Sir Elton John: My own father let me down

LONDON - Sir Elton John, who became a father for the first time little more than a month ago, never shared an emotional rapport with his own father, he has revealed.

John, who started playing the piano when he was just three and went on to attend the Royal Academy of Music, revealed that his late father Stanley Dwight was a disciplinarian who never watched the singer play a concert, reports the Daily Mail.

He said his father had no interest in his budding career even though Dwight had also been a keen musician, having played the trumpet.

“You know, my father never came to hear me play. Not ever,” said John.

“He was a tough and unemotional man. Hard. In the RAF. He was dismissive, disappointed and finally absent. I just wanted him to acknowledge what I’d done. But he never did,” he added.

Dwight, who died in 1992, had wanted his son to have a more conventional career and steered him towards banking. He then divorced John’s mother Sheila when the singer was 15.

“It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to relate to kids. He left us, remarried and had another family, and by all accounts was a great dad to them. It wasn’t children, it was me,” said the 63-year-old.

John and his civil partner David Furnish, 48, became parents to Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John through a surrogate mother last Christmas. (ANI)