Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Despite – or perhaps because of – the excess, the fraught atmosphere and the musical struggles, the songs were infused with a compelling emotional intensity which was light years ahead of the versions the group had cut in Eden Studios. Somehow, the record was finished through the fog, but it was painstaking and emotionally exhausting work. In the end, the title of the record seemed more a desperate hope than a playful instruction.

  With the record wrapped up, Elvis was left kicking his heels. There were legal problems surrounding the release of Get Happy!!. Jake and Andrew Lauder had left Radar in late 1979 and formed a new independent record company called F-Beat. However, because Radar had been financed by Warner Brothers in the UK, any act signed to Radar was also technically signed to Warners as well. As such, Warners weren’t particulary keen to simply let Elvis and Nick Lowe walk away from under their noses to join F-Beat without any recompense.

  The situation was further complicated by the fact that Elvis had never put pen to paper on a contract with Radar. ‘It was difficult,’ says Lauder. ‘The deal between Radar and Elvis [and Nick Lowe] was never actually signed. So it ended up potentially getting a bit messy.’ Jake and Andrew negotiated the possibility of F-Beat forming a new relationship with Warners, but talks broke down and Warners took the matter to court. The release of any new Elvis product was hamstrung until the matter was resolved.

  In early January 1980 a very limited edition of the single of ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’ came out on the Two Tone label, home of The Specials. ‘It was a bit of a flanker, really,’ says Lauder. ‘Because we thought that was the last thing anyone would expect.’ With the ownership of Elvis’s recorded work under legal dispute, the single was swiftly removed from sale following an injunction from Warners, and was later given away free at The Rainbow in September 1980, and at other Elvis concerts.

  Just as the stand-off was poised to go to a potentially long and financially draining trial, in February F-Beat and Warners finally came to an edgy compromise. ‘We were faced with very large bills,’ says Lauder. ‘We’d already started manufacturing Get Happy!! and there were singles and everything else. In the end we did end up doing a deal with Warners for pressing and distribution. It was against their wishes, but as a way of resolving it that was what was done. Effectively [Elvis and Nick] were still within the Warners fold, but it was now F-Beat instead of Radar.’

  Get Happy!! – originally scheduled for an early January release – wouldn’t hit the shops until mid-February. In retrospect, Elvis felt the dispute damaged the support his subsequent records got from Warners. ‘That’s when things started to go wrong for us in this country in a business sense,’ he claimed. ‘I think we’ve paid dearly for that dispute.’18

  As all this was unfolding, Elvis did his best to keep relatively busy. He was already writing and demo-ing new songs at Nick Lowe’s Am-Pro Studio in Shepherd’s Bush, putting down embryonic versions of ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Watch Your Step’, ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ and ‘Just A Memory’, which were in various stages of completion. He also met Johnny Cash at Nick Lowe’s house on Boxing Day 1979. At that time, Lowe was married to Cash’s stepdaughter Carlene Carter, and Elvis was part of a high-spirited session band which cut Lowe’s ‘Without Love’ and a duet of George Jones’ ‘We Ought To Be Ashamed’, which apparently proved an accurate assessment of the day’s proceedings.

  Since their return from America, live appearances had been few and far between. There had been a smattering of dates in France and Spain in mid-December and an appearance at the Rock For Kampuchea benefit concert at the Hammersmith Odeon on 29 December, alongside Wings, Rockpile and comedian Billy Connolly. In the New Year, Elvis and The Attractions played for NME prize-winners at The Clarendon in London, before making a one-show-only trip to New Zealand to play the Sweetwater Festival on 27 January. The festival appearance was the first known occasion of Elvis playing Elvis, as he and The Attractions ripped through Presley’s ‘Little Sister’, which would become a feature of their live set that year.

  Taking advantage of the lull in proceedings, the trip to the Antipodes turned into an excuse for a brief, hedonistic break in the sun. ‘We were getting £70,000 for the gig,’ remembers Bruce Thomas. ‘Elvis said, “OK, we’ll share it all out. We’ll just have a good time and whatever’s left when we get back we’ll share it all out.” Out of £70,000, we got just over £1100 each! We did about £15,000 apiece in two weeks, which would have bought a house back then.’ At least it bought a good time.

