“Long before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney came to Wrexham, Elton John came to Watford,” writes John Preston in the introduction to his new book, Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other.
Written in collaboration with the legendary singer-songwriter, the book looks at how Elton was the first celebrity to buy a soccer club. He purchased Watford in 1976, well before actors such as Reynolds and McElhenney became owners of Welsh team Wrexham in 2020.
Elton had grown up going to Watford games with his father, who was often distant otherwise, and the fond memories compelled him to get involved with the team — even though the squad was in last place in the lowest league at the time, ranking 92nd out of 92.
However, under Elton and legendary manager Graham Taylor, Watford FC underwent a transformation, rising from the bottom of the Fourth Division to the top tier of the First.
The excerpt below looks at how Elton, who sold his stake in the club in 1990 but still attends games with his sons, first bought in.
Around 18,000 people came to see Elton John play at the Hollywood Bowl on the evening of 7 September 1973. Afterwards, all of them felt able to agree on one thing – they’d never seen anything like it before.
Decked out from head to toe in white feathers, he made his entrance down an enormous glittery staircase while the lids of five grand pianos rose, one after the other, to reveal the letters E-L-T-O-N. At the same time, 400 white doves fluttered into the night sky.
Shortly after his new album, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” had topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic – his third successive US number one — he set off on a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
By now Elton had become so successful that his record company provided him with a personalized Boeing 707 to fly him from one concert to another. As well as having a double bed with swagged velvet curtains, it also had a piano which doubled up as a bar.
Among those travelling with him was his partner – and now manager – John Reid, along with his agent, Vic Lewis. One evening after the show, Elton and Lewis had supper.
“During the meal our conversation came round to cricket,” Lewis recalled. “While he was interested in the game, Elton confessed that his deepest passion was for football.”
What he wanted most of all, he told Lewis, was to join Watford’s board of directors. The problem was he had no idea how to go about it.
Soon after their supper, there had been an unfortunate incident. John Reid lost his temper with a barman when a particular drink he wanted was unavailable. Although it was explained that fresh supplies were on the way, Reid was in no mood to be mollified. In the ensuing scuffle a female journalist fell to the floor with blood dripping from her mouth. A male reporter was also punched.
The next morning while Reid was having his breakfast, he was arrested. Later he was sentenced to a month in prison. The whole incident left Elton feeling very upset.
Back in London, and hoping to lift his client’s spirits, Vic Lewis had an idea. He called up the football correspondent of the Watford Observer, Oli Phillips.
‘The phone rang in my office,’ remembers Phillips, ‘and this voice said, “My name is Vic Lewis. I’m Elton John’s agent and the reason I’m calling is that Elton’s rather keen to get involved with the club.” ’
Involved in what way, Phillips wondered.
Well, he was thinking of putting on a concert to raise some money, Lewis told him. And perhaps even joining the Watford board.
Phillips duly arranged a meeting between Watford’s chairman, Jim Bonser, and Elton John. Before the meeting, Elton was feeling more nervous than he had done since appearing at the Troubadour two years earlier.
“Just going into the board room at Watford was extraordinary for me. Although I could see the place was absolutely horrible, it still felt like a religious experience — like going into the place in Jerusalem where Christ is supposed to have been born. I can remember looking through the window and seeing the place where I used to stand as a boy. That was an incredibly romantic feeling. But there was also something very nourishing about it; a feeling that I was closing a circle in a way, going back to when I was a child.”
Braced for a chilly reception, he found that Bonser and his fellow directors couldn’t have been friendlier.
“Although I had huge eight-inch platforms on and green hair, everyone was very warm and welcoming. That really took me aback.”
A watching Oli Phillips noted how polite Elton was – “I think he might even have called Bonser ‘Sir’ ” – and also how polite Bonser was back to him.
“Given the state Watford were in, I think even Bonser could see that it made sense having a world-famous rock star on board.”
By the time the meeting ended, Elton John had been made a vice-president of Watford FC, with all the attendant benefits: a ticket to every home game and unrestricted access to the cold buffet.
