Sir Elton John shuts down rumours of ABBA-style hologram show with X-rated joke
Hopeful supporters began speculating after spotting trademark documents for his name covering holograms, video projections and immersive 3D virtual reality experiences.
But according to reports, those close to the Rocket Man, 78, have made it clear there's no such show in the pipeline.
Elton has long made his stance clear, previously admitting in 2018 that the idea wasn't for him.
However, during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, he did briefly dabble in the digital world with a London pop-up at King's Cross, which featured an augmented reality version of him playing the piano.
When quizzed about the stunt at the time, according to The Sun, the music legend laughed off the suggestion, branding himself a 'Luddite' and joking he'd never downloaded anything in his life - 'not even porn.'
While acts such as KISS and The Rolling Stones have embraced the futuristic hologram trend – with Mick Jagger cheekily noting you can 'have a posthumous business now' – Elton is sticking firmly to the real deal.
Fresh from wrapping his mammoth final tour, he's been back in the studio, releasing Who Believes in Angels with Brandi Carlile in April.
It comes after the Rocket Man star joined thousands of mourners to lay Black Sabbath singer, Ozzy Osbourne to rest in a private funeral at his Buckinghamshire home on Thursday.
The heavy metal icon, who died last week aged 76, shared a decades long friendship and even credited singer Elton for helping his recovery following a horrific quad bike accident in 2003.
The pair also collaborated on Ozzy's 2020 track Ordinary man, with Elton providing the piano and vocals, alongside Slash on guitar and Red Hot Chili Peppers Chad Smith drumming.
Elton, 78, even appeared on the family's MTV show The Osbourne's in 2005, giving fans a rare glimpse into the pairs unique bond.
While visiting their home in LA the Crocodile Rock icon removed a huge gold and diamond necklace from his neck to gift to his shocked pal.
Clearly shocked by the gesture, Ozzy said: 'No! f**** off!' and said he 'felt bad' for accepting the trinket, Elton quipped: 'Don't be so stupid you silly old b******'.
During his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, Eltoon did briefly dabble in the digital world with a London pop-up at King's Cross, which featured an augmented reality version of him playing the piano
Elton, once appeared on the family's MTV show The Osbourne's in 2005, giving fans a rare glimpse into the pairs unique bond as he presented his friend with a lavish necklace
Following his death Elton shared a snap of himself and Ozzy alongside an emotional tribute to his 'dear friend which read: 'So sad to hear the news of @ozzyosbourne passing away '.
'He was a dear friend and a huge trailblazer who secured his place in the pantheon of rock gods - a true legend. He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met. I will miss him dearly. To Sharon and the family, I send my condolences and love. Elton xx'.
It comes after the music legend celebrated 35 years of sobriety last month with handmade cards from his sons Zachary and Elijah.
The singer who once admitted he 'would be dead' had he not have asked sought help with his addictions, rang in the milestone with his family.
Sharing his gratitude in an Instagram update, Elton marked the milestone at home with his husband David Furnish and their sons Zachary, 13, and Elijah, 11.
He uploaded a photo of the cards and flowers he had received from his close friends and relatives.
'Grateful for all the love on my sobriety birthday,' Elton captioned.
The musician has been very open about his battle with alcohol and drugs which nearly derailed his career and cost him his life.
Speaking in an interview in December, Elton said he treated former lovers 'like hostages,' behaved like an 'a**hole' and was unable to operate household appliances without help until he was well into his forties because of his issues with addiction.
The legendary singer-songwriter made a series of startling admissions about his personal life in TIME magazine.
Discussing at length a crippling addiction to alcohol and cocaine at the height of his fame in the 1970s and '80s, Sir Elton admitted there were numerous casualties before his eventual rehabilitation in the '90s - among them his former partners.
'You make terrible decisions on drugs, he explained. 'I wanted love so badly, I would just take hostages.
'I'd see someone I liked and spend three or four months together, and then they would resent me because they had nothing in their life apart from me.
'It really upsets me, thinking back on how many people I probably hurt.'
