Elton John reveals cocaine made him a violent monster as he addresses his past struggle with drugs

Music legend Elton John has revealed the extent of his cocaine use and how it made him irresponsible and self obsessed.

The star is baring all in a new soon-to-be-released memoir, Me: Elton John, in which he’s detailing his battle with drugs and his run-ins with royalty.

In one chapter in the memoir, as serialised by the Daily Mail, Elton, 72, writes about taking the Class A drug, which left him alike a ‘monster’. 

Speaking of a period in mid-1983 when he was filming his I’m Still Standing music video, he recalled being told he’d smashed up his entire hotel suite. Only he didn’t remember a thing.

‘Everything else was on its side, or upside down, or in pieces. Sitting among the splinters was a cowboy hat that [personal assistant] Bob liked to wear. It was completely flat, like Yosemite Sam’s after Bugs Bunny drops an anvil on his head,’ he wrote of his PA waking up him to survey the damage. ‘”F***ing hell,” I said. “What happened?”

There was a long pause. “Elton,” he said eventually. “You happened”.’

Elton revealed the shoot in Cannes kicked off at 4am, before wrapping at sunset with the crooner going back to his room before the night schedule began.

It was there he bumped into Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and joined him for a drink at the bar. After downing ‘either six or eight vodka martinis in the space of an hour, and a couple of lines of coke’, Elton returned to set where he ‘started rolling around on the floor naked’ before punching his then-manager John Reid.

It was then in the extract Elton began to detail his battle with cocaine, after he started taking the drug in 1974.

Speaking about how it made him feel, the singer admitted he enjoyed the ‘jolt of confidence and euphoria’ it gave him – however he insisted it gave him too much, after feeling the icy gaze of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards after one coke-fuelled stage invasion.

‘My appetite for the stuff was unbelievable — enough to attract comment in the circles I was moving in. Given that I was a rock star spending a lot of time in Seventies LA, this was a not inconsiderable feat,’ he detailed.

‘Once again, you might think this would have given me pause for thought, but I’m afraid the next 16 years were full of incidents that would have given any rational human being pause concerning their drug consumption.’

He added: ‘That was the problem. Because I was doing coke, I wasn’t a rational human being any more. You become unreasonable and irresponsible, self-obsessed, a law unto yourself. ‘It’s your way or the highway. It’s a horrible drug.’