Despite his later protestations to the contrary, Elvis seemed happy to have her around. Bebe Buell moved into 48 Queen’s Gate Terrace during the sessions for the new album, being made under the provisional titles of Cornered On Plastic and Emotional Fascism. The team at Eden studios were the same as This Year’s Model: Nick Lowe in the producer’s chair, with Roger Bechirian handling the technical side as engineer. Six weeks had been set aside over the late summer and autumn of 1978, the extended recording time a sure sign of the desire to exert a little more craft and sophistication in the studio.
Again, the discipline was strong. ‘Elvis wasn’t the kind of guy who slept all day,’ says Buell. ‘He got up and went to the studio to record and rehearse. He was a working boy, not a loller.’12 Elvis’s work ethic extended to his clothes: he almost always arrived at Eden wearing a suit and often a tie. ‘I’d have this mad hippy hair and there was Nick looking like the pub rocker and Elvis would always be in his suit with his Doc Martens,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘And he would always come in with a carton of orange juice, because he believed it would keep colds away.’
The sessions were not without their tensions, primarily due to Elvis’s attitude. It had only been a year since the release of My Aim Is True, and in that time he had become perhaps the most feted of all his peers. He took the praise as his due, primarily because he agreed with it: there was no one around who could touch him.
‘By the third [album] I thought I was God’s gift,’ he later admitted. ‘I was totally convinced. I had no doubts.’13 At work, this manifested itself in a desire to assert himself a little more in the studio. ‘Elvis had the final say,’ said Nick Lowe. ‘All the way down the line.’14 This was new territory. Previously, the lion’s share of the production and mixing decisions had been left to Lowe and Bechirian, and the new developments caused a little unease.
Regardless, Lowe remained a vital cog in orchestrating the record and drumming up enthusiasm on a daily basis, as well incorporating some of the modernist sounds Elvis wanted on the record without diluting the essence of the songs or The Attractions. ‘The whole way those things were directed and put together was very much down to Nick,’ says Bechirian. ‘Nick had a real pop sensibility about him.’ And make no mistake, this would be the record where Elvis went ‘pop’, in more ways than one.
Steve Nieve, in particular, really came to the fore. The scale of the songs was grander, and Steve was involved a great deal in the arrangements. He’d moved away from the edgy sound of the Farfisa organ, and now the piano became the central feature of his playing.
This shift was never more apparent than on ‘Oliver’s Army’, which was transformed from a potential B-side into a sure-fire classic when Steve added a piano part in the style of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. The Beach Boys’ ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ had provided the initial inspiration for the song, but once Steve’s euphoric, chiming piano runs were added, it took on an entirely different feel. ‘Nick and I were like, “This is a fucking hit!”,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘You could smell it from the first note. They were cutting the basic track intro and we were just in hysterics, thinking this is just so good. We couldn’t wait to get it finished.’
Abba had become an unlikely but major influence on the clean, refined pop sound that Elvis was searching for. If This Year’s Model had been an approximation of a mid-’60s British beat album, the new approach was self-consciously modernist, drawing on more diverse and current sources. ‘We borrowed sounds from some records that we listened to constantly, almost obsessively,’15 admitted Elvis. David Bowie’s classic Station To Station/Low/Heroes trilogy had been a constant soundtrack in the tour bus in America (Bowie’s ‘Rebel, Rebel’ riff was also lifted wholesale for ‘Two Little Hitlers’, while the melody had ghosts of ‘TVC-15’ in its bones), along with Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk and the late period Beatles of Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine.
These were all artists as interested in the sound as the song, and their influence could be heard most obviously on the production tricks and keyboard effects which were smeared all over the record, such as Nieve’s skewed riff shadowing the title refrain on ‘Moods For Moderns’. But despite the attention to detail in the studio and hints of a concept, ultimately what drove the sessions forward was Elvis’s continuing acceleration as a songwriter. Songs such as ‘Accidents Will Happen’, ‘Chemistry Class’ and ‘Party Girl’ simply demanded a wider, grander stage to perform upon, and their demands were met.
