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Think of superstars buying old-fashioned football clubs and probably think of Wrexham, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
But in the years when the Hollywood actor and American TV star were born, 1976 and 1977, the original stardust story began – courtesy of Sir Elton John – with another British team whose name starts with W.
What Deadpool and his friend want to do in North Wales is pop star and manager Graham Taylor did reach Watford, a commuter town just northwest of London.
Watford’s incredible rise from the fourth tier of English football to the top flight took just five seasons. They then finished runners-up to Liverpool in the club’s first season in the elite division of 1982–83. A first taste of European football and an FA Cup final followed the following year.
“I never got a cent back on my investment, but that didn’t matter at all,” says Sir Elton in Watford Forever, a book released on November 16th. “It had allowed me to have the greatest adventure of my life.”
Sir Elton’s biopic Rocketman and 2019 autobiography Me from the same year focused on his musical journey, but this book, co-authored with John Preston, devotes time to his other passion.
Watford’s remarkable development through the division is charted, but there are also reflections on Sir Elton’s personal life: his difficult relationship with his father, his homosexuality and his drink and drug addictions. Sir Elton’s football club provided comfort and excitement, and he says his relationship with Taylor ultimately saved his life.
Graham Taylor and Elton John in 1984 (Std/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
An incident in the boardroom at Watford’s Vicarage Road ground, detailed in the book, explains how Taylor – who managed England from 1990 to 1993 and returned to the club for a second spell towards the end of his career, before dying in 2017 – intervened when concerned about Elton’s disheveled appearance in the throes of an apparent binge.
“You’re having that for breakfast, right?” Taylor said, throwing a bottle of brandy on the table. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You let yourself down and you let the club down. If you ever look like that again, I’m damned.”
Sir Elton, who was knighted in 1998, says he sat there and felt ashamed. “It shook me to my core,” he recalls. “It was one of those moments where all the delusions I had surrounded myself with, all the lies I had told myself, fell away. I was just left there, bewildered and mortified.
Watford owner says he would have told anyone else to “fuck off” but he couldn’t ignore Taylor because he cared about me as a person and felt if I continued the way I was going, I I’m going to commit suicide’. “That was what really came to the fore,” adds Sir Elton, now 76. “Behind his anger, I could see that he really loved me.”
The episode’s effect was profound, putting the singer on the road to recovery. “It gave me the kickstart I needed,” says Sir Elton. ‘In fact, Graham saved my life; I’ve never had the slightest doubt about that.”
Reginald Dwight, or Reggie, as Sir Elton was then known, grew up in nearby Pinner and was taken to Watford matches by his father Stanley from the age of six. The singer remembers that this was the only time his father held his hand. When they got home from the games, every connection was lost.
“No matter how successful I became, I never lost the feeling that he disapproved of me, that I had done something wrong,” says Sir Elton. “In the end it was just easier to stay away.”
In the mid-1970s, Elton was a major world star, selling millions of records in the US and Great Britain and filling venues such as New York’s Madison Square Garden and London’s Wembley Stadium. He performed a concert at Vicarage Road dressed as a bee (as close to a hornet – the club’s nickname is the Hornets – as he could get) alongside Scottish singer and close friend Rod Stewart.
Playing at Wembley, the home of English football, in 1976 (Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)
Still just 29 years old, Elton became Watford’s owner in 1976 and paid £200,000 to pay off the club’s debts. Their previous owner Jim Bonser was so unpopular that Watford striker Keith Mercer named his dog ‘Bonser Out’ – a common refrain on the terraces – and would often shout it as he walked the animal around the greyhound racing circuit that used to surround the Vicarage Road field . .
Watford were then playing in the Fourth Division and three seasons higher in the second tier, from 1969 to 1972, had been as good as it got. Family and fandom were at the heart of Elton’s decision to buy the club. “Maybe my father was in the back somewhere,” he says. “Maybe I wanted to do something to commemorate all the great times I had there as a kid.”
He brought razzmatazz thanks to his eccentric sartorial approach on and off stage, but he was also a pioneer in talking about his sexuality. It was also in 1976 that he came out as bisexual in an interview with the American music magazine Rolling Stone.
“It’s going to be terrible for my football club,” he said at the time. “It’s so straight (sexual), it’s unbelievable. But I mean, who cares! I just think people should be very free when it comes to sex… although they have to draw the line at goats.”
