Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

Rejuvenated and clear-headed, Elvis cut many of his vocal tracks live in this second stretch of recording, while the song list was again revised. He dropped ‘Almost Ideal Eyes’ – a complex song in two time signatures that he had written with David Crosby in mind – and ‘God Give Me Strength’ from the running order, while ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’ was disregarded after Ronnie Drew – whom Elvis had originally written the song for – decided he wanted to record it for his own album.

  With the final track listing reduced to twelve, Elvis decided to play to the songs’s strengths, emphasising the beauty of the melodies and the subtleties in the music, rather than succumbing to more obvious arrangements that would merely remind people of past glories. As a result, less and less emphasis was placed on group performances. Pre-recorded loops were used on ‘Little Atoms’, ‘It’s Time’ and ‘Distorted Angel’, while Elvis rearranged ‘I Want To Vanish’ with Steve Nieve, a delicate performance augmented with the Brodsky Quartet, string bass and some clarinet overdubs recorded at Westside Studios in London. Along with a little extra chamber instrumentation on ‘All This Useless Beauty’, it was the closest the album came to its original blueprint.

  Indeed, if Elvis had stayed absolutely true to the material, he would probably have recorded most of the songs with just Steve Nieve, perhaps using the Brodskys and some subtle overdubs. This was primarily an album of simple beauty, melody and voice, and Elvis was becoming increasingly aware that Bruce Thomas, in particular, was playing the songs through gritted teeth. The bass player felt that the essence of The Attractions had been diluted by the arrangements and the production. With a certain inevitablity, towards the end of the sessions the old war wounds began to bleed.

  ‘I think there was a point where Elvis definitely wanted The Attractions to turn into a karaoke machine,’ says Thomas. ‘He was basically turning the voice up, turning the voice up and turning the voice up. I thought, “Ah, the game is up now”.’ Although at this stage the atmosphere was one of unarticulated tension rather than explicit antagonism, it would prove to be a bad omen for the forthcoming summer tour.

  With the album finished and mixed at Westside and Mayfair studios in London, through February Elvis mopped up some other outstanding business. On the ninth, he met up with Burt Bacharach in New York to record their version of ‘God Give Me Strength’ for the Grace Of My Heart soundtrack.

  The film was a fiction based on the Brill Building songwriters of the ’60s and in particular the early years of Carole King, and the song would feature in various states of completion throughout the movie, as though it were being ‘composed’ in real time. When Grace Of My Heart was finally released in September 1996, the stunning Bacharach/Costello recording would not appear in full until the closing credits, but most critics agreed that the best was saved until last. From New York, Elvis flew to Nashville to record ‘That Day Is Done’ with The Fairfield Four for their forthcoming album and to catch some local shows.

  Then it was down to album business. The new record – now called All This Useless Beauty, the first record Elvis had ever named after one of its songs – was released on 13 May, dedicated to Cait in her new guise as Dr O’Riordan, just a few days before their tenth ‘wedding’ anniversary. Unlike Brutal Youth, this was an Elvis Costello and The Attractions record, the first for ten years. And the last.

  It was a seductive, beguiling piece of work. On the title track and ‘I Want To Vanish’, Elvis had conjured up two of the most beautiful recordings of his career, while the slightly ambient ‘Distorted Angel’ and ‘Little Atoms’ were sonically unlike anything he had released, floating on loops and sequenced rhythms. Perhaps most impressively, he sang beautifully throughout, with a measured restraint that could only have been learned from time spent away from roaring over loud rock ’n’ roll bands.

  However, there was a distinct sense of a band on a leash, and one sometimes wondered why – or indeed, if – The Attractions were playing on the record at all. In the end, only ‘You Bowed Down’, the berserk ‘Shallow Grave’ and ‘It’s Time’ featured any hints of the classic, aggressive band perfomances of old. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there was a certain glumness, a sullen quality, in the performances throughout which betrayed the mood in the studio. For all the personal, deeply felt sentiments on the record and the sometimes superlative songwriting, there was a distance at its heart which kept the emotions at arm’s length.

