Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Mitchell Froom also had to do a little coaxing to get Bruce Thomas enthused. However, the bass player’s animosity towards Elvis had softened considerably with the knowledge that Steve Nieve had buried the past and was back on board. Eventually the call came from Elvis, who was in Britain at the time. ‘He actually rang up in the middle of an earthquake in LA,’ Thomas recalls. ‘I said, “Look, I do want to talk to you but I’m in the middle of an earthquake at the moment!” He was probably quite pleased to have had an impact.’

  Sessions for the new album began at Olympic Studios in London in early August, with Elvis, Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve back in place, and Nick Lowe playing bass. Bruce was due to arrive from Los Angeles a little later. To paraphrase an early Elvis song, Steve chose to be amused rather than disgusted. Elvis was ‘exactly as he was before’, he recalled. ‘He wanted to record without giving anyone a chance to know what they were doing. He was really animated, always moving the microphones or behind the mixing desk pushing all the faders. Normally people do their singing and that’s it. It’s not like that with Elvis.’4

  ‘Kinder Murder’ and ‘20% Amnesia’ were already complete, left red-raw and untouched from the very earliest Pete and Elvis sessions at Pathway back in November 1992. The rest of the material came together quite easily. Nick Lowe played bass on the more Attractions-sounding tracks, while Elvis, Steve and Pete quite clearly hadn’t forgotten how to conjure up the old magic on songs like ‘Rocking Horse Road’ and ‘Just About Glad’.

  The sessions had produced seven songs before Bruce Thomas arrived back on the scene to complete the somewhat accidental reunion. Initially, the mood was ‘cautious and respectful’.5 Nobody wanted the intensity and strained feelings of the Blood & Chocolate sessions to resurface this time around. ‘We elected to get on,’ said Bruce Thomas, summing up the general tenor of tolerance and patience – perhaps it was maturity – which characterised the sessions. ‘We put a sticking plaster on it.’ Elvis also made a concerted effort not to dwell on the past, buying Bach’s Preludes for Bruce for his birthday and generally making an effort to meet the bass player halfway.

  The music fell into place immediately, but then the music had never really been the problem. ‘I got this great moment,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘I mean, I was an Attractions fan, so I got to see the first rehearsal where the four of them were back in a room together. They’d all gotten the tapes and the first thing they played was ‘Sulky Girl’, and it took about fifteen seconds for it to sound great. It was just right back. After they played that song they all laughed, saying, “Well, we know how to do this, I guess!”.’

  From that point on it all went relatively smoothly. It was actually a much easier experience than the making of Mighty Like A Rose, and the group quickly knocked off the remaining tracks. The record was finished by October, mixed and sequenced at Sound Factory in Los Angeles by the end of the year, whereupon it was played to executives at the Warners’ New Year party. There would, they noted with relief, be no string quartet on this record.

  * * *

  After visiting Canada with the Brodsky Quartet early in 1994, performing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost In The Stars’ for a film tribute to the great European songwriter, Elvis undertook heavy promotional duties in Europe throughout February and March. These included The Attractions’ first appearance on Top Of The Pops for ten years, performing ‘Sulky Girl’, which reached No. 22 in the UK charts in early March. It was Elvis’s biggest hit single since ‘Pills And Soap’ in 1983.

  Finally called Brutal Youth after a line from the closing ‘Favourite Hour’, the album was released on 7 March. Predictably, the critics focused on the return to a more familiar, welcoming sound after The Juliet Letters and Mighty Like A Rose, while the reformation of The Attractions grabbed most of the headlines. Despite the fact the band only played together on five songs and their name didn’t feature on the sleeve, the record was inevitably hailed as a comeback, and Nick Lowe’s significant role on the album was all but overlooked.

  Brutal Youth was wildly eclectic at heart, much more Imperial Bedroom than Blood & Chocolate in spirit. It wasn’t really a raw record at all, with plenty of surprising little production details buried in many of the songs. However, there were a few typically pulsing moments which were bound to induce a certain amount of nostalgia: the chorus to ‘Sulky Girl’; the razor-wire guitar riff and squaddie-baiting squall of ‘Kinder Murder’; the shades of ‘Radio, Radio’ in ‘13 Steps Lead Down’, and the majesterial fade of ‘Rocking Horse Road’, but they were fewer than many of the rave reviews suggested.