It was hardly ELO, though. There was still plenty of room for the archetypal Attractions method of simply going in and nailing the basic track live. ‘Party Girl’, for example, had changed little from the imperious live version that had been knocked into shape on the last US tour. The new-found slickness and subtleties in the performances could not simply be attributed to studio trickery; above all, they were the inevitable by-product of a year of non-stop touring. As the sessions wore on, there was a real sense that this going to be the record which really made the big, bold moves for Elvis’s career. ‘It was incredibly exciting,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘When you make an album that in general is great to listen to and you know that there are three or four hits on there, it’s great fun to do.’
The album was almost wrapped up by the last week of September. The band warmed up for their slot at the Rock Against Racism concert in Brixton on the twenty-fourth with a gig at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. A meddling journalist at the scene ended up with his wrist broken and requiring five stitches to a head wound, emphasising the fact that Elvis’s self-enforced media blackout was not going to be breached without a fight.
Then it was back to London, where Elvis and The Attractions provided the high point of a day of varied entertainment organised by the Anti-Nazi League, playing to an audience of 150,000 people in Brockwell Park. Opening with an ominous ‘Night Rally’ and ending with a fitting ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’, they played a sixteen-song set featuring only one song from the new sessions: ‘Oliver’s Army’. Here to stay.
* * *
Living together in London, there was no question that Bebe and Elvis had fallen for the each other fast and hard. At first, it was a lot of fun. ‘There was a very sweet, generous, romantic person in there,’ says Buell. ‘A very good present giver, very creative. He had a very endearing side. He was a movie buff, and we spent hours watching movies, like [Truffaut’s] L’Histoire d’Adele H. I turned him onto Mean Streets and Animal House.’
The relationship remained a secret outside of the inner circle. Although there was definitely a happy synchronicity about the romance which plugged neatly into the theme of This Year’s Model, Jake Riviera worried what the attentions of a media hungry American model who hung out with everyone from the Sex Pistols to Billy Idol would do for Elvis’s image. Lowe – perhaps more mindful of Elvis’s core insecurities and vulnerability – had more personal concerns. ‘If you hurt Elvis, if you do anything to hurt him, you’re going to answer to me,’16 he reportedly told Bebe.
On 22 October, the affair become public property when the couple attended a recital by ‘punk poet’ John Cooper Clarke at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Elvis made a very poor attempt at passing off incognito, with a pork pie hat jammed over his head and shades over his eyes, and he and Bebe were soon spotted by journalists and photographed, as they surely realised they would be. Indeed, the next morning an excited Elvis was the first down at the newsagents to check out the papers. The story duly appeared – with pictures – of this ‘surly superstar escorting bountiful American model Bebe Buell’ around London, commenting acidly that ‘Costello is – of course – happily married with one child.’
The reality was – of course – somewhat different. Elvis was still living in Steve’s flat, and relations remained highly fraught on the domestic front. Ken Smith recalls accompanying Mary Costello to an after-show party for ex-New York Doll David Johansen at the Lyceum Theatre on the Strand: ‘I was escorting Mary for the evening, and out of the blue in walks Elvis wit
h Bebe Buell. I thought, “Oh no, this is not going to be good!”. There was no way the two of them were going to ignore each other. I was expecting the worst, I thought it was just a matter of who she went for first. But she kept her cool, although she was getting vexed, I can assure you. Elvis – as I remember – was quite flippant.’ Elvis wasn’t so much flippant as delighted, happy that Mary had spotted him at first-hand with his new squeeze. After the party, Elvis and Bebe decamped to an Indian restaurant to reflect on the meeting. ‘I remember him being elated like a little schoolboy,’ Buell recalls. ‘He got some kind of ghastly pleasure out of that. He was giggling all night about it.’ The affair reportedly left Mary seeking a divorce.
In such circumstances, November’s ‘Wake Up Canada’ tour came as something of a relief. While everyone in the Costello camp was excited at the prospect of the new album and its commercial potential, ‘Radio, Radio’ was released as a stand-alone single in favour of any new material. Designed to bridge the gap between This Year’s Model and the new album, still provisionally entitled Emotional Fascism and scheduled for an release early in 1979, it scraped into the Top 30 in October, affording Elvis the opportunity to shake his fists at Tony Blackburn – the somewhat asinine Radio One DJ – on Top Of The Pops.
