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TRAILER! Which is Elton John's best album?
8 Plays28 days ago
Welcome to Elton v Elton: The Album Battle! This is the podcast where two pals (Anthony & Dominic) & Elton fans rage over which of Elton's albums we think is the best. We'll be keeping score as we go, as we delve into each of Elton's solo studio albums, discussing the tracks individually, the musicians involved, the album art, random trivia, cover versions & anything else in between!
We'd love to hear from you with your ratings, opinions and any other insights into Elton's work you have. Drop us an email via eltonveltonpod@gmail.com
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Thanks go to everyone involved in bringing Elton's work to the bigger stage, James Cook (http://www.jamescookcomedian.com/) & Paul Savage (https://www.instagram.com/savagecomics_/) who inspired the format of this show and Zapsplat.com for the SFX. Research for the show was done using songfacts.com, https://sir-elton-john.fandom.com/ , eltonchords.com, https://www.eltonography.com/ and Elton’s autobiography 'Me'.
You can find Dominic on https://www.facebook.com/dominicberry/ and on his poetry website https://dominicberry.net/
You can find Anthony on two other podcasts: Enough of the Falafel (featuring the Vegan Week & Vegan Talk shows) and The Brambling Along Podcast
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Until next time it’s goodbye from Captain Dom-tastic & the Brown Dirt Ant-boy!
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Transcript
Introduction to Elton John's Legacy
00:00:01
Speaker
Elton John has released 31 solo studio albums over a career spanning seven decades. Yeah, and at one point he released seven consecutive US number one albums. But which of these albums is the one? And which is, well, quite frankly, a stinker?
00:00:20
Speaker
Some of you might have noticed those were two Elton Song title references there. Dominic, did you notice that? are you impressed with me? I've never heard of a song called The Stinker, but I look forward to hearing it. I'm not sure using the one to represent the best album is accurate. Well, fair enough. We're each entitled to our opinion.
Podcast Concept and Invitation
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm Anthony. And I'm Dominic. And we're two Elton fans who are ready to get the gloves on and thrash it So whether you are an Elton superfan or just new to his work, we would love for you to join us in this podcast series.
00:00:53
Speaker
Elton versus Elton, the album. Battle! Dominic, this is a really exciting project. I feel like Elton, as an obsessive collector and categoriser of things himself, he might approve of our attempts to go through each of these albums fastidiously, rank them all. I think it's an Elton-worthy thing to do. Should we just take a moment now to introduce ourselves and our own journeys of learning to to love the music of Elton John? Yeah, sure. I was born in 1979, not a peak year for Elton John, a single man. Did have Song for Guy on it. But i was therefore growing up in the 80s, where really the biggest artists were probably Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. And I bought the very best of Elton John, which was a UK greatest hit. It's not released stateside. And ah I listened to it track by track, the good, the bad, the ugly. absolutely obsessed with it. What about you Ant?
Personal Journeys with Elton John's Music
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, that was the first album that I ah came across Elton's work from. When I was about four or five years old, um I remember that little semi-detached house that me and my parents lived in and my dad would put The Very Best of Elton John on whilst doing the washing up. It was the only CD in the house. This was like 1990, 1991. And so just subconsciously, i I'd learnt all these songs by by the age of, you know, five or six, because they were just on repeat every night whilst my dad was ah getting his hands covered in fairy liquid. I was learning the piano at around this time too. um I was lucky enough to to grow up with a piano in the house from the age of about five years old. Song for Guy was in my
00:02:45
Speaker
first sort of big piano book, though it was a bit too difficult for me for a few years. So yeah, Elton's music has been a fixture of my life as as long as I can remember. We moved house from Peterborough to quite near Watford in my oh o ninth or tenth year. And me and my dad started going to watch football together. And some many folk will know that Elton is a lifelong Watford Football Club fan. He was the chairman at the time that we started to go and watch Watford. So pretty soon after that, I became a ah collector of his records pretty much right through until I left home to go to university. So i I probably bought about 10 or 15 of his albums by the age of 18 19 i was lucky enough to see him perform live twice at that time and then i've seen him once subsequently in my in my mid-20s and just yeah i love him he's great i wear glasses too i'm a bit of a nerd too like he's um there are things that we don't share but there's there's lots of things where i i'd say you share his riches oh wow would would i love to share his riches no i'm i'm not sure right yeah yeah i i think so i think so dom many folk might be thinking oh do i need to have listened to all the albums before listening to to the episodes what what's your feeling on that i that's a really personal thing uh i don't think that someone
00:04:21
Speaker
as to listening anyway, they might have an album that they really love and want to just listen to us talk. So skip straight to episode five, for example, if that's your favorite Elton. I'm somebody who often reads the reviews of stuff before deep delving. So I can imagine that I would probably listen to this podcast before.
Scoring System and Album Focus
00:04:45
Speaker
listening to the record uh it's up to you and listening in order yeah i think people can dip in wherever they want can't they we're going to record them in chronological order but you can listen to them however you wish uh we're going to score them aren't we ant we're going to be quite strict about our scoring methods how going to work all that out I'm not going to go into all the details because I've given certain elements as sort of different weighting to other, but all the scores we give are going to be out of 10. The main scoring we're going to do is we're going to be scoring each album track out of 10 on each episode, but only the tracks that appear in the original version of an album. So a lot of Elton's albums were re-released in 1995 and had bonus tracks. We're not going to rate those. We'll discuss them. We won' won't give them a rating. So we're going give all the tracks an individual rating out of 10. And then in addition, we're also going to discuss and rate the name of each album, the artwork,
00:05:50
Speaker
cover versions just as a whole, the lyrics as a whole. So all of these just out of 10 each time, the music as a whole, and then the final two that they're slightly idiosyncratic. So we've got a category called flop dodge. So if an album avoids anything even resembling a flop, so every track is solid and consistent that would avoid flops. That would be a good flop dodge score. So you might score an eight or a nine or a 10. Whereas if every track was a flop, we think it's rubbish, then it might be scoring a zero, a one or a two or something like that. So that's the flop dodge category out of 10. And then finally, hits. And we're not talking about how well stuff did in the charts or anything like that. It's just what constitutes a Dominic hit, what constitutes an Anthony hit. So we'll give ah a score out of 10 for the album as a whole of how many hits it provided.
Debate on 'Empty Sky' and Future Plans
00:06:45
Speaker
Now, Anthony has been my friend for a number of years, and it was Anthony who approached me with the idea of doing this. And one of the reasons I immediately said yes was to defend Empty Sky. Empty Sky is the first Elton John album release, and there are zero official hits on in Dominic land.
00:07:05
Speaker
ah ah hit heavy hit heavy give me that harpsichord skyline pigeon so I was eager to infuse about empty sky and at the time of us releasing what you're listening to now we have released episode one so you can listen to me praise empty sky and Anthony well let's just say he might take a little bit of persuading on one or two the more harpsichord heavy moments Indeed. Oh, the dratted harpsichord. I can hear it from here. But yeah, that that episode is live now and we are aiming to drop a new episode, on a new album review each Tuesday until we run out of albums or one of us dies, whichever happens first. Yes, yes, yes. Really excited about releasing these. I think you're going to love them.
00:08:01
Speaker
Tune in, please. The show must go on.