In a interview on NBC's Today due to air next week, Elton Johns chats with Matt Lauer about his regrets, the personal toll AIDS has taken on his life, his passion for his work in the fight against the disease and his new memoir, Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS.
From NYDailyNews.
Seemingly at peace with himself now, Sir Elton John is lucky he's still standing after a past marked by drug addiction, debauchery and recklessness during the early days of AIDS.
"I wasted such a big part of my life, when this epidemic was beginning to happen in the early 1980s," John tells NBC "Today" host Matt Lauer in a two part interview set to air July 17 and 18.
Says John, " I was a drug addict and self-absorbed. You know, I was having people die right, left, and center around me, friends. And yet, I didn't stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction. It's that, you know, it's that bad of a disease… I was consumed by cocaine, booze, and who knows what else. I apparently never got the memo that the Me generation had ended."
This confession comes in advance of John's first memoir, "Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS." In the interview at John's London area home, the award winning musician also admits he feels "guilty" about his past, which included struggles with bulimia and alcoholism.
The pair also discuss John's coming out as a homosexual, which the singer doesn't think impacted his career negatively overall, though he does recall a brief period when, "In America, people burned my records for a second and radio stations didn't play me."
Though John seems to have kicked drug addiction, there's one thing he hasn't had enough of yet: children. In 2010 John and his civil law partner David Furnish's son Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John was born to a surrogate mother on Christmas Day.
"I'd love to have more children," John tells Lauer. John tried to adopt a child from a Ukraine AIDS orphanage in 2009, but was denied because of age and marital status. Still he says, " I want [Zachary]to have a brother or a sister to go to school with him. And so that he can have someone to play with."The interview, which took place at John’s home outside of London, will air on NBC’s Today in two parts Tuesday and Wednesday July 17 and 18.