Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  He was exhausted with the limitations of the rock band format, and wouldn’t tour again with a band until 2002, so sincere and thorough was his disillusion following the demise of The Attractions. He was also unhappy with his own writing, thinking deeply about the lasting worth of what he was doing and what he had done, and looking at different means of expressing himself. He talked about using electronic instruments in a new way or eventually making instrumental music so expressive it required no explanation. ‘I’ve been troubled by the relationship between word and thought and what use it is to me,’ he admitted. ‘I’m troubled by what the point is in saying anything else. Why add a single wasted word to the stack of wasted words? My ambition is to write no words at all.’2

  Preoccupied with a sense of futility, Elvis effectively took a year off, spending some time decompressing at home in Ireland with Cait and considering his options. He was far too creatively hyperactive to sit still for long, but the ensuing eighteen months were largely to be a period of patchwork activity: small pieces, fun collaborations and impromptu live appearances.

  Following the derailment of The Attractions in mid-September, there had been some piecemeal classical commitments. Spread thinly throughout October and November, Elvis had participated in a brief UK tour with John Harle in support of the saxophonist’s Terror And Magnificence album. Part of a line-up which included soprano Sarah Leonard and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, Elvis appeared in Aberdeen, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and London, where his contribution included singing the three songs from Twelfth Night that he had performed on Harle’s record, plus renditions of John Dowland’s ‘Flow My Tears’ and his own ‘Shipbuilding’. It was a rather strange affair and, aside from the show at London’s Royal Festival Hall, most of the other dates were sparsely attended and Elvis’s involvement passed off virtually unnoticed.

  There were two more similarly low-key classical engagments in 1997: three Spanish concerts with the Brodsky Quartet in Malaga, Jerez and Valencia on 8, 9 and 11 January, and the world premiere of his score for the animated film, Tom Thumb, on 3 July.

  Elvis had written and recorded the original score in 1993, but the film – which was to have been narrated by John Cleese – was never finished. However Paul Pritchard, a member of the studio ensemble who had played at the session, suggested that Elvis might like to adapt the score for a concert performance with a small orchestra, staged by the Academy of St Martin’s In The Field chamber orchestra.

  Performed in the lashing rain at the Thorndon Country Park in Essex, ‘Tom Thumb’ was effectively the warm-up act for the main production. Elvis declined to narrate the piece himself, merely introducing his work before leaving the stage and letting children’s TV presenter Zoe Ball do the honours. The music was simple, light and often cartoonish, specifically designed to give children an interest in different musical instruments and textures, but Elvis had given the piece his full consideration. ‘I try to go against type,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t make Tom Thumb a piccolo. He’s a bassoon because he’s always trying to be bigger than he is, huffing and puffing.’3

  Much of the rest of the year was spent in America. There were numerous appearances across the Atlantic, cameos with the likes of The Jazz Passengers, the Charles Mingus Orchestra, Ron Sexsmith, The Fairfield Four and Ricky Skaggs, who hosted a TV show where Elvis performed with George Jones. On that occasion Elvis was – according to Skaggs – ‘nervous as a cat’ as he sang Jones’s ‘The Last Town I Painted’ and ‘The Big Fool Of The Year’. He also played Gram Parsons’ ‘That’s All It Took’ and his own ‘Indoor Fireworks’ on the show. Elvis had written the latter back in 1985 with Skaggs in mind, but the singer passed it up, wary of the song’s ‘drinking, cheating lines. I wasn’t really doing that kind of country,’ he explains. What other kind of country is there?

  It was all enjoyably hectic, largely free of all the hassles and responsibilities of being in charge of a band on the road. He simply turned up, learned his lines and sang his songs.

  However, there was something more significant brewing. During all his many trips to the States in 1997, a collaboration with Burt Bacharach was uppermost in Elvis’s mind. Following the undeniable creative success of ‘God Give Me Strength’, he and Bacharach were now actively planning an album-length collaboration, at Elvis’s initial instigation.

  Their first public appearance was on the David Letterman show at the end of February, playing ‘God Give Me Strength’ together for the first time. The following night, Elvis and Burt popped up at the Grammy Awards to co-present an award, and they found time in March to meet again in Los Angeles.

