Elton John tells Matt Lauer he 'wasted a big part' of his life on drug addiction

In an interview with Today’s Matt Lauer promoting his book Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS, Elton John spoke candidly about his past drug abuse and how he wasted a “big part” of his life.

John said he wasted his time “when this epidemic was beginning to happen in the early 1980s. And I was a drug addict and self-absorbed.”

"You know, I was having people die right, left and center around me, friends. And yet, I didn't stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction. It's that -- you know, it's that bad of a disease,” he told Lauer at his London home, MSNBC reports.

“I was consumed by cocaine, booze, and who knows what else. I apparently never got the memo that the me generation had ended,” he admitted in his book.

Now clean, the “Rocket Man” singer has a supportive partner David Furnish and son Zachary, whom he wants “to have a brother or a sister to go to school with,” he’s also philanthropic, as he started the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The sales of his book will benefit the foundation.

But when he came out as a gay man, Elton explained that his career wasn’t too affected by it.

“In America, people burned my records for a second and radio stations didn't play me.” He compared it to the effect the “Dixie Chicks had when they made the anti-Iraq statements and their career was ruined.”

"So by me saying gay in the 1970s -- it didn't have a big effect on me whatsoever."

He also calls himself the “the luckiest man in the world” for being HIV-negative.

As for that chapter in his life, "I'm making up for it. There is so much more to be done,” he said, Rolling Stone reports.

image: NBC