Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  * * *

  Imperial Bedroom arrived on the back of a promotional campaign consisting of one simple word: ‘Masterpiece?’ It may have flirted with the truth but probably riled as many people as it attracted. Elvis stared from the back cover of the record wearing half-moon spectacles and a straw boater, looking both bored and a little mischievous, all traces of malevolence wiped away.

  To complete the sober, grown-up image, he began talking to the press again. ‘In the beginning [of my career] I did a few interviews, and I didn’t feel they went very well, so I just stopped doing them,’ he explained. ‘Why be a conspirator in this nonsense they’re writing? Then when the time went by, and I felt there were some things that were perhaps necessary to explain, I changed my mind.’8

  There were other, more practical concerns. Giving interviews was an almost essential part of publicising any new album release. The lack of cooperation on Elvis’s behalf hadn’t helped flagging sales, and his consent to giving interviews was part of a sustained charm offensive designed to run parallel with the US tour. But primarily it felt like he wanted to clear the air, specifically regarding the Columbus incident, about which he had remained silent since that combative press conference in New York in 1979.

  The most significant of all the interviews he gave was with Greil Marcus in the July 1982 issue of Rolling Stone, which served as both an apology and an explanation for that drunken brawl in the bar of the Holiday Inn. ‘It’s become this terrible thing, hanging over my head,’ he admitted. ‘It’s horrible to work hard for a long time and find that what you’re best known for is something as idiotic as this.’

  He was even more candid in the New York Times. ‘A lot of people were very angry, and rightfully so. If you make a career out of contriving anger up on stage, whether you’re feeling angry or not, sooner or later you’ll find yourself saying things, using words you don’t mean. But I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses. There aren’t any excuses for saying things like that.’ He repeated the apologies in the LA Times and in Newsweek. It must have been hard medicine to swallow for a man as proud and wary of press hypocrisy as Elvis, but he surely must also have realised that if he had said those simple, heartfelt words three years earlier, he would have spared himself a lot of heartache.

  In any case, the critics were already in a forgiving mood. Imperial Bedroom was lauded almost universally. In Rolling Stone, Parke Puterbaugh awarded it four-and-a-half stars out of five, praising Elvis’s imaginative use of his voice and the crisp production. The Village Voice cared less for The Beatles touches but loved the songs, applauding the new humanity in the writing by concluding: ‘The Elvis Costello we know may have made his last record. Could that radiant entity have been merely the chrysalis of an emerging Declan MacManus?’ Robert Palmer evoked Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart in the New York Times, concluding that ‘the album seems to be a concious attempt to get away from rock entirely, to write pop songs worthy of a Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald’.

  Perhaps the comparisons to the great songwriters and singers of the ’30s and ’40s were taken too far. After all, only a handful of the songs on Imperial Bedroom – ‘Long Honeymoon’, ‘Almost Blue’, perhaps ‘Kid About It’ and ‘Town Cryer’ – could legitimately be said to have been composed or performed in anything approximating that style.

  The pre-rock influence was more overt in terms of the instrumentation, the restraint and detail in the music, and the compassion in the voice which coloured most of the record. For despite its myriad influences and restless insistence on shunning all the easy options, Imperial Bedroom was ultimately an album of fantastic, richly drawn pop music. Crafted, instantaneously beguiling and bewildering at the same time, it endlessly rewarded repeated listens in a way that Armed Forces or Trust simply couldn’t. There was nothing that bore comparison with the angry swagger of This Year’s Model or the bare-knuckled punch of Get Happy!!. This was something new. Brighter than Trust, frequently humourous, grown-up without being dour or unadventurous, it was a coherent, audacious fulfilling of much of Elvis’s immense potential.

  The NME’s Richard Cook observed that ‘the obsessive little misanthrope has been displaced by a cooler commentator’, and noted astutely that ‘Costello has finally achieved a synthesis of words and music’. Melody Maker was a rare dissenting voice, yearning for a little less cleverness and a little more ‘raw passion’ and songs which really stick. ‘Frankly Elvis,’ concluded Adam Sweeting, ‘I expected more.’