  Reviews were hit and miss. The NME found Elvis ‘caught between the Bacharach and the Britpoppers. Curios and cheese baubles sit next to pure gems.’ Rolling Stone gave the record an A-grade, as though it were a particularly well-constructed history essay. The review in the Boston Phoenix seemed to come closest to articulating what Elvis was trying to achieve: ‘He has captured better than any singer of his generation the cautious expression, the heartache hiding behind the mask of aggression, the punctured dreams we’re all prey to,’ wrote Stephanie Zacharek, before going onto describe him as a modern-day Sinatra. It was hyperbolic, but not preposterously so.

  * * *

  Elvis concluded that the best way to promote an album heavy on quiet ballads was initially to perform the songs with just piano and guitar. As such, the mini-tour kicking off in America on 13 May featured just him and Steve Nieve. Following their emotional and wildly enjoyable performance as a duo at Meltdown, Elvis had established a new rapport with Steve. He seemed to have finally and rather belatedly come to the conclusion that he was considerably more than a band member, and perhaps something close to his musical equal.

  With the full Attractions line-up waiting in the wings for the European dates, the May tour was essentially a short, promotional hop, featuring just nine concerts in all with lots of interviews, radio slots, some industry performances and a couple of TV appearances thrown in. The theatres and clubs were small, ranging from just 350 in the Troubadour in Los Angeles to 1300 in the Filmore in San Francisco, and they made for a perfectly intimate evening’s entertainment, with Elvis in particularly fine voice on all nights.

  The sets were heavy on the All This Useless Beauty material, but alongside some of the more appropriate older material best suited for piano and voice there were plenty of surprises. In New York on 22 May, Elvis played an evening show and a late show at the Supper Club, five hours of music in total. Treats included ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’, ‘King Horse’, ‘Black Sails In The Sunset’, ‘Talking In The Dark’, ‘Watch Your Step’, ‘Men Called Uncle’ and a great, Motown-inspired new track called ‘Unwanted Number’, also written for Grace Of My Heart.

  These were some of the most expressive and enjoyable concerts of his career. Elvis looked happy on stage, impersonating Elvis Presley singing the hits of Bruce Springsteen and Blondie, and during ‘God’s Comic’ recounting a dream in which the Heavenly Father asked him if Alanis Morissette and Dave Grohl were in fact the same person. Far from limiting his options, the stripped-down format seemed to free him to achieve more than he ever could with a full rock band, particularly as a vocalist.

  Nevertheless, Elvis would be fulfilling the rest of the tour dates with The Attractions, returning to Dublin to rehearse in early June. Already, All This Useless Beauty was dropping down the charts. It had sold poorly in the States, reaching a peak of No. 53, and fared little better in Europe, dipping under the 100,000 sales mark. It limped to No. 23 in the UK.

  It was a hugely disappointing showing for an album of songs Elvis held very close to his heart. After The Juliet Letters and the commercial failure of Brutal Youth he had become increasingly disillusioned with Warners. He felt that they had promoted the new record ‘atrociously’, abandoning him in the same way that Columbia had done in the mid-’80s. ‘I was being told officially from the most senior levels that I was wasting my time,’ he said.6

  His typically bloody-minded idea of releasing a different single in the UK every week throughout July – ‘Little Atoms’, ‘The Other End Of The Telescope’, ‘Distorted Angel’ and ‘All This Useless Beauty’ – was probab
ly designed to annoy the record company as much as anything else. In that aim he succeeded, but it certainly didn’t come close to providing him with a hit single. Furthermore, ticket sales for the European tour proved to be surprisingly poor.

  On the eve of the tour, Elvis taped a BBC TV Special in London on 18 June. Entitled A Career Revue, the show looked back to the breadth of Meltdown and finally incorporated many of the elements that Elvis had initially wanted on the album: the Brodsky Quartet; a chamber orchestra; solo slots; duets with Steve, as well as The Attractions. Taped at the BBC Television centre studios, the performance was an exemplary demonstration of the core versatility of Elvis’s talents. Broadcast twice on BBC TV in July, it was later released on video in October, when Elvis finally got to use the title A Case For Song. It seemed fitting.

