His mind was already on the next record. He envisaged it combining the melodic lushness of Armed Forces with the rhythmic drive of Get Happy!!, and throughout the summer he stockpiled songs with this template in mind: ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’, ‘Lovers Walk’, ‘Clubland’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Watch Your Step’ and ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ were already written and demo-ed, although some of them would change dramatically during the album sessions: at this point, ‘Watch Your Step’ was a raucous rocker and ‘New Lace Sleeves’ a swaying, reggae-tinged number laced with melodica.
Elvis showcased some of the new material in festival appearances in Orange, France and at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in July. Steve was back in the swing after his LA car-crash, and paid his professional respects to Squeeze’s keyboard whizz Jools Holland in three concerts at the Albany Theatre in London on 12–14 August. Holland was leaving the band for pastures new, and Elvis and The Attractions, cunningly disguised as Otis Westinghouse and The Lifts, supported Squeeze each night and joined them on a few of their own songs as well.
The two bands’ paths had crossed before on Top Of The Pops and other television shows, but they had become firm friends earlier in the year after stumbling upon each other in a hotel bar in Buxton in the north of England while on tour. ‘We stayed up until the sun came up,’ recalls the band’s guitarist, singer and lyricist Chris Difford. ‘Talking about country music, old music, management, record deals and God-knows-what.’
The result of the meeting was significant in many ways. Squeeze were having problems with their manager Miles Copeland, and Jake – ever the knight in shining armour – stepped into the breach. Soon his managerial responsibilities were being shared between Elvis and Squeeze, the beginning of a working relationship which would span the next few years.
Festival appearances were dotted around the summer. A performance at the Edinburgh Festival in August – a greatest hits set with a live debut for ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ thrown in for good measure – was followed by an appearance at the Heatwave Festival in Toronto on 23 August, the one and only trip to North America the band made in the twenty months following the ‘Armed Funk’ tour.
The trip to Canada coincided with the release of Taking Liberties, a record specifically designed for the US market, mopping up stray B-sides, UK album tracks and unreleased out-takes. Taking Liberties was only intended to be available on cassette in Britain, with a slightly altered track listing and under the name Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How’s Your Fathers, but vinyl imports soon made their way across the Atlantic.
At twenty songs, it was an impressive – if incoherent – collection of material which was by no means second-rate: ‘Radio Sweetheart’, ‘Stranger In The House’, ‘Night Rally’, ‘Chelsea’, ‘Girls Talk’, ‘Hoover Factory’ and covers of ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Getting Mighty Crowded’ were all on offer. A minor addition to the canon, more than anything Taking Liberties was a useful document in tracking Elvis’s changing musical obsessions over three years of enormous creativity. ‘The harried Costello fan can pause and actually weigh up the pros and cons of the man’s work to date,’ wrote Nick Kent in the NME, before concluding: ‘I’m glad I’ve got this record.’
* * *
Elvis and The Attractions demo-ed material for the next album at Eden Studios throughout September, and work began in earnest at DJM studios in Holborn in central London the following month, with the old team of Nick Lowe and Roger Bechirian still in place. Working practices had changed somewhat. Lowe would produce for two or three days at a time on his own and then Roger Bechirian would take charge for a few sessions.
The difference in the two men’s techniques and the lack of consistency didn’t help the album’s progress. Relations within the band were also beginning to fall apart. They arrived in the studio following several days spent rehearsing in the country, which had soon collapsed into an exercise in alcoholic futility. ‘By that point, I think everybody was just fed up with seeing each other,’ says Bechirian. ‘There was a real sense of animosity, a cloud over the project. It was just a real struggle, because nobody seemed to care about it.’
