David Sefton, who by now had left the South Bank to take up a post as Performing Arts Director at UCLA in California, felt that the record stretched to the limits Elvis’s ceaseless desire and belief that anything is possible within music. However, there is often much to be taken from a well-intentioned failure. ‘The fact that he knows no fear is a positive thing,’ says Sefton. ‘Ambition and enthusiasm go hand in hand. I think there’s nothing wrong with overreaching.’
Many of the reviews proved the point by lauding the album, too easily enchanted by its charms. Nevertheless, there was an undeniable sense that For The Stars marked a natural last port of call for Elvis’s roving enthusiasm for joint ventures. His limitless curiousity, ample ego and inate sense of carpe diem meant that he was often unwilling to turn down an opportunity to work with someone he admired, but very occasionally he seemed to prolong the collaboration beyond its natural tenure, trying to bring it to life through sheer force of will. For The Stars was one such instance.
Without an album of new songs under his own banner for five years, Elvis’s core audience were in danger of viewing his designated role in music as the man who ushered non-pop acts into unlikely unions, while the media image of him had very firmly become that of someone hell-bent on chasing down every last musical nook-and-cranny until he had sated his thirst.
The numerous side-projects throughout 2000 hadn’t necessarily helped. Aside from writing a ballet score and making an album with a mezzo-soprano, Elvis had played Singleton: The Narrator in New York and London performances of Jazz Passenger Roy Nathanson’s ‘jazz oratario’, Fire At Keaton’s Bar And Grill; and Drunkman in Steve Nieve’s first-ever contemporary opera, Welcome To The Voice.
The latter role demanded a degree of acting ability, while requiring Elvis to sing complex songs in both English and French. He more than coped, although he did hide a lyric sheet inside his rather conspicuous newspaper prop. Dressed plainly in black shirt and trousers, he looked the part: crop-headed, unshaven, distinctly overweight, he attacked it with his usual animated ferocity, acting out the part with abandon while Steve and saxophonist Ned Rothenberg improvised around the score.
The New York Times came away from Welcome To The Voice with the observation that ‘a patch on the border between art music and pop is being cultivated, and Elvis Costello is its chief gardener’. Maybe so, but the pop side of the lawn was becoming distinctly weed-ridden through neglect. Elvis was in real danger of losing his connection with his core audience.
‘For the past few years, it has not always been clear what the point of Elvis Costello was,’ wrote Jonathan Romney in the Guardian. ‘He has become an expert at keeping himself interested, diversifying into umpteen left-field projects. It is obviously a healthy move for him, trading in the conventional solo role for gentleman-scholarhood, but he has also come close to being a high-culture dilettante, [and] you sometimes wish he would just come out and, well, entertain us.’
Elvis was coming to similar conclusions himself, even if he would have vehemently disagreed, mostly with absolute justification, with any charges of dilettantism. One of the lasting legacies of his career to date has been his enduring enthusiasms as a fan. In that capacity, he has written sleevenotes for re-issues of albums by Gram Parsons and Dusty Springfield, as well as published appreciations of artists as diverse as Benny Green and The Beatles. A happy knock-on effect of these appetites is the way in which Elvis has helped to introduce his fan base to genres as varied as country, northern soul and classical. On the down side, however, he hadn’t made a solo record since 1996, and he was keen to get back to it. ‘I know he got sick as being always seen as the arch collaborator and experimenter, I think that definitely wore thin,’ says David Sefton. ‘You spend twenty years giving interviews as an advocate for everything from country music to contemporary classical music, then in the end you just want to get on with making records.’
Chapter Eighteen
2001–04
‘I HAVEN’T A CLUE WHAT I’M DOING,’ laughed the dishevelled-looking man as he moved around the stage. Dressed down for the occasion in a floral shirt, combat trousers, trilby and trainers, Elvis was detonating distorted beats and slamming out electric guitar chords, revelling in simply making a noise again.
This was, appropriately enough, Total Meltdown. As part of the Royal Festival Hall’s fiftieth anniversary concert, many of the previous Meltdown curators were invited to play sets on the night of 4 May 2001. Eschewing any notions of a ‘greatest hits’ set, Elvis plugged back into the Meltdown spirit and took the opportunity to experiment with a wild solo set of almost completely unheard material, using electric and acoustic guitars, tape loops and drum machines.
