Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — Elton John
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was the first song I learned to play half-competently on the piano. I don’t mean tunes like “Chopsticks”, which I had mastered more than competently by then.
But it was the first tune I’d heard on the radio and managed to find the sheet music for.
It took a few weeks, but eventually I could make a sound that was recognisably the tune of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”…slightly halting in places — I still remember a couple of places where it was really easy to find all your fingers were in the wrong places on the keyboard for what came next…but you’d have recognised the song if you’d been walking past my bedroom when I was practicing it.
In the early to mid-1970s, I was a huge fan of just about anyone who played the piano and sung pop songs. And Elton John was about as good as this genre got, in my view.
The first single I ever bought was “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting”, which I still have in a picture sleeve in my record box in the attic. That track was also on the “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album, and I enjoyed it immensely, but when the title track was released a few months later I was in heaven.
I knew I wasn’t good enough to play “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” on the piano, but I felt I had a better-than-even chance of playing the…
