Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Elton John · S1 E4
Royal Academy of Music
A scholarship at age eleven. Saturday mornings at the Academy, classical training, but his heart belongs to rock and roll
It is 1958 and an eleven-year-old boy from Pinner has just won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. He is the youngest student in the room, and he is already bored by the syllabus.
Sad Songs Say So Much, from 1984. The big, confident piano chords in this track come straight from years of classical training. Reg learned the rules at the Academy, then spent the rest of his career breaking them.
Royal Academy of Music
Every Saturday morning for five years, Reg took the Metropolitan Line from Pinner to central London for lessons at one of the world's most prestigious music schools.
TAP TO REVEAL: What was Reg really practising in those empty Academy rooms?
Two Musical Lives
On Saturday mornings, Reg studied Handel and Bach. Every other hour of the week, he was obsessed with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Ray Charles. The classical training drilled discipline and finger control into his hands. The rock records told him what those hands were actually for.
Which rock pianist secretly obsessed Reg during his years at the Royal Academy?
Take Me to the Pilot
From the self-titled 1970 album. The thundering piano in this track is pure Academy technique filtered through rock energy. You can hear Chopin's finger speed and Jerry Lee's reckless power colliding in every bar.
By seventeen, Reg is bored of everything except music. A local R&B band called Bluesology needs a keyboard player, and he is about to say yes.
0 XP earned this session