The unrolled works would reroll immediately because of their time spent in the tube, so keeping some of them unfolded in the cold under Tiny King's eyes, had been no picnic. Finally, Tony King must have taken pity on me, because he very kindly offered to take the entire roll of gouaches, promising me he would show them to Elton John, and he asked me for my phone number in Derby, just in case.

Tony King kept his word, and till today I have very grateful thoughts for this man, because without him nothing of what happened next would have happened at all. The phone rang in Derby a few days later and I was invited to go to Elton John’s place to meet him because he wanted to thank me for my drawings.

This is how I met Elton John on December 31st, 1973. We chatted in his living room for about twenty minutes. Beyond that would have been a feat, because the conversation was de facto very limited : Elton John by then was someone quite sympathetic and extremely kind, but particularly shy and reserved, and as for me, I was on the verge of apoplexy, and handicapped by my mediocre level of English language...

At the end of the visit, Elton John offered me an autographed copy of the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album that was lying on his coffee table, the legendary double album that had just been been released in October of 1973. Yes, dreams can sometimes come true. I left Elton John with the gouaches that Tony King had presented him, which he kept for showing them to other people, from what I understood.

Later on, during the winter of 1974, I was informed by Elton John’s management that decision had been made to use a selection of these works for Elton John’s 1974 US & UK Leg tour, a huge Summer tour planned to begin by early summer 74 and to roam through the United States’ major cities, and scheduled to end with a few UK dates in December of 1974.