Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Disappointed with the standard of the performances, Elvis scrapped any plans to use the band again, but neglected to inform them. The Attractions spent the rest of their time in Los Angeles sitting in the hotel at Elvis’s expense, quietly fuming, waiting for an invitation that never came. ‘I was furious about it, absolutely furious,’ said Pete Thomas. ‘He should just have said, “I’m going to make a solo album, don’t worry about it.” The worst thing about it was that we were all there, day after day, not getting the call to go to the studio.’17

  The fiasco killed the already shaky morale of the band. ‘I thought, “If you’re going to fire us, fire us”,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘It was like being sacked by instalments.’ Elvis, they felt, had become distant and arrogant, treating them like little more than faceless session men after eight years of close, constant collaboration and companionship. ‘We had more or less been alienated,’ admits Thomas, who for one detected a growing sense of eccentricity in Elvis’s behaviour. ‘I remember going into his room at the hotel and he’d just had all the album sleeves done; there were all these pictures of him with a crown on dotted around the room, big three-foot squared photos. I thought, “You’re basically having your psychosis now, aren’t you? Your identity crisis.” I stuck a Burger King crown on my copy.’

  * * *

  Elvis had always been high profile, putting out at least one album a year and touring relentlessly. Throughout 1985, his relative reclusiveness – and his dishevelled appearance on the odd occasion when he was sighted, such as Live Aid – provided the perfect fodder for gossip. Heavily bearded, usually wearing a hat and shades and sometimes a shawl, rumours had been circulating in the press for some time: he was an alcoholic, he was suffering divorce trauma or writer’s block, he was a heroin addict.

  Elvis has always been fanatical about keeping abreast of what the media are saying about him, as both Bebe Buell and Bruce Thomas can testify. ‘He reads every review,’ says Thomas. ‘He was always the first one down at the news-stand every morning.’ Pogues engineer Nick Robbins recalls Elvis keeping close tabs on the gossip when they were recording Rum, Sodomy & The Lash. ‘Every day in the studio he’d come in with all his newspapers and the first thing he’d do is hunt through to see whether he’d been mentioned. He’d get quite upset if he had and quite upset if he hadn’t!’

  Media talk of a personality crisis was given passing credence by the fact that Elvis had made the decision to revert back to his real name. Since as early as 1982 he had occasionally raised the subject in interviews. ‘I was tired of the way people saw Elvis Costello,’ he said. ‘They saw this funny pair of glasses and a load of mannerisms.’18 Now, he legally made the swap back to Declan MacManus. There were other factors in the reversal: he was involved in divorce proceedings with Mary and probably felt it was easier to use the name he was married under, while the relationship with Cait and his tightness with The Pogues seemed to be teasing some of the latent Irishness out of him. Although Elvis often cited professional reasons for changing his name, ultimately it seemed to be a private decision, marking a return to some kind of personal contentment. He has never released a record as Declan MacManus,33 merely changing his publishing credits to D.P.A. MacManus. The ‘A’ is for Aloysius, added as a lighthearted tribute to comedian Tony Hancock, or Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, as he was known in Hancock’s Half Hour.

  Tales of Elvis’s growing eccentricity and creative impasse would be conclusively killed off in 1986 by the strength of King Of America, but the record was still many months away from its release date. He had completed the album with further combinations of the American session musicians, finishing in the autumn of 1985 with an aborted take on ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and an aggressive, hoarse-voiced cover of The Animals – and Nina Simone’s – ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, with Tom Waits percussionist Michael Blair on marimba. The latter song was a late addition to the running order, added as a last-minute sop to Columbia who, with their predictable set of priorities, didn’t hear any singles on the record.

  With the record done, Elvis had time to take stock and work out what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. He needed time to recharge the engine. The Pogues were touring heavily, capitalising on the success of Rum, Sodomy & The Lash – released to much acclaim in August 1985 – and throughout October, November and December, Elvis trailed the band through Europe.

