Word: watford
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dwight's father Stanley was frequently away on military duty. When he was home, his son discovered there were really only a couple of things he could do to please dad. One was to accompany him to Watford, six miles away, to watch the local football (soccer) team's matches. The other was to play a little Chopin; he had started piano lessons at four. Chumship evaporated, however, when Reg tuned in pop music on the radio. His mother Sheila recalls a letter Stanley sent from overseas warning that Reg, then 16, must "get all this pop nonsense...
Even closer to him is, of all things, the Watford Football Club, which he and his father used to watch in the old days. Elton is now a director of the club, called the Hornets. They are mediocre at best, but Elton lives and dies with their fortunes. He practices with the club, he bawls out its members in the newspaper when they do especially poorly, gives them the royal box at his concerts to encourage them. He has staged benefit concerts for Watford in order to buy the team the new players it needs. A year ago, he gained...
...fumble-footed kid. But there is more to it than that. The man whose latest album is a brilliantly successful attempt to write music out of his own past experience is also a man seeking to forge new links with a deeper, possibly more despised past. The Watford Hornets are the symbol of that effort. He firmly believes he might have lost himself in his superstar image had he not rediscovered the club...
...Watford has brought me back down to earth," he says. "I love it as much as music itself, and that's a lot to say. It's like erasing five or six years of my life, and here I am as if nothing had happened." There is something as innocent and touching in that statement as there is in a good pop lyric. Even if, in the frenetic pop world, Elton John is never able fully to establish his ties between present and past, his effort creates another point of contact between artist and audience...
...boat trains at Victoria Station, boarded freighters in three ports, and closely examined departing passengers at London Airport. Army helicopters hovered over 200 policemen fanning through the fields of Berkshire. Led by Alsatian dogs, hundreds of armed officers tramped for days through the forests of Epping, Savernake and Watford. A police patrol boat even picked up a vacationing German canoeist who had been paddling happily from Ireland to Argyll...