Like any long-term rock star, there is a whole plethora of things we bet Elton John has some regrets about. However, we’d bet most of them aren’t to do with his songs.
With hundreds of tracks under his belt, many of them celebrated and beloved by a writhing mass of fans, Elton John doesn’t have too many tunes that he’d rather forget, but there’s a good chance that one track remains an inescapable moment of regret.
There’s a reason Elton John hasn’t performed ‘Island Girl’ for over 30 years. The 1975 Rock of The Wrestles track is a blight on the piano man’s discography – a racist, sexist and fetishistic portrait of a Caribbean woman who relocates to New York and develops a reputation for “turning tricks for the dudes in the big city.”
By the mid-1970s, Reggae had been embraced by a host of white recording artists. Caribbean music was nothing new in the UK. Trinidadian Calypso arrived in 1948 when the Empire Windrush bought 500 passengers from Jamaica to the British Isles. One of them was Lord Kitchener, a calypso singer whose song ‘London Is The Place For Me’ was recorded quite literally as he was stepping off the ship.
The children of the Windrush Generation grew up eyeball to eyeball with the urban white working class, often sharing the same tower blocks and housing estates. This allowed for a cross-pollination of musical styles and gave birth to the ska explosion of the 1970s, which saw groups like The Specials, Madness, The Beat, and The Selector inject classic reggae with a dose of adrenaline.
Unlike those bands, Elton John grew up on a diet of American R&B and British music hall. Like so many of his contemporaries – including The Rolling Stones and Paul and Linda McCartney – he simply reappropriated elements of the reggae style to give his music more cachet. ‘Island Girl’ is a particularly glaring example. The track is basically a regular Elton John song with a reggae beat and smatterings of marimba thrown in for good measure. It is quite dizzyingly unimaginative and features some of Bernie Taupin’s worst lyrics.
The reggae elements aren’t inherently offensive. When combined with Taupin’s glaringly racist lyrics, however, they become much harder to stomach. Elton sings: “I see your teeth flash, Jamaican honey so sweet/ Down where Lexington cross 47th Street/ Oh she’s a big girl, she’s standing six-foot-three/ Turning tricks for the dudes in the big city.”
As if those first five words weren’t bad enough, Taupin then attempts to switch lenses and speak from the perspective of the girl’s Jamaican partner, who wonders what she wants with “the white man’s world?” the issue is Taupin has already established that he’s speaking from the perspective of a white onlooker, one who seems to be both aroused and disturbed by the idea of a sexualised Black woman.
“Well she’s black as coal, but she burn like a fire/ And she wrap herself around you like a well-worn tire/ You feel her nail scratch your back just like a rake, oh oh/ He one more gone, he one more John who make the mistake.” It’s the kind of lyrics that can make you thankful we live in a more enlightened world today.
Lyrically, it is enough to make you wince, but the thought of having to perform the track is even more dreadful. But perhaps the most awkward notion is that ‘Island Girl’ was incredibly popular in the US. In fact, it went to number one on release in November 1975, giving Elton his fifth US chart-topper, an astonishing fact given not onyl the calibre of the lyrics but the quality of track.
It was performed during live shows for another 15 years before being retired in 1990. Elton John has never given a reason for why he decided to remove the track from his setlists. Then again, do we really need an explanation?
