In Britain, where country music was something of a novelty and the songs were fresh to most listeners, Almost Blue got a reasonably positive hearing. In Melody Maker, the ever loyal Allan Jones predictably gave it the thumbs up, concluding that ‘it’s a relief to know that passion isn’t completely out of fashion’. Paul Du Noyer’s NME review was also on-side. ‘Costello and company cut through the layers of smart prejudice to find the music’s enduring values: its sly humour, its lyrical craftmanship, its melancholic dignity. The tunes are lovely as well.’ On the back of the single success and the South Bank Show documentary, which was aired on LWT in early November, the album reached No. 7, a respectable showing considering the nature of the material and that there was no real tour to support it.
It was a very different story across the Atlantic, however. The American notices were caustic, the record regarded with a mixture of incomprehension, suspicion, venom and dismay. Negative reviews in the Village Voice, Trouser Press and a decidedly mixed one in Rolling Stone reached a crescendo in Creem. ‘Time after time he comes off like some hack lounge singer coming to fingertip grips with heartbreak,’ wrote Craig Zeller. ‘Only thing is, the heartbreak is drowning in a sea of clicked saphead, angst-vocal mechanisms.’
Boo Browning in the Washington Post was even more troubed. Raising the spectre of the ‘Columbus Incident’ in the opening lines of his review, he misread Almost Blue as some kind of extension of a perceived assault on traditional American values, or at best an attempt to win back record buyers. It was clearly neither. ‘Costello has invaded the trusting soul of country music and made a mean-spirited mess of it,’ he claimed. ‘I don’t expect him to have any shame about this; I just want him to go home.’
Even the less jingoistic reviews tended to agree that Elvis was not an accomplished enough vocalist to take on many of these songs and win the fight. The release of Almost Blue marked a career low in America, selling a mere 50,000 copies and crawling to only No. 50 in the charts, while also proving that the events in Columbus had not been entirely forgiven. ‘They didn’t understand the motives behind it and they sort of resented us playing their music,’ said Elvis. ‘Maybe it was the aftermath of 1979, maybe that was the final exorcism of all the unhappiness.’15 And not before time.
Chapter Eight
1981–83
THE ‘MASTERPIECE’ WAS ORIGINALLY CALLED Music To Stop Clocks. Then it changed to This Is A Revolution Of The Mind, taken from James Brown’s ‘King Heroin’. Finally, Elvis settled on Imperial Bedroom, the title of a new song which was eventually left off the record.
Setting aside an unprecedented twelve weeks to pull together all his disparate influences and make an ambitious, melodic record which paid little heed to current pop trends, Elvis booked AIR Studios in London to record with Geoff Emerick in late October and November. Although initially he wanted to record most of the album live with only minimal overdubs, after Trust Elvis realised that the tried and tested methodology of Nick Lowe and Roger Bechirian had reached the end of the road. ‘I remember feeling a bit hurt by the fact that we weren’t going to be involved in it,’ admits Bechirian. ‘It was something I really wanted to do. I know [Nick] wasn’t terribly happy.’
As an engineer at Abbey Road, Emerick was a veteran of almost all The Beatles’ recording sessions post-1965, a genuine pioneer in terms of manipulating sounds in the studio. Making all the principal creative decisions himself, Elvis was effectively producing the record, relying on Emerick to make his scattershot ideas a reality. ‘He was used to being thrown an incomprehensible garble of sounds and musical directions and making some sense of it,’ said Elvis. ‘After working with The Beatles at the height of their psychedelic era, he was used to innovation.’1
Emerick’s inclination was to let the musicians find their own way into the music, letting Elvis use the expanded studio time to find whatever it was he wanted from the songs. ‘I wouldn’t say a lot on the sessions, on purpose really,’ Emerick later said. ‘[I wanted] to draw Elvis out of himself. Knowing that this man had the talent and I didn’t, rather than me interject with something, he [had] to think a little bit more. That’s my idea of producing: to draw things out of the artist.’2
Initally, this approach proved a spectacular failure. The first two weeks in the studio were especially nonproductive, the band driving into the songs with little subtlety, the results sounding like a pale imitation of Trust. Then they began to experiment. ‘The thing about Imperial Bedroom was that we went away and rehearsed all the songs and then didn’t do the arrangements when we got in the studio,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘We just improvised totally new versions, changed the lyrics, changed the melody, changed the arrangement, so it’s like we learned the structure of the songs then just deconstructed them and played completely different versions. [They] were changing all the time.’