  The writing process finally began in May, at Bacharach’s home in California. Initially, the plan was for an album partly made up of old Bacharach songs augmented with some co-written songs, satisfying Elvis’s instincts as a fan as well as his natural and ever-present inclination to create something new. However, when the two men discovered they were equally driven when it came to writing music, the ambition of the project intensified. ‘He’s someone who lives like I live,’ Bacharach said in the summer. ‘Someone who can be writing a tune at four in the morning.’4

  When Bacharach played London’s Royal Albert Hall on 1 July, Elvis was there, and over the course of the year they came together about four or five times to write, sitting at keyboards or pianos in Burt’s music room in Santa Monica or in a suite at the Regency Hotel in New York, trading ideas for days at a time.

  Sometimes, Elvis simply provided the words to Burt’s music, as on ‘The Long Division’ and most of ‘This House Is Empty Now’. But usually the songs were either a joint dialogue, or created from the process of combining separately composed pieces. Musically, the combination of magpie and fan in Elvis was happy to bend more towards Bacharach’s traditional style, and he later expressed delight that many of the more obvious ‘Burt’ touches were actually written by him. ‘Toledo’, for example, with its clipped time signature, parping horns and ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ feel, was essentially a Costello composition.

  Having written or presented the basic tracks face-to-face, much of the spade work was done apart. When Elvis was away on a jaunt or back in Dublin, Bacharach would work on the songs, altering harmony or structure or adding a bridge, while Elvis was constantly attending to the words. Lyrically, they had agreed that the songs would be loosely based on the theme of lost love, luxuriating in melancholy. In actual fact, they ended up being much darker than that: tales of infidelity, divorce, despair and obsession. Elvis later claimed the songs were written to order, essentially a craft job; if so, he showed himself to be a terrific actor.

  Renowned within music circles as not just a perfectionist but an absolute obsessive, Bacharach was one of the business’s hardest task-masters when it came to the formalities of song structure. Although he was impressed with his collaborator, the two embarked on a very amicable but bruising contest, in which the traditional Costello method of cramming as many words as he desired into whatever structure could hold them was given short shrift by his partner. ‘He’s a very exacting person,’ Elvis admitted. ‘I’ve had to really think about what I wanted to say in the lyrics, maybe get rid of the superfluous words.’5

  During the composition of ‘In The Darkest Place’, Elvis had come up with the line ‘That is the torch I carry.’ Bacharach, however, found the final syllable intolerable, because he felt it didn’t fit snugly enough the melody he had written. Left to his own devices, Elvis would more than likely have bent the melody to fit his words, but this time there was no give. Eventually, he went away and changed the line to ‘This is the torch I bear’.

  This minute pruning of lyrical excesses fitted neatly with Elvis’s stated desire to let the music do the talking for much of the time, but even so it was undoubtedly a steep learning curve for him, working out exactly what was and wasn’t necessary in a song. ‘We had the inevitable arguments, but I mostly went with his judgment,’ he admitted. ‘I found that the changes he was suggesting
weren’t just improving a line, but, two or three lines on, would pay off again. The shape of the melody, that’s really Burt’s bag.’6

  Following songwriting sessions in October and four further days in the middle of December, the duo had between ten to twelve songs written and were essentially ready to record. Indeed, they were already talking about touring.

  However, their respective schedules dictated that it was going to be the summer of 1998 before they could start work on the record. The fact that Elvis was switching record labels also pushed the recording back. His deal with Warners was dead, and throughout the year Elvis had been looking at the options for a new record company. During October, news leaked out that he had signed with Polygram worldwide, although it would not be officially announced until the New Year.

  Crucially, the deal confronted head-on one of the major problems that Elvis had encountered latterly with Warners: that of his growing diversity and his desire to release records outside of the mainstream rock market, without the pressures of trying to shoehorn them into the preconceived company idea of what ‘Elvis Costello’ represented.

