Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Other than that, it was a case of simply capturing a performance in a room; there was no overdubbing or editing between different takes. ‘That’s what I love about working with Elvis,’ said Killen. ‘He takes a lot of chances, and it’s always a pleasure to work with someone like that. You know the record is going to be of a certain quality and that vocally the performances are going to be spectacular. They are intense records, both to make and to listen to.’11

  As he readied himself for the album’s release and a short world tour, Elvis – never happy unless busy – pressed on with other side-projects. Immediately after the album sessions had been concluded in October, he recorded demos of ten cover songs in one day. The songs were a private album for George Jones, following a conversation between Elvis and Jones in Interview magazine in which Elvis expressed the hope that Jones might one day record an album of classic songs outside the country genre. Included were Paul Simon’s ‘Congratulations’, Springsteen’s ‘Brilliant Disguise’, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘My Resistance Is Low’, Gram Parson’s ‘Still Feeling Blue’ and Dylan’s ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, with Elvis backed by Pete Thomas and Paul Riley.

  A few days later he renewed his accquaintance with the Count Basie Orchestra, at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 October. After the embarrassment of his performance with Tony Bennett at the Red Parrot club in 1983, Elvis finally convinced the orchestra he could carry a tune, with versions of ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Lil’ Darlin’’.

  The following week he was due to be in even more exalted company, scheduled to perform ‘Positively Fourth Street’ at Bob Dylan’s fiftieth birthday tribute at Madison Square Garden on 16 October. However, the late addition of the Pope-bashing Irish singer Sinead O’Connor to the bill apparently prompted a last-minute change of heart. ‘Catholics, Catholic clergy and Catholic values have become the whipping post for every bigot in America,’ said Elvis in a statement. He did not attend the concert, although he later claimed that it was because he was never actually given confirmation of when and where to turn up.

  * * *

  The Juliet Letters was launched in the appropriately high-brow surroundings of a garden party in The Orangery in Holland Park on 6 January 1993, and released into the shops a week later. It was a truly unique record, fantastically clear and uncluttered-sounding, sometimes very funny, often intensely moving, at times unerringly beautiful, and occasionally falling foul of the basic audacity and ambition of its premise. Above all, after the often harsh vocalisations of Mighty Like A Rose, it was a pleasure to hear Elvis singing with such clear, open-throated abandon. It was also nice to hear the Quartet’s lyrical contributions; despite what some may have seen as the inhospitable nature of the musical set-up, The Juliet Letters was the warmest record Elvis had made since King Of America.

  The ballads worked best: ‘For Other Eyes’, ‘Taking My Life In Your Hands’, ‘Why?’ and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ were beautifully constructed and as emotive as anything Elvis had sung; ‘Jacksons, Monk and Rowe’, ‘Romeo’s Séance’ and ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ were simply great pop songs. At the very heart of the record lay a profoundly moving trilogy: the anti-war lament of ‘I Thought I’d Write To Juliet’, moving into ‘The Last Post’ with the sound of an air-raid siren eerily recreated on strings, which then segued into ‘The First To Leave’, a blasted torch song which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Frank Sinatra’s Only The Lonely.

  Inevitably, there were some misfires. Some of Elvis’s more theatrical vocal mannerisms grated on record where they might have worked in concert: ‘Swine’, ‘I Almost Had A Weakness’, the opening passage of ‘I Thought I’d Write To Juliet’ and ‘This Offer Is Unrepeatable’ tested the listener’s patience, while ‘Damnation’s Cellar’ had unfortunate similarities to one of Eric Idle’s Monty Python compositions. But in general it was a triumphant and seductive record.

  Most reviewers concurred. The notices for The Juliet Letters were highly complimentary in the main, and not just in the broadsheets and high-brow magazines. Spin rated it as ‘one of Costello’s best’, Newsweek called him ‘a songwriter beyond genre’ and Melody Maker’s perennial fan Allan Jones claimed ‘its ambition deserves your perseverance and rewards your time and effort. You know this is an album you’re going to be able to live with down the years’.