It was easily the least unified record Elvis and The Attractions had made, partially because Elvis was producing, and thus found himself concentrating more on the sound of the recordings than anything else. The melodies and lyrics were in a constant state of flux, and he was often searching for the right words or meter well after the backing track had been cut. ‘Beyond Belief’ was a case in point, the final lyric and melody boiled down from the more frantic ‘The Land Of Give And Take’. Other times, the backing track might be completed without Elvis, who wasn’t always able to get to the studio due to increasing tensions at home.
His marriage to Mary was going through familiar problems: it remained faithless, and the lack of trust and reconciliation was a constant thorn in both their sides. The family had moved from the house in Richmond to a larger, detached property in Chiswick, but Elvis’s affair with Bebe Buell – although long over – was neither forgotten nor forgiven, and it remained the source of numerous rows. In particular, Mary was suspicious – rightly, as it later transpired – of the sentiments of one of Elvis’s new songs, ‘Human Hands’. With its ‘Oh darling, how I miss you’ sentiments, it seemed to pine for a lost love. In response to Mary’s suspicions, Elvis penned ‘Tears Before Bedtime’, goading his wife that he knew ‘the name on the tip of [her] tongue’.
On the days when he couldn’t make it to the studio, Elvis would post demos to the studio. ‘Pidgin English’, ‘Boy With A Problem’, we pretty much recorded on our own,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Then he’d come in and say, “Don’t like that, don’t like that,” and we’d say, “Well, you weren’t here!”.’
This idiosyncratic, piecemeal approach meant that it was often a particular instrument or sound which defined each track, rather than the full force of the band as a unit. In ‘Shabby Doll’ it was the piano and the bass flourishes which stood out; in ‘Beyond Belief’ the rhythm section, especially Pete Thomas’s brooding drums, which had sprung directly from the drummer’s brutal hangover.
‘I staggered into the studio and it was one of those days when you’ve just got to own up,’ Pete recalled. ‘But you see, Elvis is clever: ninety-nine per cent of people would fire you or send you home. He didn’t. He said: “Have a drink, get yourself happy. I’ve got this song . . .” So we went into the studio and literally just jammed ‘Beyond Belief’, and that was it. One take. Then he said, “All right Pete, you can go home now!”.’3
The freewheeling nature of the sessions allowed them any eccentricity they wanted, adding unusual instruments like mellotrons, accordions, twelve-string guitar, marimbas, as well as strings and trumpets to the songs. Each track was treated individually and exhaustively, until virtually all the possibilities and permutations had been explored. When he was satisfied that Elvis knew the direction he wanted the record to take, Geoff Emerick began using his vast experience and expertise try to make sense of it all. ‘He had a wonderful ear for the crucial performance,’ said Elvis. ‘I realized that it was Geoff who really pulled all the best musical ideas into focus.’4 Slowly, things began to come together.
Steve Nieve was again vital, and the piano was an overriding presence. It was most pro
minent on ‘Almost Blue’, a new track which confusingly took its title from his last album, even though the song itself couldn’t have been further removed from country music. Perhaps his most beautiful and tender composition to that point, it was based explicitly on Chet Baker’s recording of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, and a clear and mesmerising indication that Elvis had all but mastered the art of the classic piano torch song. Elsewhere, ‘. . . And In Every Home’ was transformed by Steve’s eccentric string and brass score, while his accordion playing and arrangement for three French horns added colour to the already distinctive mood piece of ‘The Long Honeymoon’.
