.
He had the hip replacement in 2021 after revealing he fell “awkwardly on a hard surface”. In the summer, Sir Elton told how he suffered nasty eye infection.
He said: “It has unfortunately left me with only limited vision in one eye.
“I am healing, but it’s an extremely slow process and it will take some time before sight returns to the impacted eye.”
In 2019, after contracting an infection following his prostate cancer treatment.
Writing in his memoir, he told how he was on a flight back from a tour in South America when he noticed he “couldn’t stop shaking”. He said he felt “worse than I ever had in my life” by the time he was checked into King Edward VII’s private hospital back home in London.
Sir Elton added: “Given some of the hangovers I’d had in the ’70s and ’80s, that was saying something…
“I was told that my condition was so serious, the hospital didn’t have the equipment to cope with it.”
After being moved to a different hospital, he spent the next two days in intensive care.
Sir Elton said: “In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, I’d prayed, ‘Please don’t let me die, please let me see my kids again, please give me a little longer.’”
In the new documentary, the Pinner-born star also spoke about the physical abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his parents. He says: “They were violent, they were physically violent. I used to walk on eggshells in case I did anything wrong.
“My mother when I was a year old she beat me 'til I bled with a wire brush to make me potty trained… my whole childhood was full of fear.”
Sir Elton’s father Stanley Dwight never watched him perform.
The singer, , said: “He never saw me live. It is sad. I wish it had been much different. God I wish it had been different.”
Sir Elton won a Legacy gong at the Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards in London this week. He later posed with .
