“I write the words and he writes the melodies, so there’s no need for us to sit together and do it together,” Bernie Taupin told interviewer/director Bryan Forbes in the 1973 documentary Elton John Bernie Taupin Say Goodbye to Norma Jean and Other Things. Made four years after their first album Empty Sky (1969) was released, I can remember watching when it originally aired in the states on ABC. The fawning narrator described Taupin as a “gentle, unassuming person” and compared his lyrics to the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. “ writes as he feels when he feels, producing superior lyrics that more often than not are eventually overwhelmed by the mandatory volume of electronic sound.”

By the time that documentary aired, the duo were already known with the singles “Your Song” and “Rocket Man,” but the release of “BATJ,” which Creem magazine critic Wayne Robins dubbed “The Americanization of Elton John,” put them in a different stratosphere of pop stardom. However, when the filmmakers showed a small clip of Bernie headed to his work cottage to write in that room of his own, his quarters, with the exception of the platinum and gold discs lining the wall, was the least rock star environment one has ever seen. Dressed in regular everyman clothes, Bernie sat down behind an electric typewriter, put in a sheet of paper, stuck a pen in his mouth, and briefly stared at the sheet before he began to type.

In those few moments the filmmakers tried to convey that Bernie was a “real writer” who had more in common with an Oxford poet-in-residence than with any stereotypical dirty rockers smoking pot and scribbling words on cocktail napkins. Looking at the doc on YouTube years later, I was struck by Taupin admitting that he thought most pop songs, including his own, were disposable and the only thing one could hope for was creating a standard.

https://catapult.co/stories/their-songs-the-ballad-of-elton-john-and-bernie-taupin