There were also some classic band performances on show, nowhere more monumentally than on ‘Man Out Of Time’. The first recorded version – snippets of which book-end the final album track – was a tuneless thrash, stamping all the intrigue and mystery at the song’s heart into the ground. In the later, more considered studio sessions it was transformed into an epic, flowing masterpiece, Elvis’s own ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. All the classic Attractions elements were in place: the octave-skipping piano, the warm organ stabs, the inventive rhythm section, the evocative wordplay, but the sum was a masterful display of both majesty and malice which transcended virtually every other recorded performance Elvis and The Attractions had cut, the ensemble sounding somehow weightier, more expansive and more affecting than ever before.
The basic tracks for Imperial Bedroom were recorded in November, but only after the raw material had been assembled did much of the real work begin. It would be well into 1982 before Elvis had an album he was happy to release.
* * *
If the records weren’t selling as well as Elvis would have liked, there was no disputing his enduring pulling power as a live act. Following warm-up shows at Guildford Civic Hall on 21 December and two pre-Christmas shows on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth at London’s Rainbow, he fitted in three shows in the States.
The concert at the LA Arena on 29 December attracted a capacity 18,000 crowd, while on New Year’s Eve in New York he sold out two sets at the Palladium. Elvis looked slimmer, happier and healthier than he had for some time. In New York, he played over forty-five songs with The Attractions, ranging from country covers to new numbers like ‘Pidgin English’; from old crowd pleasers like ‘Red Shoes’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’ to superior album cuts like ‘Secondary Modern’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’. It was a stunning tour de force, almost a summation of the breadth and diversity of his career in two-and-a-half hours. The new songs in particular shone. ‘Some of them have the harmonic and melodic sophistication of pop standards from the 1930s and 1940s,’ said Robert Palmer from the New York Times. ‘As Costello matures, he seems intent on becoming a kind of latter-day Jerome Kern, and one suspects he has the talent to pull it off.’
But he didn’t just want to be Jerome Kern. The final stop was Nashville’s legendary Grand Ole Opry on 3 January, where most of Almost Blue got an enthusiastic reception at the home of country music. The Attractions – always so much more than a one-trick pony – powered through the likes of ‘Lipstick Vogue’ and ‘Radio, Radio’ for good measure. Then it was back to the Royal Albert Hall in London on 7 January for the most ambitious concert of his career.
This – truly – was Elvis’s final goodbye to any pretence of still being the gnashing aggressor of stereotype. The fifteen-song first set focused largely on Almost Blue material and the new Imperial Bedroom songs, before Elvis came out for the second set dressed in a bow-tie, singing over a voodoo combination of The Attractions, John McFee and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. There were more country covers, re-interpretations of oldies like ‘Watching The Detectives’, ‘Accidents Will Happen’, ‘Alison’ and a monumental, slowed-down Philly soul version of ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’.
It was a somewhat unclassifiable experiment, and one that got off to an inauspicious start when an under-rehearsed and clearly nervous Elvis fluffed the opening verse of the first song with the orchestra. Although later he called it ‘a disaster’, he was being hard on himself. Who else among his peers would have taken such a risk? And while the arrangements didn’t always work, Elvis was in absolutely staggering voice throughout.
The concert was filmed and recorded in its entirety. It’s an indication of Elvis’s opinion of the performance that no footage has ever been generally released, except a live version of ‘I’m Your Toy’ in April 1982. More than anything, the concert was a further indication of his ceaseless desire to keep things interesting and stimulating for himself. It didn’t always have to work.
Elvis continued tinkering with Imperial Bedroom in the early months of 1982, working alone for several weeks, experimenting with different vocalisations and textures on the likes of ‘Kid About It’, ‘Human Hands’ and ‘Pidgin English.’ He was trying to get away from having one feel throughout, a characteristic which had blighted the performances on Almost Blue. ‘I went completely the other way and used overlapping vocals and conflicting styles to suggest there was more than one attitude going on inside the songs,’5 he said.
