Elton John has told the story of the 1985 British Music Awards exactly three times in public. Once in a 1987 interview with a music magazine, once in his autobiography, and once in a conversation at a dinner in 2003 that a journalist present was allowed to report. Each time Elton John has told the story, Elton John has described the moment Keith Richards walked to the microphone as the moment Elton John realized he had made a mistake.
Each time Elton John has also said that the mistake produced the best thing that happened to him that year. This is what Keith Richards said. The British Music Awards in February of 1985 were held at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London, a venue that the British music industry used for formal occasions that required the specific combination of grandeur and discretion that a Park Lane Hotel provided.
The awards had been running since 1977 and had established themselves as the industry’s primary annual recognition event, the evening when the people who made music and the people who sold music, and the people who wrote about music occupied the same room and observed the protocols of mutual acknowledgement that the industry required.
The evening of February 11th, 1985 had proceeded for its first two hours with the efficient ceremony of an event that knew what it was and how to conduct itself. Elton John was 41 years old in February of 1985 and was receiving the Outstanding Contribution to British Music Award, the evening’s most prestigious category, given not for a specific record or performance, but for a career.
Elton John had been making records since 1969. Elton John had produced in 16 years a body of work that had sold hundreds of millions of copies across every continent and had influenced virtually every British popular musician who had come after him. The Outstanding Contribution Award was, by any measure, the correct award to give Elton John in 1985, and Elton John had accepted it with the specific graciousness of someone who receives recognition they believe they deserve and are not going to pretend otherwise.
Elton John’s acceptance speech had been going well for its first 4 minutes. Elton John was generous and warm and occasionally funny, thanking the people who had contributed to his career with the specific detail of someone who had not prepared the speech but had been carrying the relevant information long enough that it came without effort.
The room had been engaged and appreciative and the evening had the quality of a successful occasion. Then Elton John’s speech took a turn. It was not a sharp turn. It was the gradual turn of a speaker who has been moving in a certain direction and continues moving in that direction past the point where caution would have suggested stopping.
Elton John began talking about the direction of British music, about where it had been and where it was going, about the artists who were shaping the future and the artists who had shaped the past. Elton John talked about the new synthesizer-driven sound that was dominating the charts, about the energy and invention of the young British acts who were redefining what popular music could be.
Elton John talked about this with genuine enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of someone who had followed music closely enough to know when something genuinely new was happening and to recognize it as good. And then Elton John said something about the guitar-based rock tradition that had dominated British music in the previous two decades.
Elton John did not name Keith Richards immediately. Elton John talked about the tradition first, about how it had produced extraordinary things and how those extraordinary things were behind it now, how the musicians who had defined that era were still present but were no longer defining anything, were present in the way that monuments are present, important and permanent and no longer moving.
Elton John said this with affection rather than contempt. Elton John clearly meant it as a form of respect, an acknowledgement of past achievement that was simultaneously an acknowledgement that the achievement was past. Then Elton John named Keith Richards. Elton John used Keith Richards as the specific example of what Elton John had been describing, the musician who had mattered most in his generation and who was now, in Elton John’s assessment, a monument rather than a force.
Elton John meant this as recognition. Elton John had grown up listening to Keith Richards. Elton John had been influenced by the music Keith Richards had made, had studied it, had taken from the things that informed Elton John’s own development as a musician. Elton John was not speaking from hostility. Elton John was speaking from the specific kind of informed respect that sometimes expresses itself as eulogy before the subject has agreed to be eulogized.
Elton John said it with a smile. Elton John said it looking toward the table where Keith Richards was seated, 12 feet from the podium, in the way that speakers sometimes look at the specific person they are discussing when they are confident that what they are saying is generous enough received without offense.
Elton John was wrong about this. Keith Richards had a different view of what was generous. Keith Richards was seated at a table with three other people, a record producer, a music journalist, and a musician whose name has not been recorded in any account of the evening that is publicly available. Keith Richards had been listening to Elton John’s speech with the patient attention that the occasion required.
