Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Irish vocal group Anuna began and ended proceedings on Friday night, while in the middle, Elvis played with Donal Lunny and the All-Star Irish Band, thrown together at less than a week’s notice after the withdrawal of the Sabri Brothers. They were still deep in rehearsal on the afternoon of the show. It was a fun, necessarily spontaneous evening of polkas and reels, reuniting some of the musicians who had played on the Spike sessions in Dublin. It also gave Elvis a rare chance to perform ‘Any King’s Shilling’ and ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ in their original recorded format, as well as ‘American Without Tears’.

  Meltdown’s final day was a sprawling affair. The afternoon concert was almost a pastiche of collaborative zeal: John Harle, the London Saxophonic, London Brass, bassist Danny Thompson, and the seventy-nine-year-old, legendary blind New York street musician Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, all performed together. Harle played pieces from his enormously eclectic repertoire for saxophone in the first half, some dating back to as far as the twelfth century; then after a break, Moondog conducted the ensemble through his own compositions using a large bass drum.

  Perhaps mercifully, the evening concert returned to ‘The Song’, dedicated to showcasing a wide range of different voices and types of music back-to-back. It was a finale designed to underscore the broad theme of the festival: that music from all ages and genres exists simply to be heard and felt, and needn’t be categorised and pigeonholed. However, for all its ambition, in the end the evening couldn’t help but reflect the instincts and personality of the man who had put it together. It was essentially a melancholic choice of material and voices.

  It opened with a set from one of Elvis’s favourite singers, June Tabor. After the interval a number of performers took the stage, sitting and listening when they weren’t called upon to sing. To the backing of viol ensemble Fretwork and the Composer’s Ensemble, soprano Patricia Rozario sang pieces by Henry Purcell and William Byrd, vaulting rock singer Jeff Buckley sang Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ and Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid In Earth’, Mary Wiegold sang a new composition entitled ‘Malicious Observer’, which set Elvis’s lyrics to a tune written by John Woolrich, and Elvis sang his own recent Purcell tribute, ‘Put Away Forbidden Playthings’ and John Dowland’s ‘Can She Excuse My Wrongs?’

  The third and final section of the concert involved a rotating bill of Elvis, Tabor and Buckley singing to the backing of Steve Nieve and Marc Ribot. Elvis sang Randy Newman’s ‘I’ve Been Wrong Before’ from Kojak Variety, the standards ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Glad To Be Unhappy’, a version of ‘Almost Blue’ which merged into ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, its original inspiration, and a sincere ‘Alison’, a song that had served Elvis well through the years. At the end, Elvis thanked everyone for taking part in the festival and got as close to emotional as he ever does in public: ‘It’s been pretty fucking amazing, actually,’ he smiled, encoring with a poignant ‘I Want To Vanish’. Whereupon he hugged Steve Nieve and went home. It was 1 a.m.

  ‘The final concert ended up running [for] about six hours, which was probably a little long,’ says David Sefton. In actual fact, it was a little over four hours, although it had started almost an hour late. Nobody seemed to mind. The final day’s concerts were given an extra poignancy by the fact that both Moondog and Jeff Buckley would soon be dead. Moondog passed away in 1999, while the prodigiously talented Buckley drowned in the Mississippi at the age of thirty in May 1997. It was the last time either man performed in Britain, and they were fitting farewells. Buckley, in particular, undoubtedly stole the final show, and at his memorial at St Ann and Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn on 1 June 1997, Elvis sang a classical piece at the piano in tribute. ‘He was fantastic,’ he said. ‘He gave everything.’

  Meltdown proved a considered success. Generally, the ambitious and sometimes eccentric ideas that Elvis put together met with audience approval and enthusiasm, as well as inspiring rather than alienating the musicians he was working with. There was little of the frictions or petty resentments that could sometimes occur when the worlds of pop and classical met, mainly because Elvis – unequivocably – no longer regarded himself as part of any specific musical world, and had both the experience and confidence to follow his ideas through. He had become a consumate collaborator, with an uncanny knack of choosing people who relished the opportunity to experiment.

