However, by far the most interesting and significant feature of the tour was the inclusion of ‘new’ songs: at Poole on 8 November, The Attractions showcased two tunes Elvis had written for other people: ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’ for The Dubliners’ Ronnie Drew and ‘Complicated Shadows’, which had been written for – and was rejected by – Johnny Cash. By the second Friday at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on the eleventh he was also playing ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’, a slow ballad which he had reportedly written the previous night, with a piano melody based on – or more accurately, stolen from – Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. The following Friday in London, Elvis opened alone with ‘All This Useless Beauty’, the song he had written for June Tabor’s 1992 record, Angel Tiger, and a week later at the final London show he and Steve opened with ‘I Want To Vanish’, another song written for June Tabor, this time for her Against The Streams album. All this was heading somewhere.
* * *
Much of Elvis’s schedule in the opening six months of 1995 was tailored to fit around his massive commitment to curate the annual Meltdown Festival at the South Bank Centre at the end of June. During his stay at Dartington Hall in 1992, Elvis had received an offer to become the first non-classical artistic director of the festival. It would prove to be a huge undertaking, but it was both an opportunity and a ringing endorsement he had been happy to accept.
He was certainly no stranger to the South Bank, the hub of London’s contemporary arts scene. He had spent an inordinate amount of time there since 1989 watching and listening to classical music, and had recently been commissioned by Graham Sheffield, the Music Department Director at the South Bank, to write a piece for viol and counter-tenor as part of the tercentenary celebrations of Henry Purcell later in the year.
However, Meltdown was on another level entirely. The week-long festival was in its third year, but this was the first time that a non-classical composer had been approached to oversee it: in the previous two years the artistic directors had been British composer and conductor George Benjamin and Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, both little known outside contemporary classical circles. Elvis was sufficiently worldly-wise to be aware that his name was being used as a bait for a bigger audience than a classical festival would usually attract, but he also recognised an opportunity when he was handed one.
‘What I wanted to do was bring it to a wider audience,’ admits David Sefton who, as Producer of Contemporary Culture at the South Bank, was in charge of Meltdown. ‘Elvis was such an obvious choice for the first non-classical composer, from the point of view of somebody who had worked so broadly across so many different worlds and clearly was interested very widely in music.’
For Elvis, this was the chance to finally synthesise all – or at least several – of the disparate strands of his musical interests over the past five or six years. Having had three years to plan the itinerary, he spent the time ensuring that he got it right. Initially, it was simply a case of discussing loose ideas and the range of what might be possible. From making a conceptual wish list, it was then a case of everyone getting together periodically to discuss the options. ‘We’re obviously going to bring in other kinds of music [aside from classical], as I don’t belong to any particular field,’ said Elvis at the end of 1994. ‘We’re still planning it but hopefully it will lead to some new collisions and happy accidents and maybe some further collaborations on my part.’7
Anything seemed possible. Meltdown provided the perfect opportunity for Elvis to express his own feelings on how accessible most of the music he loved could be, and anyone involved in its organisation who felt that he was simply there to puff up his ego and increase his own muscial credentials was swiftly disabused of the notion. ‘He was very, very involved,’ says Sefton. ‘He personally invited a lot of the artists to take part, he was in dialogue with a lot of them about what they would do and the content of what the evening would be. He would sit in meetings and discuss not just pieces of classical music, but specific recordings of pieces of classical music. I mean, Elvis knows more about classical music than the guy who programmes the Proms, I know that for a fact.’
As discussions progressed, Elvis began to focus on what might be realistically possible, as opposed to simply what he wanted to do, which he insisted included a duet of honking horns performing from either side of the Thames. Nobody was entirely sure whether he was joking.
The festival would begin on 23 June, and as it drew closer Elvis upped his usual frantic pace, expecting others to do the same. ‘There were times when I was on the phone at 2 a.m. as he had another idea,’ sighs David Sefton. ‘You kind of think, “Well yes, but I really want to go to sleep now!”.’
Elvis also had other varied commitments to squeeze in. On 7 March he was back at the South Bank for another landmark: the performance of ‘Put Away Forbidden Playthings’, a composition inspired by Purcell’s ‘Fantazias’, written by Elvis for the Purcell tercentenary.
