IT WAS a nightmare scenario. Elton John was playing Portman Road and I was a day short of getting paid. I live 500 yards from Portman Road. I listen to an Elton John tape every night, starting with Your Song. It’s the tape with him in yellow glasses. People say Elton’s naff but that’s just because he tarts about a bit off stage. On it he is a genius, the consummate musician, utterly original. It was just that I’d never seen him on it.
With people who sneer at Elton, it is almost as if songs such as Rocket Man, Bennie And The Jets and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road existed before he got involved with them. I suppose they did. Bernie Taupin, his old flatmate, wrote them. But without Elton’s music they wouldn’t work. They are incredible inventions. If Elton were a horse, I’d back him blindly as long as Bernie led him into the stalls.
I had £15 and tickets were £75 minimum, but, to quote Frank Lampard Jr, you’ve got to take the positives. I needed to parlay it. I didn’t even feel like betting. It was impossible racing, the football was throwing up shocks and this new national betting mania is getting on my nerves. The naivety is breathtaking. Betting is a vice. That’s what makes it pleasurable.
I spent all afternoon mostly losing on horses and retired to a hotel bar. Elton was on at 8pm so I had to act fast. An ex-soldier named Daz, who frequents Ladbrokes, was in there so I sat down next to him. I was a bit alarmed by him at first, with his tattoos and all, but now recognised him as a kindly and rather lost soul, even if he is prone to consulting me on his personal problems, which seem to revolve around starting drinking cider at 8am. I asked him how the bets were going. “Terrible,” he said. He always says that.
I began scanning the paper for evening racing, but there wasn’t any. Then I remembered something a dog-man I know, Mickey, said about a certain greyhound track where wide runners were going in at a rate no one could remember. No one knew why, especially since it had been known as a first-bend track that favoured inside runners. Right then. The one and six dogs in a reverse forecast. I went and put the bet on and came back.
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“I’ve got to stop drinking so much,” Daz said.
“Yes, you have,” I said.
“How?” “Valiums and cold turkey,” I said. “It’s the only way.”
I went and stood in the bookies realising that I had won. £51. I legged it to the ground and got a ticket for £37 by asserting that I was a season ticket-holder. When I got in he was doing Bennie And The Jets. As Mickey says: “If I’d been a bird I’d have fainted.”
It only got better. It was one of those nights. The next day I walked down Portman Road and Elton’s aura hung over it as if it was a yellow brick one. He had gone. I still hadn’t been paid. I had precisely £3. For a moment I felt black but then thought, hold on, I’m still standing, and this boy’s too young to be singing the blues.