Elton John sang the praises of radio – and iHeartRadio specifically – while accepting the Icon Award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on Thursday night.
“I have to say radio is such an important thing to all artists,” the 74-year-old singer said, as his Canadian husband David Furnish captured the moment on his phone. “That’s where you hear things, that’s where you discover things.”
John was honoured on the show with a medley of some of his hits performed by H.E.R., Brandi Carlile and Demi Lovato as well as testimonials from Chris Martin and Lil Nas X.
While Lil Nas X called John “a trailblazer to those who live their lives freely and unapologetically," Martin took a different approach. “I don’t really know anything about Elton John," he joked, "and I’m just going to read what iHeart wrote for me."
Martin continued: “Elton John was born in the U.S. He and his collaborator, Bernie Sanders, worked and lived together in an apartment that his parter David furnished.”
He praised John for songs like “Uptown Girl” (by Billy Joel) and “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (Stevie Wonder) and said John wrote a song “for his husband’s parents, ‘Don’t Let Your Son Go Down on Me.'”
In his acceptance speech, John said: "It’s very touching and I’m very humbled because when I first came to Los Angeles in 1970, radio was so important. I had never heard radio in America before because I had never been here before but it was incredible to me.
“In England we had one station. Over here, you had music coming out of the radio and all sorts of formats, all sorts of styles. I was a pig in s**t basically.”
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John, who said “I’ve had my time, as they say, in the sun,” explained that he promotes young artists because “they need exposure, they need the radio.”
He also gave a big shout-out to Lil Nas X, who he said is “a wonderful artist and has balls of steel.”