  * * *

  Get Happy!! was released on F-Beat on 15 February, 1980. It was the anti-Armed Forces, crammed with twenty songs, a quarter of which were under two minutes long and barely hung together. And it was a masterpiece.

  The record showcased The Attractions at their rawest and roughest, with little of the sophistication of the previous album. This was not a record of stand-out individual cameos; rather, it was the sound of a band sticking close together for protection, flying on instinct and intuition, feeding off their singer’s desperation and turning it into something remarkable. Up front, Elvis’s voice ran the gamut from wracked hysteria on ‘Human Touch’ to a whispered soul croon on ‘Secondary Modern’, finally reduced to a ragged bark on ‘Beaten To The Punch’.

  Many of the songs were half-formed and empty-sounding, betraying the frenzied nature of the recording process, but the sense of drama and energy spilling out swept away any misgivings. The up-tempo numbers were absurdly fast, the opening ‘Love For Tender’ shooting by in a blur of pilfered Motown bass riffs and frantic word association, while the few subdued tracks were stripped painfully bare and laced with a new-found sadness. ‘New Amsterdam’ was the one oddity, culled from the solo demos Elvis had cut over the summer at Archipelago studios in Pimlico, its quiet reflection and acoustic strum setting it apart from the manic mood of the rest of the record.

  Lyrically, there were nods to the ‘Columbus Incident’ and the many small, sour betrayals and temptations of life on the road, but often Get Happy!! was so dense as to be almost indecipherable. Elvis devoured books, specifically biography, happily scrutinising the minutiae of someone else’s life, and among his most significant recent reading matter was a work on the hidden meanings of Picasso’s paintings. The book explained the various devices that the artist employed to squirrel codes and secret messages in his work, usually to his lovers. As was normal with any idea he liked, Elvis had decided to try it for himself, with the result that his relationship with Bebe Buell was heavily – if obscurely – documented on Get Happy!!: ‘Beaten To The Punch’, ‘Riot Act’ and the slow-burning regret of ‘Motel Matches’ were all reflections on the theme of that doomed romance, while ‘Men Called Uncle’ specifically referenced a furious argument towards the end of their relationship, where a desperate Elvis had found himself grabbing onto Buell’s ankles in a darkened hotel room.

  It was a brave, berserk record, less artless than it sounded but as emotionally open and as musically joyous as anything Elvis had recorded. He has always regarded it fondly, declaring it five times the record Armed Forces was. The NME cottoned on immediately. ‘Twenty tracks, fifty minutes, with the single first, just like Motown,’ gushed Paul Rambali, who appeared to have fallen foul of Elvis’s deliberately ambiguous labelling on the original album. The CD re-issue later revealed ‘Love For Tender’ as the album’s opener. Praising the pared-down sound of The Attractions and the more expressive, less polished vocals, he concluded: ‘It’s a record you didn’t expect. Elvis has gotten off the treadmill. Get it.’ Melody Maker was less sure, griping about the ‘uneven’ material and the retro ’60s-style production, which only proved that some people found it harder to get happy than others.

  In the US, there was little hint of any hubris hanging over from the previous year’s antics. Robert Palmer in the New York Times was positively brimming with positivity. ‘The stylistic range, emotional depth, melodic richness and verbal invention displayed on Get Happy!! make it Mr Costello�
��s most satisfying album,’ he wrote, with that odd formality that some American critics insist upon.

  In Creem, Jeff Nesin simply concluded, ‘If you care at all about rock ’n’ roll you must have this album.’ Eve Zibart’s review in the Washington Post was one of the few that commented on the haphazard production, which she felt let the record down. ‘Where Phil Spector painstakingly built a wall of sound, producer Nick Lowe has constructed a chain-link fence. It works to the advantage of several numbers, but Lowe overdoes it.’ But then Nick Lowe always did.