  However, there was a small but predictable amount of sniping here and there at what some saw as pretension and affectation, while others queried Elvis’s motivations. ‘To be constantly questioned about the validity of what I’m doing is just tedious,’ he later said. ‘You can not like it, that’s your choice, but to suggest that the things I’m doing are to make myself look more important [is nonsense]. Or the more idiotic criticism you get from classical music critics is that you’re doing it to make money.’12

  With a successful classical record typically selling in the region of 15,000 copies, he had a point. However, Elvis had always been sensitive to poor reviews and, already bruised by the catcalls for Mighty Like A Rose, he was more defensive than normal. This was partly because he was especially proud of the unique nature of The Juliet Letters, and partly because he felt he was representing four other people who weren’t normally thrown to the mercy of fickle pop and rock scribes.

  A savage review entitled ‘Dead Elvis’ in Vox magazine raised his ire to the extent that he sent an open letter to the reviewer, Patrick Humphries. Much of it was a slightly childish, aggressive and personal attack on Humphries’ writing and apparent lack of intellect, but there was a moment of clarity beneath the rage. ‘The Juliet Letters is not some devious trick, pastiche or bored experiment, it is a beautiful thing,’ Elvis wrote. ‘To hear it you need ears and you need soul, but consumed as you are by improbable indignation you do not even have the courtesy to acknowledge that many of the songs were written with or by members of the Brodsky Quartet.’

  The members of the Quartet appreciated his allegiance, even if it seemed a little reactionary. ‘Elvis – bless him – was absolutely adamant that we put across that this was a five-way collaboration,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘We were determined to show that we were working together, this was not him sending us some songs to make into a string quartet.’

  The world tour kicked off at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 22 February 1993 and took in the major points of the globe in a mere twenty-five days: Scotland, Denmark, Germany, England, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Japan and the USA, ending at the New York Town Hall on 18 March. Each night, Elvis would step out onto the stage with The Juliet Letters songbook, which he placed on a music stand throughout the concert. Some saw this – alongside the dinner jacket, bow-tie and theatrical hand and facial gestures – as a rather ridiculous, grandiose affectation, but Elvis claimed the book was there as a tangible representation of their collective efforts, to reinforce the idea that this was a genuine collaboration. But it was also there to hide behind. Elvis had never spent so long on stage without a guitar.

  Aside from The Juliet Letters, performed in full and in sequence each night, there were extra treats in store for the audiences – a new song by Elvis and Michael Thomas called ‘King Of The Unknown Sea’, an arrangement of ‘Almost Blue’, and some handpicked covers: The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’, the children’s song ‘Scarlet Ribbons’, Tom Waits’s ‘More Than Rain’, Jerome Kern’s ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’ and Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost In The Stars’. The traditional Irish song, ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, was added to the set especially for the show in Boston on 17 March, arranged by Irishman Paul Cassidy in honour of St Patrick’s Day.

  The next night, following the final date of the tour in New York, there was an added surprise for Elvis and the Quartet at the post-show party. Outside, a young woman came up to the steward and introduced herself as Constance, the female soldier who had written to Elvis during the Gulf War and whose letter he had used for the lyrics of ‘I Thought I’d Write To Juliet’. She had returned safely from
the Gulf and the day before the concert had completed her military service. ‘That was really spooky,’ says Cassidy. ‘The more cynical amongst us would say she was Isobel MacGowan from Dumfries, but actually I believe it was her.’

  The Juliet Letters material proved to be incredibly forceful on stage. The concerts were almost universally well-received, and audience responses were often ecstatic. It may have had less impact on record, but that didn’t necessarily explain why wasn’t it shifting more copies. ‘I know by the reaction of people that that album could have been really huge,’ says Cassidy. ‘And [Warners] buried it. They buried it because they didn’t understand it.’