  * * *

  The US tour kicked off in Santa Cruz on 14 July, and it was clear that Elvis’s new-found charm had not deserted him on stage. His high spirits, apparent throughout the tour, peaked at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia on 25 August. It was his twenty-eighth birthday, and before the final encore, Jake came on stage and announced to the audience that ‘a dangerous animal has escaped from the zoo’. The Attractions then returned to the stage followed by Elvis wearing a full gorilla suit, jamming the microphone inside the gorilla head to sing a jazzy R&B cover of Percy Mayfield’s ‘Danger Zone’.

  A funky, R&B flavour was evident throughout the tour: regular covers included James Brown’s ‘I Got You’, The O’Jays’ ‘Backstabbers’ and The Youngbloods’ ‘Pontiac Blues’, a Flip City live staple from way back in ’73 and ’74. Elvis played somewhere between thirty and forty songs a night, primarily focused around Get Happy!!, Trust and Imperial Bedroom material, but finding room for everything from the country material to ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’, both of which made a rare appearance during the first of two nights at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre on 20 July. ‘Shipbuilding’ was the only ‘new’ song on display.

  With a larger body of work to draw on, catering for all aspects of the audience’s tastes proved problematic. In San Diego on 24 July, Newsweek’s Jim Miller found that ‘most of Costello’s new material seemed to sail right past the restive young crowd. What grabbed the fans was the jackhammer beat of ‘Pump It Up’ – one of those angry songs out of Costello’s past.’ Elvis admitted that pleasing everyone as well as himself was becoming something of a conundrum. Previously, he would have played whatever he wanted.

  But representing all the extra nuances and textures of his most recent recorded work on stage was the greatest challenge. As he stretched himself in the studio, trying to reproduce Imperial Bedroom’s subtleties of voice, instrumentation and style in an hour-and-a-half was nigh on impossible. He had fewer options in concert, both with his vocal stylings and The Attraction’s arrangements. The shows were often powerful, but the power came at a price: ‘. . . And In Every Home’, ‘Beyond Belief’ and ‘Man Out Of Time’ in particular were proving tricky to pull off live.

  The tour ended on 6 September, and Elvis and The Attractions immediately flew home to do it all again in Britain. There had been no hit singles in the UK, and although the album reached No. 6 – but only No. 30 in the States – it quickly dropped. ‘Imperial Bedroom got some of the greatest reviews imaginable, [but] it didn’t sell more than any other record,’ said Elvis later. ‘The record company couldn’t find any obvious hit singles on it, though I thought it had several.’9

  He had legitimate cause for complaint. In America in particular, Columbia still hankered after the golden age of Armed Forces. They had little appetite for the new, cultured Costello, at least not musically, and Elvis felt they were shamefully timid in promoting the record. However, the stuttering sales of Imperial Bedroom also marked the beginning of a dedicated Costello campaign, devoted to blaming the record company for any number of woes. Largely through his own appetites, Elvis had become an artist with a loyal core audience, but his career now operated on the fringes of commercial viability. With only a few exceptions, the music he made from this point on was too varied, too challenging and often too downright bloody-minded to attract huge audience numbers or score hit singles. He couldn’t have it both ways.

  Nonetheless, Elvis appeared relaxed and amiable throughout ‘Th
e Bedroom Of Britain’ tour, letting fans backstage to meet and talk to the band, signing autographs, posing for photographs and handing out kisses. As one observer noted, ‘no angry words, no sneers, just smiles and jokes’.

  On the opening night in Southampton, he played for well over two hours, cramming in nearly forty songs. Aside from his own interpretation of ‘Shipbuilding’, the only other new song unveiled during the four-week tour was ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, written quickly in a Derby hotel room on 23 September as a Merseybeat spoof, and performed the following evening at Leicester De Montfort Hall. Just like the old days.

  Elvis spent part of the time following the end of the tour on 6 October in the studio, producing six tracks for The Bluebells,32 who had provided support on the tour. He was writing new material, wrestling with a way of putting on a more sophisticated live show that could cope with the complexities of his most recent songs.