A few months earlier, on the day before Valentine’s Day, Elvis had played a charity gig organised by Donal Lunny at Vicar Street in Dublin, where his set had included ‘Daddy, Can I Turn This?’, ‘Oh Well’, ‘Soul For Hire’, and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’. At the Royal Festival Hall he added more new songs to the mix: ‘Dust’, ‘Alibi’, ‘When I Was Cruel’, and an encore of ‘I Want You’, the only previously recorded song in the set.
It was as gloriously shambolic as any work-in-progress offering should be, but there was no mistaking the singularity of purpose behind it all. It may have ‘veered erratically between an acoustic guitar and a drum machine and box of tricks designed to make him sound like a one-man band’, according to The Times, but it was less indulgent than it looked or sounded. Elvis was genuinely exploring ideas for his next record.
Over the course of the year there would be the usual generous scattering of eclectic cameos and dizzying array of guest appearances: a concert in Liverpool in March to launch a local compilation record; two shows at UCLA in April, performing in tribute to legendary folk archivist Harry Smith; jamming on-stage with Roger McGuinn in Dublin in May; organised stage invasions at New York shows with the Charles Mingus Orchestra and Lucinda Williams in June; and three more performances of Roy Nathanson’s Fire At Keaton’s Bar And Grill in London, Manchester and Rotterdam during the same month.
Elvis also played his second – and last, to date – show with Anne Sofie Von Otter at the Hit Factory in New York on 6 June. It was an industry-only affair, in front of an invited audience of 150 people, mostly sticking to the For The Stars material, although Elvis also sang ‘Almost Blue’ and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’.
But the most significant concerts of 2001 took place at the Royal Festival Hall. Following the constructive mayhem of Total Meltdown, Elvis returned for the Meltdown ‘proper’ on 26 June. This year the artistic director was Robert Wyatt, and Elvis duly sang ‘Left On Man’, ‘Caroline’, and of course ‘Shipbuilding’, at a concert showcasing Wyatt’s songs on the twenty-fourth. The explosions of two nights later were another prospect entirely.
Elvis opened the show with ‘Alibi’ and ‘45’, played solo on acoustic guitar, before launching into the darkest depths of electronic exprimentation with Steve Nieve, turning ‘Green Shirt’ into a long, meandering piece filled with loops, samples and echo. He was clearly not entirely in control of the differing technical elements on stage, and for much of the time Steve was all but inaudible as the waves of electronica and distorted beats washed over the songs. ‘As deep house beats cascade and distant bells sound, with only the occasional lyric, it feels like sitting in on a radiophonic workshop and, well, I think he’s getting away from us,’ said The Independent’s reviewer. ‘The numbers are darkly anarchic but deeply distancing – there’s emotion in there but it’s lost in the random bleeping.’ The unsettling trio of ‘Dust’, ‘My Dark Life’ and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’ closed the opening set.
After a break, Elvis introduced the Brodsky Quartet for a short period of calm, including ‘Pills And Soap’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’, before returning alone to sing a very rare rendition of ‘The Great Unknown’. He then took a deep breath and plugged in his beatbox again for ‘Hurry Down Doomsday’ and ‘When I Was Cruel’, two songs which actually seemed
to benefit from the additional electronica. He and Steve encored with ‘The Bridge I Burned’ and a straight, solemn reading of ‘Shipbuilding’, before the Brodsky Quartet reappeared to run through ‘Rocking Horse Road’ and ‘Almost Blue’.
The real treat of the evening, however, came at the end, when the screen was pulled back to reveal a drum kit and a bass. Pete Thomas and US session-man Davey Farragher stepped out to join Elvis and Steve, and the ensemble lashed into ‘Man Out Of Time’, followed by seven more classic Attractions songs, only one of which – a deadly, deaf-defying ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’ – was recorded after 1978. ‘It seems he does care after all, handing out sugar lumps for those who’ve stayed the course,’ sighed The Independent. ‘And thus the devious Costello, grinning like a ferret, triumphs again, drat him.’
