Elton John will give a concert on Dutch soil for the very last time on Thursday evening, when the 75-year-old music icon is part of his farewell tour in GelreDome in Arnhem. While the Brit travels the world to say goodbye, his popularity on the streaming services has been on the rise lately. He can go on like this for years to come.
Although John is performing for the last time on Dutch soil today, the singer is not stopping for the time being: the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour will run until mid 2023. In the spring, John will once again enter Europe: only on July 8, 2023, John will give his very last concert, in the Swedish capital Stockholm.
The tour not only lasts more than a year, it has also been going on for years; John will already start working on it in 2018. John gives a total of more than three hundred concerts worldwide. These were previously planned, but had to be postponed and moved several times due to the corona pandemic and personal reasons.
Although John has been closing his live career for years, a whole new audience has been added in recent years. This is due to the autobiography published in 2019 Me and the film based on his life rocket man† But John mainly reaches a new generation through his countless collaborations.
Performances with Spice Girls and Eminem
John maintains close contact with contemporary pop stars and that regularly earns him a lot of attention and places on the charts. That is typical for the musician; in 1997 he already sings a duet with the Spice Girls during his An Audience With Elton JohnTV special.
In 2001 he caused a sensation by taking the stage with Eminem, the most talked about artist at the time, during the presentation of the Grammy Awards. The rapper is popular, but is also regularly under fire for, among other things, homophobic lyrics. John decides to share the stage with him anyway, to make the hit together Stan to be heard. It will go down as one of the most memorable performances in the history of the award show.
In 2003 John manages to score a big hit again after years, but he doesn’t do it alone. Together with the then very popular British boy band Blue, he records his song Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word up again. This gives the singer the first place on the charts in both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Collaborations lead to friendships
Anyone who thinks that John will go into the studio or go on stage with a young hip artist to only have a hit for himself, will be mistaking the singer. The artist is known for maintaining good friendships with the artists he collaborates with. He has always kept in touch with Eminem and even helped him overcome addiction, something John himself is no stranger to.
John has also become good friends with Lady Gaga over the years. The performers take the stage together for the first time early in Lady Gaga’s career, and their fight against AIDS and for equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community brings them closer together. Lady Gaga is even the godmother of John’s children.
Yet their first duet will not be released until 2020. For the album chromatics from Lady Gaga they sing the song Sine From Abovewhich is also used in a perfume advertisement.
Lockdown Sessions and radio show
The song is part of a longer series of collaborations that John is entering into with contemporary artists during coronalockdowns. He also records songs with singer Miley Cyrus and rapper Lil Nas X, among others. The collaborations are bundled in what, according to critics, is not very cohesive. The Lockdown Sessionsbut it does give John several streaming hits.
His duet cold heart Dua Lipa (Pnau’s remix) even becomes one of the most popular songs of the past year. On Spotify is the record, which contains elements of John’s songs Sacrifice† rocket man† Kiss The Bride and Where’s The Shoorah, has since been listened to more than 918 million times. In his home country, the song reaches number one on the charts.
When John isn’t recording songs with the younger generation of pop stars, he’s speaking to them on his radio show Rocket Hour on Apple Music. In addition to interviews, he also plays music from emerging artists of whom he is a fan. To her own surprise, the Dutch singer Naaz could once be heard in the show with her single Mute Love†
So John stops, although it takes a while before it really gets that far. But if it’s up to the new generation, he could easily add a few hundred more performances.