  The new deal with Polygram would, in theory, allow Elvis the freedom to release records on Polygram’s affiliated labels, specifically designed to cater for – and sell records to – specialist markets. His traditional rock releases would be released on Mercury; a mooted jazz-orientated project would come out on Verve; while classical-leaning work would appear on Decca/London. It seemed the perfect set-up. ‘A company that has outlets to accommodate everything from Hanson to Cake, from Bryn Terfel to an Allen Ginsberg record, sounds like a place for me,’7 said Elvis, with uncharacteristic optimism.

  At the same time as news was leaking concerning the new deal, Elvis was fulfilling the last part of his contract with Warners. Extreme Honey: The Very Best of The Warner Brothers Years, covering songs from 1989–97, was released on 17 October. Featuring tracks from Spike, Mighty Like A Rose, The Juliet Letters, Brutal Youth and All This Useless Beauty, the only two rarities were the Eno collaboration ‘My Dark Life’ and ‘The Bridge I Burned’, a new song based on a bastardisation of Prince’s ‘Pop Life’.

  The latter was significant not so much for its mildly unhinged nature and its kiss-off sentiments – which could reasonably be said to be directed towards both The Attractions and Warners – but for the fact that it was the first recorded collaboration between Elvis and his son.

  Matt was now in his early twenties and a jobbing bass player, propagating the fourth generation of MacManus musicians. He had already appeared on the personnel for All This Useless Beauty, credited with ‘rhythm research’ on ‘It’s Time’. ‘Elvis strongly wanted to involve his son,’ recalled Pete Thomas. ‘What [Matt] did was find out if his impressive collection of Detroit soul and funk had a loop for a song. After a while he came to me with many a loop and we listened to them all together.’8 On ‘The Bridge I Burned’, Elvis took the father-son partnership further. They produced the song together, MacManus Jr playing bass and providing a drum loop. Also involved was Matt’s friend Danny Goffey, the drummer from Supergrass.

  The promotion budget provided by Warners for Extreme Honey was $1000, a ‘calculated insult’, according to Elvis, who lamented the ‘shoddy treatment’ he had received over the past two or three years. Right at the death, Warners’ president Stephen Baker tried to stem the flow of bad blood. ‘However our relationship ended, everybody here really loved being in business with him,’ he said in a statement. ‘Whether he was happy or sad or whatever, I was talking to an artist I totally respected, and it was a thrill for me and for Warner Brothers Records.’

  For Elvis, comfort probably couldn’t have come any colder. Even so, he did his bit for the promotion of Extreme Honey, appearing on Clive Anderson’s talk show in the UK and playing ‘So Like Candy’ on David Letterman’s show on 18 November in the States, but unsurprisingly the record failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. Most fans already had the songs, while those with a merely passing interest in Elvis probably didn’t even know the record existed.

  He was, in truth, travelling very far away from the pop charts, and mainly under his own steam. A short tour of northern Italian opera houses wasn’t every record label’s idea of sound commercial practice. Nevertheless, Elvis set off at the beginning of 1998, with Steve Nieve in tow. His relationship with both Steve and Pete Thomas had survived the fall-out from the final Attractions tour, and he and Steve had become especially close. ‘He is a great friend,’ said Elvis. ‘We spent so much time touring with The Attractions and he never had the opportunity to show what he could do. He has gained a lot of confidence in the last few years.’9

  Elvis remained keen to pursue the potentially rich music the two of them had begun making, and the Italian tour was a romantic undertaking, playing in small theatres with almost perfect acoustics between the 3–16 February. Close reading of the dates revealed that Elvis was using the tour as something of a Trojan Horse, to catch as many shows as he could by Italian opera star Cecilia Bartoli, who was also touring Italy at the same time.

  The duo were somewhat under-rehearsed, but as the tour went on they took the chance to mine the deepest seams of Elvis’s songbook. In particular, he seemed to have been listening to Punch The Clock again: rarely heard obsurities such as ‘King Of Thieves’, ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Mouth Almighty’, as well as ‘Kid About It’, ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’, and ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ sat alongside versions of Shakespeare’s ‘O, Mistress Mine’, ‘Gigi’, ‘My Funny Valentine’ and a new song called ‘Bright Blue Times’, written for a BBC television series.