  Following the release of Get Happy!!, Elvis and The Attractions hit the road for the first time in almost a year at the end of February. It was a UK tour with a difference, loosely hung around the theme of playing seaside towns and places lying outside the normal concert circuit. They soon found out why. Taking in such pop-starved outposts as Cromer, Matlock, Fishguard, St Austell, West Calder and Dunfermline rather than London, Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow, it was an exercise in eccentricity which – although performed in good faith – probably did little to aid the commercial progress of the new record.

  Support was provided by Clive Langer and The Boxes. As well as ‘opening’ for the band in May on the Royal Iris ferry, Elvis had recently produced their cover of the ’60s hit ‘If Paradise Was Half As Nice’ for their debut album Splash! and now wanted to introduce them to a wider audience.

  Touring with The Attractions was not for the fainthearted, although at least one member had pulled back from the abyss. Bruce Thomas had come to his senses upon his return from Holland, when his wife saw him lying on the floor, pale and listless, and had screamed because she thought he was dead. ‘It was after the Get Happy!! sessions that I thought I’d better just cut back to six bottles of wine a day, rather than two bottles of vodka,’ he says. ‘I stopped taking drugs at that point, too.’

  The shows were strong, taking in the full sweep of Elvis’s four records but focusing primarily on This Year’s Model and Get Happy!!. Despite their extended absence from the road, The Attractions soon revved up to full speed. ‘I was amazed by them live,’ says Langer. ‘The power. They would just come out of the dressing room and attack.’

  As if to punch home the renewed heart in his music, Elvis introduced a smattering of soul and R&B covers into the set, including ‘Help Me’, Sly Stone’s ‘Dance To The Music’ and Smokey Robinson’s ‘One More Heartache’, which he hadn’t performed since the penultimate Flip City gig in November 1975. ‘Watch Your Step’ also made its live debut during the tour.

  However, for the first time Elvis’s excesses on the road were beginning to directly interfere with his ability to perform. ‘Whatever enthusiasm he’d started out with had dissipated after three or four numbers and reached its nadir when he came to a grinding mental halt at the start of ‘Alison’,’ reported a review of the show at Hastings Pier Pavillion on 4 March. ‘He stopped and started blankly, scratched his head again. The band carried on through the verse and a roadie stepped up to Elvis and after a short consultation removed his guitar and led him out.’

  ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’ had recently been released as a single, and by the time the tour hit Hastings it was well on its way to its chart peak of No. 4. The attendant celebrations throughout the day had got severely out of hand, and left Elvis in an advanced state of disrepair. He eventually returned to finish the show, but he was in poor voice, forgetting lyrics and looking mentally disorientated all the way through to the end.

  It all ended in Nottingham on 1 April, on the surface a long way down the road from the madness and malice of the previous year’s ‘April Fool’s Day Marathon’ in New York. Even so, Elvis was feeling perhaps even more dejected than he had twelve months earlier. It seems clear that his use of drugs and alcohol had escalated to the point where the arrogance and certainty of old had been replaced with self-doubt and a weariness about the whole business. Disillusioned, he made the decision to quit.

  Elvis frequently told members of the band that he was throwing his hand in, usually a short-lived impulse brought on by fatigue and a self-confessed taste for melodrama. However, this time he was more adamant, despite the fact that he had a European tour scheduled to begin a mere two weeks later.

  Steve Nieve didn’t need a second bidding: he took a holiday in America, where as a passenger he was almost immediately involved in a serious car accident in Los Angeles which laid him low for some time. By the time Elvis had eventually and somewhat inevitably come to his senses and decided to press on, he found himself without a keyboard player. It would be June before Steve was well enough to rejoin The Attractions.

  The initial Plan B had been to adapt to Steve Nieve’s absence by playing as a trio. This was overly optimistic, considering Elvis’s considerable shortcomings as a lead guitarist, and was swifly jettisoned after the opening two warm-up gigs on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey proved to be catastrophic, the songs badly battered by layers of ill-used guitar effects.

  Before the European tour moved to Holland, Germany and Belgium in mid-April, Elvis decided to augment the remaining two Attractions with The Rumour’s guitarist Martin Belmont. The setlist was adapted by neccessity. Without Steve’s warm organ sound, only a handful of songs from Get Happy!! made the cut. ‘High Fidelity’ was usually included, having been released as a single in April, alongside covers of Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have To Go’, Smokey Robinson’s ‘Don’t Look Back’ and Presley’s ‘Little Sister’. The concerts were ragged, and those members of the audience coming to the shows before deciding whether to buy Get Happy!! were unlikely to have been persuaded to storm their local record shop.