  The festival had been well attended and high-profile – famous visitors included Suggs, Eduardo Paolozzi, Terry Gilliam and Alan Bleasdale. However, there were the inevitable gripes and an underlying sense that Elvis and his robust ego had somehow hijacked the festival. ‘I suspect that even Costello’s most fervent well-wishers could hardly have been prepared for the paean of self-aggrandisement which characterised the whole ethos of this year’s festival,’ wrote Antony Bye in the Financial Times. ‘The oversized programme booklet set the tone, screaming out Elvis Costello in word and image on almost every page.’

  It was, however, a two-way trade-off. Elvis wasn’t shy about proclaiming his talents, but he had attended every single performance during the festival, taking a personal interest in every detail of the event. Such an unashamedly hands-on approach from a high-profile, no-holds-barred artist was inevitably going to make a dramatic and overpowering imprint on the festival. That, in essense, was the entire point. Ultimately, the South Bank Centre were more than satisfied with the results, both commercially and artistically. ‘There certainly, to my memory, wasn’t a bad concert,’ says David Sefton. ‘Some of the shows we did are still some of the best shows of his I’ve seen. I went on to do seven Meltdowns and I think of all of the people, Elvis was the most hands-on. Everything you could want from a collaborator worked out.’

  Elvis was satisfied, too. As well as having direct repurcussions for at least three of his subsequent solo records, Meltdown set in motion a number of small explosions, opening up numerous possibilites which he continues to explore to the present day. In the ensuing months and years some of Elvis’s more esoteric sidelines, collaborations and lower-profile projects could be traced back to Meltdown: Deep Dead Blue, the limited edition – only 10,000 copies – seven-song memento of the concert with Bill Frisell would be rush-released on 14 August 1995, a permanent record of a concert played with just a single rehearsal. Elvis would work with Frisell again on the songs for the Painted From Memory record in 1998, and beyond.

  There were numerous other connections: he recorded his own song ‘Aubergine’ on the Jazz Passengers’ next record and performed with Debbie Harry and the band several more times, as well as collaborating with saxophonist Roy Nathanson. He finally cut a version of ‘That Day Is Done’ that did the song justice on The Fairfield Four’s I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray record. He worked with saxophonist John Harle on his Terror And Magnificence album, released in October 1996, singing three settings of Shakespeare songs from Twelfth Night: ‘O Mistress Mine’; ‘Come Away, Death’; and ‘When That I Was and A Little Tiny Boy’. Elvis also toured with Harle and used him for the recording of his first ballet score, Il Sogno, in 2002. He sang on Donal Lunny’s Common Ground record, while Fretwork recorded his Purcell-inspired composition ‘Put Away Hidden Playthings’ on their album, Sit Fast. Elvis would continue to work with the Brodsky Quartet off and on over the next decade, which would in turn smooth the way for collaborations with Anne Sofie Von Otter.

  Perhaps most significantly, and certainly most gratifyingly, Elvis finally realised at Meltdown that there was a huge amount of potential in working as a duo with Steve Nieve. It had only taken eighteen years. Elvis would also work with David Sefton again on an album of songs for Ute Lemper in 1999, and in Sefton’s new role at the UCLA in 2002. ‘So much came out of Meltdown,’ says Sefton. ‘It’s nice, that’s the purpose of it. We made the time and space, he made the time and space, and he was able to do a lot of things that he wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  1995–96

  OVER THE PREVIOUS DECADE, Elvis had amass
ed dozens of songs that had either been recorded by other people, or indeed hadn’t been recorded at all. He had become adept at tailoring tunes for other artists, enjoying the craft of writing for another style of voice or musical genre. He was also happy to collaborate with anyone he found interesting, and these diversions had thrown up some excellent results. ‘I realised that if I don’t address the songs I’d written for other people soon, it’ll become an unweildly repertoire,’ he admitted. ‘It’s already something like forty songs.’1

