With 200 million records sold to date, the lyrics of Bernie Taupin, long-time collaborator with Elton John, remain among the most listened-to and enduring tunes in the history of popular music. Lincolnshire man Taupin now lives in the US, but still relies on his home county to provide the inspiration for his long-standing love of writing poetry

The high camp and glitz of Elton John, multi-million selling albums and songs that can be found in pretty much everybody’s music collection. There are few people who haven’t been touched, knowingly or otherwise, by the words of Bernie Taupin, the lyrical genius behind the words of hits like Candle In The Wind, Your Song, Rocketman, Daniel and Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting owes his entire career to his origins in rural Lincolnshire.

Oddly enough, if Taupin hadn’t been a lyricist, he would probably have ended up a farmer. Born in the summer of 1950 near Anwick, in Flatters, a house with no electricity and certainly no television, the young writer discovered poetry and literature rather than popular music, and feelings of restlessness and frustration with education.

Taupin embraced the counter-culture and ‘dropped out’ in 1965, which instilled into him ambitions of free-spiritedness, rather than the glamour and superficial fame of life in popular music with one of the world’s most flamboyant and extravagant performers.

Bernie’s father Robert was a stockman, his mother a bohemian. The family moved to Rowston and eventually Maltkiln Farm in Owmby-by-Spital in North Lincolnshire with Bernie’s two brothers. The young Bernie, after leaving school, drifted from job to job before answering an advertisement in a newspaper from somebody in London looking for a lyricist to form part of a musical collaboration.

The letter eventually landed on the desk of Liberty Records’s Ray Williams along with examples of Bernie’s poetry, and in 1967 Williams introduced Bernie to his newly signed artist, Reginald Kenneth Dwight.

The two found a rapport and became instant friends, enjoying the latest recordings of folk artists from the counter culture like Leonard Cohen. Bernie was instrumental in moulding Reginald into his better-known alter ego Elton John, and the pair’s collaboration found limited success until Your Song was written in 1970 from the album that was simply titled Elton John.