Sir Elton John has admitted he was a “nightmare” to deal with while putting together his latest album.
For his next release, the British music icon teamed up with fellow Grammy winner Brandi Carlile for a full-length collaborative album recorded in under three weeks.
On Thursday, a short film detailing the recording of the project was shared online, showing Sir Elton and Brandi in the studio together.
In the footage, Sir Elton was seen having a fair few of his infamous tantrums, slamming down his headphones, snapping at his collaborators, tearing up song lyrics and threatening to walk out of the session entirely.
The following day, The Guardian published a joint interview with the musical pair, in which they spoke candidly about what went on in the studio.
“I was very grumpy, I was tired, I didn’t feel well and I was extremely nervous, and that nervousness caused quite a few sparks to fly,” the Candle In The Wind singer recalled.
Brandi later disclosed that during the recording process, Sir Elton smashed his iPad and a pair of headphones in what she described as “really amazing, classic Elton John outbursts”.
“My lyrics got torn up and thrown on the ground,” she recalled. “He goes: ‘Fuck off, Brandi.’ He would yell: ‘Predictable! Cliché!’”
Sir Elton added that while he eventually settled into the process once three songs were completed, he “was a bit of a nightmare” prior to that.
Elsewhere in the interview, Brandi said that while she never told her collaborator that he’d crossed a line, “there were definitely points that I felt that”.
In a voiceover for the short film released this week, Sir Elton could be heard saying: “The reality is, I was exhausted. I had a lot of doubt, and I was a nightmare. [I was] angry, I was tired, I was irritable. There was tension in the studio.
“And I thought, ‘I don’t want to do it’. And then I thought, ‘there’s other people involved, I can’t abandon it’. And once we got going, Jesus!”
In the archive footage, Brandi also admitted that she was “having a hard time connecting to Elton”, revealing in voiceover: “There were times I thought, ’why does he want to do this? Why is he going from Glastonbury to making an album with me?’.”
Sir Elton’s temper was previously a major theme in the 1997 documentary Tantrums And Tiaras, directed by his future husband David Furnish.
His and Brandi’s album Who Believes In Angels? is released on Friday 4 April. Watch the music video for the title song, directed by David LaChappelle, in the video below: