Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  As the highly-strung sessions continued throughout March, April and May, The Attractions eventually succeeded in conjuring up a rolling pop sound on some of the more melodic songs: Steve Nieve’s chiming keys turned ‘Blue Chair’ into a thing of considerable beauty, while Elvis did a passable John Lennon impersonation at the end of the bridge. Bruce Thomas’s ‘Taxman’ bass line finally nailed ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, while ‘Next Time ’Round’ seemed to take ‘La Bamba’ as its lift-off point. Elvis often undercut the songs with a degree of malevolent humour and – when it worked – it made for some exhilarating music.

  Cait was around, naturally. She provided backing vocals on ‘Poor Napoleon’ and ‘Crimes Of Paris’ and co-wrote the sweeping global nightmare of ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ with Elvis. Some of The Attractions were rather chauvinistically sceptical of this creeping ‘Yoko Ono’ factor, but her contributions to Elvis’s songs throughout their relationship consisted of much more than suggesting the odd word here or there over breakfast. ‘It is a huge pity Cait wrote so little in those years,’ says Philip Chevron. ‘But it would be a mistake to underestimate the work she did do. Cait was very much an equal partner on those co-compositions. She genuinely is a great writer.’

  Immediately after the sessions concluded, Elvis and Cait were ‘married’ on 17 May, 1986, the day of Self Aid, a well-intentioned if politically dubious attempt to provide charity for Ireland’s unemployed, featuring U2, Van Morrison, The Pogues and Elvis and The Attractions. In true rock ’n’ roll fashion, the ceremony – such as it was – was romantically squeezed in between the afternoon soundcheck and the evening performance at the RDS Showground in Dublin.

  In fact, the marriage was not a legally recognised union at all. Elvis was still married to Mary, and although her initial petition for divorce was decreed on 17 November 1986, the decree absolute did not take place until much later: 3 February 1988. As such, Elvis and Cait’s union was in name only. ‘It was a spiritual wedding,’ Cait later said. ‘Dec’s been married before so we didn’t get married in church, and a registery office would have been too cold.’5 The fact that neither of these options were legally available to the couple mattered little. They were very much in love, and instead of a formal ceremony, they held hands in St Stephen’s Green in the centre of Dublin and exchanged rings by the duck pond, as firm and genuine a commitment as either of them required. They never would officially be man and wife.

  That night, Elvis and The Attractions opened with ‘Leave My Kitten Alone,’ Little Willie John’s dynamic blues, recorded for Blood & Chocolate but left off the final album. He dedicated the song to, ‘Cait, my kitten from Clare’. The rest of their short set was enthusiastic, but a little rusty. Having played just one gig prior to Self Aid, there were definitely a couple more gear changes to be made. In Dublin, ‘Uncomplicated’ and ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ fought it out on stage with ‘Pump It Up’ and a rough, misguided cover of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, but Elvis was in fine form throughout, teasing and working the 30,000 crowd like an old hand. As if to herald the fact that he was making classically recognisable ‘Elvis Costello’ music again, he was clean-shaven, back in his trademark black horn-rims and dark suit.

  Blood & Chocolate had been finished in May with everybody just about still on speaking terms, and although the mood within the camp was frosty, European festival dates had been booked throughout early July. The relatively short sets featured only a handful of the new tracks, usually ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’ and ‘Uncomplicated’.

  The album was scheduled for a September release and Elvis had the summer free of muscial responsiblities. He popped over to America to join Cait and The Pogues in Chicago on 12 July, getting rip-roaring drunk with Tom Waits and his band after-hours at Holsteins folk bar. Much of the rest of his time was spent making a film.

  Elvis had done tiny pieces of acting before: he had appeared as Earl Manchester in Americathon as early as 1979, and had recently had speaking bit-parts as a family member in the TV series Scully and as bungling magician Rosco de Ville in No Surrender, both written by Liverpudlian Alan Bleasdale. But Straight To Hell was his first feature film.

  The film had been conceived by British director Alex Cox, featuring The Pogues, Joe Strummer, Courtney Love and Elvis, as well as ‘proper’ actors such as Sy Richardson, Kathy Burke and Dick Rude. Cox had recently directed The Pogues in the video for ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’, and was fresh from the success of Sid And Nancy, his biopic of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon.

