Elton’s 1979 Tour of the USSR – A Look Back

By the end of the show, and after some emphatic urging to clap during Bennie And The Jets and other up-tempo songs, the crowd was firmly in Elton and Ray’s hands. The pair understood the "newness" of the relationship between this particular audience and the entertainers, neither side really sure of how the other might react, and that added to the excitement for all involved. It had been years since Elton had performed in front of a crowd that was largely unaware of his repertoire, and he enjoyed the challenge immensely. 

After the concert, the younger members of the audience continued to take the party outside as they gathered en masse in front of the venue, repeatedly chanting Elton's name until he and Ray appeared in the dressing room window. Even the local police, there to keep the crowd at bay, turned around and watched the global superstar thrill the throng with waves and some tossed flowers.

Apparently, the Communist authorities viewed the situation, as Times of London reporter Michael Binyon put it at the time, “Like a sort of slight weakening, a sort of concession to Western culture – Western pop/rock tastes, which still isn’t fully accepted [in the USSR]”, and asked that the show be toned down a bit. Elton and Ray respectfully continued to give the audiences what they wanted, even if it wasn’t what they expected. The pianist even mixed some classical music segments by Russian composers into Bennie And The Jets in a sort of auditory attempt at Glasnost.

A day or two after taking the midnight train from Leningrad back to Moscow, and checking back in to the Metropole Hotel, Elton struck a Cossack dance pose for photographers in front of the Kremlin and remarked how he and his party had been, “surprised at people’s friendliness and the beauty of what we’ve seen.” The group also attended a football match on May 26 (Moscow Dynamo over the Red Army side, 2-1), a reception at the British embassy, and a performance of Swan Lake by the Bolshoi Ballet.

In their spare time, Elton and Ray sat for a variety of on-camera interviews for Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais for the subsequent To Russia With Elton documentary. Elton also appeared on Moscow television for an interview with journalist Tatiana Korshilovoy and political commentator Anatoly Ovsyannikov, doing his level best to gracefully manage the translation delay and some of the questions themselves. At the end, he provided them with a performance of Candle In The Wind and I Need You To Turn To, the latter song notably not included on the current tour's setlist.

Even while commenting on how the Russian capital was much more beautiful than other Communist bloc cities he had been to, Elton and his group privately noticed a change since coming to Moscow. They could tell they were being secretly monitored by the KGB and many of the British and American journalists felt uneasy in the shadow of Red Square. And the concert audiences seemed a bit more reserved – as if the already skewed ratio of Soviet party members-to-young fans had become more exaggerated since leaving the relatively more liberal Leningrad.

On May 28th, Elton and Ray gave their second concert at Rossiya Hall in Moscow, part of a massive hotel complex consisting of 6,000 guest rooms. The show was aired, not without some technical difficulties in the set-up, in stereo on BBC Radio. Both countries were keen to test out the broadcast lines as they readied for the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Fans in the UK were able to enjoy the goings on starting at 5:30 pm Monday night from the comfort of their own homes, listening to Radio 1 announcer Andy Peebles introduce the festivities by commenting on how the venue reminded him, somewhat surprisingly, of London’s Royal Festival Hall.

The Moscow concerts went from strength to strength and as Elton prepared to leave Moscow for London, he spoke with some fans about their musical tastes and made a present of a video cassette of one of his favourite bands at the time, the Sex Pistols. He continued to receive gifts as he moved about in public, appreciating that even the smallest of them set their giver back a good amount due to the local economy. With every passing day, Elton’s appreciation of the young people who came up to him on the street grew and he left the country with a Russian spring in his step.