On tour also, Elvis and The Attractions decided to keep their powder dry, holding back on the new material in order that it would have maximum impact upon release. Instead, they performed a variation of the set they had been playing for almost a year, along with a few surprises: two superior songs which would be left off the album – probably because they were too reminiscent of the style of This Year’s Model – were aired on the first night, 3 November, at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre ‘Tiny Steps’ and ‘Girls Talk’, the latter a blatant hit given away by Elvis to Dave Edmunds in a moment of drunken generosity. During the short tour, Elvis also added a new cover to their repertoire, The Merseybeat’s ‘I Stand Accused’, which would later be recorded for Get Happy!!. The final date in Vancouver on 17 November included ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and the first tour outing for ‘Alison’.
From Canada it was off to conquer more uncharted territory in Japan and Australia, but first there was a detour. In Hawaii, director Chuck Slatter recorded a video promo for ‘Oliver’s Army’, already ear-marked as the first single from the new record.
Elvis and The Attractions would never be anyone’s idea of photogenic icons for the pre-MTV generation, and their early videos were a slapstick montage of drunken revellery, live performances and some of the most inept dance steps ever captured on film. The clip for ‘Oliver’s Army’ was filmed in a local strip club at 4 a.m. after the band had been out all night recceing for locations, and the dishevelled quartet were about as sober as they looked in the finished film.
Filming continued in this haphazard manner when they reached Japan, where they assembled footage for the fall-down-drunken clip for ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. ‘We’re jumping up and down in the hotel corridor, we’d had eighteen bottles of saki each,’ says Bruce Thomas, who was still rooming with Elvis on tour at that time. ‘I remember waking Elvis up at three in the morning and saying, “Hey! Guess what?” “What?” “I am indestructible!” “You fucking won’t be if you don’t get off this bed”.’
The Japanese tour opened in Osaka on 23 November. Aside from a minor tantrum from Elvis on the opening night when some technical problems hampered the sound, it passed off a little too peacefully until they reached Tokyo. Overall, the Japanese media hadn’t been especially impressed with Elvis and the band and as a result they took promotion into their own hands, playing a short set from the back of a truck daubed with a banner proclaiming: ‘Elvis Costello Is Now Touring Japan’. They were fined ¥4000 by the police for the accurate if unsympathetic charge of ‘making a noise in the street’.
The trip to Australia was an even less rewarding experience. The opening concert at Sydney’s Regent Theatre on 3 December ended in chaos after Elvis played a fifty-minute set and then refused to give an encore, even following an increasingly ill-tempered eight-minute standing ovation. According to local press reports, ‘the crowd threw bottles, lightbulbs and even seats onto the stage. No one was hurt.’ Elvis later received some half-hearted death threats live on the Double Jay radio show, and was stampeded at Sydney Airport as he attempted to make his escape.
By the time the last gig of the tour rolled around in Adelaide on 12 December, everyone was ready to go home. But to paraphrase a later Elvis song, home wasn’t where it used to be. Instead, it had come to constitute little more than a hotel, a stage, a bus, or an aeroplane. Jake had never been an advocate of the less-means-more policy, and he had booked a thirty-date British tour to promote the release of the new record, beginning with a seven-day residency at the Dominion Theatre in London running from 18 December to Christmas Eve.
Riviera had at least granted them Christmas Day off, and Elvis joined Mary and Matthew for the day. Bebe Buell had stayed on in London while Elvis had been on tour, remaining at Queen’s Gate Terrace at his behest. He often called ‘collect’ from the road, running up enormous phone bills which Jake was often left to pay. When he returned, he had wanted Buell to bring her daughter Liv over to London to spend Christmas with them, but instead she returned to the States to spend the holiday with her family in Maine.