  Instead, it was the strange, humourous, slightly off-kilter songs like ‘This Is Hell’, ‘My Science Fiction Twin’ and ‘Clown Strike’ which best summed up the mood of the record. ‘Still Too Soon To Know’ and ‘Favourite Hour’ – performed solo on the piano by Elvis – were spare, stark and sorrowful, while ‘You Tripped At Every Step’ and ‘London’s Brilliant Parade’ were lush, beautiful, compassionate recordings.

  The latter in particular was a very personal song: there were mentions of the ‘Gates of St Mary’s,’ the local Catholic primary school in Olympia, where Elvis spent his earliest years; the Hammersmith Palais where Ross plied his trade for so long; and even the Diorama in Euston, where Elvis had first laid eyes on Cait. Elsewhere, there were regretful glances back at youthful bravado in ‘Just About Glad’, and even a few classic selections from the Costello Book of Puns.

  All in all, it was a far more ambitious, melodically broad and warmer record than the lazy This Year’s Model comparisons often gave it credit for. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the inclusion of The Attractions and the sense of returning to something fundamental helped the record enormously, and most of the reviews were predicatably euphoric. ‘This is an emotional whirlwind,’ said Chris Roberts in Melody Maker. ‘A disciplined stab at perfection, a jaded howl of unabated anguish and a bloody good beat record.’ The NME awarded it nine out of ten. ‘Elvis Costello has made an album that sounds like a debut, with all the fire and fury that entails – and he has brought to it a wise man’s brain and wit.’ Q heard his ‘best pop album since 1982’, while CD Review praised the ‘superb melodies, punkish anger, sarcastic wit, creative arrangements, flashes of tenderness, daring and literate lyrics. Although The Attractions don’t appear on every track, the old chemistry does.’ There were dozens more along similar lines, an outpouring of genuine affection and delight which must have touched even Elvis. It was enough to quickly propel Brutal Youth to No. 2 in the UK charts and No. 32 in the States, his best combined placings since Get Happy!!. However, the record dropped quickly and in fact did not sell significantly better than his recent releases.

  If the album was the appetiser, then the Brutal Youth world tour was the proper Attractions reunion. Opening in Vancouver on 3 May with the swift knock-out triptych of ‘No Action’, ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘The Beat’, the spine of each night’s set was firmly centred around This Year’s Model and Brutal Youth.

  ‘No Action’, ‘The Beat’, ‘You Belong To Me’, ‘Radio, Radio’, ‘Lipstick Vogue’ and ‘Pump It Up’ were all regulars, while ‘Hand In Hand’ and ‘This Year’s Girl’ also made the odd appearance. Almost all of Brutal Youth was played every night, while the remaining third of each night’s show consisted mainly of classic Attractions material: ‘Alison’, ‘Red Shoes’, ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Less Than Zero’, ‘Clubland’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Shabby Doll’, ‘Beyond Belief’, ‘Party Girl’, ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’, ‘Watching The Detectives’, ‘Accidents Will Happen’, and a Merseybeat-style ‘Everyday I Write The Book’. Spike and Mighty Like A Rose were raided for ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’, ‘Veronica’ and a rare ‘So Like Candy’, with the occasional ‘Uncomplicated’ or ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’ from Blood & Chocolate. Rarities included ‘Temptation’ and a performance of ‘Puppet Girl’, one of the songs Elvis had written for Wendy Jam
es. All in all, it was the closest thing going to a crowd-pleasing, greatest hits set, albeit one that rarely featured ‘Oliver’s Army’ or ‘Chelsea’.

  Some found great difficulty in reconciling the well-fed, classical music-loving millionaire on stage with the angst-ridden anti-hero who wrote most of these songs in the late ’70s. ‘Anyone who saw Costello when these songs seemed like fresh wounds couldn’t help but recognise how emotionally hollow they seem now,’ wrote Greg Kent in the Chicago Tribune, afer the show at Tingley Park in Illinois on 28 May, claiming that the concert was ‘at best nostalgia, at worst hypocrisy’.

