Ice on Fire is Elton John’s nineteenth studio album, released in 1985. The album was recorded at a tumultuous time in John’s personal life, with his addictions to drugs and alcohol worsening and his ill-advised marriage falling apart. I’m not really sure whether this is evident in the music, but it can’t have helped.
The album’s opening track This Town is actually quite cool. It’s a more funky electronic track and sounds rather unlike John’s other music, or the rest of this album. I’m glad the whole album doesn’t sound like this though.
Nikita is the album’s only hit. The lyrics tell the story of someone looking over at a border guard on the East German side of the Berlin Wall, whom he names “Nikita”. It’s a simple song about longing, but it also accidentally has some gay subtext because Nikita is a masculine name in Russian. John was openly gay by this point1 but neither he nor Taupin intended the song to be gay. It’s a nice ambiguity though. I think the song is kind of reinforced by the ambiguity of “Nikita”’s gender. In regards to the love/longing aspect of the song, I think it helps emphasise that it’s a silly little crush, and that the singer has no actual connection to the person, they’re just someone cute they saw. In the other aspect of the song, “Nikita” could be anyone behind the iron curtain, whether man or woman.
I don’t like Wrap Her Up but it is kinda interesting. It features contributions from a number of other artists, most notably George Michael and Kiki Dee. The song is basically just objectifying female models, and the second half of the song pretty much just consists of a list of a whole bunch of famous. It’s just kinda weird and gross and unnecessary. He’s gay?
Ice on Fire is “fine, I guess”. Its highs are not particularly high and its lows are mostly just boring. I find it hard to care. 2 stars.
The truth is slightly more complex. John came out as bisexual in 1976, married Renate Blauel (a woman) in 1984, and then referred to himself as gay in 1992 after divorcing Blauel. But I think everyone correctly understood he was gay.