Elton John is readying the arrival of his new memoir Me, set to arrive this week.
Just ahead of its official release, however, a few publications received advanced copies of the work and a certain selection concerning John's perception of Michael Jackson has particularly stood out.
In the excerpt, John expresses that he felt as though the King of Pop was "genuinely mentally ill" in his later life, detailing the time he was found playing video games with the 11-year-old son of John's housekeeper at a dinner party.
“I’d known Michael since he was 13 or 14,” the legendary singer-songwriter pens. “Elizabeth Taylor had turned up on the Starship with him in tow. He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine. But at some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away from the world, and away from reality the way Elvis Presley did.”
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“God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles. I don’t mean that in the light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around. It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.”
He would go on to add that at the party, which John had arranged for his future husband David Furnish to meet his mother, Jackson didn't look well and refused to eat anything that was being served.
“After a while, he got up from the table without a word and disappeared. We finally found him, two hours later, in a cottage in the grounds of Woodside where my housekeeper lived: she was sitting there, watching Michael Jackson quietly playing video games with her 11-year-old son. For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”
Elton John's Me biography will arrive on October 15th.