Keith Richards had been listening to Elton John’s speech for 4 minutes without particular incident. Keith Richards heard his name come out of the microphone. Keith Richards heard what followed his name. The three people at Keith Richards’ table have each described, in various conversations over the years, what Keith Richards’ expression was in the moment after Elton John named him.
All three descriptions are consistent with each other in a way that suggests they are describing the same real thing rather than a memory that has been shaped by subsequent telling. Keith Richards looked at Elton John for several seconds with an expression that was not anger and was not offense and was not the careful neutrality of someone suppressing a reaction for the benefit of the people watching.
Keith Richards looked at Elton John with the expression of a man who has just been given a specific and clear reason to say something and is making the decision about whether to say it and has decided yes. Keith Richards stood up. The room registered this immediately. 300 people at 40 tables watched Keith Richards push his chair back and stand up at a table 12 feet from the podium while Elton John was still speaking. Elton John noticed.
Elton John’s speech slowed for approximately 2 seconds while Elton John processed what was happening. Then Keith Richards began walking toward the podium. Elton John stepped back from the microphone. This was not a planned gesture. Elton John stepped back the way people step back when something unexpected is moving toward them and the automatic response is to create space.
Keith Richards arrived at the microphone. Keith Richards looked at the room. 300 people, 40 tables, the full attendance of the British music industry’s most important annual event, and then Keith Richards looked at Elton John. Keith Richards said, “Monuments move.” Two words. Keith Richards said them at the volume of a normal conversation, not raised for effect, into a microphone that amplified them to every corner of the Grosvenor House Hotel ballroom.
Then Keith Richards nodded at Elton John, turned away from the microphone, and walked back to his table and sat down. The room was silent for approximately 4 seconds. In those 4 seconds, 300 people processed what they had just heard. The two words, the microphone, the nod, the walk back to the table. 300 people in the British music industry sat with two words in the silence and understood what the two words meant.
Then the room began to respond. It was not the polite applause of an audience following a cue. It was the noise a room makes when 300 people have simultaneously understood something and are responding to the understanding rather than to any external signal. The noise grew quickly, the way crowd responses grow when the initial response validates rather than checks the impulse. Several people stood up.
The ceremony’s host, a television presenter named Christopher Webb, who had been standing to the side of the stage throughout the exchange, said afterward that in 11 years of hosting industry events, he had never experienced a room change temperature as completely as that room changed temperature in the 4 seconds between Keith Richards’ two words and the beginning of what followed them.
Christopher Webb said the temperature change was permanent, that the room was different for the rest of the evening, that the two words had shifted something that could not be unshifted. Elton John stood at the side of the podium while the room responded to what Keith Richards had said. Elton John’s expression in those 4 seconds has been described by the people who were watching as the expression of someone receiving new information, not embarrassment, not irritation, but the specific look of a person whose model of something has just been revised by a
more accurate model. Elton John has confirmed this in each of the three times Elton John has told the story publicly. Elton John has said that Keith Richards’ two words did something to Elton John’s understanding of what Elton John had been saying that Elton John had not anticipated and could not reverse. Elton John had been describing Keith Richards as a monument.
Keith Richards had pointed out in two words that monuments do not describe themselves that way, that the decision about whether something is finished belongs to the thing itself, not to the observer. After the ceremony concluded, Keith Richards and Elton John found themselves in the same section of the hotel bar, which may or may not have been accidental since the Grosvenor House Hotel’s post-ceremony bar was not a large space, and the industry’s senior figures tended to occupy the same part of it. Elton John approached Keith
Richards. This detail is confirmed by both accounts. Elton John initiated the conversation, which is relevant because initiating it required Elton John to walk toward the person who had just said two words into a microphone in front of 300 industry people in response to something Elton John had said.