  Although the record company had been content to let Elvis record the album, they didn’t really consider it to be ‘proper’ Costello product. It was viewed largely as an indulgence, an amusing side-step before Elvis got on with the job of making music with a beat again. ‘I actually had someone very senior at Warner Brothers at that time say, “This Juliet Letters would be all right if it just sounded more like ‘Eleanor Rigby’,”’ Elvis said. ‘I said, “Yeah, but Paul McCartney already made that record. Why would we want to make that again? We’re trying to make a record that’s not like ‘Eleanor Rigby’.”’13

  The Juliet Letters reached No. 8 in the UK charts and sold well throughout Europe, but it didn’t chart in the States, the first Elvis album containing original material to fail to do so. Elvis – still seemingly convinced that everything he touched had inate commercial potential – thought he knew where to lay the blame.

  Even so, it had been a short and very successful world tour. There was certainly scope for many more concerts, but there was something in the format and the songs that seemed to preclude over-kill. The Juliet Letters was a very personal statement from five people, and they chose to protect it, to be unwrapped occasionally as a rare and beguiling treat. ‘Elvis’s shows are always full on,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘He doesn’t hold back ever. But when you’re standing in New York Town Hall without a mike – that’s heavy duty.’

  The black and white world, 1980.

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  Touring Trust on the ‘English Mugs’ tour of the US, January 1981.

  Credit: Redferns/Ebet Roberts

  Jake Riviera and Elvis, Dublin, June 1983. Credit: Redferns/Keith Morris

  The Coward Brothers: Elvis and T-Bone Burnett wear their influences on their sleeves, 1985.

  Scenes from the opening night of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook, Beverly Theater, Los Angeles, 4 October 1986.

  Credit: Byron Wilson

  The Beloved Entertainer, 1989.

  Credit: Redferns/Rob Verhorst

  Deep in the ‘Beard Years’, 1991.

  Credit: Redferns/Rob Verhorst

  An uneasy truce: The Attractions reunite in 1994.

  Credit: Red ferns/Keith Morris

  Elvis brings Brutal Youth to the world in 1994.

  Credit: Tony Sacchetti/Mike Bodayle

  King of the South Bank. Elvis curates Meltdown in the summer of 1995.

  Courtesy: The South Bank Centre

  The final night of Meltdown, 1 July 1995, featuring Jeff Buckley (below).

  Credit: Mary Ann Hauser

  Elvis and Cait on tour in 1996.

  Bruce and Elvis edge closer to the end of the line.

  Note the difference in body language. Credit: Masanori Saito/Keiko Sunata

  The master craftsman keeps a keen eye on his star pupil.

  Burt Bacharach and Elvis bring Painted From Memory to the stage in 1998.

  Credit: Redferns/JM Enternational

  The Lonely World, 1999.

  Credit: Michel Laake

  The Brodsky Quartet in their original line-up: (l-r) Ian Belton, Paul Cassidy, Michael Thomas and Jacqueline Cassidy. Credit: Redferns/Patrick Ford

  The reformed Radiators From Space (Plan 9) in 2004, featuring Philip Chevron (far left) and Cait O’Riordan (far right). Courtesy of Philip Chevron

  Mr and Mrs MacManus: Diana Krall and Elvis step out in style, May 2003.

  Credit: Starfile Agency

  Chapter Fourteen

  1993–95

  HE COULD NEVER STAY IN ONE PLACE for long. Just as Elvis was getting to grips with the formal structures of writing and reading music, the weekend songwriting spree and primal demo recordings that he and Pete Thomas had made for Wendy James in Pathway at the end of 1991 had reconnected him with the idea of making louder, simpler music again.

  Following the end of The Juliet Letters album sessions, Elvis had toyed with an embryonic vision of a noisy record called Idiophone, playing everything himself, with Pete Thomas adding percussion. In November 1992, he had gone into Pathway with Pete and cut a few exploratory tracks with just guitar, vocals and drums. With Kevin Killen again roped in on production duties, work soon moved from Pathway to The Church Studios in early December, where Elvis overdubbed bass onto the ultra-raw takes of ‘Kinder Murder’ and ‘20% Amnesia’ and toyed with an extended rant called ‘Poisoned Letter’, quite possibly aimed at Vox’s Patrick Humphries and his ilk.

