Elton John, it goes without saying, doesn’t really do things by halves. When even he, the poster boy for late 20th-century pop star excess, decided he owned such absurd quantities of stuff that some kind of intervention was in order, the people from Sotheby’s who turned up to value it all – the Magrittes, the Lalique, the Melbourne W2-class drop-centre combination tram that had to be delivered into his garden by two Chinook helicopters – came away monosyllabic and pale at the sultanic accretions of stuff.

John’s vast record collection had been made even more Brobdingnagian by the purchase of a BBC radio producer’s hoard. At that point, the musician owned every 7in single released on vinyl in Britain between 1958 and 1975. He is, he confesses in this revealing memoir, a collector: a squirreller who expands his horizons with the research, plays out his completist impulses for the buzz.

You do wonder, though, reading this lavish catalogue of stadiums filled, drugs taken, lovers discarded and Versace stores ransacked, whether – had Reg Dwight the struggling 60s musician not been handed an envelope containing lyrics by the equally floundering Bernie Taupin, after a failed recording session one day – a prurient Channel 4 documentary would eventually have been made about an anonymous hoarder in Pinner; a session musician unable to move about his house for yellowed write-ups about Bluesology – John’s pre-fame gig – and newspaper cuttings about Watford FC.

Is there an actual human being behind the diva? Just about. It is to Reg Dwight – the music obsessive, the football fan, the son of quite a mother – you must cling throughout a no-holds-barred memoir, written with the assistance of the Guardian’s music critic Alexis Petridis. Yes, a book, as well. Because a fly-on-the-wall documentary, 1997’s Tantrums and Tiaras, and a movie fictionalisation of John’s life, Rocket Man, and the forthcoming West End stage show of the movie weren’t ever going to be enough.

Naturally, Me is a landmark in the whole memoir genre. A tale this eye-popping, this name-dropping, this chemically enhanced, this era-charting should be quite hard to mess up. But John’s willingness to reveal and Petridis’s unerring ability to foreground John’s ridiculousness are key.

The Sun once made up all sorts of horrendous lies about Elton John’s sex life (he sued and won £1m in damages). Here, he tells you rather more than you expected about how he likes to watch. Bluntly, that’s why he’s not long dead. The radical candour is one of this memoir’s strongest suits.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Is there an actual human being behind the diva?’ Elton John performing in 1974. Photograph: Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

The tone is off just once: he’s a tad too flippant about his two suicide attempts – cries for help, he contextualises, but playing them almost for laughs as just more drama.

John clearly does not lack for acerbic wit himself – he once called Keith Richards “a monkey with arthritis” – but readers of Petridis’s journalism will recognise the ghostwriter’s signature turns of phrase. A row breaks out between John and Taupin over the piano man’s increasingly outre stage antics, which found “the biggest songwriting partnership of the era locked in a dispute backstage at the Santa Monica Civic, not about money or musical direction, but about whether it was a good idea for me to go on stage with an illuminated model of Father Christmas hanging in front of my willy”.

One big appeal of this book to most readers will be that simply everyone is in here, from the Queen Mother (comes to lunch) to US shock jock Rush Limbaugh (Elton plays his wedding and donates his sizable fee to Aids charities). Elton reunites John Lennon and Yoko Ono at one point; in the aftermath of Lennon’s murder, Yoko asks Elton to take over Lennon’s unreleased music. He refuses, one of the more noble decisions taken in a life that often seems entirely devoid of good sense or higher sentiment.

Being a nightmare is very much John’s brand and the subplot throughout is one of post-hoc self-deprecation and enough eye-rolling contrition to make it all palatable. Quite how John squares his love for Princess Diana and her offspring with a serialisation of this memoir in the Daily Mail, when Prince Harry’s wife is currently suing the Mail on Sunday, is a moot point.

Older and wiser, John is now a happily married father of two, a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ equality, a tireless fundraiser for HIV/Aids causes and a saviour to younger musicians who end up mixing the most devastating of cocktails – fame and drugs.

It is to this book’s credit, though, that a lot of time is spent not just recounting how Sylvester Stallone fancied Princess Diana but in the fertile mulch that was the British 60s blues-rock scene, where the future pantheon of pop stars rubbed along. It seems so very long ago, where artists made music that people bought. They earned good money off it, too, enabling the sort of misbehaviour we all enjoy reading memoirs about.

• Me by Elton John is published by Pan Macmillan (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99