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How do you make an old fashioned? 35 cocktail questions answered
It's hard to credit it these days, but there was a time, not so long ago, when cocktails were extremely uncool. As recently as the mid-2000s they were seen as sickly, kitsch things with a forbidding lore around them. That has all changed. We are a nation of Aperol spritz sippers, manhattan fixers and negroni mixers. Tesco has a decent range of bourbons. Heck, even my dear parents now keep their freezer well stocked with ice. We seem to have learnt that making cocktails is not that hard and is, in fact, great fun. Here are the questions I'm most often asked by those embarking on this spiritual journey. 'A cocktail is a ritual/ To make a minute immortal', Clare Pollard wrote in her poem Last Word, named after the excellent combination of gin, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime juice. That's the poetic answer. There's a pedantic answer too. Originally a 'cock-tail' was specifically spirit, sugar, water and bitters and was distinct from 19th-century drinks such as daisies, sours, juleps and punches. But at some point these finer distinctions were lost. Which brings us to the practical answer. A cocktail is a delightful combination of liquid ingredients, at least one of which should be alcoholic. Yes it is. Is snakebite a cocktail? Sure. 'If a drink is in the right glass at the right temperature, chosen for a person in a particular mood, it's a cocktail,' the esteemed bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana has told me. 'Cocktails are more about the consideration of all of the details than how many ingredients we've added.' It's to do with horses' anuses. If you were an 18th-century horse trader and wanted to zhuzh up a tired nag on market day, you'd shove a bit of ginger up its bum. It would duly cock its tail and behave in a frisky manner. Which is precisely the effect the first (orally ingested) 'cock-tails' had on human drinkers. The first recorded definition of the term linked to the drink was in 1806, when The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, referred to it as a 'stimulating liquor, composed of spirits, sugar, water and bitters'. That combination (with whiskey) is now known as an old fashioned, since it's the old-fashioned way to make a cocktail. If you want to explore the classic cocktail canon (martinis, manhattans, old fashioneds, whiskey sours, negronis) you could do worse than: gin (about £25), bourbon (£35), Campari (£15), Italian vermouth (the red sweet stuff; £15), French vermouth (the pale dry stuff; £15) and Angostura bitters (£10). You'll be amazed how many cocktails these six bottles make. Vermouth is wine, fortified with a little brandy, lightly sweetened and infused with aromatic herbs, roots and spices. In the late 19th century American bartenders began to replace the traditional sugar and bitters with vermouth. The manhattan was born. The martini was born. Trumpets blared and angels sang. So yes, you'll want vermouth, which comes in two main styles. The Italians traditionally made theirs darker, sweeter and richer (Carpano's Antica Formula is the elite choice, but Martini Rosso does the job). The French tended towards the drier, paler, herbier kind (Noilly Prat and Dolin Extra Dry are good starting points). I make a lot of cocktails and these are the bottles I replace most often. Lemons, for their juice and their peel, which makes a handy garnish. Limes too, plus oranges, grapefruit, passion fruit, pineapples and raspberries if they're passing through your kitchen. Sparkling water is handy (it doesn't need to be 'soda water'). And you'll definitely need sugar syrup. Take a saucepan. Pour in two cups of raw cane sugar and one of water. Stir on a low heat until the sugar is fully dissolved. Cool and decant into a jar; it will keep in the fridge for weeks. If you use two parts sugar to one part pomegranate juice, this is grenadine. See, simple! • Where two of London's cocktail supremos drink when they're off-duty Rum is the next most useful spirit. Light rum (about £20) for daiquiris, mojitos and el presidentes; dark rum (£25) for tropical sours and punches. If you like margaritas you'll want tequila too (£25). And orange liqueur (such as Cointreau; £15), which is the most useful sweet liqueur (for sidecars, white ladies, mai tais). That's ten bottles. Throw in brandy (£30) and absinthe (£30) and you'll beguile just about anyone. Less than you'd think. A basic three-piece cocktail shaker is handy. A 'jigger' too, a small cup that shows you liquid measurements down to the nearest 5ml; I have an angled stainless steel one by Oxo. But if you know a teaspoon holds 5ml and a tablespoon 15ml, you can always improvise. The other essential piece of kit is a strainer — a tea strainer will do — to remove the last tiny shards of ice. Other items are just nice to have: a long bar spoon for stirring martinis; a decent peeler for cutting lemon zest twists; a wooden muddler for pulverising stuff; and I rarely leave home without my nutmeg grater or absinthe diffuser. You basically need three types. For martini-type cocktails that are served 'up' (in a stem glass with no ice), a coupe — a rounded saucer on a stalk — is an excellent all-rounder. Or you could use a V-shaped martini