  He was enjoying the opportunity to indulge in the kind of extended break he hadn’t experienced since the release of My Aim Is True. Spending time away from home, falling deeper in love with Cait, was the perfect antidote to the previous year’s personal and professional pressures. ‘I think it’s fair to say that people in his office clearly thought he’d lost the plot,’ says Philip Chevron. ‘They could never get hold of him. He was off in fjords of Norway with The Pogues, giving no account of his actions, living a sort of belated youth. He was having a great time.’

  On his travels as an unofficial Pogue, Elvis was happy to take on any duties that were required of him. He might stand in for the guitar roadie when he fell sick; in Freiburg in Germany he took the place of drummer Andrew Ranken, who had a septic hand. On 6 November in Malmo, Sweden, he even agreed to be Shane MacGowan. The singer had gone down with a serious bout of pneumonia, and Elvis filled in, singing ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’, ‘Old Main Drag’, ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘Boys From The County Hell’. It was – predictably – a drunken, shambolic set.

  Elvis was generally well-liked by the band, and his presence on tour was accepted for a variety of reasons. ‘He was always good for a tenner,’ admits Chevron. ‘Certain people shamelessly touched him for money.’ He didn’t try to steal their thunder, mostly content to stay firmly in the background as they made tentative inroads into the big time. However, it was not all sweetness and light. There was a degree of professional needle, primarily from Shane MacGowan. As the principal songwriter and visionary of The Pogues, MacGowan regarded himself as Elvis’s peer and equal in a way that the others did not. Already sensitive, volatile and quick to attack, MacGowan felt threatened and a little patronised by Elvis’s adoption of the band, and began to retrospectively criticise the job he had done producing Rum, Sodomy & The Lash.

  Furthermore, The Pogues were a band of merciless mickey-takers, and the humour became increasingly cruel and crude as Elvis’s relationship with Cait developed and deepened. The couple had started dressing the same way, reading the same books, and they became a ripe source of amusement to the band. There was nothing underhand in The Pogues’ behaviour. Elvis knew what people thought about him. ‘It was very often [to his face] or Cait’s face,’ recalls Philip Chevron. ‘He became the whipping boy for a number of people in the band. Not just the guy you pushed for money but the guy you took the piss out of, the guy that you bullied almost. There were times when I felt the cruelty went too far.’

  It was a strange turnaround. Elvis had often been a figure of fun to The Attractions, especially as time wore on, but he paid the wages and called the shots, and was always regarded as the boss. This time, he was an outsider – a guest – among a large group of complex and fiercely individual characters. As a man who had plenty of experience travelling the world being nasty to people from within the cocoon of a rock band, it was an interesting process to be on the receiving end of the same kind of behaviour. ‘Groups like The Pogues, groups that are in a class of their own, can be very cruel,’ Elvis rationalised. ‘When I’m about, the cruelty just transfers to me.’19

  He tolerated the barbs because of his relationship with Cait, but it also fed into the deep-rooted sense of being apart – even of victimisation – that had spurred him from an early age. There had always been a whiff of masochism in Elvis’s music and motivations, and ultimately the jibes brought him and Cait closer together. They were a very tactile, demonstrative couple, and all the sweetness started to become a little too sugary for many of the band. ‘Occasionally, it got just a bit nauseating
,’ admits Philip Chevron. ‘Canoodling at the back of the studio while you’re trying to do some work.’

  The growing ill-feeling reached a head when Elvis agreed to produce the Poguetry In Motion EP at Elephant Studios in January 1986. Matters combusted over the recording of ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’, The Pogues most ambitious song to date. By this point, Shane MacGowan hated even being in the same room as Elvis, and had taken to not showing up in the studio when he wasn’t needed. He felt that Elvis’s production ideas were limiting the vision of the band – and his own artistic vision in particular – while infringing too much on the personal politics of The Pogues. ‘Essentially Elvis got sacked from Poguetry In Motion,’ says Chevron. ‘He was questioning the structure of the band. There was a groundswell of anti-Elvis feeling.’

