‘I don’t remember him changing,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember any obnoxiousness, I don’t remember any animosity.’ There was one problem, however. His old friend didn’t know what to call him, left flat-footed and a little embarrassed by the game of media cat-and-mouse which surrounded Elvis at the time. ‘That was a nightmare for me, because nobody was supposed to know his real name,’ he admits.
The local paper’s review of that night’s gig at Eric’s was telling. Already, the praise came with a caveat. ‘Enough has appeared in print on this gawky wonder for the time being,’ cautioned the reviewer, before succumbing: ‘The lad is great, and so is the band.’
And so they were, an explosive, ferocious live spectacle. Those who came to the shows expecting a reproduction of the chugging pleasantries of My Aim Is True were knocked backwards by the sheer violence, energy and electricity of Elvis and The Attractions. This was something quite different from the record, a wild, furious unleashing of frustration, unsettling in its intensity. It was irresistible.
Halfway through the tour, while Elvis was spending a couple of days in London en route to Marseilles, the news broke that Elvis Presley had died in Memphis. It was 16 August, 1977. Ken Smith and some friends were visiting Mary at the flat in Cypress Avenue when Elvis arrived home. ‘I remember being in the front room when he came in,’ Smith recalls. ‘Very quiet. White faced.’
It wouldn’t be too harsh to conclude that Elvis was not simply grieving the death of The King. The news could easily have been a hammer blow for his fledgling career, and indeed two of the more conservative national newspapers – the Daily Mail and Daily Express – dropped their planned features on Elvis immediately after Presley’s death. However, for a label as confrontational as Stiff it was a matter of honour to seize the day. ‘The King Is Dead, Long Live The King’ ran the new slogan. The NME also saw an opportunity to further establish the battle lines between Us and Them, contemplating running the cover line ‘Elvis & Elvis: Which One Is A Stiff Artist?’, a masterpiece of bad taste which was quietly dropped pre-publication. Far from being damaging, Presley’s death only helped to secure Elvis’s growing status as a homegrown darling of the music press, as if somehow the mere presence of this skinny, acidic, seething young man had helped kill off the bloated, embarrassing, Las Vegas circus act that Presley had become.
If anyone at Stiff had any remaining concerns, they were quickly dispelled. Just four days after Presley’s demise, Elvis and The Attractions played their usual Sunday night show in London. With My Aim Is True enjoying the third of its twelve-week run in the UK album charts, where it would eventually peak at No. 14, the 400-capacity Nashville Rooms was crammed with over a thousand people, eight of whom were arrested by police summoned to ease the chaos.
The same week, Elvis recorded a live version of ‘Red Shoes’ for inclusion on the BBC’s flagship pop show Top Of The Pops, and on 10 September they played an ill-advised set supporting Santana at the Crystal Palace Garden Party. Elvis and The Attractions were second on the bill, and although the crowd was hostile – naturally, Elvis was suitably hostile back – and their music unsuited to the vast expanses of an open-air venue, it was a tangible sign of how quickly things were moving.
‘When the record was totally done, Clover went back to the States to tour,’ recalls John Ciambotti. ‘And after we got back to London, Elvis was already famous. It was fast! It was really fast. It was astounding.’ ‘The King Is Dead, Long Live The King,’ indeed.
* * *
‘Love? I dunno what it means, really,’8 Elvis had told Nick Kent in the summer, a strange public admission for a man with a wife and young child. Admittedly, he was drunk and drumming up press coverage at the time, but the footprints of domestic dissatisfaction were stamped all over his songs.
Aged twenty-three, Elvis had never really cut loose. He had been an awkward, chubby adolescent who’d had little luck with girls. He had been with Mary since his late teens, with parental and spousal responsibilities following soon after. He had never indulged himself in the illicit pleasures of excessive drink and drugs. Now, as his potentially successful career dictated that his absences from home would become more and more protracted, he felt duty bound to explore the new opportunities that were placed in front of him. Whether Elvis had been faithful to his wife up until this point in their marriage is impossible to say, but soon he was straying.
