The feel-good football story of Watford Forever

One Saturday in 1953, the six-year-old Reggie Dwight of 55 Pinner Hill Road went to his first football match with his perennially gloomy father, Stanley. ‘Emerging from the Tube station,’ writes John Preston, ‘Stanley reached down and took his son’s hand.’ Reggie was enchanted by Stanley’s sudden happiness. The only place the two would ever manage to connect was on the stands at their beloved Watford FC. Once Reggie became the rock star Elton John, he bought the club and took it, improbably, to the top. He did it with a manager who was both his opposite and his soulmate, Graham Taylor – better known for his later disastrous reign managing England.

Their relationship carries Watford Forever, a wonderful, feel-good account of an ultimately English provincial story. Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, collaborated with Preston, an accomplished writer of novels and non-fiction. Taylor died in 2017, but Preston had access to his diary. In the budding field of Elton studies, Watford Forever complements this autumn’s memoir by his lyricist Bernie Taupin, and the 2019 biopic Rocketman.

Reggie Dwight spent much of his childhood hiding in his bedroom talking to his Watford programmes while his parents shouted at each other downstairs. At the risk of cod psychology, he escaped himself by becoming Elton Hercules John, in platform shoes and green hair. By 1973, he had three straight US No.1 hits. In 1976, aged 29, Elton bought Watford FC, for Reggie.

At the time, Watford were a terrible team in a terrible town wrecked by post-war planners. They played in English professional football’s lowest tier, the fourth division. Their assistant scout was 95 years old. Rats lived beneath the grandstand. Hooligan-infested 1970s English football was not the new rock and roll, and Elton was possibly the most glamorous person in it.