  The problems soon affected Cait. The taunts and abuses heaped upon Elvis continued even in his absence, and when The Pogues arrived in America in February 1986 she was feeling increasingly isolated. By the time the tour reached New York in late February, she had tired of the relentlessly masculine atmosphere in the band, and was feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the first real rush of fame. The Pogues were taking New York by storm, feted by the critics and meeting the likes of Matt Dillon and Robert De Niro, who loved the band. Twenty-one-year-old Cait was swept up and almost away in the excitement. Taking a lot of cocaine and drinking ‘for twelve hours straight’20 in the VIP lounge of the Limelight Club, she eventually broke down. ‘Cait was going way off the rails, she was just like a kid in a sweet shop,’ recalls Mat Snow, the NME journalist who accompanied The Pogues on that tour. ‘Wasn’t sleeping, was just getting a little bit psychotic.’

  Back in Britain, Elvis was concerned by the reports coming back to him. He arranged for Bill Flanagan, a New York-based journalist and MTV supremo whom he’d been friends with for many years, to visit Cait at the hotel, take her to JFK Airport and put her on the next flight back to London. The first The Pogues knew about it was waking up the next day and finding that their bass player was nowhere to be found. They were far from pleased.

  Cait returned to America in early March to complete the tour, having reportedly slept for two days straight. She clearly needed the break, but the covert manner in which it was taken would prove to be the beginning of the end of her involvement in the band.

  Chapter Ten

  1986–87

  BY THE TIME KING OF AMERICA was climbing the nursery slopes of the charts in the spring of 1986, Elvis was back making a row with The Attractions. It would ultimately prove to be a valedictory reunion, but in truth the band hadn’t really been missed on the new record. Their sole contribution on ‘Suit Of Lights’ was sober and dignified, but it would be difficult to imagine them improving on the finished album.

  Finally released in February 1986, King Of America showed a bearded Elvis on the cover, decked in a gaudy, brocade jacket and wearing a crown. He wore almost-round, wire-rimmed spectacles and looked both older than his years and slightly bemused, daring the audience to laugh at his world-weariness. The name Elvis Costello didn’t appear anywhere on the record, which must have delighted Columbia. Instead, it was lumberingly credited to ‘The Costello Show featuring The Attractions and The Confederates’, co-produced by Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus. The sleeve dedication was to all four of his grandparents.

  It was a beautiful record, restrained, sad and personal, featuring some of Elvis’s very best writing and monochrome, Dylan-esque shifts in the music. The smart word games and hedged bets had all but vanished, replaced with a compelling honesty. The bitter-sweet ‘Indoor Fireworks’ was a book-end to the domestic pain of ‘Home Truth’, and a fittingly tender goodbye to Mary, while ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’ was a defiant declaration of his love for Cait, with a dig at The Pogues buried in its centre.34 In between, there were break-neck country canters, minor-key folk songs and heartbreaking ballads, while lyrically it spanned the lacerating social side-swipe of ‘Little Palaces’ to the laugh-along ‘Glitter Gulch’, all played with impeccable style and grace by the disparate band of musicians.

  Not everything worked. The most unrepresentative and least alluring cut from the record had been released as a single in January. A clumpy, footsore complaint, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ reached No. 33 in the UK, backed with the third-rate Attractions tear-up ‘Baby’s Got A Brand New Hairdo’. Elsewhere, the callow R&B of ‘Eisenhower Blues’ was simply uneccesary, while the bouncy, puppylike charms of ‘Lovable’ wore thin.

  But overall King Of America was a triumphant return to the fray, fighting it out with Get Happy!! and Imperial Bedroom as Elvis’s finest record. In Melody Maker, Nick Kent (who had crossed the floor from the NME) heralded him as ‘still this blighted isle’s finest songwriter, a force who, at his best, is simply beyond peer’. The NME seconded the motion. Both reviews placed perhaps undue significance on the name change, reading ‘Suit Of Lights’ in particular as the burial of Elvis Costello and the rebirth of Declan MacManus. In the US, Creem astutely praised Elvis’s musicianship, rightly placing his austere, undulating rhythm guitar-playing at the heart of the album. Elsewhere, the majority of the critics were pleasantly surprised at the warmth and compassion on show, the all-encompassing excellence of the songs and the playing.