Mary maintained good relations with many of Elvis’s friends; she had kept in touch with Ken Smith and Steve Hazelhurst from Flip City, and she quickly established a friendship with Bruce Thomas as well. Elvis would sometimes stay over at Bruce’s if there had been a domestic row, and Mary would often call Bruce the next day to bend his ear.
‘Mary rang me quite a lot,’ he says. ‘A couple of times I was the one who dropped Elvis in it. I’d say, “Oh well, I know he shouldn’t have done this, that and the other.” And she’d say, “I didn’t know he’d done that!”. At one of the first gigs we did at the Nashville Rooms, I said to Elvis: “Look, I think I’ve just blown it, I’ve just told her about that girl from Scotland.” And he’d just say: “Oh, don’t worry, where do you think all the songs come from?”.’
Other people were beginning to ask themselves the same question. In the late summer of 1977, a Liverpool reporter had recognised that Elvis Costello was in fact ex-folk troubadour Declan MacManus, and contacted Allan Mayes about doing a story. Mayes called Stiff, leaving a message with the secretary that somebody wanted to go into print about the very early years. Within twenty-four hours he got a call from Elvis: ‘Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve just got one thing to tell you, Allan. If these people print anything, Jake says legs will be broken.’
His tone was deadly serious, although the threat certainly wasn’t. ‘We all know it was only talk,’ says Mayes. ‘But I told this reporter I wouldn’t do it. If they wanted to play the mysterious game, fine.’ The aura of paranoia, the scare tactics and the secrecy surrounding his past would come to characterise – indeed define – the Costello-Riviera partnership in the coming months and years. ‘Jake had a lot of charisma and he was a bit of a strongman,’ says Dave Robinson. ‘The pair of them got off on that.’
There were bigger problems brewing. Stiff were planning a ’60s-style package tour for the beginning of October, a rotating revue featuring Elvis and The Attractions, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Larry Wallis and Nick Lowe. However, with the tour already booked, it became clear that the relationship between Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson wasn’t going to last the distance. The reasons appeared vague even then, but it was Jake who wanted out, apparently driven to distraction by the business headaches of keeping a small label going.
‘To this day, I do not know [why],’ says Robinson. ‘I’d spent ages in and out to America, we had this big deal with Sony which was really going to fund us if not into the big time then into the next stage. And just on the cusp of this Jake decided he couldn’t go on with it. So I said, “You should take Elvis”.’
When Elvis signed to Stiff, he had also signed a management deal with Robinson and Riviera. A secondary consequence of the split, therefore, was that Jake alone was left in the capacity of Elvis’s manager, a position he would hold for almost twenty years. In truth, it was merely a formalisation of an emotional and intellectual partnership that had already been forged. Although in theory Robinson and Riviera shared everything, Elvis was Jake’s guy.
It was agreed that not only should the Stiff tour go ahead, but that the forthcoming single, ‘Watching The Detectives’ b/w live versions of ‘Blame It On Cain’ and ‘Miracle Man’ would also be released on Stiff. Then Elvis would officially leave the label. It was cold comfort for Robinson, who also lost Nick Lowe and The Yachts with Jake’s departure and was left to mop up a plethora of residual problems at Stiff, including significant debts which the label had accrued over the previous eighteen months. ‘It was a dangerous time,’ he admits today.
The Live Stiffs tour began on 3
October, 1977 at High Wycombe Town Hall, and became legendary for its swift, headlong descent into chaos and disorder. By all accounts, Elvis tried to keep his head while all around him were losing theirs, but his resistance could only hold firm for so long.
At first, however, it was all about the music. Never keen on pandering to the tastes of the audience, especially one that wasn’t there exclusively to see him, on the opening night at High Wycombe he played a set featuring virtually nothing from My Aim Is True save for ‘Less Than Zero’. Mostly, he played new songs and covers.
