Elton John famously played a special rendition of his hit “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s funeral, as the singer was a longtime friend of the late royal. But few people know the real story of how the duo met—and it happened to involve a hilarious evening with Prince Andrew.
In Q: A Voyage Around The Queen, author Craig Brown details Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party in 1981, when Queen Elizabeth hired Elton John to perform. Lady Diana Spencer was newly engaged to Prince Charles and attended the Windsor Castle bash, where she first encountered Elton John.
Before the star’s performance there was a "discotheque in the ballroom," but apparently, Queen Elizabeth was worried about the noise. Brown shared that according to Elton, "the disco was turned down about as low as you could get without switching it off together. You could literally hear your feet moving around the floor over the music."
Elton John called his friend Diana "a real gossip."
Princess Anne asked Elton to dance to Elvis Presley’s "Hound Dog," which is where things got even more awkward. "Well, I say dance: I ended up just awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot, trying to make as little noise as I could so that I didn’t drown out the music," Elton said. The music switched to "Rock Around the Clock," and Elton shared that Queen Elizabeth "appeared," handbag and all.
"So now i was trying to dance as inaudibly as possible with Princess Anne and The Queen—still holding her handbag—while what appeared to be the world’s quietest disco played Bill Haley…here I was, desperately trying to act normal, while the world around me appeared to have gone completely mad."
This is when he was introduced to Diana. “We immediately clicked. We ended up pretending to dance the Charleston while hooting at the disco’s feebleness," Elton said, per Brown.
Diana and Elton John reconnected at Gianni Versace's 1997 funeral after the two had a falling out.
The singer shared that Diana "was fabulous company, the best dinner party guest, incredibly indiscreet, a real gossip: you could ask her anything and she’d tell you."
In his autobiography, (via Time), Elton wrote that Princess Diana "was blessed with an incredible social ease, an ability to talk to anybody, to make herself seem ordinary."
Sadly, the two fell out when Diana backed out of attending a charity event Elton was organizing, but they reconnected in July 1997 when their mutual friend Gianni Versace was murdered. Sadly, Diana herself died just a month later, on August 31, 1997.