  Such pitfalls were not helping the promotion of the record. Get Happy!! had proved a considered commercial success, but those expecting the carefully sculpted pop music of Armed Forces were inevitably disappointed. The record climbed to peaks of No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the US – both highly creditable chart placings – but it didn’t sell anywhere near as many copies as its predecessor. ‘Jake actually laughed about having a Get Happy!! house in his garden made with all the unsold records,’ recalls Roger Bechirian.

  It’s likely that the ‘Columbus Incident’ had something to do with the disappointing sales, if not directly. Vast numbers of people hadn’t suddenly stopped buying Elvis Costello records on the strength of that one moment of madness, but the events of March 1979 undeniably had a knock-on effect. CBS were unwilling to market the record with any great fanfare; indeed, according to Roger Bechirian, ‘they were horrified with Get Happy!!’. On top of it all, Elvis had decided not to tour America this time around, unquestionably a reaction to the madness of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour.

  However, the story wasn’t that simple. The legal dispute with Warners had muffled a little of the record’s initial punch, but the drop in sales was primarily attributable to Elvis’s rough-and-ready, radical switch in musical direction. In the States especially, a country that has always liked its music neatly labelled and pigeonholed, this was clearly not the polished new wave sounds of Armed Forces, and radio stations were unsure what to do with it.

  The net result was not promising. ‘F-Beat was running into financial struggles at that time,’ admits Andrew Lauder. ‘We had overpressed on the album based on the sales of Armed Forces, which was a platinum album. We had a situation where we were shipping out lots of records and they were all coming back. Having paid for all the advertising and all the publicity, financially it was a tough one to make work.’ With a promotional campaign which included 100,000 free posters, over 500 record shop window displays, double-page magazine adverts and radio and television exposure, the cost of failure was high.

  Chapter Seven

  1980–81

  ELVIS HAD RELEASED FOUR FULL-LENGTH ALBUMS in the space of two-and-a-half years; had toured the world almost constantly, and become one of the foremost musical figures of his generation. Throughout it all, he had been under no illusion that playing to the hilt the ‘Elvis Costello’ chara
cter established in the opening months of his career would provide the quickest route to success. He had stuck to it, cutting his musical cloth as simply and efficiently as he could, adhering to the somewhat one-dimensional template that the public recognised. It wasn’t really artifice, it was simply that he restricted himself to displaying only a certain side of his personality: the vengeful, cocksure, embittered side, which undoubtedly existed. But he was finding the parameters frustrating.

  Get Happy!! had marked the first step away from that persona, and now he felt the urge to add even more of himself to the music. ‘There was really the need in me to reflect something else: a bit more tenderness, a bit more regret, because you make mistakes in your life and you have to sing about those as well as the things you’re very confident or cocky about.’1

  He was looking back to move forwards. Earlier in the year he had cut eccentric versions of old D.P. Costello songs ‘Ghost Train’, ‘Hoover Factory’ and ‘Dr Luther’s Assistant’31 at Am-Pro and TW studios in Fulham. They were beguiling doodles, floating around without a beat, not songs that could easily be played with The Attractions. He was also picking up on threads of songs and lyrics he had written in the mid-’70s. ‘Different Finger’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Luxembourg’, even a short instrumental piece called ‘Weeper’s Dream’ were all dusted down and rearranged, a sure sign that he was beginning to change direction, focusing on the wider musical ambitions he had set aside in 1977.

  Elvis’s musical frame of reference had always been immense, but only a fraction of it had been suggested in his musical output to date. This was set to change. He had bought a baby grand piano at the beginning of the year, which had an almost immediate impact on his songwriting process. Although it would be a full year before he began to feel his way around the instrument with enough confidence for it to become his principal compositional tool, he quickly wrote ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, a restrained, almost formal piano piece which would later become a live tour de force.