But these were only peripheral factors. The primary fact remained that the shows were often uninspired, and many critics and fans alike simply didn’t have time for much of the new material Elvis was playing. On the first of six nights at the Hammersmith Odeon on 1 July, the response veered from lukewarm to openly hostile; the audiences were strangely undemonstrative, seemingly unsure of who it really was beneath the beard.
The headline above a stunningly critical review in Melody Maker simply read ‘The Imposter’, while another proclaimed: ‘This Year’s Muddle’. The next night at the Odeon, Elvis responded to a shout from the audience calling him a genius. ‘Ah, not yet I’m not,’ he replied. ‘That’s next week. And the week after that I’ll be a fucking idiot again.’
The sets were merely solid rather than spectacular, similar in composition to the ones in the States, although ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Watching The Detectives’ were added to most concerts. There was a single rendition of ‘Shipbuilding’ in Glasgow and airings for ‘Almost Blue’ in London and Bristol. ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ – virtually meaningless in America – also came into the British set, sung solo and complete with a post-Thatcher verse encompassing the ‘glove puppet’ Prime Minister John Major, calling for him to ‘Kick the royal cuckoos out of the nest/And place the Queen Mother under arrest.’
On 16 July Elvis fulfilled a long-standing – and financially suicidal – commitment to return to the Shetland Isles with a band, playing the Clickimim Centre in Lerwick, where he seemed to get a kick out of playing for locals rather than sneering critics. From there it was on to the rest of Europe, where there were a handful of cancellations due to poor ticket sales.
The torrential ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ became the new opening song on most of the remaining tour dates, first played at the Irish Feile festival on 3 August, and carried over into the second leg of their American tour a few days later. The derision was becoming contagious. ‘Costello has the musical equivalent of Woody Allen Syndrome,’ said Fred Schuster in the Daily News. ‘He wants to be taken for a mature, serious artist; his public wants the funny songs.’ Schuster then went on to rate Elvis’s performance at the Universal Amphitheatre on 17 August as exuding ‘all the passion and personality of a plate of cottage cheese. It hurts to say it: Elvis is dead.’
Chapter Thirteen
1991–93
THE NEXT DECADE SAW ELVIS COSTELLO moving even further away from the solid ground of being Britain’s greatest, most incisive songwriter, into less certain, less convenient territory. Along the way, he effectively ceased to be anything remotely resembling a pop star.
He was thirty-seven years old and keen to test himself further by exploring the outer reaches of his fascinations. Far from being daunted by the negative press for Mighty Like A Rose, Elvis felt he was only beginning to touch the surface of his capabilities, and was as sure as ever of the intrinsic value of his artistic instincts. ‘Critcism just makes him more determined in his own way to do whatever he wants to do,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘And Mighty Like A Rose gave him the confidence to do anything.’
The logical conclusion of Elvis’s obsession with classical music was to start working and writing squarely within that idiom. His on going enchantment with the Brodsky Quartet and his frequent attendance at their concerts had not gone unnoticed by Warner Brothers, who were also the Brodsky’s record label. A meeting between the two parties was subsequently engineered following one of their lunchtime Shostakovich concerts at the South Bank Centre in London in November 1991; the get-together between the Quartet, Elvis and Cait in the Archduke Wine Bar, proved a spectacular success, each of them quickly establishing a bond which had little to do with high-brow classicism, but rather was founded on personal chemistry and wide-ranging musical enthusiasm. ‘From the first afternoon we met, we were discussing the possibility of collaboration,’ said Elvis. ‘It was a very natural thing.’1
The lunch meeting dragged on happily until seven o’clock in the evening, when everyone suddenly remembered they had other places to be. As they drifted out to the street to say their goodbyes, the six began crossing the road back towards the Festival Hall. It transpired that they all had tickets for a performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony that night. ‘It was really weird,’ says Cassidy. ‘We went to the concert and then went back to the wine bar! That was a Thursday, and we started work on the Monday.’
Throughout November and December they would meet in the Quartet’s rehearsal space at the Amadeus Centre in Maida Vale, north London, and quickly realised that musically they were all coming from the same place. They compiled tapes of their favourite songs and instrumental passages, played music to and for each other, and talked constantly, trying to formulate a musical language that they all understood.
Almost immediately, the Brodsky Quartet realised that Elvis was not some bored, dilettante rock star, dangling his toes in classical music for want of anything better to do. ‘We thought that maybe he knew a wee bit about this and a wee bit about that, but the fact that he could talk about orchestral pieces or a Stravinsky ballet was the extraordinary thing,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘It was fascinating for us to find that Elvis was not only aware of the music of Shostakovich, for instance, but knew it intimately and was able to say, “You know that bit in the Fourteenth Symphony, that’s the sort of thing that turns me on”.’ According to violinist Michael Thomas, ‘Elvis [knew] more about classical music than we did.’
Similarly, Elvis was excited and a little relieved to discover that the Quartet were not confined to the cloistered world of classical music. Not only did they know his own music well and had attended many of his concerts, but they also had a wider awareness of the more innovative artists in pop and rock. ‘We were able to say to him, “Don’t you think Brian Wilson is a genius?”,’ confirms Cassidy. ‘We were aware of Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell and Meredith Monk and Bjork and he was aware of the sort of people we were building up.’
It proved to be an almost perfect mixture of personalities and interests. Before breaking up for a Christmas hiatus in December, they agreed to reconvene in January and February and begin writing together. Already, they had settled on a format. Cait had read a newspaper article about a professor in Verona who had taken it upon himself to reply to the thousands of letters that came addressed to Juliet Capulet, the heroine of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The professor started replying to each letter, until one day he was subjected to allegations of impropriety in the Italian press and subsequently dropped the project. As such, there was a vacancy, and an advert in the British newspapers requested applicants for the job of replying to Juliet’s anonymous correspondents. Cait saw the story and showed it to Elvis, who in turn brought it to the attention of the Brodsky Quartet, and they all agreed that it provided a good starting point as a focus for the project: the letter form.
* * *
By his return in mid-January, Elvis had achieved two new personal landmarks: he had learned to read and write music; and – perhaps just a little less remarkably – he had written an entire album for Wendy James.
In the late ’80s, British trash-pop band Transvision Vamp had launched a minor pop career based on James’ overtly sexual pose and the ability to come up with a decent quote. At the Feile festival the previous August, James had watched Elvis from the wings with admiration and envy as the last seconds of her fifteen minutes of fame ebbed away. ‘I could see that everything he was saying and doing were in my heart and mind as well,’ she later said. ‘People might take at face value the music of Transvision Vamp and the way I had behaved in the past and the way Elvis conducted himself and think we were poles apart, but we’re not.’2
Having decided to leave the band, Wendy James put her rather optimistic theory to the test. When she bumped into Pete Thomas in America while on an autumn promotional tour, Pete had suggested – without any promises – that she contact Elvis if she was interested in his work. A little later, James claims she sat down in Washington and wrote Elvis a lette
r. ‘It was a bit like a letter to an agony aunt,’ she said. ‘I wrote down all the reasons why I wasn’t really a happy person – not with my emotional life, but with my musical life. I simply said, “I need to get better, and you’re what I consider is better. So can something be done?”.’3
Within two weeks, Pete Thomas called to tell Wendy James that Elvis and Cait had written her an entire album. It had been composed between Friday evening and Sunday night, a weekend diversion for their own amusement as much as anything else. With its echoes of The Stones writing for Marianne Faithfull, or Lee Hazelwood for Nancy Sinatra, it’s likely that the Svengali-ish nature of the project also appealed to him. ‘We did it as a kind of gag,’ Elvis admitted. ‘I just took some fragmentary things from the odd newspaper article which told me what she was supposed to represent and then invented a character for her which she could probably play.’4
The songs were short and simple, closest in feel to This Year’s Model out-takes and a world away from anything Elvis had written recently. Lyrically, they referenced a litany of London landmarks, and baited James into conceding that her wildly ambitious, loud-mouthed public persona was something of a joke, and not a very good one at that. The first song was called ‘This Is A Test’. Another, ‘Puppet Girl’.