In this mood of extreme disillusionment and disenchantment, the songs Elvis was writing were mired in ‘sour and rotten doings,’2 detailing a very English pre-occupation with sleaze, cheap assignations and corruption when the lights are dimmed. The Conservative Party had recently come back to power, and the looming shadow of Thatcherism infiltrated the songs and contaminated the mood in the studio. In addition, Elvis was at a personal low. His marriage to Mary had once again reached a point where it was approaching ‘terminal fracture’ and he was ‘close to nervous collapse on a diet of cider, gin and tonic, various powders, Seconal and Johnnie Walker Black Label.’3
The atmosphere at DJM was predictably dire. The sound was dry and lifeless, ill-suited to the more expansive music that Elvis wanted to make. The band were drinking their way through the sessions and generally the prevailing mood was that they were getting nowhere fast. As with Get Happy!!, it was swiftly decided that a change of scene would help. This time, the familiarity of Eden Studios seemed attractive, and once there, the record began to take shape.
Elvis had tired of playing up to the angry, aggressive stereotype, and he and The Attractions finally located the heart of the record in the wiped-out, resigned lushness which characterised the mood of the strongest tracks. Much of the credit for this fell to Steve Nieve, who – having come close to quitting after Get Happy!! – was determined to exert more influence this time around. His piano and organ work dominated the songs, lending a sense of poise and calm restraint which belied the miserable mood of the sessions. In many ways he held the record together.
The previously frantic demo’s of ‘Watch Your Step’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’, slowed down and performed with a new, held-back power, benefited most from Steve’s attentions, but ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’ and ‘Black Sails In The Sunset’ were all enriched by Nieve’s ‘lead’ piano playing. Vocally, Elvis experimented with a low, quiet croon, first utilised on ‘Secondary Modern’ on Get Happy!! and now developed into a silky, lascivious moan, at once amused and disgusted. It was very effective.
The on-going friendship with Squeeze further energized the record. With both acts now managed by Jake, Elvis had already agreed to produce the band’s new record upon finishing his own album, and vocalist Glenn Tilbrook was happy to return the favour. During the sessions, Elvis’s voice was often suffering from the cumulative effects of a little too much hard living, and on one such occasion Tilbrook offered to sing a guide vocal for ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ to enable The Attractions to cut the backing track. ‘The effect was so impressive that we decided to cut the song as a duet when I recovered,’4 said Elvis.
By early November the record was finished, and right until the end the atmosphere was fraught. ‘I remember when we were mixing there were fights,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘Bruce Thomas walking out of the control room, leaving the band and Jake chasing after him. The whole thing was mental.’ In the end, the darkly ironic title of Trust was considerably more apt than the original title: Looking Italian.
On his return from a short tour of Sweden and Norway, which mixed songs from Trust and Get Happy!! with only a selection of old favourites, Elvis was back in the studio to co-produce Squeeze’s East Side Story with Roger Bechirian. Initially Jake had planned for Squeeze to make a double album with Paul McCartney, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and Elvis producing a side each, but although all parties were willing, logistically it proved impossible for everybody to find the time.
It was left to Elvis and Roger to spend the six weeks preceding Christmas 1980 producing the entire record, which was eventually scaled down to a single album. Loosely speaking, Elvis filled the Nick Lowe role as all-round creative inspiration while Roger Bechirian covered the technical aspects, although Bechirian articulates the distribution of talents a little differently. ‘Elvis sat t
here and pontificated a lot about this, that and the other and I got on with getting the stuff down and rallying the band. I mean, Elvis did have an influence to some extent, but it wasn’t that great.’
Thankfully, the band were a little happier to have Elvis in the studio. For Chris Difford and vocalist Glenn Tilbrook in particular, sparring with him was an experience that was both slightly terrifying and wildly inspiring at the same time. ‘I was in complete awe of working with him,’ admits Difford. ‘It was a great challenge to come in every day with a lyric that would be better than the one that he might come up with. I worked diligently and furiously to get the lyrics in such a shape that he would be pleased with them – and me too. I mean, I wasn’t just doing it for him! But it really raised the bar. I could tell which were the weak ones just by looking at his face.’