  There was indeed a vast array to choose from: ‘Shadow And Jimmy’ (Was (Not Was)); ‘The Miranda Syndrome’ and ‘Shamed Into Love’ (Ruben Blades); ‘The Other End Of The Telescope’ (Aimee Mann); ‘Miss Mary’ (Zucchero); ‘I Want To Vanish’ and ‘All This Useless Beauty’ (June Tabor); ‘You Bowed Down’ (Roger McGuinn); ‘Hidden Shame’ and ‘Complicated Shadows’ (Johnny Cash); ‘Why Can’t A Man Stand Alone’ (Sam Moore); ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’ (Ronnie Drew); ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’ (Mary Coughlan, also recorded as ‘I Wonder How She Knows’ by Charles Brown); ‘Punishing Kiss’ (performed by Annie Ross in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts); not to mention the collaborations with Paul McCartney, the ten songs he wrote for Wendy James, and a selection he had quietly kept to himself.

  Elvis had played many of these songs in concert over the years and had aired a large number of them during Meltdown. Now he planned to make a record using the pick of the litter, under the heading: A Case For Song. Elvis’s initial ideas for his new record had been heavily influenced by his ongoing involvement in organising Meltdown. He wanted to make a double album, using several different types of musical accompaniment: string quartet, The Attractions, jazz ensemble, gospel quartet, whichever style suited each individual song.

  In order to aid the selection process, Elvis had popped up as an unannounced support act for Bob Dylan in the spring, playing solo and testing out new material. In Paris on 24 March, Brixton Academy on 29–31 March, and Dublin on 11 April, he strolled on-stage and played a dozen songs to generally sympathetic crowds.

  Opening each night with ‘Starting To Come To Me’, a spry country shuffle which dated back to the Mighty Like A Rose sessions and owed something to Dylan’s ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’, Elvis added several other ‘new’ or unrecorded songs over the five nights: ‘Complicated Shadows’, ‘All This Useless Beauty’, ‘Shallow Grave’, ‘I Want To Vanish’, ‘It’s Time’, ‘The Other End Of The Telescope’ and ‘You Bowed Down’ had all been written either as collaborations or with other artists in mind, while ‘Distorted Angel’, ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’ and ‘Little Atoms’ were fairly recent compositions – the former had been kicked around with The Attractions at the Brutal Youth sessions. All eleven would end up on the next record.

  Also debuted on the closing night in Dublin was ‘God Give Me Strength’, a genuine work-in-progress which at the time of the concert was still being co-written with Burt Bacharach for the film Grace Of My Heart. The collaboration had been suggested by the film’s musical supervisor Karyn Rachtman, but when a scheduled songwriting session in Los Angeles was scrapped, the pair had to find another way of working together to fit the tight deadline. ‘I was in this extraordinary situation where I was coming home from the last show I did with Bob in Dublin at 2.30 in the morning and ringing Burt when it was still afternoon [in LA] and working on the song,’ said Elvis.2

  As an ice-breaker, Elvis had written the plaintive, characteristically Bacharach-esque intro of the song and nervously played it onto Burt’s answering machine, fearing it was too close to pastiche. Bacharach loved it, adding his own harmonies and structural changes to the blueprint. In this eccentric manner – using telephone, fax and answerphone, ideas criss-crossing the Atlantic between Dublin and Los Angeles – the track was quickly completed. Then Elvis wrote the words. The minute it was finished, he knew he had a winner. He played it again at Meltdown with Steve Nieve, and at every opportunity thereafter, like a boy eagerly displaying his favourite new toy.

  ‘God Give Me Strength’ was one of the songs Elvis had in mind for the next record, but although Meltdown had prepared him for the more esoteric side of the record, The Attractions needed warming up. There had been only two live performances with Elvis in 1995, the second coming at Denmark’s Roskilde festival on 2 July, and both had been limited to showcasing old songs and Kojak Variety material.

  To get inside the material, Elvis scheduled five shows over six nights with The Attractions in New York’s Beacon Theatre in early August as ‘open rehearsals’. It was another bold and novel idea, although in truth it was also one born of a growing and uncharacteristic amount of uncertainty about what the new record should sound like. In New York, he was hoping to stumble upon something.

