Elton John’s 44th (no, really) studio album is bizarrely supposed to be an ‘update’ to his 1975 classic release Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the title track of which includes the line which names this brand new disc.

Already a strange, complex concept, stranger still is the lack of obvious connections between the two. Rather than a return to the old-style songwriting which made him a household name, Elton instead continues the circuitous path he began to tread with his last album, Peachtree Road, which while passable remained rather too lazy for its own good. So do we have anything more than a gimmick here?

Perhaps we do. A collection of American-sounding ditties, infused with a country/bluesey warmth that often brings a smile (if occasionally a disinterested one), The Captain and the Kid is a puzzle unlocked by its final, eponymous track. Bernie Taupin, who has written pretty much every word Elton John has sung barring dalliances with musicals and Disney since 1967, features on the cover of this album for the first time. And it is their conspicuous partnership which unlocks the whole album: the final song is an openly retrospective look across their career, which has in a sense come full circle as Elton John continues to be ‘Captain Fantastic’ – the showman, the over-the-top dresser – and Taupin the ‘Brown Dirt Cowboy’ – living on a ranch, riding horses somewhere in the American South. And it is with a wry awareness of this irony that ‘The Captain and the Kid’ reuses the riff from Captain Fantastic to tell the story of this incredibly successful couple. It is also a little telling that this is by far and away the best song on the album, carrying a freshness which, sadly, is not truly its own.

Yet while the album as a piece repeats the sins of Peachtree Road and leaves one singularly unimpressed if completely objective, it retains a charm that is hard to ignore. As ‘The Captain and the Kid’ take you on one more trip, as they say themselves, they’re ‘pleasing the people, some of the time, for better or for worse’, but whatever they’ve done they’ve always told their own truth.

Right now John and Taupin are content to write the songs they want, and it’s hard to criticise the record for failing to reach the heights of their 1970s output when, as that perceptive final song makes clear: ‘you can’t go back – and if you try it fails’.

A few more songs, then, after 35 years of success. ‘Blues Never Fade Away’, and ‘Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way (NYC)’ are a couple of tracks which have some value in themselves, but really The Captain and the Kid must be seen not purely on its own terms, but as another piece in a yellow brick road that began back in ’67.
(3/5)