Elton John remembers Michael Jackson as “mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around” in a new memoir.
In Me: Elton John, the 72-year-old music icon recalled: “I’d known Michael since he was 13 or 14. He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine. But at some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away from the world and away from reality, the way Elvis Presley did.”
John said it was clear to him that there was something wrong with Jackson.
“God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles.
“I don’t mean that in the lighthearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around.”
The singer noted that Jackson spent so much time with children because “he couldn't seem to cope with adult company at all.”
In the just-published memoir, John also recalled walking away from a planned tour with Tina Turner in 1997 during rehearsals because she criticized his appearance.
“She didn't like my hair, she didn't like the colour of my piano and she didn't like my clothes,” he wrote, claiming that Turner told him: “You wear too much Versace, and it makes you look fat — you have to wear Armani.”
He shared: “The subsequent debate about whether I knew how to play ‘Proud Mary’ became quite heated, before I brought it to a conclusion by telling Tina Turner to stick her f***ing song up her arse and stormed off.
“I've thrown plenty of tantrums in my time, but there are limits: There's an unspoken rule that musicians don't treat their fellow musicians like s***.”