Spears arrived with her vocals warmed up and laid down the ideas for her contribution and nailed the performance in less than two hours. “She sang fantastically,” says John from his home in the south of France. “Everybody was saying they don’t think she can sing anymore. But I said, she was great when she started, so I think she might. And he did, and I was so excited about what he did.” Out today, the euphoric Hold Me Closer follows Cold Heart, John 2021’s duet with Dua Lipa, which combined the hits Rocket Man, Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride and Where’s the Shoorah? and made him the first solo artist to score a UK Top 10 single in six different decades. “I want to do one every year for a fun, happy summer record,” says John. After he and Watt created the new remix of Tiny Dancer, they weren’t sure who to invite as a guest vocalist. Then John’s husband, David Furnish, had an idea. “He said it would be great for Britney Spears to do it,” says John, as the pair sit side by side the day after surprising diners at a Cannes restaurant with an impromptu rendition of the song. “I said, this is a pretty amazing idea. He hadn’t done anything for so long. I’ve been watching what was happening to her for a long time.” The Hold Me Closer single. Giannis was a fan from day one. “He just put out incredibly brilliant records,” he says. “He sang and danced so beautifully.” They first met at the Aids Foundation’s Oscars watch party in 2013 and she was “lovely – adorable”. And they had their respective residences in Las Vegas at the same time, she at Planet Hollywood, he at Caesars Palace. But even though they often lived in the same block of flats, “we didn’t really see each other,” says John. With what we know now, it’s hard to imagine that many people saw Spears at the time. In chilling testimony at a court hearing about her conservative position in June 2021, Spears said she was punished and put on lithium for rejecting some new choreography during her residency and likening herself to a slave, earning millions for the deal’s auditors, including her father, Jamie Spears, while she was given a $2,000 weekly allowance herself. Elton John during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in New Orleans in January. Photo: Derick Hingle/AP In January 2019, he canceled the residency and announced an “indefinite layoff.” Soon after, the #FreeBritney movement went mainstream, convinced – rightly so, it would turn out – that Spears was being exploited and abused. In September 2021, the New York Times released the documentary Framing Britney Spears, detailing her struggle with her father. John watched it. “You forget she was the biggest star in the entire world at the time. And seeing what happened to her makes me so angry. What happened to her shouldn’t happen to anyone.” Spears was released from her conservative position by a judge in November 2021. The following month, she said her experiences had left her fearful of the music industry, with no intention of continuing her career. “Not making my music anymore is a way to say ‘fuck you,’” she wrote on Instagram. But he didn’t need any convincing to join John for the duet, he says. It is very difficult for young musicians today to start a career. But I’m Uncle Elton. They can call me Spears was due to fly to London to record with John, but was in the middle of her honeymoon following her marriage to Iranian-American model and actor Sam Asgari – having been restricted from marrying or managing her birth control under conservative service – and so it was recorded with Watt at his Los Angeles studio. He had never met her before. When he arrived, they talked about the music they loved. “She asked me who my favorite artists were – Prince – and I asked her who hers was. Elton John said,” says Watt. “The song meant so much to her and you can hear it in her vocal performance. She’s singing her ass off.” It was as if it hadn’t been a while since Spears had last entered a studio, Watt adds. “She was so prepared. He had spent time with the record and knew how he wanted to do it.” To make the song, he meticulously explains, he took the guitar from Tiny Dancer, which was originally pushed so low in the mix you couldn’t hear it, and played with the tempo. Extracting the initial bass and strings and speeding them up gave it a disco feel. To enhance this sense of transcendence, he punctuates the song with a soaring, heavenly sample of “hold me closer.” And John played a new Rhodes piano (these are his original vocals). Music producer Andrew Watt in his home studio in Los Angeles. Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP Watt is 31, the prime age to have been a huge childhood Spears fan with her posters on his wall. Now she was up against one of the biggest pop stars of all time recording her instantly recognizable, stroboscopic vocals in the same room. “She’s incredible at differentiating her voice and doubling, which is one of the hardest things. He was really pushed, vocally. Sometimes when you’re producing, the greatest thing in the world you can do is say nothing, so I let her do her thing. She’s so good at knowing when she’s got the right shot. He took complete control.” Spears recorded the falsetto parts first and then the lines where she belts. Watt never had to ask her to do anything, and watched her enforce her own high standards. “He went on: ‘No, again, again, again.’ Then he had an “amazing idea,” he says. “She wanted to listen to the music multiple times and started doing all of her incredible commercials that make her the record so much. Tiny Dancer with her voice is pretty special, but then she came through and did all these amazing runs.” Once they recorded, Spears was “incredibly specific” about how she wanted her vocals and levels mixed, she says. “She was really collaborative and had really good ideas for the production. He’s an expert in music to make you dance.” (Spears’ primary form of performance in recent years has been posting self-choreographed dance videos on Instagram.) “So many of her records are pop perfection, she’s worked with the greatest of all time and made timeless pop. We experimented with speeding up the record and increasing certain elements of the sound to make it stronger and make you want to dance.” Britney Spears performs in San Jose, California in 2016. Photo: Steve Jennings/WireImage Given how disempowered Spears said she was in the process of making her own music during the Conservative tenure, she must have felt liberated to exercise her studio expertise, I suggest. “We didn’t really go into it,” says Watt. “He came there to sing and record. He is so professional. And if that’s something he was thinking, he put it all on the record.” It was afterwards, John admits, that Spears needed some convincing that releasing the track was the right thing to do. (On Aug. 25, she tweeted that she’s “kinda shocked… she’s a big deal to me!!!”) “We had to get her to approve of what she did,” he says. “He’s been missing for so long – there’s a lot of fear there because he’s been betrayed so many times and hasn’t officially come out for so long. We held her hand throughout the process, reassuring her that everything was going to be okay. “I’m so excited to be able to do it with her because if it’s a big hit, and I think it can be, it’s going to give her a lot more confidence than she already has and she’s going to realize that people really love her and care about her and to want her to be happy. That’s all anyone in their right mind would want after going through such a traumatic time.” John is no stranger to helping musicians struggling in their personal or professional lives, from George Michael, Robbie Williams and Geri Horner (Halliwell) in the 90s to contemporary artists such as Lewis Capaldi, Oliver Sim and Sam Fender of the xx. He is motivated by his memories of his own struggles, he says. “It’s hard when you’re young. Britney was heartbroken. I was broke when I got sober. I was in a terrible place. I’ve been through this broken feeling and it’s horrible. And luckily, I’ve been sober for 32 years and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been. Now I have the experience to be able to advise people and help them because I don’t want to see any artist in a dark place. A lot of artists, you’d think they’d have a lot of self-esteem, but they don’t, and that’s why we go on stage and get the applause, and then we walk off the stage and go back to the beginning.” He wants musicians to “enjoy what they do and feel worthwhile,” he says. “They deserve to be happy and to be loved and to have an affirmation from someone like me. When I first came to America, I had endorsements from Leon Russell, George Harrison, the Band, Neil Diamond – it made me so happy. It makes you realize they cared and it gave me validation that what I was doing was okay.” The artists as children in the artwork Hold Me Closer. Peer support is one thing: should the industry be better regulated to support musicians and prevent exploitation? “It’s in having…
