Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Elton John · S2 E1
The Liberty Records Ad
A newspaper ad for songwriters. Two strangers answer it. Neither gets the job, but the label pairs them together
June 1967. A twenty-year-old piano player in a dead-end backing band circles a small ad in the New Musical Express: "Liberty Records seeks talent."
Elton John -- Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Written six years after that NME ad changed everything. A song about leaving one world behind and stepping into another, which is exactly what Reg Dwight did when he walked into Liberty Records.
The Ad Man
Ray Williams is barely twenty himself, working A&R at Liberty Records in London. He places the ad looking for songwriters and vocalists. Dozens of hopefuls respond. One of them is a frustrated session player from Pinner who can write melodies but cannot produce a single lyric.
TAP TO REVEAL: How old was the mystery poet who mailed his words to a stranger?
“I went along, played them some stuff, and admitted I couldn't write lyrics. They handed me an envelope full of poems by somebody I'd never heard of. I took them home and started setting them to music that same night.”
— Elton John
How did Elton John and Bernie Taupin first connect?
The Ad: By The Numbers
Empty Sky -- Elton John
The title track of Elton and Bernie's debut album, released in 1969. Raw, ambitious, and stretching past seven minutes, this is the sound of two young men discovering what they can build together. Recorded just two years after that NME ad, it already sounds like nobody else.
The envelope is open and the melodies are flowing, but Reg has never met the person writing his words. Next: Bernie Taupin arrives in London, and the strangest songwriting method in pop history takes shape.
0 XP earned this session