ELTON JOHN – "Sacrifice"/"Healing Hands"

In 1997, I saw an ITV special, ‘An Audience With Elton John’, featuring the great man performing to an audience of fellow celebrities, duetting with a few of them and answering their questions.

Richard E Grant presented Elton with a challenge. He’d heard that he could compose a song from scratch when supplied with lyrics. Grant brought along the instructions for his new oven to turn into a song. John accepted the challenge. Reading the booklet he observed “‘Delicious mouthwatering meals’, well that’s the hook…” And Lo and behold the instant rinkytink song was rather fun (certainly superior to similar efforts that actually made their way to vinyl by The Cure and The Fall)

I think that the stunt illustrated the musical problem that John faces every time that Bernie Taupin hands him some new lyrics. How on earth can he make sense out of this convoluted and hamfisted stuff? And to his immense credit, he almost always does!

Which is a roundabout way of explaining why I really like Sacrifice. Its not much of a song, really, but Elton’s phrasing, the tune, and the doomy mid-eighties arrangement that takes its time to add new flickery bits of instrumentation that always work make the single a source of real pleasure to me, even though I can’t draw much emotional resonance from the actual song. Elton wins the Taupin challenge once again!

TOTPWatch: Elton John performed Sacrifice twice on Top Of The Pops. Of the Christmas edition, more anon;

22 June 1990. Also in the studio that week were; Magnum, Big Fun & Sonia and Yazz. Jakki Brambles was the host.

it sounds as if elton had taken note of the success Phil Collins had been having with his dreary ballads and decided to follow suit.

Over Christmas 1990 I had the very bad luck to lose my virginity while the fella in question had Sacrifice on REPEAT PLAY. I’ve tried never to hear it again since. But I remember it was very sludgy and depressing. The song.

Well, Elton needs something to latch onto. If it hadn’t been for Taupin, he’d probably have remained a respected sessionman/ bandmember, albeit a much-loved music business character. If you look at, say, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (which I’d say was the best thing they ever did), every song has got a striking idea behind it that Elton can make something of; Marylin Monroe, Science-fiction girl group, Country boy rejects the big bad city, lesbians, arsonists, hooligans, and so forth over four sides of fun.

The B-side of ‘One Love’, ‘Something’s Burning’, is great, though – It sounds like Can!

I haven’t heard Something’s Burning in years (checks… yes, Can doing Fools Gold!). Can seemed to become a major influential drop around this time – Happy Mondays had certainly listened to Tago Mago.

Re #15. The royalties were split between four AIDS charities; The Terrence Higgins Trust, London Lighthouse, Jeffriss Research Wing Trust and Body Positive.

Re 19: I remember the same thing happening in my kitchen with a few friends when Love Spreads got its first play – tumbleweed! The production on One Love was a mess, widdly guitars (a pointer to the Roses’ future) masking quite a decent chorus. “I’m a dolphin – I just don’t swim in the sea” wasn’t quite “I am the resurrection”, either.

Sacrifice has less of a hook than One Love; try and imagine (please do) a muzak version with a sax replacng the vocal. There’s nothing there. It took plenty of airplay before I could remember how it went. A bloody weird idea to pair two flop singles as a charity record, as if Paul McCartney had decided to benefit AIDS charities by releasing Old Siam Sir b/w Press.

“old siam sir” has a great sekrit hidden macca bassline, ircc

oh maybe — having just relistened — it doesn’t and i’m thinkin of something else 🙁

Cover version watch: Sinead O’Connor!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWa-aMiqQKE

I am now intrigued to hear this album, although I think it might require some fortitude;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Rooms-Celebrating-Bernie-Taupin/dp/B000025SX8/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1294081900&sr=1-1

I don’t know that much about EJ, and haven’t heard this for years, and probably didn’t like it at the time, but I have an idea that as #1s go, it’s probably quite good.

Some interesting comments on a not very interesting record.

