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Elton John admits that his days of prima donna-type explosions still happen — despite having vowed long ago to keep his ego in check. The “Rocket Man” reveled to The Guardian, “I’m not proud of that stuff, no, it makes me shudder. My behavior was so erratic and so unpredictable. And it’s still in me, to explode at any moment. I’ve been trying to work on that for a long time and I’ve got a wonderful husband who knows how to get me out of that stuff. I think it’s an artistic thing — artists can be so self-destructive sometimes, for no reason. I can have a day when everything in my whole life is going so well, and I get up and I feel like the world is against me. Why, I do not know.”

Elton, who despite the decades of adoring fans and accolades, still battles personal issues that are ingrained from his childhood: “The self-loathing, not having any self-esteem, that all comes from when I was a kid That’s the way it was in the 50’s — you got slapped round the face, you got a good hiding. ‘It was bloody good for you’ — it wasn’t good for me. It left me walking on eggshells.”

He added, he still considers himself a shy person at heart: “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.”

Elton John admitted that his over-the-top persona — both on and off the stage — during the 1970’s and ’80s was often a mask for his admitted low self-esteem: “When I was drinking and doing drugs, you become completely ridiculous. I mean, you become self-obsessed, your values go completely out the window. Y’know, you don’t like the color of the wallpaper on the plane, or the way it’s done, you don’t like the color of the furniture in the hotel room — it’s all that absolute nonsense. Like all entertainers, they’re very comfortable on the stage, off the stage, I didn’t really. . . I was still the young boy from Pinner, who was just kinda insecure, a little overweight, and, y’know, had an inferiority complex. I just showed off on stage. All entertainers want to do is show off.”