  Elvis had originally wanted in-demand American producer Brendan O’Brien to produce his new album, but they had failed to agree over budgets. Instead, he decided to reunite the production team of Geoff Emerick and Jon Jacobs, who last worked with him on Imperial Bedroom in 1982. The two engineers were in New York to record all the shows between 2–7 August, on hand to capture anything spectacular on tape before they all went into Windmill Lane in Dublin later in the month to begin recording.

  Over the residency at the Beacon, Elvis and The Attractions played seventeen new or unrecorded songs: all of the twelve tracks that would eventually make up the album were performed, as well as ‘God Give Me Strength’, ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’, ‘Almost Ideal Eyes’, ‘Puppet Girl’, and an eight-line fragment called ‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’.

  Although the concerts were played and performed – and priced – as proper shows, the idea of an ‘open rehearsal’ was no joke; these were most definitely work-in-progress sessions. During the opening night, the audience were often looking at bowed heads and squinting eyes, as the notes and lyrics placed on music stands on stage were given plenty of attention by each of The Attractions. Gradually, these were dispensed with over the five nights as the band grew into the material. In addition to the new songs, there was the odd nice surprise as well. ‘Opportunity’ got its first – fairly ragged – airing since the early ’80s, while Marc Ribot joined the band on the last night to play on ‘Hidden Charms’ and ‘Pump It Up’.

  By the time Elvis entered Windmill Lane in Dublin with The Attractions a week after the final show, he at last had a firmer grasp of the songs he wanted to record for the album. ‘I had already changed my mind about the contents of the record several times,’3 he admitted, but now he had narrowed down the shortlist of suitable songs to around fifteen. The gigs at the Beacon had also convinced him to set aside his initial concept of a double album featuring numerous different styles and forms of instrumentation, and focus on a single album featuring just Elvis and The Attractions.

  The sessions proved difficult. Elvis found that some of the songs he had written for others and now wanted to record for himself – such as Aimee Mann’s ‘The Other End Of The Telescope’ – needed drastic rewriting in the studio. He was also finally feeling the pace after the energy-sapping sprint of Meltdown, and was struggling to capture the vocal performances he wanted, while increasingly seeking solace in large amounts of alcohol. His uncharacteristic lack of decisiveness and propensity for self-criticism and self-doubt often infuriated the band, who also found the basic nature of the material problematic.

  At least half of the songs being considered were fragile, melancholic ballads, with disappointment and sadness rather than fury at their hearts, and Elvis envisaged the record as largely stripped down, with his voice and Steve’s piano to the fore. But progress was slow and the failure of the musicans to get close to the mood of the songs in the studio was made all too clear by the inclusion of live excerpts – taken from one of the Beacon Theatre shows – on ‘Complicated Shadows’, and several aborted takes of ‘God Give Me Strength’.

  Geoff Emerick had a long-standing production commitment in the autumn of 1995 to record with Paul McCartney, and the sessions were put on hold in Octobe
r to await his return. During the break in proceedings, Elvis deliberated about where he wanted the album to go. While doing so, he performed a one-off concert with the Brodsky Quartet at St George’s Hall in Bristol on 7 November, and also found time to record a song for a Warner Brothers album of songs inspired by the cult sci-fi show The X-Files, cutting the brooding and rather magnificent ‘My Dark Life’ between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 a.m. on 22 November with Brian Eno at the helm.

  Elvis impressed – and rather annoyed – his collaborator with the sheer wealth of detail he brought to the studio. The session had originally been intended as a chance for the two men to experiment together, but ‘My Dark Life’ was presented as ‘a completely (and minutely) written piece’,4 according to Eno. He ultimately felt rather surplus to requirements.

  Elvis and The Attractions reconvened in December and January 1996 to finish recording the album, still provisionally titled A Case For Song. During the break in proceedings, Elvis had decided to stop drinking alcohol. It had been a major part of his life for long periods over the last two decades, and had often exacerbated his blackest moods. Increasingly over the past twelve months he felt it was getting in the way of his creative process, while doing nothing to lift a sometimes melancholic disposition. ‘I’m not afraid of it,’ he explained. ‘I drank a lot and some of it inspired some very good songs, and then I got tired of it.’5