‘The crowd was shouting for stuff off the album,’ recalls Wreckless Eric. ‘And Elvis said, “If you want to hear the album you can listen to it at home.” Just incredibly arrogant.’ Stiff publicist Glen Colson also remembers the gig: ‘Elvis deliberately cut his own throat. He was just a perverse sort of guy and he did that sort of thing.’9 26
It wouldn’t be the first or last time there were traces of self-sabotage evident in the choices Elvis made in the guise of artistic integrity. It was as though he strove to make it as difficult as possible for both himself and the audience by choosing the least accessible route. Already, he felt a deep-rooted unease at meekly offering up what people wanted, doing what was expected of him. Partly, this was a genuine desire to keep things fresh for himself – after all, most of the songs on My Aim Is True were already a year old – but it was also indicative of a long-standing cussedness towards his audience and towards success which bordered on contempt.
It was a dangerous game to play so early on, and indeed Elvis swiftly backtracked on the tour to include several more My Aim Is True songs in his set. At High Wycombe, the reviewer from Sounds, Vivien Goldman, berated Elvis for his ‘self-absorption’ and ‘lecturing’ pose. Goldman’s review went on to praise Eric’s set and especially Ian Dury and The Blockheads, sparking an intense rivalry between Dury and Elvis which dominated the entire tour.
The antipathy was exaggerated by the general demeanour of both men, insecure at heart, with highly charged emotions held below the surface. The rivalry was rarely explicit, usually characterised by a tight-lipped tension when the two met and fuelled by the tacit acknowledgement that each man had a degree of professional admiration for the other: both Elvis and Ian were gifted songwriters heading for big things, and both took pride in the fact that they had excellent bands.
The stand-off was probably a little lop-sided. ‘Ian hated Elvis, I’m afraid, he just hated him, but Ian absolutely hated everybody until he knew them,’ says Wreckless Eric. ‘He was terribly competitive. Elvis was a rival and it was like some war.’
Dury was still displaying traces of hostility not long before his premature death in 2000. ‘It was not a relaxed, happy tour,’ he said. ‘It was geared towards launching Elvis, I didn’t need it as much as he did. There was a certain amount of paranoia flying about because [my] band often upstaged Costello.’10 For his part, Elvis feigned indifference. ‘It was anti-boring, stab-you-in-the-back stuff,’ he later shrugged, before adding pointedly, ‘There was lots of human chemistry but lots of it was just down to basic negativity. [The tour] was principally down to pushing Ian’s album.’11
The fraught atmosphere was exacerbated by the fact that all the acts on the tour were alternating as the headliners each night, which ensured that it swiftly became a competition. In such circumstances, Elvis’s insistence on playing songs by other Stiff acts on the tour was no accident. Dury’s ‘Roadette’s Song’, by his old band Kilburn and The High Roads; Wreckless Eric’s ‘Whole Wide World’; and The Damned’s ‘Neat Neat Neat’ were all excellent additions to Elvis’s set, but one suspected they were played more in the spirit of one-upmanship and anything-you-can-do bravado than sincere tribute or comradeship.27
Under the circumstances, writing a song for Dury seemed a rather perverse kind of provocation. An inveterate news junkie, Elvis was killing time on tour by flicking through the News Of The World in the hotel when Wreckless Eric pointed out all the strange little adverts, singing the praises of support shoes, commode chairs and special gadgets to squeeze spots. ‘I said, “Look, ‘stylish slacks to suit your pocket.’ It’s a line in a song, isn’t it?” And he said, “Yeah! Let’s have a race to see who can get it into a song first.” I thought, “Oh God, we’re off to work again!”’
Later that day on the coach, Elvis unveiled his new song, featuring the line from the paper. Called ‘Sunday’s Best’, it was a sleazy litany of Middle England’s tabloid pre-occupations, written with Dury in mind and debuted the same night – 31 October – at Guildford Civic Hall, where Elvis sauntered on stage with the words: ‘I see we’ve got some cunts in the audience tonight.’ Dury never did use the song, although the version that Elvis and The Attractions eventually cut for the Armed Forces album retained some of The Blockhead’s swirling, vaudevillian flavour. Part grudging tribute, part V-sign.
