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Elton John Is TIME's 2024 Icon of the Year

After decades of both musical hits and personal struggles, the music legend is doing much more than still standing.

At his piano in Pinner, England, at age 6 (L), and in 1962 (R)Rocket Entertainment (2)The documentary (which George Michael advised him to bury) captures him in full meltdown mode, insisting on one occasion that he will never make another music video because someone left a bag in a car, and on another instructing his private plane to leave the South of France as soon as possible and never return because a woman waved at him during a tennis lesson. John, who has taken a half-hearted bid at ending his life three times, thinks there were three things that saved him from the fates that took so many of his peers: Watford FC, a soccer club local to where he grew up that he bought and took to the Premier League; Alcoholics Anonymous; and a hemophiliac teenager from Indiana named Ryan White. At the club he met people who cared more about soccer than his fame, AA’s methods helped him deal with his multiple addictions, and White, who contracted HIV from a tainted blood transfusion in the early days of the AIDS crisis and was shunned by his school and neighbors, showed him how selfishly he was living.

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