  The tour kicked off at the Stadium in Dublin on 26 June, opening with just Steve and Elvis. The Attractions joined in halfway through ‘Oliver’s Army’, before things really took flight with a rare performance of ‘Miracle Man’. As the tour moved on, the band were playing with much more light and shade – and far fewer decibels – compared to the sometimes extreme Brutal Youth shows two years earlier. The song selection was also much more adventurous, with a generous sprinkling of old and new tracks throughout: ‘Motel Matches’, ‘Brilliant Mistake’, ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Human Hands’ among them. On a Cajun campfire reworking of ‘Pump It Up’, Steve Nieve even switched to accordion.

  But tellingly, the highlights of the shows were usually the sections featuring just voice and piano. In truth, any concept of band unity on- or off-stage had long since evaporated. Elvis broke up the tour to perform alone with Debbie Harry, The Jazz Passengers and The Brodsky Quartet at the Montreux Jazz Festival on 9 July, and fitted in gigs with Steve in Dranouter in Belgium and the Water Festival in Stockholm, performing without the remaining two Attractions. He had his own dressing room and travelled separately to and from concerts, and he and Cait very often stayed in different hotels to the band. Essentially, they would meet at the soundcheck and again at the show, but other than that, singer and band had very little to do with each other.

  With Pete Thomas the most laid-back member of the group and Steve finally getting the recognition he deserved as a worthy collaborator in his own right, it was left to Bruce Thomas to play upon the tensions and resentments that had been simmering since the recording of the album. Although he and Elvis had both made genuine efforts to get along, their relationship had an all too easily activated fault line. ‘It gradually just deteriorated again,’ says Thomas. ‘It got into some sort of dysfunctional loop, like when you get back together with your ex and after three months you’re fighting over the same things. No matter what we did, we just ended up the same.’

  Matters came to a head when the tour reached the Auditorio San Javier in Murcia, Spain on 14 July. The Attractions were playing ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’. ‘Elvis did this Wilson Picketty sort of soul declamation, and I just did a little blues lick,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘The next day on the bus, he said, “By the way, I don’t want you camping it up on stage again tonight, blues licks and things like that.” I said, “Well, it was just a bit of spontaneous expression. Where’s the problem?” Then he said, “Well, there’s only room for one star on that stage.” And I thought, “Well, that’s it.” When somebody turns round to you and says that they don’t want your input intruding, who would want to play under those circumstances?’

  Bruce and some of the road crew immediately took to calling Elvis ‘Tex’ behind his back, a lightly-coded reference to Texas: The Lone Star State, and a pointed sneer at his apparent reluctance to share any of the limelight. From then on, relations deteriorated rapidly and the mood worsened, to the extent that communication all but ceased between singer and bass player for the rest of the tour. It wasn’t the only relationship going through the mill. Bruce Thomas claims that Elvis and Cait were arguing frequently – and audibly – and she even quit the tour on a few occasions, flying back home to Dublin, only to return a few days later. On other occasions, again according to Thomas, she would stay in the hotel after a row, running up an enormous room service bill while Elvis was working.

  The concert in Barcelona on 16 July betrayed something of Elvis’s furious mood: he walked on-stage nearly an hour late, played ‘Veronica’ by himself and then performed a perfunctory half-an-hour set with The Attractions before stomping off. It was almost like 1979 all over again. On his return for a three-song encore he shouted, ‘Fuck Johnnie Walker and fuck Sold Out,’ the sponsors and promoters of the gig respectively. It lasted barely an hour.

  In this atmosphere of recrimination and rapidly declining respect, Bruce Thomas chose to air his grievances by sliding into disinterest and unprofessionalism on-stage. Disenchanted with the record they were promoting and tired of the growing sense that this was The Attractions in name but not in spirit, the bass player was beginning to let his personal feelings affect his performances. ‘I just lost interest and I suppose it showed in my eyes and my body language,’ he admits. ‘I was taking the piss out of him, to be honest, singing alternative versions to the lyrics when he was doing his solo set, or forgetting songs on stage. Elvis would turn around and say, “You’d better fucking rehearse!”. But I don’t have a problem remembering songs, I just have a problem concentrating when I’m not committed anymore.’