glass or a 'Nick & Nora' glass, which is somewhere between a wine glass and a coupe. Then, for your 'down' cocktails (served over ice and often made in the glass itself), you'll need an ordinary tumbler. It's also handy but not essential to have taller 'highball' glasses for fizzes, G&Ts and so on. Not too big. Quality not quantity is an overarching cocktail principle and too large glassware often means too diluted cocktails. My go-to retailers are Urban Bar ( and The Vintage List ( You must! Place them in the freezer five to ten minutes before you make the drinks. Making cocktails is a game in which the objective is to make everything as cold as possible. Yes, shedloads. Ice is the essential cocktail ingredient, maybe even more so than alcohol. Don't consider hosting a cocktail party unless the contents of your freezer could sink the Titanic. Fortunately ice is easy to make. Decant cubes from trays into another freezer container so you can make more. You can also freeze water in plastic boxes and hack them into rugged 'bergs to make negronis. And for spheres of ice, which melt slower than cubes, fill a child's water bomb with water, tie up and freeze! Peel the balloon away, give the ice a rinse and pop it in a whisky. The whole point of a cocktail is to surprise and delight whomever you make it for — so yes, appearances matter. Lime wedges, maraschino cherries (not glacé!) and mint bouquets are good garnishes. Dehydrated citrus is voguish: slow-roast slices of orange and lime in a 90C oven for a few hours and they'll keep for ages. If in doubt, go lemon zest twist. Cut a strip of lemon peel with a veg peeler, twist it over the drink to release a fine spray of bitter oils, and drop it in. You can always tell the home of a serious cocktail maker by the scars in the citrus. Wait. Were they ever not cool? Innumerable types, though not all 'martinis' truly merit the name. A classic dry martini is made from, ooh, five parts gin to one part French vermouth, stirred over ice until it is colder than Neptune and garnished with a lemon zest twist or a fat green olive. But cocktail culture is all about variation. You can sub the gin for vodka. You can fiddle about with the ratio of spirit to vermouth. You can add dashes of absinthe or orange bitters. In fact you can replace almost every element of the above as long as you remember the platonic essence of the martini lies in its cold, hard, consoling booziness. Martinis became confusing in the 1980s and 1990s when bartenders began using the term for anything in a triangular martini glass: porn star, French, espresso, lychee and many other fruity abominations. OK, not all are abominations. But as of the early 2000s, sanity and vermouth have been restored. Freeze your coupe. Measure 50ml gin and 10ml French vermouth into a mixing vessel. (My favourites are No.3 gin and Dolin Dry vermouth.) Fill this vessel at least halfway with ice and stir, patiently, for at least 30 seconds. Now strain this heavenly elixir into your frozen glass. A bartender will ask you: 'Olive or twist?' If you're at home, why not have both? Yes, but he's an idiot. Shaking gives you a cloudy, watery drink. Ian Fleming took his stirred. There's a simple rule regarding stirring and shaking. Aromatic cocktails, composed of solely alcoholic ingredients, are almost always stirred. Sour-type cocktails, which contain fruit juice, are shaken. If you feel like throwing in a few little spins and twirls, you mustn't let anyone stop you. Shaking helps with cooling, necessary dilution and texture. Experiment with a classic daiquiri. Freeze a coupe. Pour 50ml light rum, 15ml lime juice and 10ml sugar syrup into a shaker and half-fill it with ice. Attach the lid and give it a good ten seconds of vigorous agitation. Fine-strain into the cold glass. Amazing, isn't it? In the glass. Pour in 60ml bourbon (or rye) whiskey; 5-10ml sugar syrup and a good dash of Angostura bitters. Now add ice; one large cube or ball is best. Stir well in the glass and garnish with an orange zest twist. Incidentally, dark rum, brandy and aged tequila also make stellar old fashioneds. You won't go wrong with 50ml tequila, 15ml lime juice, 10ml agave syrup and a pinch of rock salt, shaken. Serve it up or on the rocks. This is a tommy's margarita. The more trad ratio is 45ml tequila, 30ml orange liqueur and 15ml lime juice — but the tommy's is better. You can always add 10ml orange liqueur if you miss it. A negroni is hard to mess up, though Lord knows Stanley Tucci tried (not least by getting the proportions wrong and shaking it with ice). This is 25ml each of gin, Italian (red) vermouth and Campari. Mix it in the glass over ice; garnish with orange zest. • The best cocktail recipes — according to bartenders This depends on the spirit. Gin is, frankly, gin. I have favourites (Hepple, No.3, Tanqueray No Ten, Plymouth) but I don't turn up my nose at Lidl and Aldi gins. I keep the good stuff for martinis where I can really taste it. There are some sensational bourbons (Michter's, Eagle Rare, Elijah Craig, New Riff) and you might want to save these for neat sipping. But your workaday Jim Beam will be fine in, say, a whiskey sour. Brandy is an expense — small producers and supermarket own-brands often offer the best value. Rum is far more variable. The best rums rival the finest cognacs; the