  A political animal to the bone, Cox had organised a benefit gig for Nicaragua at the Brixton Fridge in 1985, at which most of the musicans taking part in the film had played. Initially, he had planned to get all the acts to play a similar concert in Nicaragua in solidarity with the freedom movement there, before releasing the footage as a concert film. However, no one seemed willing to put up the funds for such a blatantly politically motivated venture, and eventually the project fell through, with the result that, according to Cox, ‘there was an embarrassing hole in everybody’s schedule which I was really responsible for’. To plug the gap, the director proposed Straight To Hell as an alternative, a homage to the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that he loved, to be filmed in searing heat in Almeria in Spain in August and September 1986.

  The script for Straight To Hell had been knocked off in a matter of days and the filming wrapped up in about four weeks. The speed of both the film’s conception and execution was glaringly apparent. ‘I should have worked harder on the script and not just dashed it off,’ admits Cox. The film was an extravagant exercise in pastiche which capitalised on the fame of its main participants (there were also cameos from Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper) while making little impact beyond that.

  Elvis played Hives, the obsequious butler. Cox was impressed with his ability and clearly saw something in his performance which most people missed. ‘He really stands up next to Kathy Burke, next to real professional actors,’ he says. ‘He was very studied, and very thoughtful and serious about it. He thought what his character would do and came up with improvisations for extra scenes. He took it very seriously.’

  For Elvis, Straight To Hell was fun for a short while and then became a drag. His presence in Spain was essentially as a companion to Cait, and despite Cox’s comments, his role as the subservient butler appeared to have been loosely thrown together as a dramatic extension of his real-life role as the most put-upon member of The Pogues entourage. ‘It was quite interesting actually, the way things were played out as a sort of parallel to real life,’ says The Pogues’ multi-instrumentalist Jem Finer. ‘There was a scene where Elvis was tortured which was cut out, and he was a sort of bullied character, a loser. In a sense it was almost like Alex Cox and maybe everyone else – in some sort of collective consciousness – played out the things that they would like to do in real life.’

  The most significant fall-out from the shoot in Spain was Cait’s departure from The Pogues. It had been coming for some time, spreading slowly through the year. When Elvis flew to Los Angeles in late September to prepare for the start of his tour with The Attractions, Cait posted AWOL and accompanied him, instead of meeting The Pogues at Eezihire Studios in London to rehearse for their imminent tour. Eventually, she showed up for rehearsals a week late and stayed for a day, before taking her bass home. Two days later she was back with Elvis in Los Angeles, and phoned the band to say she was leaving, this time for good.

  The increasing strain in her relationship with The Pogues, not to mention the difficulty of maintaining a personal relationship in which both parties were successful musicians touring the world had proved too much. Cait chose to bail out and support Elvis, and for the next decade and a half she was his almost constant companion on tour, and occasionally on stage and on record. ‘She actually faced up to the choice of being with the man she wanted to be with or being with the band,’ said Pogues banjo player Terry Woods. ‘When decisions get down to personal levels l
ike that then I think personal life takes precedent.’6

  * * *

  Following the making of the twin polarities of King Of America and Blood & Chocolate within a few months of each other, Elvis constructed a stage show designed to reconcile all the disparate elements of his career over the past two years: solo balladeer, roots revivalist, and spitting mad Attraction. He also wanted to have a little fun. He planned extended residencies with both The Attractions and The Confederates in fifteen cities in the US and Europe, playing between two and five nights in each city, attempting to make each night in each town a markedly different spectacle from the other.

  This unprecedented and ambitious tour came on the back of Blood & Chocolate, released on 15 September. With a bizarre cover painting by Elvis’s transparent alter-ego Eamnon Singer and a back photo featuring him as Napoleon Dynamite, those looking for an identity crisis could find plenty to shout about. But the sleeve attributed the record simply to Elvis Costello and The Attractions, and the searing music held within left no one in any doubt.

