Elton John's Farewell Tour: Tickets Sell Out at Glastonbury as Iconic Singer/Songwriter Steps Back

 Elton John's Farewell Tour: Tickets Sell Out at Glastonbury as Iconic Singer/Songwriter Steps Back 

(Elyse Jankowski/Stringer/Getty Images North America)

Many know of Elton John and his famous music tracks, but not many will know his reason for retiring soon.

 

The famous icon first made his foray into music when he started to play the family’s piano at three years old and taught himself to play.

 

He also was part of a band as a teenager, called Bluesology, and has shared a stage with many other well-known singers and musicians, many of whom were his friends.

 

In fact, During a 1974 performance at Madison Square Garden, Elton John coaxed John Lennon up to the stage to perform a duet with him. Lennon performed three songs with Elton, and the appearance marked the last time that he would sing in public. 

 

Due to his prolific performances, Sir Elton has had more than fifty years on tour and is the first headliner to be announced for the Glastonbury festival this upcoming year, now already sold out wherever tickets can be purchased.

 

Organiser Emily Eavis told BBC,  “It gives me enormous pleasure to let you know that the one and only Elton John will be making his first ever Glastonbury appearance, headlining the Pyramid Stage on Sunday night next year”.

 

“This will be the final UK show of Elton's last-ever tour, so we will be closing the Festival and marking this huge moment in both of our histories with the mother of all send-offs.”

 

This was announced recently by iconic singer-songwriter Elton John, now in his seventies, who wishes to spend more time with his family, David Furnish, and their two young sons, Zachary and Elijah, who are now ten and eight years old, respectively.

 

“I will do records, and I'll do my radio show, but as far as schlepping and doing shows? I've had enough applause. I wanna be with my family. I wanna be with my boys.”

 

“I'll still be creative, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life flying here, flying there. I can't do any more than I've done now, and save for the odd charity thing that may come up, that's it for me,” He admitted to NME in March this year. 

 

Originally his tour was supposed to be in March, but due to an on-stage fall, it was postponed until this year while he went through Physio and recovered at his home in Windsor during the midst of the Covid Pandemic.

 

He has recently finished touring America, reprising his Iconic tour at the Dodger’s stadium, famous not only for its baseball team but for Elton’s iconic performance on October 25th 1975, which included famous Tennis player, Billie Jean King, as part of the chorus line.

 

The scene was so iconic for his career and presence in general it even featured in the biography film Rocketman, in 2019. It starred Taryn Egerton as young Reginald Kenneth Dwight and how he became the famous Elton Hercules John through childhood, parental struggles, music school, abusive relationships, drugs and rehabilitation, and who he is today.    

 

Elton met his husband, David Furnish, shortly after his years in sobriety in 1993, a story he happily told Parade magazine in 2010. 

 

“I was attracted to David immediately. He had a real job, his own apartment, a car. He was independent. I didn’t need to take care of him. I thought, ‘God, this is new territory for me—someone wants to be with me just because he likes me.’ I knew he was the one, because he is not afraid of me.”

 

David Furnish first got a civil partnership with Elton in 2005, but when it became possible in England to upgrade civil partnerships to marriages in 2014, the couple was one of the many first couples to do so.

 

“For this legislation to come through is joyous, and we should celebrate it," John told the BBC at the time. "We shouldn't just say, 'Oh, well, we have a civil partnership. We're not going to bother to get married.' We will get married." He added that civil partnerships were massively important historically, however. "Having our civil partnership was an incredible breakthrough for people that have campaigned for a long time—through the '60s and the '50s in England when it was so hard to be gay and hard to be open about it. And it was a criminal act.”

 

After sixteen years together, and despite his quiet life, Canadian-born David Furnish has worked as an advertiser with the PR agency Ogilvy & Mather, as well as writing pieces for GQ and Tattler as a journalist. 

 

He supports his husband Elton’s charity, Elton John AIDS Foundation, as well as being on the executive team for Rocket Films, part of Elton’s Rocket Entertainment group.

 

As for the rest of their private life, the two have two boys, Elijah and Zackary, born in 2010 on Christmas and January 2013.

 Picture Credit: Elton John’s Instagram

[Having children] makes all the difference because it’s about them, not you,” He told Zane for Beats 1 in 2017. “And it’s the greatest thing you’ll ever know." The musician acknowledges that parenthood might not be for everyone but added he loves it. “People say, ‘Well, I disagree, I don’t want children,’ and that’s fine—I would have said the same thing until I had them," John added. "Then it was like, ‘Wow, this is it? Are you kidding me?’ If I was 15 years younger, I’d have two or three more. Without question.”

 

For the rest of the tour, before he mostly retires from the spotlight, Elton has end of the UK leg of Sir Elton's farewell tour, which kicks off in Liverpool next March, and seven dates left to play in Europe.

 

However, the star has not completely ruled out the possibility of one-off concert dates in the future - telling the BBC in 2018 that his "dream thing" would be a theatrical residency where he could play lesser-known tracks like Amoreena and Original Sin instead of hits like I'm Still Standing and Candle In The Wind.

 

"I've sung these songs nearly 5,000 times, some of them, and although they're wonderful songs, and I'm very appreciative of them, I've sung them enough," he admitted.