Yes you do sometimes wonder why people like Elton or Brian Wilson for that matter are so unconfident about expressing themselves in words. Mind you when you hear some of Elton’s Taupin-less stuff like “Blue Eyes” it starts to make more sense.

In terms of fitting music to difficult lyrics I think Elton takes second place to James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore. How they could come up with the music for “Motorcycle Emptiness” when they were presented with that lyric is beyond me.

I seem to remember this was number one when Inspiral Carpets brought out their debut LP “Life” from which their career never really recovered.

Yikes, well Sacrifice is a bit of a horrible shock to the system after our run of good-to-excellent, intensely memorable #1s isn’t it? The song’s new to me and it’s pretty unpleasant (watching the vid. it was hard to make it through and I was honestly thinking ‘”No sacrifice”? Speak for yourself mate, that’s 5 minutes of my life I’m not getting back, and I could have used it to listen to Sinead’s Last Day of our Acquaintance.’).

I agree with Tom that the lyrics are only superficially the big problem, it’s the music and arrangement that flummox. The vocal line is very constricted, wibbling about just a handful of notes for almost the whole time, and as a result EJ’s voice is strangulated, and loses the color and dimensionality it has when it ranges a bit. His enunciation is also uncharacteristically poor: I hear ‘Cocoa heart’ throughout. The melody needs a lot of work I reckon, and probably a few more chords to force some movement into the thing. Doing that would also have the benefit of giving the instrumentation something to play. Overall, the song reminds me quite a lot of late Abba stuff (which can definitely irritate if you aren’t in the right mood for them), but those songs are really well written for their particular singers to *do* something, show off some particular features of their voices, and the instrumental arrangements are very fine.

With Sacrifice usual service has been restored in the charts and I’m not happy (and I want to take back every mildly snippy thing I might have written about WiM or Killer or The Power or….):
2 or 3

I remember Neil Tennant (or poss Chris Lowe)saying writing music to a lyric-rather than the other way round- was a recipe for disaster and citing Sacrifice as a key example with words to the effect of “Sorry but the word ‘Sacrifice’ has 3 syllables-NOT 4! It’s not pronounced “Sac-er-if-ice’!!”
I still have asoft spot for One Love though I’ve not heard it for a few years. Somethings Burning is great though.I remember being confused for several years when I read somewhere that it was a Kenny Rogers cover! Same title, different song i think…
Doin the Do would have been an amazing #1- as would Betty’s forgetten “comeback” single Let Me Take You There complete withPet Sounds instrumental break..

I can’t hear this song without expecting the words “You’re listening to Mellow Magic” at the end.

It’s tied into a very specific memory for me, getting a taxi on the way to meet my family in Dublin at about 4am in the morning in May 2006, and this playing from that same radio station. With the sun slowly rising on the motorway drive to Luton Airport, it sounded quite beautiful, and forms a music video of the song in my mind. More than anything, that gives it a higher grade for me.

In fact for me it’s this, not World In Motion, that brings to the end of one of the most amazing runs of number 1s ever, going right back to Nothing Compares 2 U. Even I admit that by the time we get to the next one things have gone very wrong…

This just seems like an inexplicable number one to me, still, just as it did at the time. Elton was hardly, overall, at the peak of either his creative or commercial success at this time – probably the best single from the previous album, “Reg Strikes Back” (which is to damn with faint praise), “A Word in Spanish” hadn’t even made the top 75).