Elvis went into Pathway with Pete, and over two days they knocked the ten songs together in single takes, Elvis playing guitar and bass and a little piano, and Pete on drums. When James returned to Britain from the US in December there was a demo tape of an entire album’s worth of material waiting for her at her flat. ‘I thought I’d landed in heaven,’ she said. ‘It was only later it dawned on me that it was now down to me to do something with it.’5
Despite her public enthusiasm, James was reportedly a little reluctant to record all the songs as a piece, but Elvis’s all-or-nothing ultimatum eventually forced her hand. When the album was finally released in March 1993, entitled Now Ain’t The Time For Your Tears, it failed to have the impact that she desired. Her voice hadn’t improved any, the songs sounded tinny and badly produced, and it would prove to be the last record she would make. As Elvis had had nothing to do with the making of the album other than writing the songs and letting James get on with it, he claimed not to care one way or the other.
Learning to write music, in contrast, was serious stuff, and the minimum commitment Elvis felt was required to make his work with the Brodskys an equal and enjoyable collaboration. He had resisted making the leap into notation for some time, wary that he might be disconnected from the impulse of simply creating music by instinct. ‘I didn’t want to lose sight of the other way of writing songs,’ he admitted. ‘Just picking up a guitar and making a noise and getting something out quick.’6
However, neither did he want the frustrations he felt when relying on Richard Harvey to orchestrate his ideas on GBH, or Fiachra Trench on Mighty Like A Rose, to compromise him on this project. So he taught himself – with the help of a tutor in Ireland – the basic craft of reading and writing music in about a month. Although Elvis was some way down the road to musical notation already, and initially he was only able to work painstakingly slowly, it was nevertheless an astonishing accomplishment. ‘It’s a very complicated process,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘It’s something I learnt over the years, gradually.’
Composition with the Brodsky Quartet began in earnest in the New Year of 1992. They were already tentatively thinking in terms of an album, but primarily the ensemble were simply playing for their own amusement. They approached it systematically. On any given day they would go home and write a love letter, the next it would be a begging letter, or a chain letter, or a postcard, a thank you or a suicide note, coming in the next morning with their homework from the night before. Then they would mesh all the ideas together into something that worked as a whole. ‘One of the best ways to work was for one person, namely myself, to be the editor,’ explained Elvis. ‘Everybody would come with these things and I’d say, “That’s great, that bit, that whole paragraph there is really the way his character speaks, and it can be juxtaposed with this”. Little by little it came to make up a text.’7
Sometimes, they used extracts from real letters which had been sent to Elvis from fans. The lyrics for the second part of ‘I Thought I’d Write To Juliet’, for example, were taken verbatim from a letter that was sent to Elvis from a young female soldier called Constance, serving in the Gulf War: ‘If I do get home alive, I imagine I will think again,’ she wrote. The music itself came organically. When Jacqueline Thomas conjured a siren sound on her cello, it was incorporated into the song.
There was the odd track that Elvis brought in completed, but on the whole they used the same approach that a rock band might take if it were jamming. ‘I remember Elvis coming in one day and sitting down and saying, “I’ve got this really nice little thing I want you to hear”,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘It was literally a four-bar idea, which subsequently became a little part of ‘A Letter Home’. He’d play it on the piano a little bit, someone else would come in with a little riff, and the songs grew.’
The process moved quickly, but it was not without its own particular stresses. It was the first time that any of the Quartet had tried to write original songs, their background being one of interpretation and performance rather than composition, and the emotional vulnerability of providing words in particular proved difficult. ‘You can imagine sitting next to one of the greatest lyricists of all time and going, “Your eyes are like the stars,” y’know!’ Cassidy laughs. ‘It was tricky, because you’re dealing with another side of each other. If someone comes in and says, “Jesus, sorry, but that lyric’s really embarassing,” you’re touching something else. That was something that we as a quartet had to deal with, that undeniably created a lot of tension.’