  It was admittedly a tricky tightrope to walk, but for most observers the undeniable whiff of nostalgia in the setlist was largely nullified by the sheer vigour of the performances. Clearly, everyone involved felt an urgent need to play this music again, even more so considering the rancour that had surrounded the end of the band in the ’80s. As they hammered through thirty-odd songs in under two hours each night, with barely a pause in between and little inter-band interaction, it was impossible to feel that this was anything other than a creative collaboration brought on by something deeper and more fundamental than nostalgia or money. It may have been lacking in the trite, on-stage bonhomie of most ‘reunions’, but then everyone was on-stage for very personal and probably very different reasons. Certainly, there was little sense of someone simply going through the motions. Elvis and The Attractions played for their lives most nights.

  The band were in good musical shape and all concerned were managing to survive the early rigours of touring without coming to blows. Elvis and Pete were thirty-nine years old, almost forty, Bruce was forty-five and Steve thirty-six. Having spent fifteen years on and off the road, they had all finally grown up to a greater or lesser extent, and had other interests outside of music, alcohol and chasing women. Bruce was still interested in literature and increasingly into martial arts, and had combined the two by writing a book on martial arts legend Bruce Lee; Pete Thomas had settled down and was often heard talking about his nine-year-old daughter’s progress on the piano; Steve Nieve retreated into his portable computer. Elvis even brought his mother Lilian out to California for a Mother’s Day treat to see the show at Concord Pavillion on 8 May. Compared to the madness of old, the US tour was calmness personified.

  ‘I think we’re probably less selfish [now],’ said Elvis. ‘Nobody is going wild. It would be really stupid to think that just because you’re playing some of the old songs, you’ve also got to stay up all night and get drunk. We might have less nervous energy and more physical energy, because we’re probably looking after ourselves a bit more.’6

  Nonetheless, the sense of kinship and comradeship was forever lost. The band were paid as session men, and Elvis seemed rather churlishly reluctant to actually utter the name ‘The Attractions’, instead referring to the band as ‘these gentlemen on stage with me’ or similarly vague terminology. ‘It was never a band again,’ says Bruce Thomas.

  Away from the shows, Elvis spent most of his time with Cait, visiting museums, reading and eating well, although it was not always entirely harmonious. Their relationship could be wildly volatile and inconsistent, and there were frequent rows throughout the tour, the rumours of marital discord reaching print in America. And although most of the concerts had been very well attended, audience responses had often been surprisingly muted, given the circumstances. The tour also wasn’t helping the record: Brutal Youth had slid to No. 195 in the US charts by mid-May and continued its descent thereafter. Neither was there a hint of a hit single which may have helped focus the attention on more current concerns, rather than past glories.

  Elvis and The Attractions headed back to Britain in June to play at Glastonbury, the scene of their last British appearance seven years earlier. It was a standard set, notable for the fact that Elvis duly dished out ‘Oliver’s Army’ for the fairweather festival fans and Jake refused to allow any of the performance to be filmed for TV – unlike all the other acts – because permission had not been sought early enough.

  It was Jake’s last stand, though at the time he probably didn’t know it. Following a brief British tour and festivals in Europe throughout July, Elvis and The Attractions took a break for the whole of August. As Elvis turned forty, the indomitable and often fearsome pairing of Riviera and Costello had finally cracked. ‘Like Burton and Taylor, [Graham] Taylor and England, and Halpern and Burton’s, many great partnerships come to an end,’ ran a statement released the following month. ‘After seventeen mighty, furious years we have decided to end our working relationship. We remain good pals and do not invite and will not welcome further questions on this matter.’

  The off-hand bonhomie of the press release was a smokescreen. The underlying reasons for the split inevitably remained private, mired in nearly two decades’ worth of intense personal involvement, but it seemed that the fissure was deep and far from amicable. There were rumours of a backstage bust-up between Riviera and Cait at one of the three Royal Albert Hall shows, which ran between 5–7 July. When Jake showed up for the next British concert at Liverpool Royal Court on the twelfth there were embarrassed glances among the band and the crew, who already knew his fate. By the time July was over ‘he was gone’, says Bruce Thomas. ‘And we never saw him again.’

