Elton John was told he was just “24 hours from death” before confessing “I don’t have long left”. The Rocket Man hitmaker was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017 but recovered thanks to surgery. But on the plane home from Santiago to the UK, Elton began feeling feverish – and was left hospital-bound after a horror experience.

In his autobiography Me, released in 2019, Elton, 78, admitted “something clearly wasn’t right” at the time, and by the time he headed home he had to be rushed to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London, where he was taken for a scan. Elton wrote: “[They] noticed that something was terribly wrong. I was told that my condition was so serious, the hospital didn’t have the equipment to cope with it.”

He was instead moved to the London Clinic, rushed into another surgery to drain lymphatic fluid from his diaphragm. Elton woke up in intensive care and was informed he’d contracted a “major infection” while in South America.

Things seemed to be looking up for a while, until: ““They took a sample of the infection and grew it in a Petri dish. It was much more serious than they had first realised; they had to change the antibiotics, up the dosage. I had MRI scans and God knows how many other procedures.

“I just lay there feeling terrible, being wheeled here and there, having tubes stuck in me and taken out again, not really taking in what was going on. The doctors told David I was twenty-four hours away from death. If the South American tour had gone on for another day, that would have been it: brown bread.”

Elton confessed that he “didn’t know how close I really was to dying”, as his husband David Furnish tried his best to protect him from the truth. Elton confessed: “How ill I felt in itself was enough to get me thinking about mortality.

“This wasn’t how or when I wanted to go. I wanted to die at home, surrounded by my family, preferably having lived to an enormously advanced age first. I wanted to see the boys again. I needed more time.”

Thankfully, Elton recovered and left the hospital after 11 days, though he still couldn’t walk due to pain in his legs. It took him seven weeks to recover and learn to walk again – not leaving the house except for medical appointments.