It was in two parts: an instrumental opening and closing section to be played by the viol ensemble Fretwork and a lyric for counter-tenor Michael Chance in the middle. Elvis wasn’t playing or singing, but he was in attendance at the Purcell Room to watch the performance of his work, one of six specially commissioned for the event and something he described as ‘one of the three most terrifying moments of my life’. He neglected to mention what the other two had been, but he needn’t have worried. The performance went smoothly enough for the Daily Telegraph to call it ‘the loveliest of all six. This seemed a genuine homage’. Elvis would sing the text himself a month later with Fretwork at an AIDS benefit, and would also reprise it during Meltdown.
Following a brief tour of Spain with the Brodsky Quartet between 23 –28 January as part of the Grande Conciertos 1995 series, Elvis and the Quartet teamed up again on 23 March, for a charity performance with Paul McCartney in aid of the Royal College of Music.
The concert took place at St James’s Palace in front of Prince Charles, and required Elvis to set aside his deeply held antipathy towards the Royal Family. However, he studiously avoided meeting the Prince of Wales. ‘There’s people who want to meet him and it’s a big deal to them, but it ain’t a big deal to me,’ he said. ‘I was there at Paul’s invitation, not his.’8 It was Elvis’s first public performance with McCartney, and the two duetted happily with acoustic guitars on ‘Mistress And Maid’ and the old Beatles song ‘One After 909’. Having already performed ‘I Almost Had A Weakness’, ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ and ‘God Only Knows’ with the Brodsky Quartet, Elvis then left the building as quickly as he could.
The run-in to Meltdown was further complicated by the release of Kojak Variety, which had finally been slotted into Warner’s schedule for 9 May, almost exactly five years since it had been recorded in Barbados. The intervening years had done little to perk up an already jaded piece of work, but Elvis was keen to ensure that the record wasn’t simply passed over as old news.
To coincide with the album’s release, there was a one-off gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 17 May, featuring The Attractions and the two guitarists from the record: Marc Ribot and James Burton. By the time the gig came round Elvis’s voice was in trouble after over-energetic performances on Jools Holland’s and David Letterman’s television shows, and the set never really took flight.
He began with three solo songs to warm up, but thereafter all the songs were from Kojak Variety – which wouldn’t necessarily have helped to rouse the audience – except for ‘Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down’ and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ from Almost Blue, specifically included to showcase James Burton’s searing country licks. It ended with predictable encores of ‘Alison’ and ‘Pump It Up’. ‘The level of chat among the crowd told a sorry story,’ said Max Bell in the Evening Standard. ‘The concert proved to be a labour of love for both the artiste and the audience – accent on the word labour.’ Kojak Variety only limped to No. 21 in the UK, and failed to chart in the States.
Elvi
s was disappointed with both the set and the reaction, but in the months leading up to Meltdown he had become accustomed to dealing with criticism. His stewardship of the festival provided a perfect opportunity for all manner of snipes and jibes, ranging from cries of ‘pretentiousness’ about the venture from the pop end of the spectrum, to accusations of ‘dumbing down’ from the hard-line classical fraternity. In the end, most of it boiled down to: ‘Who does this guy think he is?’
‘That’s the kind of deadening hand of anti-intellectualism,’ says David Sefton. ‘You’re not allowed to experiment, it’s the anti-arts stance. The only acceptance comes when you’re being told that you’re not being very much like yourself, when your name is used as a stick to beat your back with. I think that’s the same with any pop star trying to do anything unusual. It’s definitely no-win.’
As it was, the final line-up for the festival was hugely appetising to anyone with a thirst for interesting and unique musical adventurism. It was a truly ambitious sweep across the boundaries of modern music, with Elvis seemingly everywhere at once. In the words of David Sefton: ‘He knows no fear.’
* * *
Meltdown opened on the evening of Friday, 23 June with a performance by the Rebirth Brass Band, followed by London ensemble Afro Blok, a wall of drummers spanning the entire stage. Then – in the spirit of sometimes wilful collaboration which was to define the festival – the Rebirth Band returned to the stage and the two acts played together.
