Quotes from Elton John

and punches being thrown. It wasn't a gig so much as a small riot with accompaniment from an r'n'b band. It made Saturday night in the Northwood Hills look like the State Opening of Parliament.

AIDS might as well stand for "Appalling Indifference to the Disenfranchised in Society.

I found myself buying a cuckoo clock that, instead of a cuckoo, had a large wooden penis that popped in and out of it every hour. I gave it to John Lennon when I went to visit him.

As a result, I'm probably the only British musician of the sixties who went to work on the Reeperbahn and came back still in possession of his virginity

Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You'll find things liven up quite considerably.

after a long but ultimately fruitful search to find the most boring song in my catalogue. He managed to unearth something completely nondescript that Bernie hadn't even written the lyrics for, one that we'd earmarked for sale to a middle-of-the-road crooner.

You get up in the morning after you've slept with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: 'Why have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?' It's just weird. It really takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss.

He could whistle for his fucking apology.

Every time I caught Dee's eye – wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as ridiculous as ever – I had a fit of the giggles.

Keith had basically died from an incurable case of being Keith Moon.

Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she'd ever worked with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.

Then again, if I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and punch someone in the face, it might as well be John Reid; he could take it as payback for thumping me when we were a couple.

Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just happened.

It's worth pointing out that Renate didn't just marry a gay drug addict. That would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life was about to go haywire in ways he hadn't previously thought possible.

Mine was just an ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows. It didn't seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park.

But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn't want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God's judgement on homosexuals

I'm Eminem's AA sponsor. Whenever I ring to check in on him, he always greets me the same way: 'Hello, you cunt', which I guess is very Eminem.

And George Michael really didn't want to know. I nagged at him because I was worried and because mutual friends kept contacting me, asking if I could do something. He wrote an open letter to Heat magazine, most of which was concerned with telling me, at considerable length, to fuck off and mind my own business

He was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck's sake.

Then, somehow, P. J. Proby became embroiled in the conversation. I'd love to be able to tell you what the trouser-splitting, ponytail-wearing enfant terrible of mid-sixties pop had to say regarding my impending wedding, its potential cancellation and, indeed, whether or not I was a homosexual, but by then I was incredibly pissed, and the exact details are a little hazy, although at some point I must have given in and conceded that John was right, at least about the marriage.

If she wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place.

Presumably already alive to the thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in my utter degradation.

Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid!

If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don't think like that when you're making your first album.