The untold story of the tribute song to Princess Diana
Elton John singing Candle In The Wind (Image: Getty)
Whenever the anniversary of Princess Diana’s death comes around, as it does every August, radio stations across the world reach into their vaults and haul out Elton John’s impassioned anthem Candle In The Wind which, for a moment in time, became the musical embodiment of the most famous woman in the world. Nobody plays its redrafted version, Goodbye England’s Rose, any more – but in the welter of shock and grief surrounding the death of Diana on 30 August 1997, Elton’s immortal melody and Bernie Taupin’s hastily-rewritten lyric rose to the top of the global singles charts, selling a staggering 33 million copies.
Elton and Bernie waived their royalties, so too did their management and record company, record sales outlets refused their cut, and as a result almost £35 million raised by the sales went into the hands of the newly-created Princess Diana Memorial Fund. It was the single largest charitable donation in the world at that time. And it all started in a Southampton car park with a 24-year old television greenhorn struggling to find a music tape – any tape – in her car to fit a collage of Diana pictures she’d stitched together to end the TV show Straight Up, anchored by DIY SOS’s Nick Knowles and Alison Martin. The TV rookie was Kate Thornton, later to find fame on programmes including The X Factor, Loose Women and Top Of The Pops. At 24 it was her first TV job and she’d had just eight hours of television experience.
Princess Diana visits Bosnia in August 1997 to meet land mine victims (Image: -)
Diana, Princess of Wales at Red Cross headquarters in Washington in 1997 before her death (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
These days Kate, now 53, is reluctant to talk about triggering this global musical phenomenon beyond recalling that she was given the job of cutting the segment together and laying a music track underneath. “But because it was a Sunday, the studio’s music library was shut. And the only thing I had in my car – the only piece of music that was appropriate- was ‘Candle’ from Elton John’s Greatest Hits. And I thought, well, you know what, she was our Marilyn – she was the princess for the young generation.”
That accidental find could not have been more fortuitous. Taupin wrote the original Candle lyrics in 1973, apparently about Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, but as he later put it, “It was a song about beauty frozen in time.” Both women, world icons, were great beauties. Both died at 36.
Nick Knowles, now a stalwart of mainstream TV shows, was anchoring the lunchtime show from The Mall, where thousands had gathered – his job to interview younger people in the crowd and get a ‘youth’ reaction.
“And then I heard this music coming down my earpiece and it blew me away,” he says now. “I was there among the crowds, seeing just how stunned and moved everybody was as they gathered outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and started to lay their flowers – already a sea of flowers – and then this song about loss and emotion and tragedy. “It was perfect. Perfect.”
“We only knew an hour before we went on air that the show would go ahead,” recalls his co-presenter Alison Martin. “The atmosphere in the studio was electric, and one of the production managers said they could see my heart beating in my chest. When it came to the final sequence it was an incredibly emotional moment – the montage Kate had put together, with that music, it was beautiful. I think, and I hope, we did Diana proud.” At that stage nobody knew quite what Kate Thornton had started, but already the ball had started to roll. And everyone who was there at the beginning, including me, remember that day so vividly.
I’d been invited on Straight Up! as a royal expert to discuss with Alison Martin Diana’s legacy and the future now for her two sons, aged 15 and 12. It seemed, as we talked, there were too many questions to which there were too few answers – the world was in shock.
Candle In The Wind went viral that afternoon, playing on radio stations across Britain and later, as America woke up, across the United States. By early evening, ITN’s veteran anchor Sir Trevor McDonald had assembled a 90-minute programme devoted to Diana – the first moment in that day of frenzy that television could actually draw its breath and present a reasoned and balanced account of her unique life and its impact on the world.
With Candle In The Wind reverberating in everyone’s ears, Sir Richard Branson came on the show to give his memories of Diana before Sir Trevor asked my opinion on the life ahead for the two young princes. I said, Charles now has to learn to be both father and mother to his boys.
In the station’s green-room afterwards, Sir Richard and I shared further Diana memories, but unknown to me was the idea already forming in his brain. A couple of days later, having visited St James’s Palace to sign the book of condolence to discover other signatories were quoting Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, Branson rang Elton John.
“He asked if I’d be prepared to rewrite the lyrics and sing it at the funeral,” Elton later recalled. “I hadn’t been expecting that at all, but I called Bernie.
“I thought it was incredibly tough for him – not only whatever he wrote was going to be broadcast live to literally billions of people, it had to be vetted by the Royal Family and the Church of England. But he faxed the lyrics over the next morning, I faxed them on to Richard Branson and they were waved through.”
Taupin confesses that the rewrite from Candle to Goodbye England’s Rose happened quickly: “It’s extraordinary. I did that remake in about five or ten minutes – no time at all.
Princes William and Harry bowing their heads as their mother’s coffin is taken out of Westminster Abbey (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
“I did it very much as a favour to Elton because he was very close to Diana. I didn’t know her – I paid very little interest in her day-to-day life – but I’m glad I did it because the record did a great deal of good for charity.”
The difference in the two men’s attitude towards the People’s Princess is reflected in the finished record, made overnight in West London’s Townhouse Studios with Elton on piano and synthesiser, with a string quartet accompaniment scored and conducted by Sir George Martin. Elton’s emotional vocals carry the essentially weak Taupin lyric – “And even though we try/The truth brings us to tears/All our words cannot express/The joy you brought us through the years” – are more worthy of a greetings-card competition. Today they sound cringeworthy, but good or bad, the record was an overnight sensation.
Its humble origins in a Southampton car park less than a fortnight before already long forgotten, the finished recording instantly broke all sales records when it was released in September. Carrying the title ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ on the label, Goodbye England’s Rose entered the UK singles chart at number one after a single day of sales, shifting 658,000 copies. By the end of the first week it had sold 1.5 million copies in Britain alone.
In America it went straight to No 1, with first-week sales of 3.5 million and eventually selling nearly 9 million. According to one estimate, at the peak of sales six copies of the single were being sold per second – and its 33 million tally, achieved in a staggeringly short 37 days, has only ever been exceeded by Bing Crosby’s 1942 hit “White Christmas” which has sold 50 million-plus in its 84-year history.
Kate Thornton found a tape of Candle In The Wind in her car (Image: LWT)
Elton’s song can never top that because he only ever sang it once – at Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997 – and, he says, will not sing it again unless asked by Prince William or Prince Harry.
It’s a neat showbiz ploy, hinting at decorum and respect, when in fact the original, lyrically sturdier, Candle has remained part of his touring repertoire, featuring strongly on his record-breaking Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour and at his epic Glastonbury performance on the Pyramid stage in 2023. Whether he disliked Taupin’s rewrite, or he thinks Marilyn casts a longer shadow than Diana, we will never know.
What’s certain is that, with everyone’s agreement, Elton was able to donate the entire income from the record – all £38 million – to the Princess Diana Memorial Fund.
The Fund in turn combined the record proceeds with public donations to award 727 grants to 471 organisations targeting humanitarian causes close to Princess Diana’s heart. These days, nobody credits the young Kate Thornton with the monumental fire she lit with her Candle. But for those of us who were there, in the hours after Diana died, we will never forget.