Between school buddies, we lent each other records at the time : the pocket money we received was not enough to quench our exponential thirst for discovering new musical innovations, in this Golden Age that gave birth to everything that constituted the Pop/Rock pantheon since then.

But Johan had flatly refused to lend me the "Black Album" (that's how he called Elton John's second album -a little nod to the Beatles' White Album, supposedly). He listened to that album over and over, alongside Elton John's third album Tumbleweed Connection. Given that Johan already owned these two discs (the first, Empty Sky, was impossible to find in Nice), we had agreed that I would buy the fourth and then freshly released opus from late 1971, Madman Across The Water, and that we would swap them alternately.

So my first Elton John vinyl was Madman Across The Water, and this is one of the reasons I never got over that record (the main one being that it is a masterpiece album, and my favorite Elton John opus, with the Blue Moves album). For the record, at the time my parents also had trouble getting over it. As it happened, because of works in my bedroom, I had emigrated for a week to the living room's sofa, where the family’s Dual turntable stood. Every evening, I took the opportunity to religiously listen to the album through headphones, on repeat and at full volume, until 2:00 am and beyond.

One night, absorbed in my ritual, I did not understand why the light suddenly turned on, nor why my mother appeared like a vociferous dragon. The last thing I knew was that she suddenly tore off my earphones, and then... to my great horror, like a clap of thunder in the silence of the night, Holiday Inn burst on the speakers near the sofa. The loudness of a concert in a living room at 2:00 am in the morning, only rivaled now by my mother's screams. All of this din (music and screams) was to be heard as far as the Promenade des Anglais, I guess…