The article was received with great enthusiasm at Watford.
Taylor’s predecessor, Mike Keen, went to Elton to explain that he and the team loved him for who he was. That unconditional love extended to the fans, although they had to deal with opposition supporters who used their chairman’s sexuality as a stick to beat them with through mocking songs during matches. Elton’s resilience impressed Taylor.
(Alan Cozzi/Watford FC archive)
“His (Elton’s) ability to drown out the chants of a crowd amazed me, but it also saddened me,” Taylor once said. “There is something about the anonymity of a crowd that gives people the impression that they have the security to say things they would never dare say if they were alone.”
The priority for Elton was to get Watford into the top division, but also to see them play in European competitions – and to show anyone who assumed he was a five-minute wonder that he was capable of hard work .
“When I put my mind to something, I go for it 100 percent,” says Sir Elton. “All I cared about was getting the fans and the community on side. As far as I’m concerned, anyone could ruin themselves.”
Perseverance through repeated phone calls and sticking to those big goals helped convince Taylor to move south. He had made waves at Midlands club Lincoln City, where he won the Fourth Division title in 1975-76, and was recommended by then England manager Don Revie. However, Sir Elton admits he was nervous when he met Taylor at the singer’s home in Windsor, west of London.
He says: ‘I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to convince this guy to come to a run-down s**t-hole like Watford?’ A club with a rock ‘n’ roll chairman who was 193cm tall with platform shoes and had green hair?’
Taylor and Elton John shortly after the manager’s appointment in 1977 (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
Taylor would later see Elton as the younger brother he never had, with the pop star comparing his relationship with Taylor to that with songwriting partner Bernie Taupin. “I was Mr Fancy Pants and he was Mr Down To Earth,” says Sir Elton. “It was meant to be that way somehow.”
The partnership saw back-to-back promotions in its first two seasons. After two years in the second division, 1981–82 saw Watford advance to the top level for the first time in their history.
During this period, Elton was warmly welcomed into the Taylor family, and there was a sense of family in the Watford dressing room too. Four players – Ross Jenkins, Luther Blissett, Ian Bolton and Steve Sherwood – rose all the way up the divisions with the club and each contributed to the new book.
‘I just find myself drifting back, except now it doesn’t even feel real, not anymore. Instead, it’s as if the whole thing happened to someone else, someone completely different, long ago and far away,” says Jenkins.
In 1984, Elton’s tears during the FA Cup final against Everton at Wembley Stadium became one of the most famous images of the club’s journey. He says he tried in vain to control his emotions that day: “I always cry to Abide With Me (traditionally sung by the crowd before the FA Cup final) because it’s such a beautiful anthem, but suddenly it just hit On. how much we had already achieved just by getting there.”
(Derek Cattani/The People/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
Watford lost the match 2-0.
“Having played there myself (in concerts), I wish I had spoken to them beforehand and told them not to be intimidated,” says Sir Elton. “But I thought we were giant killers and that we would fly. Instead, they flopped.”
He often visited the dressing room, but did not overstay his welcome.
John Barnes, perhaps the club’s most gifted player during their most successful period, recalls Taylor telling his superstar backer that he had to leave on one of the occasions when he showed his face.
Elton with the 1982-1983 squad (Alan Cozzi Archive-Watford FC)
“And Elton just said, ‘Sorry, boss!’, and got out,” Barnes adds. “It was clear that they both had an instinctive understanding and they brought out the best in each other. But I think it went further than that; each learned from the other in a way that had a hugely beneficial effect on their lives.”
After Taylor left the club to manage Aston Villa in 1987, Elton quickly sold to Jack Petchey. He had invested around £8 million to £9 million over the last ten years as owner. “I still loved the club, but there was a serendipity, a magic, about the two of us together, and I couldn’t conjure up that same magic without him,” says Sir Elton.
They would be reunited in the late 1990s, when Watford rose from the third tier to the Premier League with successive promotions, but this was the original and most unexpected journey.
Watford Forever: how Graham Taylor and Elton John saved a football club, a city and each other by John Preston in collaboration with Elton John, is published by Viking Books on November 16 for £18.99.
(Top photo: Rhianna Chadwick/PA Images via Getty Images)
