For most of the 72,000 concert-goers who had handed over £3.50 to see Elton John, The Beach Boys, The Eagles, Joe Walsh, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan and Stackridge at the Midsummer Music festival at London's Wembley Stadium, Saturday, June 21, 1975 is a date that'll live long in the memory. For Elton John, however, the biggest show he'd played in his career to that point was "an unmitigated disaster", and his mum wasn't too impressed either, as Beatles legend Ringo Starr reveals in a new interview with The Times newspaper.
Starr shared his memory of the day in question during his conversation with writer Paul Sexton after discussing the risks artists face when they choose to bless audiences at gigs with new material, rather than tried-and-tested fan favourites.
“In the late Nineties, I would put in, like, two or three from the new album, and you could feel the room empty,” he admits. “It happens to everybody.”
By way of an example, Starr cites Elton John's 1975 show, at which the singer/songwriter elected to perform his recently-released Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy album in its entirety, debuting 10 new songs in a row. Starr says that he bailed on the gig after Bitter Fingers, song three of the ten, and that Elton John's mother did the same.
“I was with his mother,” he recalls. “He came on and said, ‘I’m only going to do the new album.’ Me and his mother left after three tracks because we didn’t know them.”
For the record, it should be noted here that Elton John didn't start his Wembley performance with new songs: before debuting his new songs he had played the likes of Rocketman, Benny and the Jets, The Bitch Is Back, Candle In The Wind and, in fact, not one, but two Beatles covers, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I Saw Her Standing There. But, as the singer/songwriter acknowledged in his 2019 autobiography Me, the former Beatle and his own mother weren't the only ones lacking the patience to sit through his album premiere.
"It was the biggest show I’d ever played," he wrote. "Everything was perfect – the sound, the support acts, even the weather. And it was an unmitigated disaster. Here’s something I learned. If you’ve elected to come onstage immediately after the Beach Boys – whose set has consisted of virtually every hit from one of the most incredible and best-loved catalogues of hits in the history of pop music – it's a really, really bad idea to play ten songs in a row that no-one in the audience is particularly familiar with, because the album they come from was only released a few couple of weeks ago.
"Unfortunately, I learned this lesson three or four songs into the album performance, when I sensed a restlessness in the crowd, the way schoolkids get restless during a particularly long assembly," he continued. "We ploughed on. We sounded wonderful – like I said, we were a shit-hot band. People started to leave. I was terrified. It was years since I had lost an audience. I was taught both a lesson in the perils of artistic integrity and that you’re never too successful to fall flat on your arse."
