Elton John: ‘I need to perform in Russia to help gay people’
Sir Elton John says he won’t cancel a planned Moscow concert because he wants to support Russia’s gay community.
“I’m supposed to be going to Moscow in December,” the pop icon said to the Guardian. “I’ve got to go. And I’ve got to think about what I’m going to say very carefully. There’s two avenues of thought: do you stop everyone going, ban all the artists coming in from Russia? But then you’re really leaving the men and women who are gay and suffering under the anti-gay laws in an isolated situation. As a gay man, I can’t leave those people on their own without going over there and supporting them. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve got to go.”
Sir Elton has revealed he once had sex with a KGB spy on a hotel roof during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1979. He said: ”I went to Russia in 1979 and I knew we were being watched all the time.
”I had an interpreter that they’d clearly set up. I ended up having sex with him on the hotel roof.”
The 66-year-old also talked about his recent appendix health scare.“I was so lucky, because usually if it bursts, it causes peritonitis. If that happens, you have to be in hospital within an hour, otherwise you’re brown bread.” Sir Elton added: “I’m lucky to be alive. They did the operation and it was not a walk in the park. They said: ‘Oh, you’ll be out the next day.’ But it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. I was in a lot of pain, and I was hallucinating from the morphine and the anaesthetic. I didn’t sleep for four days, it was like being on speed. I was hallucinating like mad, which was, you know, amusing for the people around me.”