  Many listeners welcomed it as his most musically straightforward record since before Get Happy!!. Robert Hilburn in the LA Times made copious – if erroneous – Armed Forces comparisons, opining that it was the record fans had ‘been waiting seven years for him to deliver’. But a closer inspection revealed that this was something new. Although Blood & Chocolate featured The Attractions at full volume and fundamentally unadorned, it was darker, less harmonically ambitious, and lyrically much more personal than anything Elvis had done in the late ’70s. This was a subterranean record, with little emphasis on subtlety or melody. Most of the time, the band were recorded as though they were a single instrument, as brutal, blunt and effective as a club.

  The record was roughly split in two, between the repetitive, mono-rhythmic nightmares of ‘Uncomplicated’, ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’, ‘Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head’, ‘I Want You’ and ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’; and the brighter pop of ‘Blue Chair’, ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, ‘Crimes Of Paris’, and ‘Next Time ’Round’. Only the dreary, disjointed ‘Battered Old Bird’ and the atonal ‘Poor Napoleon’ failed to quicken the pulse.

  As an extended mood piece it worked brilliantly, but Blood & Chocolate required an element of faith from the listener. This was not easy listening, and reviews were mixed. In the NME, Adrian Thrills celebrated the ‘welcome resurrection of a tough, uncompromising streak that has been underplayed since the turn of the decade’, but The Times was less impressed with the ‘maudlin songs peopled with morose, cobwebbed characters’, concluding that the record sounded as though it were conceived in a ‘bout of musical agoraphobia’. Rolling Stone occupied the middle ground, singling out ‘I Want You’ as a career highlight, but viewing much of the rest of the record as ‘too often glib and sketchy’.

  It was easily the starkest record Elvis had made, and perhaps his truest, but the density and idiosyncracies of Blood & Chocolate ensured that he was increasingly destined to make his big splashes in a small pond. Columbia viewed the record with some distaste, the long, murderous songs and murky production a world away from the clean, crisp pop of Armed Forces which they still coveted. ‘They hated it and subsequently just fucking buried it,’7 said Elvis, although he did little to aid his own cause.

  With pop songs of the calibre of ‘Blue Chair’ and ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ at his disposal, to release the doggedly uncommercial ‘I Want You’ and ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ – both over six minutes long – as the first two UK singles was a wilfully perverse move on Elvis and F-Beat’s part. Elvis always expressed surprise that ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ wasn’t a hit, clearly crediting the record-buying public with more adventurous tastes than they merited. It made No. 73. Little wonder that Blood & Chocolate would be the last record Elvis would make with Columbia, and his least commercially successful, limping to a pretty disastrous No. 16 in the UK and a truly awful No. 84 in the US. With typically contrary timing, Elvis saw this as the perfect moment to embark on the most creatively ambitious and financially draining tour of his career.

  Beginning on 1 October 1986, at the Beverly Theater in Beverly Hills, California, the concerts were intended to showcase the full span of Elvis’s abilities and enthusiasms. The opening night was a loosely based ‘Greatest Hits’ – or rather, best-loved – set with The Attractions, including a request slot and three tracks from King Of America: ‘Lovable’, ‘Jack Of All Parades’ and ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’. ‘The music itself was stirring,’ said Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, which was on ‘Costello-watch’ and reviewing all five nights at the Beverly Theater. ‘Terrific songs sung with passion and played by The Attractions with captivating force.’ However, the much-vaunted request slot was a mess and inherently unspontaneous, as Elvis rather comically rifled through the crumpled notes thrown on to the stage, before choosing the one he wanted to play. It all ended – predictably enough – with ‘Pump It Up’.

  The next night, Elvis performed mostly alone, featuring only a handful of songs that had been played the previous evening. Highlights included a tongue-in-cheek cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Pretty In Pink’, a live debut for Blood & Chocolate out-take ‘Forgive Her Anything’, a beautifully rewritten ‘Deportees Club’ and a stunning solo ‘I Want You’, which reduced the audience to silent awe.

  After fifteen solo songs the mood changed, as T-Bone Burnett jumped on-stage and The Coward Brothers rifled through five songs, including The Beatles’ ‘Twist And Shout’. The Confederates, consisting of King Of America stalwarts James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner and Mitchell Froom, joined in for the final ten songs, and the next night they had the whole show to themselves.