  Having watched Imperial Bedroom die something akin to a commercial death despite a keen promotional campaign, rave reviews and a successful tour, he was eager to change direction once again with the next record. With The Attractions in tow, he road-tested some of the songs for what would become Punch The Clock in late 1982 with a single show at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool on 21 December and two shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh.

  Each night, as the shows reached their conclusion, The Attractions were augmented by the Imperial Horns, the brass section from Dexy’s Midnight Runners: Big Jim Paterson on trombone, Paul Speare on tenor sax, Jeff Blythe on alto sax, plus newcomer Dave Plews on trumpet. ‘I had the idea of getting some horn guys in and they were available,’ he said later. ‘So we [rehearsed] songs going back over the last two or three albums and did arrangements for those. It worked out so well that I was keen to have them come in and play on the new album.’10

  He had already used a ‘thrown together’ brass section on the November single ‘Party Party’, a dreadfully jaunty number written and recorded quickly to accompany a truly forgettable film of the same name. Now Elvis planned to make horns an integral feature of his new sound.

  The handful of new songs on show at the Christmas concerts – among them ‘Mouth Almighty’, ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, ‘The Comedians’, and ‘The World And His Wife’ – bore scant relation to the versions that would eventually appear on the next record. The early, storming live version of ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, for example, showcased the song in the traditional, bustling Attractions mould, while ‘The World And His Wife’ was originally played solo as an acoustic ballad.

  However, it became clear that everything was open to change, similar in a sense to the spirit that Elvis and the band had harnessed during the Get Happy!! sessions. While that record had been a breakneck, drug-fuelled sprint through every rough-and-ready soul styling in the book, Punch The Clock was to be a slicker, more calculated take on the pop-soul sound.

  It would not be a record where critical plaudits were high on the list of priorities. For all his belief that success wasn’t measured in terms of shifting units, Elvis badly wanted a hit single. Rather like a film actor who deigns to star in the occasional Hollywood blockbuster in order to fund his more heartfelt independent efforts, from this point on he would always insist upon trying to pick up the threads of his pop career after spells of single-minded experimentation; partly to show that he could, and partly because he understood how the realities of the business worked. ‘Counting Trust, we’d gone three records without any substantial hit apart from ‘Good Year For The Roses’,’ he later admitted. ‘You have to consider if you allow that contact with the mainstream audience to be severed for too long, you may lose the freedom to do what you want to do.’11

  From the very start, Punch The Clock was a conscious attempt to reconnect, and Elvis needed a production style to match his ambitions. Having satisfied his more sprawling, cerebral cravings under the tolerant gaze of Geoff Emerick, he sought out the services of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. They were undisputably the hottest pop producers of the day, and had recently scored a US No. 1 single with ‘Our House’ by the quintessentially English pop group Madness. The fact that Elvis’s old friend Langer was the dominant partner in the axis was an added incentive, but the duo’s Midas touch in the charts accounted for the major part of their appeal. ‘I think he accepted that that’s what we did as producers: [have] hits,’ says Langer. ‘He always reacts against what he’s done before, so we went for it. We tried to get singles.’

  As soon as rehearsals began in early 1983, it became obvious that the new production team would have a more active role in the creative process than had been usual in the past. While Emerick had largely left Elvis to his own devices, Langer and Winstanley demanded a far greater degree of discipline.

  They shaped the songs, applying a jerky, rhythmic logic to them, structuring each one in a way that left little room for improvisation. Langer was ruthless about getting The Attractions to play the same things over and over again, and much time and attention was taken over the contribution each instrument made to each song. It was a way of working that was alien to the traditional happy spontaneity of Elvis and The Attractions. ‘Langer and Winstanley favoured the building block method of recording,’ Elvis recalled. ‘Retaining very little from the original live take and tailoring each instrumental overdub to best serve the arrangement.’12

  In rehearsal, these methods teased out an arrangement of ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ that was unlike anything they had ever recorded. ‘It’s like a Beatles song, but Elvis would come in and say, “I’m listening to Marvin Gaye, can we go in this direction?”,’ says Langer. ‘I was really excited by the idea that Elvis Costello could make a calculated pop record. I wasn’t very interested in recording the band, you know, as just a band. I was interested in the whole idea that Elvis could make incredible pop music.’