  Elvis was enough of an old hand to keep on playing through the storm, but there was only so much of this behaviour he was prepared to swallow. ‘[Bruce] was making lots of embarrassing mistakes, and The Attractions had taken pride in never being erractic,’ he said. ‘We did set a very high standard and the last thing I wanted it to be was a sorry excuse for it.’7 When the tour reached America, he made the decision privately – then publicly – that this would be the last time around the block for The Attractions. This time he meant it.

  The tour rolled into Los Angeles on 25 August like a thundercloud. Bruce gave Elvis a stuffed armadillo as a forty-second birthday present, a fairly pointed indication of how high Elvis ranked in his affections. The next night, Elvis and The Attractions performed the withering ‘You Bowed Down’ on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in Los Angeles, and Elvis changed the words to incorporate the title phrase from a new song, ‘I Should Have Never Walked Over That Bridge I Burned’.

  As if the inference wasn’t obvious enough, he told Leno he was quitting touring and possibly even recording. Disenchanted with the predictability of playing with a loud rock ’n’ roll band, particularly one where only three-quarters of the line-up were committed to the music, his exhaustion and disaffection was palpable. ‘I don’t think he’ll be working with The Attractions again,’ admitted a Warners’ spokesman the next morning, with some understatement.

  Effectively, for the last three weeks of the tour, The Attractions were simply working their notice. Everyone knew it was the end, and by the time the tour dropped anchor in Osaka in Japan on 6 September, the mood had turned unbelievably sour, far worse even than the first time the band had imploded. Elvis and Bruce hadn’t spoken to each other for nearly a month, and the expression of animosity had descended to primary school levels. ‘In the end I was blowing raspberries at Cait, or she would walk into the lift and stand with her back six inches from my face,’ admits Thomas. It was a terribly undignified way to end.

  Elvis, for his part, was displaying signs that the whole experience had left him somewhat dejected. In Minneapolis on 18 August, he had walked into his room in the Whitney Hotel and decided that the windows were too narrow, moving instead to the Presidential Suite at the Marquis Hotel at a cost of $2000 a night. Bruce also alleges that Elvis believed the bass player was badmouthing him, feeding snippets of (mis)information and hostile propaganda to Costello fanzines.

  It all ended, mercifully, on 15 September at the Kinro-Kaikan in Nagoya. There seemed to be a kind of release, The Attractions ratcheting up the intensity as they neared the finish line, racing down the final furlong with
a searing blast of ‘The Beat’, ‘Man Out Of Time’, ‘Mystery Dance’, ‘Red Shoes’, ‘This Year’s Girl’ and a final – perhaps ironic – ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. Elvis introduced The Attractions one last time and they were gone: ‘Good night. God Bless. Sayonara!’

  They at least exchanged a tepid handshake after the show. ‘Whenever,’ Bruce shrugged. ‘Yeah, whenever,’ replied Elvis. And that was that. There would be no sentimental rapprochement this time. ‘You won’t see them again,’ swore Elvis. ‘I had a slight feeling of sadness on the last night that we played. It was like the last night of your childhood. I knew I wouldn’t do that again. When somebody is deliberately fucking it up, you have to get rid of them. It’s as simple as that.’8

  Chapter Sixteen

  1996–99

  ELVIS DIDN’T JUST SAY GOODBYE to The Attractions in Japan, he effectively waved farewell to the notion of taking any further part in the commercial circus of rock ’n’ roll for several years. Following the disappointment of All This Useless Beauty – which a year on from its release had sold a mere 97,000 copies in the US – and Elvis’s less-than-complimentary remarks about his record company over the last couple of years, the relationship with Warners was entering its death throes. ‘I’m sick of working as hard as I do for no reward in terms of selling records,’ he later said. ‘That had to stop.’1

  Amid allegations that Elvis had stormed into the Warners building in Los Angeles and resigned, it became clear that the next record would be his last for the label. ‘I just think he’s done all he could do with us and he’s looking to start over and find some new blood,’ said Warners spokesman Bill Bentley, with the usual corporate diplomacy.

  However, Elvis was unwilling to hand them any new material, and it was agreed that his final record for Warners would be a compilation, scheduled for release in the autumn of 1997.