After fully five years, Elvis was finally back in band mode, reconnected to the primal impulse of the most basic of beat music. ‘I had done some things that were very concentrated and very disciplined, whether it was working with Burt Bacharach or Anne Sofie Von Otter,’ he explained. ‘And then, suddenly, all the liberties of [rock ’n’ roll] appealed to me again.’1
The quartet made their second live appearance supporting Bob Dylan at Nowlan Park in Kilkenny on 15 July, although this time there were no new songs in evidence. Instead, it was a unashamed and breathless ‘greatest hits’ set, beginning with ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ending with ‘Pump It Up’ and ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. With all the linear career landmarks – ‘Less Than Zero’, ‘Alison’, ‘Lipstick Vogue’, ‘Chelsea’, ‘Oliver’s Army’, and ‘Good Year For The Roses’ – assembled in order and fired off into the air, this was clearly an opportunity to mould new bassist Davey Farragher around the two remaining Attractions. Inevitably, no offer was extended to Bruce Thomas, although Pete and Steve had initially lobbied to get him on board. In Kilkenny, Elvis chose to respond by playing ‘How To Be Dumb’.
Shortly after the Dylan show, Elvis finally went into Windmill Lane in Dublin to record his long-awaited ‘beat’ album. Essentially, he planned to make a rock ’n’ roll record, but one with a tight and inflexible rhythmic pulse at the core of many of the songs, which would then stretch outwards towards the melody and harmony, rather than vice versa.
Whether the songs had been written simply and traditionally on guitar, or their origins had been more rhythmically propelled, melody would be secondary to feel throughout, in the manner of modern hip-hop and R&B records. There had been such a lot of melody, anyway, on Painted From Memory, that Elvis was ready to take a rest from it.
Straying into somewhat uncharted waters sonically, he needed a production team who were comfortable with the modern studio technology he wanted to use on the record, such as MIDI and digital. With this in mind, he assembled a young team of engineers and producers in Dublin who could work at speed, with a confident command of the latest possibilities that the studio now offered.
They consisted of Ciaran Cahill, the assistant engineer on All This Useless Beauty; Leo Pearson, who had programmed for The Corrs and U2 among others; and Kieran Lynch, who had worked with Shania Twain, which obviously didn’t put Elvis off. Broadly speaking, each had a defined role. Cahill took care of the engineering, Lynch oversaw the editing and musical ‘housekeeping’, while Leo Pearson looked after the rhythm processing, perhaps the most important element of the record.
‘If we created a sound and we wanted it twisted a little bit to give it a little more character or a little more grit, Leo usually had that job,’ admitted Elvis. ‘We tried to work as a team. Obviously, I’m governing the thing, from the point of view I’m writing the songs and I know what I want to hear, but I allowed them responsibilities for different areas.’2
Elvis had originally envisaged it as a solo record, but the Dylan show convinced him that he might as well use the band, who were now all in Ireland anyway. Once that decision had been made, the primary production task became finding a way of welding the electronic textures central to the sound of the record with the traditional shape and sound of a four-piece, combo-style band.
Some of the simpler, more traditional songs such as ‘45’, ‘Doll Revolution’, ‘My Little Blue Window’, ‘Tart’, ‘Dissolve’ and ‘Alibi’, were laid down with the minimum of fuss, Elvis playing his guitar through a cheap fifteen-watt Roebuck amp, happy with the rough sound it produced as he bounced off the band.
However, other tracks needed a more ambitious and less immediately straightforward approach. ‘Leo would start off getting a groove together, picking out some sounds, and we just kept layering,’ says Ciaran Cahill. ‘There are many different approaches to recording, from putting the band in a room and letting them go at it full-tilt, to looping up something that Pete Thomas was playing.’3
The most startling and easily the most successful example of this experimental approach was ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’, a seven-minute near-masterpiece which was as sonically adventurous as anything Elvis had ever put on one of his records, using samples, loops and pre-programmed rhythms to create a genuinely unsettling and yet beautiful musical landscape. ‘It started with a ’60s Italian pop record by Mina,’ explained Elvis. ‘It’s a two-bar loop that’s just put through this little kind of kids’ sampler, and there’s a little bit of backward bass that’s also on that.’4 Over the top, Steve added impressionistic piano, Elvis twanged a baritone guitar and added a mesmerising lyric and serpentine melody, until the track gelled into something wonderous and haunting.
Despite the new, experimental approach to recording, Elvis had been working on many of the songs for some time and he knew exactly the sound he wanted. As a result, the recording sessions were fast and furious. ‘Alibi’ was recorded in one take, and all the basic tracks were finished by the end of August.