On 5 May 1974, he played a concert in aid of Watford FC at Vicarage Road, topping a bill that included his friend and fellow football fanatic Rod Stewart. Elton had hoped to appear dressed as the club’s mascot, Harry the Hornet – back in 1959 Watford had changed their colours from blue and white to gold and black – but unable to find a hornet costume, he arrived dressed as a giant bee instead.
In the programme, he was described as “an unashamed schizophrenic who is equally at home in his Watford colors cheerleading in the back of the coach, or on stage in a $500 feathered outfit.”
Now that Elton was on the board of Watford, his passion for the club was more intense than ever. In the spring of 1975, on the day that Watford were playing their last match of the season, he ran into a record shop in New York asking if he could use their phone to call home. Learning that Watford had just been beaten 3-2 by Walsall – a result that sent them back down to the Fourth Division once again – he immediately sat on the floor and burst into tears.
Six months later, following a unanimous vote by the directors, Elton John became the vice-chairman of Watford Football Club. Yet far from signalling a rapid about-turn in the club’s fortunes, things limped on much as before.
On 26 March 1976, Watford were beaten 5-1 at home by Lincoln. “A particularly spineless performance,” declared another of Watford’s directors, Muir Stratford.
But it wouldn’t be a completely wasted afternoon as far as Stratford was concerned. In keeping with tradition, Lincoln’s young manager, Graham Taylor, was invited for a drink in the Kremlin after the game.
“You get a certain feel for people and as soon as Graham came in, I took a liking to him,” Stratford recalls. “He seemed to be a very nice chap and he also talked a lot of sense.”
Meanwhile, the world outside was lurching from one crisis to another. Unemployment in the UK had now soared to 1.2 million while the annual rate of inflation had gone up to 24.2 per cent — its highest level since 1800. At the same time there had been further outbreaks of football hooliganism — or the ‘English Disease’, as foreign newspapers had taken to calling it.
In an interview Elton gave to Playboy magazine, he too bemoaned the state of the country: “England is falling apart; inflation is incurable and the politicians are useless.”
His own life, he acknowledged, had become so strange that even he found it hard to believe what had happened. Recently, he had played a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York. During the show, he introduced a special guest, John Lennon — the man that just seven years earlier he had named one of his goldfish after. It would turn out to be the last time that Lennon played in public.
Elton was then asked if he had any unfulfilled ambitions.
Absolutely, he replied. “My real ambition is to make enough money to retire and become chairman of my local football club, Watford.”
Events finally came to a head in the spring of 1976.
Jim Bonser decided that he was too old, tired and fed up to continue. He offered to sell Elton the club outright — or rather give it to him if Elton agreed to settle the club’s debts of around £200,000. Perhaps Bonser was expecting a little humming and hawing; after all, £200,000 was still a lot of money — more than a million pounds in today’s terms.
In the event, Elton practically bit his arm off. “I didn’t need to think about it, not for a moment. I was so keen to accept.”
Elton John was now twenty-nine years old. The year before, he had been responsible for 2% of the world’s album sales. To put it another way, one album in every fifty sold had been by him.
In rapid succession, he had made three of the best-selling albums of all time. A couple of weeks before buying Watford, he played seven consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden in New York to a total of nearly 140,000 people.
What he’d never done, of course, was run a football club, or chair a board meeting. But for the time being, these seemed like trifling concerns. Watford may have been one of the worst teams in the Football League, yet far from being put off by the club’s plight, it brought out Elton’s competitive streak.
“I remember when I took over telling the board that I wanted to take Watford into the First Division. They all looked at me as if I was stark staring mad.”
Possibly there was another factor that made him so keen to buy Watford — though he didn’t become aware of it until much later.
“Perhaps my father was at the back of it somewhere. Perhaps I wanted to do something to mark all the great times I’d had there as a kid.”
Reprinted from Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town, and Each Other by John Preston. Introduction by Elton John.
Copyright © 2023 by WAB Global Limited. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. First published in Great Britian in 2023 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House.”