One would think Elton John had committed a transgression especially egregious if an entire country had barred the Rocket Man from playing within their borders.
But nation-states are often highly anxious types with notoriously thin skins. Singapore infamously sent Led Zeppelin and the Bee Gees packing in 1972 due to a ban on long hair, ostensibly to crack down on drug culture. Israel was so spooked by the fan hysteria over Cliff Richard’s 1963 Tel Aviv show that the stuffy Interdepartmental Committee for Authorising the Importation of Foreign Artists shut down any idea of Beatlemania spreading to the militaristic state over the Fab Four’s “negative influence on the youth”.
Even in the supposed Western hinterland of the free world, Alice Cooper’s shock rock troupe was denied entry to Australia when planning their 1975 Welcome to My Nightmare Tour by the personal intervention of Labor and Immigration Minister Clyde Cameron over perceived “degeneracy”, presumably under the impression Cooper was indeed decapitated every night under an eight-foot guillotine.
On a darker note, Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens before his conversion to the Islamic faith, discovered he’d been placed on a US no-fly list in 2004 in the paranoid aftermath of 9/11, a Homeland Security Department spokesperson stating the ‘Father and Son’ singer had “…been placed on the watch lists because of activities that could potentially be related to terrorism”.
All absurd, as was John’s Egyptian rejection. Conservative knickers were already in a twist when the piano maestro had torn organised religion a new one while speaking to The Guardian in 2006, but an interview with Parade four years later saw John make the unforgivable sin of casting doubt on Jesus’—or Īsā as he’s known in the Quran—red-blooded, heterosexuality.
He said, “I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel.”
The Christian world wasn’t without its heat, the US Catholic League president Bill Donahue taking offence at John supposedly rendering the Lord a “sexual deviant”, and Christian Voice director Stephen Green dismissing John’s musings as “a desperate cry for attention”.
What was the moment that got Elton John banned from Egypt?
It’s hard to imagine John caring, but his blasphemous heresy triggered the ire of Egypt so severely that his planned May 2010 concert in the Arab Republic was outright banned.
Orders were made by the Egyptian Musicians’ Union head Mounir al-Wasimi, an arm of the country’s Culture Ministry, and well-known for harassing artists who may evoke the Islamist anxieties around Fitna, the perceived allure of conflict, sedition, civil strife, and ‘loose morals’. “How do we allow a gay, who wants to ban religions, claimed that the prophet Īsā was gay and calls for Middle Eastern countries to allow gays to have sexual freedom,” he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur news agency at the time.
John really had played everywhere, including China over 20 years ago, and even dates in the Soviet Union, but with the announcements of calling it quits on the whole touring gig, Egypt will likely remain eluded. John still managed to eke a set in Morocco, however, playing Rabat’s Mawazine Festival along with Sting, Carlos Santana, and Julio Iglesias, despite the Right-leaning Justice and Development Party’s Mustapha Ramid throwing a hissy fit over John’s “bragging about his homosexuality”. Stay mad, Ramid.
