Elton John says David ‘Yoko’ Furnish proves ‘unpopular’ after taking over business

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Sir Elton John has said his husband David Furnish has proven “unpopular” with staff after taking over the “family business”.

The Tiny Dancer singer said that he has nicknamed Furnish ‘Yoko’, after Yoko Ono, as he has proven to be unpopular when dealing with their business affairs.

“I call him Yoko now because a lot of people don’t like what he’s doing,” Elton said in an interview with the Sun.

Elton John says David ‘Yoko’ Furnish proves ‘unpopular’ after taking over business

“David has taken over the complete reins. We’re a family business now and we’re trying to get rid of people we really don’t need.”

“We just changed some assistants… It’s very unfortunate and I’m very sad about it but we’re trying to run a tight ship. I want to have a business that I can pass on to my boys. Not that they’re going to be musicians but I wanted to make sure I’m going to leave them something really worthwhile.”

Going on, he added: “When you do that, you’ve got to become unpopular. David is Mr Unpopular but he’s making the decisions that have to be made… It gets him down but he’s strong.”

The singer is also adamant that he still plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss LGBT rights.

“I’m not going to go to Putin and say, ‘You’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.’ There’s no way! Because who the f*** am I?” he said.

“But I’m going to sit down, have a cup of tea with him and finally broach the subject of LGBT. We’ll probably talk about something else for a while but if I can help towards changing something I have to do it.”

“It doesn’t have to be about gay people. It’s anyone who’s having a hard time living under an awful regime.

“I’ll do anything to help someone make their life better but I’m under no illusion that it’s going to be me who changes things.”

Earlier this week Sir Elton said he was going to phase out performing live to spend more time with his sons – but also that he regrets not having a daughter.

Despite saying he wanted to leave the business to his boys, Sir Elton previously said he doesn’t plan on leaving his children a vast fortune – because he expects them to work for success in life.

He also confirmed that he would appear in the sequel to hit 2014 film Kingsman.