Elvis set himself apart on the tour, preferring to avoid the schoolboy antics of ‘this coachful of lunatics’, to borrow Steve Nieve’s description.12 28 While capable of enjoying himself when the mood took him, Elvis was not the kind of man who welcomed being cajoled into ‘having fun’. So while Larry Wallis was cavorting through a hotel foyer wearing a policeman’s helmet, Elvis could be found rooting round Woolworths looking for rare EMI copies of ‘God Save The Queen’ in the remainder rack.
Such reluctance to throw himself full tilt into ‘The 24-Hour Club’ led to resentment from some quarters. One night when he was sleeping – and snoring – heavily on the bus, a prank ended with him having his shoe-laces tied together and a full ashtray emptied into his mouth. He was understandably furious.
Nevertheless, it was impossible to stay straight for long. ‘I did go strange towards the end,’ he admitted. ‘I’d blank out and just see red.’14 Elvis had never been a drug taker; he had never dabbled with marajuana, nor did he smoke cigarettes, and he had rarely been a big drinker. As late as July 1977, he was adamant on the subject. ‘I don’t take drugs,’ he stated. ‘I can’t even be in the same room as people doing cocaine.’15 However, touring with a rock band – never mind five rock bands – has a way of making such clear-cut stances disappear into the ether.
‘The excess started pretty much from when there was any money about, or from the first time people realised it was a happening band,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Once people realise that, people appear from everywhere offering you this and that. Nothing succeeds like perceived success.’
Women, drink and drugs played a big part on the Stiffs tour. Alcohol would always be a core constituent of The Attractions’ touring antics, but the drug use would soon escalate. This time around it was primarily amphetamines, the quintessential punk drug.
Perhaps more damaging was the convoluted sexual affair which unwound as the tour went on. An American girl fond of calling herself Farrah Fuck-it-Minor – a pointed reference to Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett-Majors – was travelling on the Stiff bus, ostensibly as the companion of Steve, whom she would go on to live with for many years and with whom she also has two children.
During the tour, Farrah had flings with both Elvis and Bruce Thomas, both of whom reportedly fell for her quite hard. The mess culminated in Newcastle on 4 November. Following the gig at the Polytechnic, Elvis wrote ‘Pump It Up’ on the hotel fire escape of the Swallow Hotel, scrawling pages and pages detailing his love-hate relationship with rock ’n’ roll excess, viewed from both the outside and the inside. At the heart of the song is his barely concealed disgust at how easily he has been seduced by the lifestyle. ‘It was getting so ugly I was compelled to write ‘Pump It Up’,’ he later said. ‘Well, just how much can you fuck, how many drugs can you do before you get so numb you can’t really feel anything?’16
Among other things, ‘Pump It Up’ can be interpreted as a thinly-veiled account of the escapades involving Farrah Fuck-It-Minor, the ‘bad girl’ who is ‘like a narcotic’. He ends with the resigned acceptance that he can do little else but succumb: ‘No use wishing f
or any other sin.’ True to form, the song underwent drastic editing the following day and was unveiled that evening – Bonfire Night – at Lancaster University, the tour’s final calling point. From there, all concerned crawled home. It had only been four weeks, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was only the beginning.
Within a matter of days Elvis and The Attractions were heading off on their first trip to the United States. Starting on 15 November, the four-week Stateside trek took in shows in most of the major cities, beginning in San Francisco and ending at the semi-legendary Stone Pony at Asbury Park, New Jersey, the club where Bruce Springsteen had made his name.
If Elvis’s rise to fame in the UK had been swift, his ascendence in the US was supersonic, when taking into account the vastness of the country and the fact that less than five months previously he had still been working at Elizabeth Arden. As the tour went on, he attracted the kind of attention usually reserved for genuine rock stars: Time and Newsweek magazines were tailing him, and he was approached to appear on NBC’s flagship TV show Saturday Night Live.
My Aim Is True had initially been available only on import, but the newly minted deal that Jake had secured with Columbia ensured the record gained a full release to coincide with Elvis’s shows; indeed, it had sold a remarkable 100,000 copies by the middle of the tour, helped by strong reviews from every organ that mattered: Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the LA Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post. ‘I can hum them all, but I don’t understand any of them,’ mused the Post’s Mark Kernis wryly.
Complicated Shadows Page 11