  It was a genuinely energising experience. Elvis judged the results to be some of the freest and most rewarding shows of his career, and within six months he would receive the Tenco Award, the most prestigious recognition for a foreign musician in Italy. The tour was also a healing process after the desultory mood of the last Attractions tour. The sense of gloom and futility was beginning to lift. ‘I’ve rediscovered a love of playing live and an affection for performing a broad range of my own catalogue,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a pride in it that I didn’t have a few years ago.’10

  * * *

  On 8 April, Elvis and Cait travelled to New York to appear with a gallery of stars at Burt Bacharach’s ‘One Amazing Night’ tribute concert at the Hammersmith Ballroom in Manhattan. At the show, which also featured Dionne Warwick, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow and Luther Vandross, the audience were given a brief filmed preview of the pair working together, before Elvis came on and sang one of their new tracks, ‘This House Is Empty Now’.

  Immediately afterwards, the two men embarked upon their final songwriting – or more accurately, song-polishing – session before they finally began recording the songs in Ocean Way in Los Angeles over June and July 1998. It was one of the hottest summers in living memory, and Elvis cut an eccentric figure in the Californian sun: receding hair brutally shorn and topped off with a straw pork-pie hat, dressed in a thick black leather coat and tinted yellow shades, he was the antithesis of Bacharach’s immaculate West Coast cool.

  The sessions were split into two. The basic tracks were laid down in the first half of the recording schedule, while the final two-week session was devoted to adding the layers of overdubs and wealth of detail that characterised Bacharach’s recordings. There were a few familiar faces at Ocean Way. Elvis had insisted on putting together a core group to hold the songs together – Steve Nieve played keyboards, Greg Cohen bass and Jim Keltner drums, while Kevin Killen was engineer – but although it was a genuine collaboration and a co-production, the songs inevitably leaned far more towards Burt’s style than Elvis’s. ‘There was nothing to be gained in trying to prove the point that we could make some sort of Frankenstein’s monster out of the most extreme edges,’ Elvis admitted. “The hybrid of ‘Pump It Up’ and ‘What’s New, Pussycat’ might seem like something of a road crash.’11

  It was arduous work. Even Elvis found the intensity of Bacharach’s
focus astonishing, and ultimately the older man called the shots. They were still tinkering with the songs as they arrived in the studio, with Bacharach continuing his zero-tolerance approach to the shape of the songs and especially the lyrics, fussing and fretting over misplaced commas and stray syllables.

  Elvis was more assertive in terms of instrumentation: he weaned Bacharach away from the thick synthesiser sound that he had been using since the early ’80s and towards more organic, emotionally resonant textures. Many of the vocals were sung live as Burt played piano and conducted the rhythm section of Jim Keltner and Greg Cohen, ensuring that there was an emotional heartbeat at the record’s centre.

  The lushness of the final album was achieved at the second recording session, where a twenty-four-piece orchestra overdubbed string arrangements written and conducted by Bacharach; female backing singers were added to most of the songs, as well as brass and woodwind; and a whole day was devoted to adding tuned percussion touches. Finished by the end of July, the record was scheduled for a late September release, and Elvis came away from the sessions exhausted but beaming. ‘Just watching him work like that has been an inspiration,’ he said. ‘I’m blessed.’12

  While Elvis and Bacharach were recording in Ocean Way, Bill Frisell was hard at work in New York on a unique parallel project, recording instrumental versions of the same set of songs at the same time without having the faintest clue what Elvis and Bacharach were coming up with. ‘They gave me the music as they had finished writing it,’ says Frisell. ‘It was just Elvis singing the songs, standing next to Burt Bacharach who was playing the piano. I had this cassette of what sounded like classic songs that no one had ever heard before, it was just amazing.’

  Although neither knew what the other was doing, there were odd resonances in the finished project. Frisell might give the melody to the trumpet on a particular song, and later find Elvis and Bacharach had done the same, while Elvis later came and added vocal parts to ‘Toledo’ and ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’.