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The process is described successful the caller doc "Elton John — Touched By Gold."
Gershwin Prize honoree Elton John speaks onstage during the 2024 Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize Dinner astatine The Library of Congress connected March 19, 2024 successful Washington, DC. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Elton John has ever had a keen oculus for things that sparkle. The soft popular fable is simply a sucker for things that spell bling, but his latest pieces are not for the faint of heart. In a caller documentary abbreviated called Elton John — Touched by Gold, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer describes the “timeless” quality of gold, which tin beryllium simple, ravishing, decorative, oregon adjacent overwhelming.
And, if you’re idiosyncratic whose beingness is gilded from top-to-bottom, with golden records and countless aureate awards, it’s a precious metallic that tin travel to specify your life. “It’s been determination since the satellite began and it’s been utilized successful each sorts of ways,” John says successful the doc successful which helium chronicles his past with the precious metal.
Which is wherefore it should travel arsenic nary astonishment when, halfway done the abbreviated film, John reveals that he’s turned 1 of his astir achy moments into gleaming keepsake jewelry.
“When I had my kneecaps removed, the near 1 archetypal and past the right, I asked my surgeon if I could support the kneecaps, which helium was alternatively startled about,” John tells London jewelry decorator Theo Fennell. “Then I rang you and said, ‘Would you beryllium prepared to, if I gave you the near and the close kneecap to bash what you privation with them?’”
Fennell wholly got the duty and shows disconnected a portion of jewelry helium created with a fragment of the kneecap bony that helium turned into a necklace. “We baked them. We had to cook them to adust them out,” says Fennell. “Then they get alternatively similar pumice stone, they’re precise porous. So we had to overgarment them with acetate and past conscionable polish them up.”
Fennell sys helium was precise blessed with the results, holding up the shiny necklace to the camera arsenic John professes to beryllium pleased with the unusually beauteous result. “That is amazing,” helium says arsenic Fennell twirls the finished piece. “That one, that’s the close kneecap. That’s my close patella.”
John, 78, says that his surgeon told him that helium had “the worst knees he’s ever operated on,” pointing to a ample spread successful the portion that Fennell utilized to loop the necklace through. “It looks similar an aged artifact from Egypt oregon something,” John says of the necklace Fennell refers to arsenic “talismanic.”
“I emotion doing things that, successful a 1000 years, this volition be, arsenic it says here, this volition beryllium Elton John’s kneecap,” says Fennell. “How galore radical volition judge that? I don’t know.” The necklace concatenation was crafted retired of bones and the backmost of the charm features a operation successful Latin that reads “I volition nary longer bow to immoderate man,” which is ironic, Fennell says, because, of people present John can’t bow to anyone with his kneecaps missing.
Fennell turned the smaller near kneecap into a brooch due to the fact that determination was little worldly to enactment with. “I honestly deliberation these are timeless pieces that volition past for centuries,” John says.
John chronicled his litany of wellness issues during a chat astatine the New York Film Festival past twelvemonth to beforehand the U.S. premiere of his Elton John: Never Too Late documentary. “To beryllium honorable with you, there’s not overmuch of maine left,” helium said astatine the time. “I don’t person tonsils, adenoids oregon an appendix. I don’t person a prostate. I don’t person a close hep oregon a near genu oregon a close knee. In fact, the lone happening near to maine is my near hip. But I’m inactive here.”
Watch Elton John — Touched By Gold below.