A shrewd judge at spotting an apt cover version when it came to his own career, Elvis proved particularly adept at seeing the potential in material that the band were disenchanted with. Later becoming a hit single for the band, ‘Labelled With Love’ was destined for the scrap heap until Elvis heard it and immediately recognised a hit. He bullied and cajoled the band into having a second stab at it until they succumbed, in a way that a conventional producer might not have been able to.
Halfway through the recording, John Lennon was shot dead in New York, on 8 December 1980, and work on the album ground to a halt. ‘We went into the studio and a dozen or so musicians just dropped in,’ recalls Difford. ‘We cracked some beers and just played John Lennon songs the whole day. It was highly emotional. We’d lost somebody that we looked up to, a father figure, and one way that we knew how to demonstrate how loved he was was to play his songs in the studio.’
Elvis’s immediate response to Lennon’s murder was to write ‘Kid About It’, which name-checked the traditional song ‘The Leaving Of Liverpool’ and in its original version contained the line: ‘Someone got killed/And he cried.’ He later changed it, but the sense of sadness and loss remained in the finished song.
Upon its release, East Side Story was hailed as a classic and remains arguably the best record the band ever made. ‘I think the sound they got was amazing on that record,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘I’m really, really pleased with it. I think it’s one of the best works that I’ve been involved in.’ Difford agrees, arguing that Squeeze made two great albums ‘and that’s one of them. Working with Elvis was obviously the major reason why’.
* * *
In a craft shop in Washington DC, they were selling stuffed-cloth Christmas tree decorations of Elvis, complete with skinny tie, dark glasses and a curling forelock, for a bargain price of $6. The slightly more valuable genuine article landed less than two weeks later, riding into town on the back of another Jake-inspired masterplan: The English Mugs Tour. Six weeks in all, west to east, with Squeeze supporting Elvis and The Attractions throughout.
He arrived back in America with the knowledge that ‘Clubland’, the opening single from Trust, had stiffed at No. 60 in the UK charts. It broke a run of nine straight Top 40 singles, and effectively marked the end of Elvis and The Attractions’ flirtation with pop stardom. For the time being at least, he appeared unconcerned.
From the start of the tour in Vancouver on 4 January, the legacy of the ‘Columbus Incident’ was discreet but strong. There was tight security, with two guards on the bus most of the time. ‘I just remember his feet hardly touching the ground when he walked through the lobby,’ recalls Chris Difford.
That aside, the contrast to the last time Elvis played North America was vast. The shows were often twice as long as they had been in 1979 – up to thirty songs a night, never less than twenty – and evenly paced, with far more light and shade than before. During the tour he played over sixty songs, spanning his entire career, but almost every date opened the same way – quietly, with ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ or ‘Just A Memory’, featuring just Elvis and Steve on piano, usually followed by the band crashing into ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ‘Strict Time’, or occasionally ‘Hand In Hand’.
One notable exception was Elvis and The Attractions’ first-ever Nashville show on 20 January, where they opened with revved-up versions of three Hank Williams songs: ‘Move It On Over’, ‘Honky Tonkin’’ and ‘Mind Your Own Business’, which did little to impress a young Tennessee crowd who dismissed country as the music of their parents, and were still seeking their new wave kicks in 1981.
Tellingly, there were several other country songs aired on the tour, including Billy Sherill’s ‘Too Far Gone’, Loretta Lynn’s ‘(S)He’s Got You’, and Elvis’s own ‘Stranger In The House’. While in Nashville, Elvis took the opportunity to record two songs at the legendary CBS Studio B, where he had sung his duet with George Jones two years earlier. He and The Attractions cut ‘He’s Got You’ and ‘Too Far Gone’ in a day, with Pete Drake sitting in on pedal steel and Billy Sherill producing. The session was significant: it would turn out to be a deceptively smooth dry-run for the Almost Blue album later in the year.
Throughout the tour, Elvis’s on-stage demeanour was generally amiable; he at last seemed pleased to be there. Cameo appearances from Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and also Martin Belmont during many of the shows also added a bit of spark and sparring which was a million miles away from the surly, arrogant demeanour of old.