The main act of the opening night was New York’s Jazz Passengers, an eclectic and consciously post-modern collective of saxophones, trombones, vibes and strings, with Marc Ribot’s skewed guitar lines thrown in for good measure. Guest vocalist Debbie Harry stole the show early on, before departing to make room for Elvis to sing half-a-dozen songs, including ‘Man Out Of Time’ and ‘God’s Comic’. The evening ended with a closing duet between Elvis and Debbie Harry, the long-since abdicated King and Queen of new wave, on Blondie’s ‘The Tide Is High’. It undeniably became the first high spot of the week.
The National Film Theatre was running a ‘Celluloid Jukebox’ season, and the next day Meltdown took film as its theme, screening some of Elvis’s favourite music movies: two Thelonius Monk documentaries, The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup among them. Elvis dropped in to chat about his own videos, and used other film extracts to illustrate his points. He also previewed five minutes – sadly, all that would ever be completed – of the animated feature Tom Thumb, for which he was scoring the music.
That evening, Marc Ribot and avant garde pianist Keith Tippett performed ‘Music Out Of Film’, the kind of event that, for good or ill, could only happen at a contemporary arts festival: Ribot played live guitar over a 1920’s Soviet science fiction film called Aelita, Queen of Mars, while Tippett improvised over several animated shorts.
Elvis’s opening showcase as a performer fell on Sunday the twenty-fifth. In the early evening he took part in ‘Waterloo Sunset’, a performance of pieces from the Composer Ensemble’s 300-strong songbook which included arrangements of works by Shostakovich, Brahms, Lizst, Madness, Brian Wilson, Peter Gabriel and the Pet Shop Boys. Elvis selected a closing version of Ray Davies’s ‘Waterloo Sunset’, before departing for the Queen Elizabeth Hall for a concert entitled ‘Old Flowers In New Dirt’.
It was a show of many parts, unashamedly ambitious and illustrating something of the variety and lack of boundaries of his artistic reach. Elvis initially took to the stage alone and played six songs on acoustic guitar, half of which were unrecorded: ‘Starting To Come To Me’, ‘All This Useless Beauty’, ‘Complicated Shadows’, ‘Indoor Fireworks’, ‘Little Atoms’ and ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’.
Once the venerable gospel quintet The Fairfield Four had performed a selection of gospel standards, Elvis returned with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. He had worked briefly with Frisell a few years previously on ‘Weird Nightmare’, a track on a Charles Mingus tribute record, and had later sought him out at the Village Vanguard club in New York.
The songs that had emerged as the strongest in their one brief rehearsal tended to be among the least accessible – and most neglected – of Elvis’s repertoire: ‘Poisoned Rose’, ‘Poor Napoleon’, ‘Baby Plays Around’, ‘Love Field’, ‘Shamed Into Love’, plus an incongruous cover of ‘Gigi’, and a new collaboration with Frisell, called ‘Deep Dead Blue’, where Elvis added words to Frisell’s music.
It was a sparse, uncompromising vocal-and-solo-guitar performance, adding extra dimensions to the material, most of which hadn’t been heard in concert for many years. Although one-paced and not entirely successful, the concert was put together with just a single rehearsal, an indication of just how confident Elvis had become in trusting his own instincts. ‘He takes a lot of risks,’ observes Frisell. ‘He likes to put himself into situations where he’s not sure what’s going to happen: to play in that kind of naked circumstance with just guitar and voice, where there’s nothing else there to hold things together. He just goes in there wide open and lets it happen, and that’s the way you learn the most, rather than trying to mould it into something that you already know.’
When Frisell departed, Elvis played a number of songs with just Steve Nieve on piano. More obvious choices like ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, ‘Just A Memory’, and ‘Shipbuilding’ lined up alongside the recently composed ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’ and a magnificent reinterpretation of ‘Temptation’ as a stately ballad. To finish, The Fairfield Four joined Elvis and Steve for an a capella treatment of Van Morrison’s ‘Full Force Gale’ and a closing ‘That Day Is Done’, both ranking among the most emotionally uplifting performances of his career.
