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Sir Elton John has revealed that changing his name caused a ‘void’ in his life.
In his 20s, Sir Elton changed his name legally to Elton Hercules John after not liking his ‘old fashioned’ birth name Reginald Kenneth Dwight.
Now he has explained why, and also revealed how making this change has caught up with him in later life.
‘Reginald is a really old fashioned name, shortened to Reggie, which I hated. But in America it’s quite a popular name,’ Sir Elton began while chatting to Good Morning America
‘But I just didn’t like it. As soon as I could I changed my name. I was very clever, I thought no one is really called Elton, so I will be Elton and I will be the only Elton.
‘It was kind of a good decision to make. I wanted to leave my childhood and that persona behind, but that caught up with me.
‘I realised I’d put everything into my work, my art, my recording. There was nothing underneath it, I was just a void. So I’d left little Reggie behind, but little Reggie was still inside of me.’
Sir Elton worked in the industry under the name Reggie in the 1960s, but he made the move in order to stand out from the crowd, and to distance himself from childhood.
His new name was formed from meshing together the names of his Bluesology bandmate Elton Dean and Long John Baldry, with Hercules thought to be a nod to the name of a horse in British sitcom Steptoe and Son.
Bluesology became Long John Baldry’s supporting band in 1966.
In a 1987 interview, Sir Elton previously reflected that the change gave him a whole new personality.
‘I became Elton John, it was like a new lease on life,’ he said. ‘I didn’t particularly like being Reg Dwight. It had too many unhappy memories.
‘I hated the word Reg, anyway. It was just a horrible name. As soon as I was Elton, it was just great. It was like a new personality.’
Sir Elton has previously opened up about childhood trauma, having revealed in his memoir that his mother beat him with a wire brush while potty training him and his father hit him for taking his school blazer off the wrong way, which left him ‘walking on eggshells’ around them.
He reflected in an interview with The Guardian in 2021: ‘The self-loathing, not having any self-esteem, that all comes from when I was a kid.’
Sir Elton explained: ‘All my life, until I became sober, I was afraid of talking to anybody. They asked me when I went to treatment how I felt and I said: “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything.”
‘I came to defrost, as it were, and discovered I did have feelings, and they went back a long time. And I think it stays with you for the whole of your life … I just have terrible feelings about myself; I feel bad about myself sometimes.’
This admission comes after a series of health problems for the Rocket Man hitmaker.
A severe infection left him with limited sight in one eye while the other is ‘not the greatest’ either making work a struggle for the musician.
Earlier this year the I’m Still Standing hitmaker reflected bleakly that there’s ‘not much of [him] left’.
‘To be honest with you, there’s not much of me left. I don’t have tonsils, adenoids or an appendix. I don’t have a prostate,’ he told People Magazine earlier this year.
‘I don’t have a right hip or a left knee or a right knee. In fact, the only thing left to me is my left hip. But I’m still here.’
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