At his trio of concerts at the Palladium in New York in early February, Elvis even cracked a few weak jokes, responding to the crowd’s exuberance by ramping up the energy levels, tearing into the new songs. Praising the tightness of the band and the contribution of Steve Nieve in particular, veteran Costello-watcher Robert Palmer of the New York Times concluded that ‘there isn’t another singer-songwriter today who can match Costello’s range, depth, richness of language or sheer productivity. It can only be hoped that he won’t wait two more years to tour this country again.’
At the final show at the Palladium, Elvis had opened with a solo guitar version of Reszo Seress’s melancholic ballad ‘Gloomy Sunday’, a tune so bleak it was also known as the ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’. Made famous by Billie Holliday in 1941, it was a wilfully contrary choice, and one that was virtually ignored by a restless crowd eager for something easier to digest. But it was another sure sign that Elvis was moving away from current pop conventions – and perhaps his core audience – towards the deeper, lasting values of jazz and country.
There was a focused power, a new-found elegance in the music. Elvis himself did his best to match up, sporting a mean line in Al Capone chic: smart suits, shades, waistcoats, silk tie and polished Italian shoes, a slightly more dapper version of his normal attire. He even agreed to be interviewed on the Tom Snyder talk show, his first appearance on live television in the US since the heady days of the Saturday Night Live stand-off in late 1977. The self-imposed media blackout still extended to all print mediums, but it was further evidence of a slight thaw in the air.
In any case, Snyder was an easy ride, a lightweight talk show host who wasn’t going to delve too deep. He didn’t even allude to the events in Columbus, and in general Elvis was free to exert the easy, if guarded, charm which could come naturally when he was so inclined. He dropped Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart into the short conversation, little hints of where his heart now lay.
Despite the poise, the touring antics were often far from refined. With the exception of Bruce – who was merely drinking a lot – Elvis and The Attractions were still running wild on a diet of alcohol, drugs and adrenalin. To cut costs, Jake had put Squeeze on the same bus, which only intensified the activities.
‘The first week or so was fantastic,’ says Chris Difford. ‘There were so many of us it was just like being men on a submarine, and we were all playing cards and getting on really well. By the end of it we had to have security in the middle of the bus to keep us apart. There were a few occasions when bass guitars were flying around.’ There were other jittery moments: following the show at New Orleans, the English Mugs gained a unique insight into some of the
more arcane traditions in the American south, when the tour bus was stopped by the Ku Klux Klan. ‘It was ten o’clock in the morning, and they had guns,’ recalls Difford. ‘Most of us were asleep and the bus driver just told us to keep our heads. The guy got off the bus, he realised we were an English rock band and he let us through.’ First Rock Against Racism, now the Ku Klux Klan. Just what was it with Elvis and America?
According to press reports, Jake conformed to type by sparring with journalist Charley Crespo after the show at Providence on 4 February, but Elvis seemed more relaxed. He had put on weight and appeared less up-tight, more intent on enjoying America than he had been previously. Always interested in good food and expensive wine, he ensured that the culinary standards were higher than the normal roadside café culture of most touring bands. He even took a Good Food guide book. ‘It would be Japanese meals all the time, we’d take a cab sixty miles to go off to lunch together,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘And we polished off some good wine. I remember having a waiter literally weeping on the table because Elvis and I ordered the last bottle of ’61 Haut Brion, whilst having very erudite conversations about social reform, Jeremy Bentham and William Blake. We weren’t idiots.’
* * *
By the time the tour ended in Toronto on 9 February, Trust was in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The American reviews had been strong: Newsweek’s Jim Miller proclaimed it an ‘extraordinary’ record, while Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone was frequently bowled over by the technical brilliance of Costello’s phrasing and wordplay, although he added as a caveat that ‘[Trust] contains some of his very best work and some of his very worst – none of it readily comprehensible, all of it shot through with surprising images and strikingly lovely music’.
Complicated Shadows Page 18