All the girls love a sweet painted lady

Why my favourite Elton John songs are filled with queer sex and prostitutes.

Image credit: Terry O’Neill

Elton John is nothing short of a queer icon. Yet, during the release of his eighth studio album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), John was decidedly in the closet. For  21st-century queer people, like me, who grew up with and love this album, it hasn’t always been easy to reconcile these two pieces of John’s legacy.

At 15, I was devastated to find out that Elton John didn’t write the lyrics to his own songs. I had recently come out as bisexual, and imagining that he secretly sang about men felt like understanding. He and I were connected, across the oceans and the decades, by queer common ground. His lyrics sounded to me like gay anthems. 

Then I learned they were actually written by a straight cis man: Bernie Taupin.

The Bernie/Elton partnership is definitely nothing to scoff at. The seamless blend of Bernie’s words and Elton’s piano composition speaks to their profound bond. It’s a truly great artistic partnership, but it scattered my queer fantasies to the dust.

Now when I queue up their songs, which spoke so deeply to me when I was young, I try to listen with fresh ears. I pay closer attention, not only to the words but the musical construction underneath. I reach out and try to balance these songs as they are, against the weight of my own failing expectations for them.

Track 9: Sweet Painted Lady

Like many of Elton’s, or rather,  Bernie’s, slower ballads, ‘Sweet Painted Lady’ is quick to set the scene. Desperate men stumble from sea to land, out of gutters into prostitute’s arms. You can smell and feel the languid, salty lull of ocean waves long before you hear their melancholy swell. Elton briefly takes on the role of brothel matron, beckoning sailors (and listeners) into the song’s first chorus. Its string harmonies and accordion accompaniment might fool you into thinking this is a classic French love song; but here, love could not be further from the picture.

At its core, ‘Sweet Painted Lady’ is concerned with a particular sort of repetition, one that comforts just as much as it numbs. Elton’s persona laments and asks the painted lady to forget the sexual acts they’ve just performed. These acts are written more like bodily maintenance than driven by desire. It was this detachedness from heterosexual sex that initially drew me to the song. Its melancholy betrayed the queer person beneath the words, forced into lovemaking just as much as the lady he serenades.

At least, it would have 一 if Elton had written the song. Now it seems like Bernie just needed to get a girlfriend.

Track 12: All The Girls Love Alice

‘All The Girls Love Alice’ cuts into me like a knife, but it’s hard to articulate exactly how. Is it the way the synthetic warble of the opening guitar trembles through me? Is it the marching pulse of drum and bass? Or is it the rattlesnake hiss of maraca, filling me with dread even as Elton’s energetic vocals pour in? All I know is that ‘Alice’ begins like a whip crack, and you are engrossed before you even know you are listening.

Unlike ‘Sweet Painted Lady’, ‘Alice’ is actually about queer relationships. It centres around Alice, a troubled 16-year-old who is paid for companionship and sex by older married women. The line,

/Wait till my husband’s away/

is sung in a smooth drawl, punctuating the first chorus. It seals the sexual nature of Alice’s work as something unacceptable within the patriarchal structures of her world.

Bernie is sympathetic to Alice’s situation, citing in part her abusive mother and past failed relationships for her sexual deviance. But despite the sympathy, this is precisely what Alice’s sexuality remains throughout the song: deviance. Like many queer characters throughout history, Alice is denied a happy ending. Her fast-paced lifestyle finally catches up with her, she is found dead on the subway. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether or not Alice is actually queer, or acts so due to poor circumstances.

So, if Elton John didn’t publicly come out as gay until 1992, and had nothing to do with the lyrical construction of his songs, then why should I find anything redeeming in this work, which on paper rejects queer experience?

I can’t help it, he makes me feel seen.

If there’s one thing an Elton John song can show you, it’s that music can say just as much as a lyric can. ‘Sweet Painted Lady’ might not speak of sadness, but its minor drawl certainly sounds like it. It’s like lying on the beach, waiting for the tide to sweep you in. ‘All The Girls Love Alice’ may have its flaws, but as you listen you can’t deny that  you are always with Alice. Together, you rush alongside the music, hurtling towards an end that never really comes.

Elton John may not have written his lyrics, but I’m sure glad he wrote his songs.