  But it was the same old story: rave reviews, poor sales. King Of America reached No. 11 in the UK and No. 39 in the US, and Elvis was becoming increasingly disillusioned with what he perceived to be Columbia’s growing indifference to his career. Believing that the record company still regarded This Year’s Model and Armed Forces as the commercial template for the kind of music he should still be making, Elvis decided to tackle them head- on. The new songs he was writing suited the particularly no-nonsense recording approach of his initial records with The Attractions. He already had ‘Blue Chair’, ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and ‘Next Time ’Round’ left over from the King Of America sessions, and he wrote several more songs quickly on guitar.

  The generic style of the new tracks was brutally simple and rhythmically primal, often featuring little more than two or three chords. ‘Uncomplicated’ – something of a theme tune for the record – was written in the middle of the night by Elvis banging his hands on his kitchen table and singing into a tape player, dispensing with any musical accompaniment at all. Under such circumstances, who else could he call but Nick Lowe and The Attractions?

  The tentative rapprochement began with a one-off session at Eden Studios, cutting a hastily co-written song called ‘Seven Day Weekend’ with reggae legend Jimmy Cliff for a film called Club Paradise. The presence of Cliff probably kept everyone on their best behaviour, but it was always going to be an uneasy truce.

  The ‘air of suspicion and resentment still lingered’,1 according to Elvis, when they went into Olympic Studio One in Barnes, London, in March to begin work on the album. ‘It was a much more uptight situation,’ said Nick Lowe. ‘It wasn’t a gang feeling. I never really knew what their internal arguments were, but they had plenty of that, Lord knows.’2

  The idea was to get the songs down on tape before the personal chemistry became so negative that they would have to abandon the whole project. Taking the ‘uncomplicated’ maxim as far as they could, Elvis and the band played the songs loud and live through a stage PA with no separation, ensuring lots of spillage in the sound. It was a unique approach, essentially like recording a live concert in a cavernous studio with a few microphones dotted around the room. Subsequently, the denser songs like ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’, ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’, ‘Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head’ and ‘Uncomplicated’ became thick, dark blocks of noise, each part virtually inseparable from the other.

  ‘It was a total mess,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘There were no screens, no separation on the drums, the bass, nothing. It was a soup.’ They often captured a track in a single take, usually taking no more than three stabs at each song before moving on. There was little deliberation. The few overdubs that were required w
ere usually completed straight after the best take had been decided upon. The album’s title, Blood & Chocolate, seemed to perfectly sum up the texture of the music.

  These techniques might have created the kind of claustrophobic effect that Elvis was looking for, but it was not a particularly rewarding experience for the band, and did little to ease personal tensions. ‘I thought it all added to it, the fact that there was a little bit of bile in there,’ admitted Nick Lowe. ‘In fact, I used to rather encourage it.’3 Elvis, too, was rarely happy if the atmosphere was too easy-going in the studio, although he sometimes had trouble recognising when to let go of the compulsion to create tension. In Olympic, he stirred up the sour atmosphere to accentuate the primitive, violent music they were making. ‘He created situations where you just basically wanted to strangle the bastard,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘You’d be just about to walk out and he’d say, “What’s the problem? What’s wrong?”. So you’d stay and do the take and he’d get the angst that he wanted, but then you’d go away for two days thinking: “Fucking bastard”. I suppose it was an artistic device, and maybe now I can see it a lot more than I did at the time.’

  It was astonishingly effective on ‘I Want You’. Perhaps Elvis’s darkest, bravest song, it was immeasurably enhanced by the uptight, quietly furious Attractions burning a slow fuse behind six minutes of Elvis’s increasingly unhinged cravings. The primal studio technique added to the sense of drama, and in the final minute everything the listener hears is coming through the vocal mike, the band bleeding onto the backing track to create a ghostly echo behind the choked voice. ‘The vocal performance sent shivers down my spine,’ admitted Colin Fairley, engineer on the sessions. ‘The mix used on the album is the original monitor mix thirty minutes after we cut the track, warts and all. I’m convinced this performance from the whole band was achieved because of this unusual studio set-up.’4