But then…looking through the top 40s for the weeks that this was on top – well, there is no other way to say this: there was a hell of a lot of really crap songs in the charts that summer. As bad as the mid-80s in fact! And, well, I must admit that even “Sacrifice” is preferable to Craig McLachlan and Check 1-2’s absolute dross. (And as for the stinkers yet to come at number one…). I think, overall, my favourite from among them (and I was another who rushed out to buy “One Love” when it was released, I think on my 15th birthday, and was just shocked at how uninteresting the A-side of it was – although in retrospect this was a good warning for what to expect of the future career of both the Roses as a group and of the members thereof) was The Inspiral Carpets’ “She Comes In The Fall” (B-side “Sackville” – also exceptional stuff)

Of course this was also the summer in which (in London, at least) the stronghold of Radio 1 and the established commercial radio stations started to be threatened by a range of legal newcomers (and also the end of pirate radio playing killer, but verging on the poppy, tracks like “Lies” by En Vogue – another favourite of that summer. which the illegal stations around Hackney seemed to be broadcasting as frequently as the latest, pretty damn good, offerings from the Ragga Twins). I think Jazz FM had already become legal by this point of the year, and the legal (and as yet unwatered down, and also as yet not aimed solely at the socially and intellecutally subnormal – as it was for a while in the mid-2000s, Kiss FM was I think to follow a few months later, and Choice FM (for our friends on the wrong side of the river) , and Melody (later Magic). And then later on, Heart, XFM and so on.

(And then of course later on in the decade or in the 2000s almost all of these got swallowed up and emblandened by conglomorates. Hmm. Time to wave the flag for distributism I suppose)

As for what impact all that had on the charts…well, there clearly was some. Jazz FM (and Gilles Peterson in particular) must have helped out acts on the Acid Jazz label a bit – I guess the Brand New Heavies being the big beneificiary, while already by the end of 1990, and more so a bit later, loads of “Kiss records” were scoring very respectable chart positions (Shut Up And Dance’s rogue, illegal, number 2 in 1992 being toppermost among them I suppose).

Much I would love to say that the somewhat excessive success of “Sacrifice” (and, yes, “Healing Hands” is, marginally, better) marked the end of Radio 1 promoting ultra-bland music to great commercial success….well, by the following year it was quite clear that films could do that too. Oh. I didn’t mean to wake the spoiler bunny there, as it appears we may need to discuss that far sooner than we might have liked.

I think the Sinéad O’Connor cover of this is gorgeous (though I’ve never listened that closely to it, it’s mostly about the chorus melody than anything else).

There’s something about Elton John’s voice that I find really offputting, even – especially – when it’s singing really strong melodies (strong as in obviously catchy), but I’ve never really worked out what it is.

Fourteen years later came the double-sided sequel to “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” The bonding has frayed, there has been betrayal (“Sweet deceit comes calling”), bitter endings (“Sensitivity builds a prison/In the final act”) and darkness (“I never knew it could hurt so bad/When the power of love is dead”).

Similar sentiments could be found in abundance in Blue Moves, the exhausting double album which came in the wake of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and the record which marked both an ending and a self-built barrier for its artist; his self-immolating solo performance of the record’s lead single, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word,” looked uncomfortably out of place in the disturbingly surreal environs of the 1976 Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show (“HE IS HERE”? “HE IS GONE”? Repeated Subbuteo goosesteps? The boxing match halfway through the Angela Rippon routine? The house blowing up at the beginning of the show and a satanically cackling Des O’Connor machine-gunning them at the end? The incogent streams of improvised nothing throughout the endless WW2 sketch? Did somebody seriously think that this was light entertainment?). Soon afterwards, as Dellio and Woods put it, “he did, after all, turn thirty in March 1977, coinciding almost exactly with his semi-disappearing act. He likely just looked in the mirror one day and muttered, ‘Enough’s enough.'”

I suspect punk and disco hurt Elton more than he cared to admit. Unable to adapt readily to the latter – as Bowie had already done and Jagger was shortly to do – he retreated, recording an unreleased album with Thom Bell in the dying days of Philly. When the E.P. salvaged from the sessions, with its lead track a cover of the Spinners’ “Are You Ready For Love?,” eventually sneaked out in 1979 it seemed as out of place in that year as Alma Cogan. Having devoted a double album to setting Bernie Taupin’s post-breakup angst to music, he experimented with other lyricists, issued disturbing one-off singles like “Ego,” albums with self-deflating titles like A Single Man and Reg Strikes Back, and they all disappeared into a void – it is significant that his only remaining major hit of the seventies was “Song For Guy,” a bleak threnody and virtually an instrumental.