  It is possible that there may also have been some residual tensions at play. ‘I think Elvis had to reel in Jake on one or two times – I won’t go into details – but let’s just say old Mr Riviera was an impetuous sort of person,’ says Marc Ribot. Jake had reportedly been unhappy for some time about the direction in which Elvis’s career was travelling, while Elvis may have felt that Jake’s aggressive style of management didn’t sit well with his new classical contacts. He also probably felt that commercially he should be doing somewhat better than he was, especially with Brutal Youth, which had sold less than The Juliet Letters in the US by the summer of 1994. Indeed, none of Elvis’s ’90s records had sold more than 200,000 copies in the US.

  Neither Jake nor Elvis has ever spoken publicly about their parting of the ways, but Roger Bechirian remained on good terms with Jake and recalls some of the fall-out. ‘Certainly, I know Jake would never want to see Elvis for as long as he lives,’ says Bechirian. ‘He doesn’t even buy his records any more. As far as he’s concerned, Elvis’s ego is so enormous that he needs a truck to drive behind him to carry it, and he [thinks he] just [won’t] listen to reason. It hurt Jake tremendously.’ A character like Jake Riviera was basically irreplaceable, but in time his role was taken on by Elvis’s own management company, By Eleven, under which he started running his own affairs with the day-to-day help of former Riviera-Global assistant Gill Taylor, aided by Chris Difford’s elder brother, Lew.

  * * *

  By the time the tour reached Japan on 17 September, the set had begun to loosen up a little. Elvis was playing a lot of very loud and haphazard solo guitar, a tactic which had begun on the US tour and had increased in Japan, and did little to add to the songs. However, The Attractions had become something approximating the mercilessly well-oiled unit of old, and were more than ready for their first extensive tour of the UK since 1984.

  Before the tour kicked off on 3 November, there was a welcome distraction. While working with the Brodsky Quartet in 1992, Elvis had appeared on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, choosing his eight all-time favourite pieces of music: ‘At Last’, sung by Ross MacManus with the Joe Loss Orchestra, had featured, alongside Beethoven’s ‘Opus 35’; Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’; Mozart’s ‘Marriage Of Figaro’; The Beatles’ ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’; Schubert’s ‘B-flat Sonata’; ‘Dido’s Lament’ sung by Anne Sofie Von Otter; and ‘Blood Count’ by Bill Strayhorn and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He had wanted to include a recording of his son Matthew playing guitar, but feared it would make him cry.

  Two years on, Elvis finally got to sing ‘At Last’ with Ross at a tribute to Joe Loss at the Barbican on 30 October. It was a brief, sentiment
al journey, directly at odds with the full-throttle Attractions shows. Once again, Elvis was playing a little residency on the tour: four Friday nights at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire throughout November. In between, they were playing theatres and small halls around the 2000 capacity mark, but even then most shows were far from being a sell-out.

  There was a significant amount of new blood in the set. ‘I Want You’ quickly replaced ‘No Action’ as the opener, a choice guaranteed to grab any audience by the throat. In Manchester and Glasgow, Elvis threw up ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ and ‘Good Year For The Roses’ as back-to-back encores, and on the second night in Glasgow on 16 November he acceded to an audience request by playing Leon Payne’s ‘Psycho’, a real note from the underground.

  Ultimately, however, the tour was marred by the problems Elvis was having with his voice, which eventually forced him to cancel the show in Exeter on 20 November, and led to walk-outs from some disgruntled audience members in Bristol the following night. In truth, Elvis’s insistence on keeping the concerts as raw as possible began to seem slightly self-defeating. It was as though he were pre-empting any criticism of having mellowed by racing through everything as fast and as furiously as possible. With the sound mixes frequently terrible, it was often to the detriment of the material.

  Part of his frenzy was aimed at rousing audiences who were tame and usually didn’t fill the halls. By the time the tour reached Oxford Apollo on 27 November, Elvis gave up any pretence at civility. ‘You can’t stand up for sitting down,’ he screamed sarcastically during ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’, ending it all with ‘Good night, God bless, God help you!’