Following the release Thursday of Elton John starring in a Christmas commercial for U.K. department store chain John Lewis, comes an article from The Sun on what the commercial left out.
The clip starts in the present day with Elton playing the start of "Your Song" and over its two minute run time it rewinds back in time until he's a kid on Christmas morning.
The Sun says the "advert makers of The Boy and the Piano failed to include – no doubt because it didn’t quiet fit into the wholesome image - the years Elton spent addicted to drugs, drink and sex and that, at its peak, saw him take cocaine every four minutes."
He was once quoted as saying, "I never considered myself a drug addict. I thought drug addicts were people who stuck needles in their arms – and I was the biggest junkie there was. I came very close to dying.”
And in 2010 he told Piers Morgan: "This is how bleak it was, I'd stay up, I'd smoke joints, I'd drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I'd stay up for three days and then I'd go to sleep for a day and a half, get up, and because I was so hungry, because I hadn't eaten anything, I'd binge and have like three bacon sandwiches, a pot of ice cream and then I'd throw it up, because I became bulimic and then go and do the whole thing all over again."
Also missing are his legendary tantrums and his sex-crazed days in the '70s when he said, “People should be very free with sex -- they should draw the line at goats.”
Elton has been clean and sober since 1990.