1983’s “I’m Still Standing” suggested a superficially brisk comeback, along with the Taupin reunion – but it came from an album entitled Too Low For Zero on which few other tracks were redolent of emotional resuscitation. The suspicion was that the glam era had provided Elton with convenient cover, and when that ended he simply reverted to being the introverted, troubled songwriter of Empty Sky and Tumbleweed Connection, albeit with a bigger budget and celebrity guests. Indeed the 1989 album from which both “Sacrifice” and “Healing Hands” were taken was entitled Sleeping With The Past; the spectre of Aids was hard to dispel.

Individually released as singles in 1989, with little success (“Sacrifice” and “Healing Hands” peaked at #55 and #45 respectively), both songs were reissued on one 45 in 1990 with royalties going to sundry Aids charities, and rather surprisingly gave Elton his first solo UK number one, nineteen years after “Your Song.” It is difficult to see how such unsparingly bleak songs could have succeeded in the SAW era, but clearly by 1990 a threshold had been crossed, and the rather stilted approach he applies to both tracks heralds the reborn, corporate Elton of the Lion King/Princess Di nineties. “Sacrifice” mulls gloomily over the suppressed doom of adultery, the unspoken glances (“No tears to damn you/When jealousy burns”), the simmering sorrow (“Some things look better, baby/Just passing through”) but does so rather gloopily over its five very slow minutes against its ticking wine bar MoR setting. “Healing Hands” – which despite its double A-side status was hardly played – attempts redemption (“You gotta wade into the water/You gotta learn to live again/And reach out for her healing hands”) but does so against a tackily bland echt-gospel setting which sounds exactly like a Lion King demo. To paraphrase James Ellroy: the concept rocked, the reality…doesn’t exactly stink, but does appear rather mouldy in its impenetrable cocoon. Best to try to rescue Two Rooms, the 1991 various artists Elton/Taupin tribute album, the next time you see it in the bargain bin, where Sinead O’Connor lends “Sacrifice” the serenely sobbing emptiness which the original doesn’t quite capture.

Tunnel in particular is a lyrical peak. It is very much of its time though. I find myself going back to it less than I do Darkness… as a result. You’re right though, that it fits the narrative of its times and Bruce’s career too; I suppose it is a logical progression from the synth usage on “My Hometown” and “Dancing In The Dark”.

Ouch, this one isn’t very popular, is it? I’m afraid it’s something of a guilty pleasure for me. I remember it being all over the radio when I was a child, so it has a warm nostalgia for me. Objectively, I can appreciate that it’s fairly bland though, and yes ‘sack-uh-ri-fice’ is a bizarre bit of pronunciation.

This definitely sticks out as a rather odd chart topper among all the forward-thinking songs that preceded it. But there is a warmth to this song that sort of envelops you (despite the depressing lyrics).

Two Rooms is a very hit and miss project. Sinead O’Connor definitely does the nicest job, as ever she effortlessly gets to the emotional core of the song. Kate Bush could never have sung Rocket Man badly, and Wilson Phillips give a very sweet rendition of Daniel which showcases their harmonic skills beautifully, their inherent wholesomeness lending the song a sweetly naive reading.

Tina Turner covering ‘The Bitch Is Back’ was quite fitting too, although it’s a bit shrill for my taste.

In America “Healing Hands” was the bigger hit (it almost scraped into the top ten), but “Sacrifice,” which charted lower, received and still receives much more airplay, while “Healing Hands” has disappeared into the void.

Tunnel of Love is my favorite Springsteen album, and the strange production – the mixture of high-tech and acoustic – suits the material perfectly.

I wrote a longer piece about it a few years ago:
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/bruce-springsteen-tunnel-of-love.htm