It was a truly remarkable evening of music, all the more so when considering the fact that, as artistic director, Elvis was also running around making sure that all the events were going smoothly. ‘Seeing him functioning was unbelievable,’ says Bill Frisell. ‘I couldn’t believe how somebody could deal with that much information all at one time.’ To add to Elvis’s considerations, he learned over the weekend of the cancellation of Friday night’s main act, Pakistan’s Sabri Brothers, after one of them had been injured in a car crash. On hearing the news, Elvis called Donal Lunny and asked for help in putting together a band of traditional Irish musicians for Friday’s show, a concert which would now have to be rehearsed from scratch.
Elvis watched the Brodsky Quartet perform Szymanski and Shostakovich in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, a little nostalgic reminder of how he came to be there in the first place. The following evening Bill Frisell played again, starting his set solo and then expanding to a trio of trumpet and violin. He included a sweet version of Elvis’s ‘Sweet Pear’, obviously one that didn’t make the final cut for their collaboration.
On the night of Wednesday the twenty-eighth, Elvis made the second of his three major contributions to Meltdown as a performer, prefaced by a solo piano recital by Steve Nieve in the Purcell Room.
The main performance took place in two parts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. For the opening half, Elvis was alongside the Brodsky Quartet, playing a selection of songs from The Juliet Letters, but also showing off their expanded repertoire: ‘Pills And Soap’, Michael Thomas’s new composition ‘Skeleton’, Tom Waits’s ‘More Than Rain’, ‘God Only Knows’ and Jerome Kern’s ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’. In their own way, they had become as tight a pairing as he and The Attractions had ever been, instinctive, able to improvise and surprise each other.
Perhaps the second set was less sure of itself. The Brodskys were augmented with an eleven-piece chamber orchestra directed by Diego Masson, featuring french horns, clarinets, trumpet, flute and double bass. Interspersed with classics such as ‘New Lace Sleeves’ and ‘Long Honeymoon’ were rarities like ‘Having It All’, ‘Punishing Kiss’, and the beguiling ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’, arranged by Bill Frisell. Proving there were no grudges left over from the G
oodbye Cruel World debacle, ‘Shipbuilding’ had a new arrangement, written by Clive Langer. ‘I had a good chat with him,’ says Langer. ‘It was great to see him. I always found him brilliant to work with, he’s interesting and fascinating and he’s got a great mind.’
The second set was over-ambitious, with the larger chamber ensemble sounding slightly cluttered after the stripped-down, assured performances of Elvis and the Brodsky Quartet. But nobody could claim that it didn’t make for riveting listening. ‘I’d be inclined to think more in terms of a “shared path” than the woefully inadequate “cross-over” epithet,’ said Robert Cowan in The Independent. ‘This was quality stuff, and as significant for the development of music now as anything we’re likely to hear from the hard-line avant garde.’
On the Thursday, the London Philharmonic Orchestra provided eccentric and compelling entertainment. The daytime Children’s Concert featured John Williams’s film themes for Superman and Star Wars, as well as several of Elvis’s beloved cartoon tunes. In the evening, guest conductor Gunther Schuller led the orchestra – plus a scratch seventeen-piece jazz band, saxophonist Martin Robertson and violinist Alex Balanescu – through a melange of different music, including a suite from Bernard Hermann’s score for the film Taxi Driver, Duke Ellington’s ‘Night Creatures’, Mark-Antony Turnage’s ‘Drowned Out’ and Korngold’s ‘Violin Concerto’, as well as the world premiere of Elvis’s first orchestral work, a modest three-minute ‘thumbprint’ called ‘Edge Of Ugly’. The latter was slotted into the running order with typical haste. ‘He sang it over the telephone to me the other day,’ Schuller laughed on the eve of the performance. ‘I could tell it was fine. It’s very short, a pot-pourri that goes from a fanfare to a waltz, some cartoon music and ends with very fast swing.’9
In truth, ‘Edge Of Ugly’ was hardly the highpoint of the festival, and left many fans and critics alike desperately disappointed at both its slightness and its brevity. ‘Two wacky xylophone motifs and a brass passage resembling the theme tune to That’s Life! hardly amount to orchestral fare,’ sneered Rick Jones in the Evening Standard. But then it was never intended to be. The LPO concert as a whole marked the outer limits of the festival’s experimentation, a wildly eclectic meshing of styles that took most of the concert to find its feet. By the end, it worked, but only just.
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