This is the moment when everything changed for Elton John

When Elton John first tried cocaine, back in 1974, he felt sick. “But it didn’t stop me going back for another line,” he recalls in his new documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late. “I became social. It gave me confidence. I suddenly found I could talk.”

It was a different story inside the recording studio. John was physically exhausted and creatively depleted – and it showed. “More than a little bit dull,” is how one reviewer described his 1974 album Caribou. “Maestro of mediocrity,” declared another.

Around this time, the English musician learnt that his manager, John Reid – the man he lost his virginity to – had been unfaithful. Heartbroken, he’d lock himself away for days on end, bingeing on whisky, marijuana and pornography. (Fearful of harming his career, he retained Reid as his manager until their bitter falling out in 1998.)

“Running away was what I did in my childhood,” John tells Alexis Petridis, co-author of his autobiography Me, in Never Too Late. “I’d been running away since I was four or five years old, shutting the door [when my parents argued].”

The recordings of these conversations are used throughout the documentary, which can be streamed on Disney+ from December 13. Co-directed by John’s husband, David Furnish, and documentarian R.J. Cutler, Never Too Late follows the superstar as he reflects on his life and early career while preparing for his final North American concert.

“I sometimes can’t believe he is off the road,” says Furnish over Zoom from London, where he is joined by Cutler, “because he used to say to me, ‘I want to die on stage.’ What kept him alive through all that unhappiness was his connection with the audience and the joy and love of playing his music.”

The footage from John’s global Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, recorded at LA’s Dodger Stadium in November 2022, is bookended by his 1975 performances at the same venue, where he played to 110,000 screaming fans over two nights.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact John had on popular music in the 1970s. In the first five years of his career, he released an astonishing eight studio albums. He ditched his hated birth name, Reginald Dwight, and embraced the flamboyant outfits and eyewear he was forbidden from wearing as a child. Then he risked it all by admitting his attraction to men – and his desire to have children – in a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, resulting in some radio stations setting fire to his records.

The filmmakers unearthed the recording of this Rolling Stone interview while combing through thousands of hours of unseen footage and audio in the archives of the New York Public Library.

“When I met Elton in 1993, he didn’t want to have children,” says Furnish, who has two sons, Zachary and Elijah, with John. “He’d taken it completely off the table because he thought he wouldn’t necessarily be a great parent, and because his life wasn’t conducive to raising children.

“I found it incredibly heartwarming to discover that something that was always a dream and an ambition of his, [which] the pain of addiction and loneliness and unhappiness had snuffed out, has become such a happy reality for us.”

Cutler agrees.

“The most beautiful moment for me is when David, Elton and the boys come out on stage at Dodger Stadium,” says the director, whose previous documentaries include The War Room, The September Issue and Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.

“It’s a moment the whole film has been leading up to: the struggle of Elton’s childhood, the fraught relationship with his father and the unrequited [platonic love for his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin].

“It was possible for Elton and David and the boys to have 50,000 people cheering for his family because all those years before, Elton had come out to Rolling Stone.”

Born and raised in London, John – who recently revealed that an eye infection had left him with limited vision – was the only child of Stanley and Sheila Dwight. (He has four half-brothers from his father’s second marriage.)

His early years were a misery, as he recounts in the film.

“[My parents] were abusive, they were physically violent, and I used to walk on eggshells in case I did anything wrong,” says the 77-year-old. “My mother, when I was a year old, beat me until I bled with a wire brush to make me potty-trained. My dad, when I was playing football and the ball went on the garden instead of the grass – there was hell to pay.

“My mum said, ‘It never did you any harm’ and I said, ‘God, you have no idea.’ To be reprimanded and walloped on the street in front of people … it stays with you.”

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In 1967, John and Taupin each responded to an advertisement seeking songwriters for Liberty Records. The company arranged for them to meet, marking the start of a long-running and fruitful collaboration.

The pair’s best-known singles include Your Song, Rocket Man, Crocodile Rock, Daniel, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Candle in the Wind, which John rerecorded in 1997 as a tribute to Diana, the former princess of Wales. That version, which sold more than 33 million copies, remains the world’s best-selling physical single: one of many chart records that made him England’s No. 1 solo artist.

While Never Too Late demonstrates John’s artistic evolution, it also shows him as thoughtful, wise and content: a contrast to the quick-tempered man Furnish captured in his 1997 fly-on-the-wall documentary, Tantrums and Tiaras.

In one memorable scene from the earlier documentary, John is distracted from his tennis by a fan calling “yoo-hoo!” Panting with rage, he smashes his racquet and storms back to his hotel. “I’ll never come to the South of France again!” he proclaims, summoning a plane to whisk him away before changing his mind.

John insisted this footage appear in the final cut, explaining, “I don’t want a sycophantic [portrayal], I just want people to see me as I am.”

Furnish says John is now happier and more fulfilled than ever.

“He loves himself more than he ever has in his life,” he says. “The love you get from a child is completely unfiltered, natural and unconditional. That’s something Elton was searching for his entire life; our boys just adore their daddy so much. And he takes that love and it gives him strength, and that’s what pulled him off the road more than anything.”

In Never Too Late, John is frank about the violence he suffered at the hands of his parents and then Reid, as well as his problems with alcohol and other drugs. (He has been sober since 1990.) But he never considered airbrushing these struggles from the film.

“Our secrets made us sick,” Furnish says. “[Elton has] made amends with his past [and] there were many great things about the upbringing that he had.

“Often people that come from dysfunctional backgrounds become dysfunctional parents; it’s a pattern that can repeat itself,” he adds, noting that the most important thing for him and John is to give their sons a stable and loving home.

Cutler says that while John has enjoyed “many moments of great serendipity” throughout his career, he “worked his ass off” to get where he is.

“This movie is about active decision-making defining your life,” he says. “You get one life and you choose how you’re going to live it and what your values are going to be. And here’s a great story about a guy who followed that path – and it worked out.”

Elton John: Never Too Late streams on Disney+ from December 13.

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