Song For Guy – Elton John

 

I ended up on a Zoom call with Stuart Epps, a very well known music producer and studio engineer for some of the best known artists and bands. He was telling some great stories about of some of the big names and studios he'd worked with. It's a who's who of music royalty, it was amazing to get the chance to speak to him. He played a big part in Elton John's career and that leads me to this song.

Elton is another artist that a fully admire and I really love some of his songs but can't pretend he was one of my influences, guitars all the way for me. But as a song writing partnership Elton and Bernie are up there with the best of them. Which makes this song stand out as it's the only one Elton wrote alone. Usually he'd be crafting a melody around Bernie's supplied lyrics, but here he came up with an soulful instrumental.

Stuart told the story how it was getting near the end of a long studio session when Elton mentioned again that he had this tune he wanted to get onto tape. Being off the cuff and not following the normal pattern of recording, Stuart didn't worry to much about putting a whole new tape onto the machine as this was only meant to be a musical note sort of thing. Elton made a couple of false starts and wasted a bit more tape, but after a few more attempts he got the tune flowing along very nicely. It turned out to be quite a long tune and Stuart noticed that the tape was running out at a rate of knots. Elton carried on oblivious while Stuart and his partner were now sweating as they knew Elton would throw a fit if his great take ended short. Luckily for all concerned as Elton hit the last note on the piano the tape machine clicked off bang at the end of the tape.

A few overdubs later and this song was complete. It's named after a 17 year old lad that worked at the recording studio who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

Favourite lyric : Life / Isn't everything