The following month, on 24 September, Elvis was in Avatar Studios in New York with Kevin Killen, laying down brass overdubs for ‘15 Petals’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’, while Bill Ware of the Jazz Passengers played vibraphone on ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’. Elvis also recorded a version of the old Charlie Chaplin song ‘Smile’, commissioned for a Japanese television programme. ‘It just came out of the blue,’ he shrugged. ‘‘Smile’ is a famous song in Japan, in lots of different renditions, and they just for some reason decided they wanted me.’5 He cut the song live in a three-hour session with old hands like Marc Ribot and Greg Cohen, as well as a string octet for which he had written and orchestrated an arrangement.
He was pleased to see them all. Both New York sessions took place less than a fortnight after the 9/11 attacks, and Elvis and Kevin Killen discussed at length whether they should cancel the pre-booked studio time, but decided to press on and immerse themselves in music rather than dwell on the alternatives.
While in New York, Elvis also rehearsed with the Charles Mingus Orchestra for shows in Los Angeles. Earlier in the year, in his position as Head of Performing Arts at UCLA, David Sefton had approached Elvis about becoming Artist in Residence for the 2001–02 academic year, beginning in the autumn. Elvis agreed. It was designed as a natural progression from Meltdown, with Elvis engaging on a roughly quarterly basis, with the idea that he would be present at regular intervals throughout the year. ‘Really, the template was as loose as that,’ says Sefton. ‘I didn’t really want to impose any real rigours on it.’
The first fruits of the proposed year-long residency were two full concerts with the Charles Mingus Orchestra on 27 and 28 September at the Royce Hall. Elvis had jumped on stage with the Orchestra on several occasions, but this would be the first time that he would lead them through a full concert, as well as the first time that they would be playing adaptations of original Elvis songs alongside their own material. He added ‘Long Honeymoon’, ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’, ‘Stalin Malone’, ‘Chewing Gum’, ‘Watching The Detectives’ and ‘Almost Blue’ to the Orchestra’s traditional set, without diluting the essence of the ensemble.
The shows were sold out and the two evenings were generally deemed to be a highly successful opening collaboration to his year as Artist in Residence. ‘When Costello performed it was not merely as singer, instrumentalist, songwriter or former new wave rocker anthropologizing in the big, sophisticated world of jazz,’ ran the review in the LA Weekly. ‘It was, instead, as a bona fide bandleader, welding dizzyingly complex tunes to weird lyrics and singing them all like he’s squeezing passion from a narrow-necked tube. His fans are forever vindicated.’
* * *
Elvis returned to Dublin in the autumn to mix the new record, taking care not to sanitise the tracks: he wanted a raw, densely packed rock record with harsh electronic beats. There was spillage and distortion on some songs, but – as with the making of records as diverse as My Aim Is True and Blood & Chocolate – any technical imperfections were deemed secondary to the feel of the final recording. ‘If something was going down that was passionate and had a vibe and had emotion and carried the message or idea of the music, that’s more important,’ said Leo Pearson. ‘There were other mixes of tracks that were more sonically correct but that just didn’t have the same vibe to them. And we want to tip our hat to Elvis for hammering that home.’6 If the production team of Cahill, Lynch and Pearson had taught Elvis much about the most advanced production practices, he had taught them plenty about the inexact art of making records in return.
The release of the new album was delayed slightly to make way for a short tour that Elvis undertook in January 2002. The Concerts For A Landmine Free World took in Belfast, Dublin, London, Glasgow, Stockholm and Oslo between 13–20 January, and Elvis shared the stage with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, John Prine and Nanci Griffith, taking it in turns to sing and play their songs and occasionally joining in on each other’s.
Thus he got to duet with Emmylou Harris on heartbreaking renditions of ‘Indoor Fireworks’ and ‘Sleepless Nights’, or enjoy the attentions of A-grade ensemble backing vocals for ‘American Without Tears’. ‘Elvis loved it and he had a great time doing it,’ recalls Steve Earle, who was mesmerised by watching Elvis sing at close quarters. ‘He’s one of the best singers alive. My favourite singers are Costello, David Hidalgo and Aaron Neville – he’s that good a singer.’
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