  Early in these trial sessions, Elvis had realised that his own instrumental limitations were going to hold some of the more involved material back. A chance meeting in a London studio solved the conundrum. Steve Nieve was playing on a session by Sam and Dave stalwart Sam Moore, which included ‘Why Can’t A Man Stand Alone?’, a song Elvis had written specifically for the soul singer. When Elvis popped down to see how the recording was going, he inadvertantly ran into the Attraction. The two hadn’t seen each other for some years, but Steve had apparently decided that enough time had elapsed since their falling out back in 1987 to let bygones be bygones. ‘We got chatting in the break over a tea, and I was invited to a session where Elvis was cutting tracks with Pete Thomas,’ said Nieve. ‘That was how casually [it] began.’1

  Although the mood at the first studio session for six years was ‘a little formal’,2 according to Elvis, the three-quarters-Attractions trio quickly cut piano, drums and vocal versions of ‘Favourite Hour’, ‘You Tripped At Every Step’, ‘This Is Hell’ and ‘London’s Brilliant Parade’ at Church Studios. Nick Lowe also popped in to play bass on ‘Poisoned Letter’.

  It was all slightly chaotic. Elvis had a lot of very beautiful, quite slow material, but after The Juliet Letters he wanted to make a raw, rocky record. Producer Kevin Killen was somewhat confused at what was required of him and decided to bow out. Furthermore, there were forthcoming promotional duties and a tour for The Juliet Letters to attend to immediately after Christmas. With things in a general state of flux, the Idiophone sessions were put on hold until after the spring commitments. By then, Elvis hoped, he would have written some more material and have a clearer idea of the kind of record he wanted to make.

  Upon his return from touring the world with the Brodsky Quartet in February and March 1993, Elvis’s thoughts quickly returned to the next record. He realised he needed more upbeat material and wrote on guitar throughout the spring and summer, when he spent part of his time in Florence with Cait. It was a month-long working holiday. Cait was taking a doctorate in Classics, and they spent much of their time studying the Italian language and visiting museums and art galleries.

  Following the template of the tracks he had recorded before Christmas, the new songs were much simpler than those on Mighty Like A Rose and came quickly: indeed, the bare bones of ‘Rocking Horse Road’, ‘Pony Street’, ‘Clown Strike’, ‘Still Too Soon To Know’, ‘13 Steps Lead Down’ and ‘Just About Glad’ were all written in a single day, swift work even for Elvis. ‘I would work for about half an hour with the guitar cranked up really loud, and make a tape of just anything that came into my head,’ he said. ‘I did it in bursts, and then I listened to see if any of it was interesting. A lot of it was gibberish.’3

  However, the stronger material began to rise to the surface. He added ‘All The Rage’ and ‘My Science Fiction Twin’, both formed when ‘Poisoned Letter’ was split into three pa
rts, Elvis keeping many of the words for the former, a bass riff and a snatch of melody for the latter, and discarding the third. ‘Sulky Girl’ soon followed. Combined with the material that he had attempted to record at Pathway and Church Studios, he now had enough songs for an album.

  Elvis demo-ed most of the new songs in Pete Thomas’s basement studio, with Nick Lowe on bass. With Mitchell Froom again pencilled in to co-produce, the plan was to make a stripped down combo record, with a number of ballads included. However, there were problems with the band line-up. Lowe regarded himself as strictly a rhythm man, and wasn’t particularly at ease playing bass on the slower, more intricate material. When Elvis sent the demos to Froom in Los Angeles, he also felt that some of the songs needed another style of bass playing. The producer had recently been working with Bruce Thomas on albums by Richard Thompson and Suzanne Vega, and tentatively suggested that perhaps the ex-Attraction could provide the kind of inspiration that some of Elvis’s new songs required. ‘At first Elvis hated the idea,’ says Froom. ‘But I think he started thinking about it musically and then he came back and said, “Maybe Bruce and I will get together and have a cup of tea or something. And just see”.’

  Elvis’s immediate misgivings had little to do with music and everything to do with personality. After the numerous snipes and counter-snipes between singer and bass player over the last few years, topped off with the bridge-burning The Big Wheel, he seriously doubted whether they could pull off being in the same room together again, never mind the same band.