While he did so, he took the band into Matrix Studios in London in February to bash out a hatful of cover songs, primarily intended as B-sides. Steve Nieve was ‘out of town’ for the sessions, so they played as a trio with Elvis producing. The songs were light, a million miles away from the dark preoccupations of Imperial Bedroom. The stand-out track was a version of Smokey Robinson’s ‘From Head To Toe’, a breezy, good-natured rendition which kept jumping key and featured The Attractions on bawdy call-and-response backing vocals. It was a sign of how much Elvis’s original music was flying against the prevailing commercial winds that when ‘From Head To Toe’ was released as a stand-alone single in September 1982, it became a bigger hit than the two cuts released from Imperial Bedroom: ‘You Little Fool’ and ‘Man Out Of Time’. Tellingly, neither of the three troubled the Top 40.
Work on the new album finally finished in March, but its release would be held up until July due ‘to contractual things in America’,6 according to Elvis, which in reality meant financial problems between F-Beat and Columbia. According to Andrew Lauder, Elvis had been extremely helpful and understanding regarding the sometimes haphazard cash flow problems that F-Beat were experiencing. His reward was to be appointed co-owner of Demon Records and Edsel, both offshoots of F-Beat. While Demon had started as a hobby, releasing independent singles in the frequent gaps between F-Beat releases, Edsel soon expanded into a reissue label, buying up the rights to deleted albums or old material, repackaging them and putting them back into the shops.
To fill the gap between the completion and release of Imperial Bedoom, Elvis and The Attractions went back on the road: a short, six-date tour of Holland in late April, followed by more dates in Australia and New Zealand throughout May and June.
When Elvis returned from the Antipodes in mid-June, he was in possession of a new song. It was called ‘Shipbuilding’. A co-composition, its genesis lay in the music Clive Langer had written for Robert Wyatt, having been influenced by Wyatt’s aching version of the Billie Holliday song, ‘Strange Fruit’. Langer recorded a basic demo of the song, but was struggling with the lyrics until he played the backing track and a sketched-out melody to Elvis at a party at Nick Lowe’s house one evening in the spring of 1982.
‘I said, “Do you want to write the words, and write them for Robert Wyatt?”,’ Langer recalls. ‘Then I went to America to produce a band and he went off to tour Australia, and he called me at my hotel in New York and said: “I’ve written the best words I’ve ever written”.’
Elvis’s lyrics were inspired by the harsh mood of the times. Enduring the opening spell of a decade of gross national mismanagement under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain was ‘at war’ with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a tiny colonial outpost in the South Atlantic. While touring Australia in June, Elvis watched the tabloids salivating over every last detail of the tawdry affair, and for once put aside his cust
omary splenetic rage and mined a deeper seam of reflective, resigned sadness.
‘I was trying to think from the point of view of a father,’ he later explained. ‘The kid’s gone away [to war] on a ship that he’s built. He got his job back, he got his way of life back, only to send his own child to go and get killed.’7 Evoking both the numb waste of war and the destruction of traditional British industries under Thatcher’s Government, the words were a stark warning call which perfectly matched Langer’s poignant melody.
Lyrics in hand, Elvis’s arrival back from Australia preempted Langer’s return from America, and he took the opportunity to put down a guide vocal, before going into the studio to record Robert Wyatt’s vocal over the original backing track. When Langer returned, they all got together and mixed it. The result was ‘Shipbuilding’, the Wyatt version – the original. ‘When I heard the final mix I just left the studio and burst into tears,’ says Langer. ‘It was the most amazing thing. The whole track was beyond my dreams.’ Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’ reached No. 36 in May, 1983, by which time it was being re-visited by Elvis both in concert and on record.
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