This was not the easy path. Elton John took it anyway. Keith Richards and Elton John spoke for approximately 20 minutes. The conversation has been described by both men on separate occasions across 40 years, though neither man has reproduced its content in specific terms. What is known from their separate accounts is that the conversation was a genuine one, not the diplomatic conversation of two public figures managing an awkward situation that both need to make smaller than it was, but the conversation of two musicians who had each been making music
for longer than most of their industry had existed, and who had between the podium and the bar arrived at the kind of mutual honesty that industry events are specifically designed to prevent, and that occasionally happens anyway. Elton John has said that Keith Richards told him something in the bar that changed the way Elton John thought about his own career.
Something about the relationship between what critics and industry people say about an artist and what the artist actually does. About the difference between the narrative that forms around a career and the career itself. Elton John has said this was the best thing that happened to him in 1985, better than the award, better than the recognition, better than anything else that year produced.
Elton John has said that the two words at the microphone were the beginning of it, and the 20 minutes in the bar were the rest of it, and that the whole evening was, despite its uncomfortable middle section, one of the most valuable evenings of Elton John’s professional life. Keith Richards has never discussed the February 1985 evening publicly in any interview or any written account.
Keith Richards received his own outstanding contribution to British music award four years later in 1989 at the same ceremony at the same venue. Keith Richards gave a brief acceptance speech that lasted approximately 90 seconds and contained no references to monuments, no references to the 1985 evening, and no references to Elton John.
Keith Richards thanked three people by name, his bandmates, his long-time manager, and a session musician whose contribution Keith Richards had apparently been meaning to acknowledge publicly for several years. Keith Richards said, “Thank you.” Paused once and walked off the stage. The audience, which included Elton John, who was seated at a table near the front of the room, gave Keith Richards a standing ovation that lasted considerably longer than the speech.
Elton John started clapping before anyone else in the room. This was noted by Christopher Webb, who was hosting the ceremony for the 12th time that year, because Christopher Webb had been paying attention to Elton John’s responses to Keith Richards since 1985 and had found them consistently instructive.
The 1985 British Music Awards are not among the most frequently discussed events in either man’s public record. The ceremony was not filmed for broadcast and no recording of the full evening is commercially available. There are photographs from the red carpet and the award presentations, but the specific exchange between Elton John’s speech and Keith Richards’ two word response exists only in the memories of the people who were present.
Those memories are consistent with each other in the ways that matter. 300 people heard two words. 300 people were in the room when the silence lasted 4 seconds and then broke in the way it broke. The specific detail that appears in every account from every person who has discussed the evening is the same.
Keith Richards said two words, nodded once at Elton John, and walked back to his table. Keith Richards did not look at the room. Keith Richards did not wait for the response. Keith Richards said what needed to be said and returned to his seat, which is perhaps the most complete description of Keith Richards’ approach to public situations that any single action has ever provided.
What also exists across 40 years is the three public accounts Elton John has given of the evening and the two words themselves, which Elton John has quoted accurately in each account. Monuments move. Two words. Keith Richards said them at conversational volume into a live microphone in a Park Lane Hotel Ballroom and then walked away.
Two words that replace the room’s accumulated assumptions about who was past and who was present with a more accurate version in less time than it takes to draw a breath. Elton John has described the two words in each of the three times Elton John has told the story as the most efficient thing one musician has ever said to another in Elton John’s presence.
Elton John has described them as the beginning of a 20-minute conversation in a hotel bar that changed how Elton John thought about his own career. Elton John has described them as the best thing that happened to Elton John in 1985. Two words that cost Keith Richards nothing to say, that required no preparation, no strategy, no management consultation, no calculation about how they would land, and that Elton John has been thinking about, by Elton John’s own account, across four decades and three public retellings. Keith Richards said them,
nodded once at Elton John, and sat back down. Keith Richards was still making music. Monuments move. Both things were entirely true. Keith Richards simply said so. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Has someone ever described you in a way that completely missed who you actually were? And did you find exactly the right words to correct them? Tell us about it in the comments.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the only person qualified to declare something finished is the person still doing it. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