  The challenge of making a gung-ho pop album with contemporary rhythms and lots of instrumental hooks affected the way Elvis wrote. Having used the piano to compose the bulk of the Imperial Bedroom material, he had initially continued in this vein for the new songs, picking out soft melodies and melancholy ballads. Although Elvis later claimed that Punch The Clock was an upbeat, outward looking record, it was clear to Langer that the familiar woes weren’t far away from the surface. ‘I thought there was a lot [of issues] from his first marriage when I worked with him,’ he confirms. ‘‘TKO’ and things like that, I thought they were based on domestic issues. We did talk about it at times.’

  Langer cajoled him into picking up a guitar to write some more lively material. ‘The Element Within Her’, ‘The Greatest Thing’ and ‘Let Them All Talk’ were all written to fulfill this criteria, bold slices of bright pop which complemented the preordained sound they were after. In some instances, Elvis even wrote with the new horn section in mind. ‘I wrote at least three songs on the album leaving the gaps,’ he said. ‘I used to go “ba baba, ba baba!” when I sang.’13

  This process was not without calculation. The perky ‘Love Went Mad’ was an example of a slight song that was included on the final record at the behest of Langer, even though its author had serious reservations about it. Such were the compromises in creating a record with one eye on current trends and the other on the pop charts. However, Clive Langer stresses that making the record was a mutually creative process. ‘Elvis was up for it. At certain times I would have control, other times I’d just let him do it, but if he really didn’t like something it wouldn’t go on, it was as simple as that.’

  The producers brought many of their own ‘house’ musicians and trademark musical reference points into the mix: backing vocalists Caron Wheeler and Claudia Fontaine, known as Afrodiziak, had worked with them several times, and became a central part of the Punch The Clock sound. Dave Plews apart, all of the horn section – now dubbed the TKO Horns – had been involved with Langer and Winstanley on the last Dexy’s Midnight Runners album; string arranger Dave Belfor
d had also worked with Madness.

  For the first time in the studio, the fiercely independent Attractions were sharing musical space with a number of session musicians. ‘I think the band enjoyed the process of that album,’ says Langer. ‘The more difficult it was, the more of a challenge it was. There was a discipline, because I had a certain amount of control which they weren’t used to. Normally Elvis had control.’ Nevertheless, neither Elvis nor the band were ever completely convinced of the merits of their producer’s highly calculated approach to making the record. ‘Those trendy production values,’ recalls Bruce Thomas with a shudder. ‘Everything gated together, very bright and shiny. It wasn’t our thing, but it worked on a couple of tracks.’

  Ironically, the two stand-out tracks on the record were the sparsest, the ones that mostly steered clear of sonic gimmicks. ‘Pills And Soap’ was a stark, stabbing piano track based on Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, rush-released as a single in May on Elvis’s own IMP label and then supposedly deleted – in actual fact, it never was – on the eve of the 1983 general election. Loosely inspired by a film about the abuse of animals which had made Elvis turn vegetarian, it hid a scabarous – if obscure – political viewpoint beneath the surface.

  Meanwhile, ‘Shipbuilding’ stood up against the very best of his recorded output. While always conceding that Robert Wyatt’s version was the original, Elvis liked the song so much he wanted it to be heard by the widest number of people possible. To make his version even more distinctive, he visualised a trumpet solo on the track.

  Chet Baker wasn’t the first choice. Langer recalls that Wynton Marsalis was discussed but wasn’t in the country, while a typically undaunted Elvis had Miles Davis as his original first pick, but it so happened that Baker was in London in May playing a residency at The Canteen. His melancholy, melodic trumpet sound and remarkable good looks had made him a 1950’s poster boy, but he had since descended into a grim cycle of cocaine and heroin addiction which gripped him until his death in 1988.