Ringo Starr, the legendary drummer of The Beatles, describes an iconic stadium concert by Elton John as “an absolute disaster,” explaining why he and Elton John’s mother decided to leave the performance early.
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Elton John recalls his performance at the 1975 Midsummer Music Festival at London’s Wembley Stadium as “terrifying,” noting that both his mother and Ringo Starr contributed to the challenging experience.
For the 72,000 attendees who paid £3.50 to see Elton John, The Beach Boys, The Eagles, Joe Walsh, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, and Stackridge at the 1975 Midsummer Music Festival at London’s Wembley Stadium, June 21 was a day to remember. However, for Elton John, the biggest show of his career at that point turned out to be “an absolute disaster,” and his mother wasn’t thrilled either, as shared by Ringo Starr in a recent interview with The Times.
Starr reflected on the day during a conversation with Paul Sexton, discussing the risks musicians face when performing new material instead of familiar fan favorites. Starr recalled his own experience of performing new songs in the late ’90s, saying, “In the late Nineties, I would put in, like, two or three from the new album, and you could feel the room empty. It happens to everybody.”
As an example, Starr mentioned Elton John’s 1975 performance, where he played his newly released Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album in its entirety, debuting ten new songs in a row. Starr explained that he left the show after the third song, “Bitter Fingers,” along with Elton’s mother.
“I was with his mother,” Starr remembered. “He came on and said, ‘I’m only going to do the new album.’ Me and his mother left after three tracks because we didn’t know them.”
It’s important to note that Elton John didn’t start his Wembley performance with new material. He first played popular songs like “Rocketman,” “Benny and the Jets,” “The Bitch Is Back,” “Candle in the Wind,” and even two Beatles covers, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” However, as Elton later confessed in his 2019 autobiography Me, he, his mother, and Starr weren’t the only ones struggling to connect with the new material.
“It was the biggest show I’d ever played,” he wrote. “Everything was perfect – the sound, the support acts, even the weather. And it was an unmitigated disaster. Here’s something I learned. If you’ve elected to come onstage immediately after the Beach Boys – whose set has consisted of virtually every hit from one of the most incredible and best-loved catalogues of hits in the history of pop music – it’s a really, really bad idea to play ten songs in a row that no one in the audience is particularly familiar with, because the album they come from was only released a few weeks ago.”
Elton continued, “Unfortunately, I learned this lesson three or four songs into the album performance, when I sensed a restlessness in the crowd, the way schoolkids get restless during a particularly long assembly. We ploughed on. We sounded wonderful – like I said, we were a shit-hot band. People started to leave. I was terrified. It was years since I had lost an audience. I was taught both a lesson in the perils of artistic integrity and that you’re never too successful to fall flat on your arse.”