  The emphasis was on rootsy, good-time rock ’n’ roll and country. Most of King Of America received an airing, as well as well-worn R&B covers such as ‘Sally Sue Brown’, ‘It Tears Me Up’ and ‘That’s How You Got Killed Before’. The original songs worked well in concert, but the handfuls of covers tended to drag. Despite an increasing insistence on playing blues music, Elvis would never be particularly convincing handling such stodgy material, often sounding puffy and uninspired. However, mid-set he slipped five gems into his solo spot: ‘Green Shirt’, ‘Party Girl’, ‘Heathen Town’, ‘Little Palaces’ and ‘American Without Tears’, the latter with a brand-new lyric.

  If night three was a gently swinging, somewhat middle-aged affair, then the following evening’s show was where the real fun erupted. Saturday, 4 October marked the debut of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, the dramatic centrepiece of the tour. The Songbook was a twelve-foot-high carnival wheel plastered with thirty-eight different song titles, from Elvis favourites to obscure or bizarre covers like Prince’s ‘Pop Life’ and Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’.

  Like a cheap TV game show, members of the audience were taken on-stage to spin the wheel, overseen by Elvis in the guise of MC Napoleon Dynamite, as well as any passing celebrity who happened to be in the area. As the band played their chosen selection, the audience member could listen to the song in a section of the stage named The Society Lounge, or they could dance along in the go-go cage. ‘It started as a flip suggestion for solving the problem of which songs to sing,’ said Elvis. ‘[But] it made for an interestingly random evening.’8

  Having strolled down the aisle towards the stage as Napoleon Dynamite, Elvis led The Attractions into a lashing ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ before the interactive festivities commenced. Elvis’s personal assistant Paddy Callahan – to be known as Xavier Valentine for the evening – picked members of the audience to come up on stage to spin the wheel. They were greeted by the two guest MCs, X’s John Doe and the exemplary Tom Waits. Replete with bowler hat, the gruff Waits in particular was a masterstroke, hollering out the evening’s entertainment with an intrinsic understanding of the ringmaster’s art. He set an impossibly high standard for the rest of the tour.

  In Beverly Hills, the wheel threw up a few nice surprises: ‘Strict Time�
�, ‘Miracle Man’, ‘Motel Matches’ and ‘Temptation’ among others, but in truth, Elvis’s long-standing predilection for changing his sets around on a nightly basis, throwing in rare old songs and brand-new ones, rendered the Spinning Songbook largely superfluous. It was primarily there for Elvis and the audience’s amusement rather than to conjure any genuine musical oddities.

  Elsewhere during the evening’s entertainments, John Doe joined in on The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’, Waits duetted with Elvis on a cover of ‘I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know’, and three-quarters of The Bangles replaced The Attractions mid-set, adding backing vocals on The Beatles’ ‘Yes It Is’, their own ‘If She Knew What She Wants’ and Elvis’s ‘Next Time ’Round’. Then The Attractions roared into the second half with ‘You Belong To Me’, before closing on the irresitible one-two of ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ and ‘Pump It Up’. In the LA Times, Chris Willman called the hugely entertaining proceedings a ‘spectacle akin to a meeting of PT Barnum, any slick TV game show host you want to name and The Troggs. It was all warm, witty and wonderful.’

  It was also difficult to top, but that wouldn’t stop him trying. The final night’s performance at the Beverly Theater was designed to showcase the Blood & Chocolate material. Elvis and The Attractions played nine songs from the record, but there were other delights: ‘The Beat’, ‘Man Out Of Time’, ‘Clubland’, ‘Suit Of Lights’, ‘Kid About It’ and a medley of ‘Ferry ’Cross The Mersey’ and the ultra-rare ‘Tiny Steps’ to name a few. The encore featured Tom Petty on ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’, ‘American Girl’ and ‘So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star’.

  The shows were an undoubted triumph, but it wasn’t all sweetness. Elvis was having a fractious time with the media. First, he had banned news photographers from the concerts, attracting widespread criticism. Jake Riviera claimed that photographers would ‘ruin the show for the 1300 people who bought tickets’, adding with typical forthrightness that ‘most newspapers and magazines in this country aren’t worth reading’.9 Instead, one photographer was hired to distribute syndicated photos to all the papers.