Elton John had his kneecaps turned into gold-plated jewelry after they were removed. Yes, the actual bones from his body. The famed musician shared this rather baffling anecdote in a short new documentary called “Elton John – Touched By Gold,” which was created by the World Gold Council because, in the organization’s words, John’s life “has been touched by gold in fascinating ways, both on and off the stage.” Fascinating is certainly right; who else wears their right patella as a necklace?
The good stuff starts around the 11-minute mark, if you want to see the kneecap jewelry for yourself. “When I had my kneecaps removed, the left one first and then the right, I asked my surgeon if I could keep the kneecaps, which he was rather startled about,” John tells London jewelry designer Theo Fennell in the video. “Then I rang you and said, ‘Would you be prepared to, if I gave you the left and the right kneecap, to do what you want with them?'” Fennell was on board. “We baked them. We had to bake them to dry them out,” the designer recalled. “Then they get rather like pumice stone, they’re very porous. So we had to paint them with acetate and then just polish them up.”
Fennell was able to turn some of the problems with John’s knees (his surgeon apparently said they were “the worst knees he’s ever operated on”) into a solution. There was a natural hole in the singer’s right kneecap that now has a necklace chain—styled to look like bones, no less—running through it. “It looks a bit like an old artifact from Egypt or something,” John mused while admiring the piece. Fennell agreed that the necklace was “talismanic.” “I love doing things that, in a thousand years, this will be, as it says here, this will be Elton John’s kneecap,” he continued. “How many people will believe that? I don’t know.” The jewelry designer also got a good joke in while simultaneously revealing that the charm features the phrase “I will no longer bow to any man” in Latin. “Which, of course, you can’t do with a kneecap missing,” he quipped.
Fennell turned John’s left kneecap into a brooch because there was apparently less bone to work with. “I honestly think these are timeless pieces that will last for centuries,” John said. Even if they don’t, just the idea of him doing this in the first place is as good as gold. You can watch the full video below.