By the beginning of March the musicians had all but brought a halt to the writing process, fearing that it would soon become unwieldly. Further time was then spent getting the songs into shape and assembling them in such a way that they would hold together as a unified concept, with a rhythm and a sense of light and shade.
Already, the plan had formulated to record it as an album, but first – as with most classical works – it would have to be performed. The first public flowering of an intense six or seven-month period of work came with the debut performance of this ‘work in progress’ on 1 July. It took place at the Amadeus Centre before a largely invited audience of about 400 people, including family, friends, and Alan Bleasdale. By the time of the performance the song sequence had been christened The Juliet Letters in honour of its original inspiration, and arranged in the order in which it would finally be recorded.
Elvis was shorn of both locks and beard and seemed physically to be something approaching his old self, but he was nervous at the prospect of his first-ever foray into live performance in the classical sphere. And rightly so. ‘I caught this feeling at the Amadeus Centre,’ says John Woolrich, co-founder of the Composer’s Ensemble and a friend of the Brodsky Quartet. ‘There was a sniffiness there all right, and quite a lot of “Elvis who?”.’8
The evening was split in two, with an intermission after the opening seven songs, and Elvis stilled any dissenting voices by singing beautifully throughout. He was also unamplified, an acoustic quirk that caused some problems as the adrenalin levels rose. ‘We came off for the interval and Elvis just went, “What the fuck?!! What are you doing?? It’s so loud!”,’ recalls Paul Cassidy. ‘This was someone who had spent his life in a rock band.’
With an electric instrument, the same noise will emerge unless the volume knob is turned up, which clearly isn’t the case with an acoustic instrument. Elvis had been playing with the Brodsky Quartet for six months, but he had never heard them in performance mode, and as soon as he was standing in the middle of the group in concert, the energy levels – and hence the volume – exploded. So did the audience, who gave this unclassifiably seductive music a standing ovation and called them back for an encore, which consisted of the repetition
of three songs. They had no other material they could perform together.
Much of the rest of the summer was spent at Dartington Hall in Devon, a sprawling estate that incorporated an arts society. The Brodsky Quartet were in residence at the Dartington International Summer School, an annual gathering which encompassed composing masterclasses, workshops, courses and concerts. It was here, in the fourteenth-century Great Hall on 13 August, that Elvis and the Brodsky Quartet played their second concert in front of their classical peers. It was the same set as the one they played at the Amadeus Centre – the songs and order having been established – but Elvis began the second encore with a new song, the freshly minted ‘Favourite Hour’, written on piano in a silent rehearsal room. It may have been the most beautiful – if ominous – combination of lyrics and melody he had ever composed.
On either side of the performance at Dartington, Elvis – as plain Declan MacManus – spent time teaching the songwriting class, working diligently and making no attempt to pull rank by explaining who he was. ‘He offered a refreshingly new perspective on songwriting,’ said John Woolrich, who was a fellow contributor to the course. ‘The odd thing was that after two weeks many of our students were still unaware that the talkative guy in horn-rimmed specs, who had been acting as midwife to their hesitant attempts at songwriting, was Elvis Costello.’9 He found the experience and relative anonymity of Dartington energising. It gave him a tiny glimpse into a life he might have chosen, had music not taken him over at such an early age. ‘I never went to university, so it was like a little flavour of university life, sitting on the croquet lawn on a sunny afternoon or in the pissing rain,’ he said. ‘It was very enjoyable and there were lots of great concerts.’10
Played-in and perfected at Dartington, The Juliet Letters was recorded quite painlessly in September and early October at Church Studios in Crouch End in London. Produced by Kevin Killen, it was essentially a live recording of the concerts, and the only real technical problem was ensuring that Elvis’s voice didn’t overpower the instruments in the small studio.
Complicated Shadows Page 31