![]() soul acts, leading one of his bandmates to point out Reg needs a name that’s a bit more rock ’n’ roll. Realizing his heart is in rock ’n’ roll, Reg ( Kingsman star Taron Egerton) starts playing with a small band in pubs on Saturday nights. “As soon as I’d finished, he played it straight back to me just like a gramophone.” Biographer Philip Norman wrote that “ Even as a toddler, Reggie Dwight could hear a piece of music just once, then sit at the piano and replicate it note for note.” He did win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, which he attended on Saturdays for four years, and his ability at the academy to reproduce even long and intricate pieces of music after a single listen is backed up by his teacher: “I remember once playing him a prelude by Handel, four pages long,” Helen Piena recalls in Norman’s biography. According to a story repeated both on John’s website and in multiple biographies, young Reg shocked his family by sitting down and playing The Skater’s Waltz by ear. ![]() He doesn’t prepare a piece for his audition but instead is admitted after replicating the piece he hears the teacher practicing. At the age of 11, he wins a scholarship to Britain’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music. In the film, the first inkling of little Reg Dwight’s talent comes when, as a tot, he picks out a melody on the family piano after hearing it on the radio, impressing his kindly grandmother and his glamorous if self-absorbed mother, who decide piano lessons are a good investment.
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