worst have all sorts of nonsense chucked in. I would go for a trusted distillery: Appleton, Smith & Cross and Mount Gay make great dark rums; for light, try Havana Club, El Dorado and Flor de Cana. With tequila, look for the words '100 per cent blue agave'. If it has a red plastic sombrero on top, donate it to a raffle. Anything can be put into a cocktail! A Glenfiddich 12 makes a sensational rusty nail, for example. But you'll probably want to save the expensive stuff for sipping. For your classic scotch cocktails such as the blood & sand or the bobby burns, I'd opt for an affordable blend — say, Famous Grouse or Monkey Shoulder. Mixologist is a pretentious 1990s term for bartenders that most industry types now find a bit embarrassing. But make no mistake, bartending is a noble calling. Most bartenders will say their main challenges are things such as the economy or drunk people. The bit where they get to fool around with alcohol is the fun part. This is also the part you get to do in your own kitchen. No. They're almost all terrible. Honourable exceptions: Whitebox, which makes cute pocket negronis, dirty martinis, and even a boulevardier in dinky 100ml cans. Pimentae does decent margaritas. And Bloody's bloody mary is excellent, especially if you're too hungover to make one. A 50ml serving of most 43 per cent ABV spirits contains about 100 calories. (For comparison, a 250ml glass of white wine has about 250 calories; a pint of IPA can be 300 calories.) But what you add can significantly up the calorie content: sugary syrups, liqueurs, sodas (such as Coke) and cream are the worst offenders. So the best strategy is to keep it clean and simple. Yes, and I've nothing against them other than their price. There's no reason why a bottle of perfumed water should be as expensive as a bottle of premium gin. Try using cold, unsweetened tea instead. Fino sherry and tonic. All the flavour of a G&T, half the booze. The daiquiri ratio — 50ml spirit, 15ml citrus, 10ml sugar syrup, shaken — works with any spirit. Remember, you can sub the sugar syrup for grenadine, (almondy) orgeat, elderflower cordial, honey, maple syrup . If you have weird liqueurs to use up (I always do), try these as a sweetener too: 50ml spirit, 15ml citrus, 15ml liqueur, plus maybe 5ml sugar syrup. A dash of bitters rarely goes amiss. A good formula for aromatic-type stirred cocktails is 50ml spirit, 25ml vermouth, 10ml liqueur, maybe a dash of bitters. The spritz is a good format too: 25ml liqueur, 100ml sparkling wine, a dash of sparkling water. And dessert cocktails can be fun. The alexander ratio is 25ml spirit, 25ml liqueur, 25ml cream, shaken. You won't go back to Baileys, I promise. A huge bowl of rum punch, Mary Poppins's favourite. Peel four lemons. Put the peel in a bowl with 200g brown sugar. Crush the peel into the sugar with a muddler to create an oleo-saccharum, your key to deliciousness. Slowly pour over one bottle (700ml) of fine dark rum, continuing to stir and crush, so all the sugar dissolves. Now pour in about 800ml of cold black tea and a liberal shaking of Angostura bitters. Finally add the juice of one, maybe two lemons; you want it to taste rounded, a harmonious blend of sour, sweetness, dilution, strength and spice. Chill with large lumps of ice before everyone arrives. Serve in teacups or cocktail glasses. A grating of fresh nutmeg is nice on top. The basic formula for punch, by the way, is 'one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak'. The negroni is also an easy and economical party cocktail — especially since it benefits from premixing. Here's a fun tip. Combine equal parts Italian vermouth and Campari, decant into one bottle and store in the fridge. Then it becomes a simple thing to thrust into the hand of each arriving guest. Top with gin for a regular negroni, champagne for a negroni sbagliato, fizzy water for an americano and bourbon for a boulevardier. More of a hangover-delaying mechanism. I swear by Alka-Seltzer XS plus Berocca. Insofar as it contains caffeine and alcohol, yes. Yes, but put a towel down first as the sand gets everywhere. The not-very-good cocktail of the same name was long ago usurped in the nudge-nudge-wink stakes by the only slightly better porn star martini. I'd go with 30ml Aperol, 90ml prosecco and a splash of sparkling water, in a wine glass with lots of ice and an orange wheel. But know this: Campari makes for a superior spritz and there are better Aperol cocktails too. Try the naked & famous: 20ml mezcal, 20ml yellow chartreuse, 20ml Aperol and 20ml lime juice. Strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish. Whatever you want to drink, for goodness' sake! But these three are catching on. The hugo spritz is like the Aperol one, only with elderflower liqueur and mint instead of Aperol. The paloma is tequila and fresh lime, topped up with grapefruit soda. And the jungle bird is dark rum shaken with Campari, sugar syrup, pineapple juice and lime. • Have you tried the tequini? It's the cocktail of the summer Remember Dorothy Parker's deathless poem: 'I like to have a martini/ Two at the very most/ After three I'm under the table/ After four I'm under the host'.Richard Godwin is the author of The Spirits: A Guide to Modern Cocktailing (Square Peg £16.99) and runs The Spirits, with its weekly cocktail newsletter, at