The band reunited on the twenty-seventh for a tour which would take them up to the end of January, before – once again – heading on to America. It was a bruising schedule, and it was hardly surprising that the week-long festive extravaganza at the Dominion proved to be something of an anti-climax. Despite the inclusion of many songs from the forthcoming album and guest appearances by the likes of Nick Lowe and The Rumour’s Martin Belmont, Elvis and The Attractions couldn’t help but sound tired and a little lacklustre; the shows were duly met with deliberations as to whether the wunderkind was finally beginning to run out of steam. ‘We were all fried,’ admits Bruce Thomas. ‘It wasn’t just the drink and all the rest of it, we just didn’t get a break. I know what Jake was doing, but I think he pushed it too hard, I think he really did.’
* * *
The new album was released on 5 January. Now called Armed Forces after CBS flinched at the idea of trying to sell a record called Emotional Fascism to Middle America, the record was an audacious upping of the stakes. From Barney Bubbles’ garish, complicated fold-out sleeve to the smoother sounds within, it was clearly a declaration of a vaulting ambition. It also revealed Elvis as both master and maniac of the word game, throwing puns, double entendres, double-bluffs and non sequiturs into the air like confetti, almost like a form of textual Tourette’s.
There was an element of the emperor’s new clothes in all of this: the dense, encoded language and scattergun wordplay was dazzling on a surface level, but a closer inspection revealed little to grasp onto; the technique became an end in itself. It certainly felt like there were some deeply felt personal pre-occupations being exorcised, but what were they exactly? ‘Either he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s talking about, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about himself,’ concluded Bruce Thomas, and he had a point.
The impact of the self-lacerating ‘Big Boys’ and ‘Busy Bodies’ – side swipes at Elvis’s own promiscuity – and the desperate tour postcards of ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ‘Goon Squad’ (‘Mother, Father/I’m here in the zoo’) was partially dulled by the military imagery, not to mention the feverish switching from first to second person mid-song and often mid-verse; but then disorientation and obscurity was precisely the intention.
‘I got fascinated with words and playing games and disguising things, and I’ve written some really good songs that are not about literal things, because they’re not trying to be,’ he later said. ‘The big lie is that everything has to make sense.’17
Some were disturbed by this lack of clarity. The material drew a sometimes haphazard line connecting individual acts of emotional violence and deceit t
o global and military atrocities, a conceit which Elvis later admitted was wildly flawed: ‘Betrayal and murder are not the same thing.’18 In particular, ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Sunday’s Best’ came in for criticism, partly for using such incendiary terms as ‘nigger’ and ‘darkies’ amidst such emotionally charged material. ‘At best it’s feeble, at worst it’s offensive,’ reprimanded Melody Maker’s Tony Rayns, although it was a mere blip in a broadly positive review. Elsewhere, Rayns commented accurately that Elvis’s voice and phrasing had improved considerably, while singling out Steve Nieve for special mention. ‘[His] keyboards have a range and bite unique in contemporary rock. It falls to him to introduce most of the gorgeous cross-melodies that distinguish many of the songs, and he brings it off every time with terrific finesse.’ In the same issue, This Year’s Model was voted ‘Album of the Year’ for 1978.
In the NME, Nick Kent declared Armed Forces ‘Costello’s most fervent declaration of intention yet for the title of great ’70s pop subversive. The only comparisons even worth making are with The Beatles and Bowie, and they scarcely scratch the surface.’ This was a little too much. The record was bursting with brashness and confidence, and sounded unlike anything Elvis had done before, but perhaps that was half the problem. Beneath the gimmicky touches and lyrical gymnastics, Armed Forces was only half the towering pop masterpiece it proclaimed itself to be. Aside from ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Accidents Will Happen’, only another four tracks – ‘Green Shirt’, ‘Party Girl’, ‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Two Little Hitlers’ – were truly great pop songs. The remaining half-dozen were inventive, lyrically mesmerising at times, beautifully performed and sung, but the nagging sense remained that they were more reliant on a varied palette of sounds and textures than might have been advisable. The end result was often brilliant but contrived, and date-stamped in a way which This Year’s Model has managed to escape. In the NME, Charles Shaar Murray concluded with the warning that Elvis may simply be trying too hard to fulfill a role others had mapped out for him. He would soon come to a similar conclusion himself.
Complicated Shadows Page 14