Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  * * *

  North was recorded a month later, engineered by Kevin Killen in Avatar Studios in New York during April and May. The city was now effectively Elvis’s new adopted home; Waymark was up for sale, and would be sold for €1,300,000 before the end of the year. While in New York, he and Diana Krall joined Willie Nelson on stage at the Beacon Theatre to sing ‘Crazy’ on 9 April, but for most of the month Elvis was squirrelled away in the studio.

  The songs were simple and stark, all whispers and sighs, and needed the subtlest of touches rather than a beat band. As such, most of the record was played in a four-piece, jazz quartet format: Elvis singing, Steve Nieve playing simple piano, Peter Erskine on muted drums and Michael Formanek on bass. The tracks were then augmented with various shades of brass and string colours – a forty-eight-piece orchestra, flutes, French horns. All the orchestrations had been written by Elvis, which he then conducted. He was keen to keep it simple. ‘There are strings, but used very sparingly,’ he said. ‘They might only play three notes on a song. There are only twelve bars of electric guitar in the whole thing.’14

  The Brodsky Quartet appeared on ‘Still’, playing live in London while Elvis sang live in New York, brought together in the moment by the magic of technology. Elvis sat at the piano and sang the closing ballad ‘I’m In The Mood Again’ alone, a very personal ending to his most naked album to date. He recorded quickly, wanting to stay true to the immediacy of the songs.

  By the first week of May the record was being mixed, and by the time he went back on the road with The Imposters in July it was ready for release. However, there were no new songs on show until the tour reached the Canadian border, where for four concerts it was just Elvis and Steve on-stage. The stripped-down format allowed them to flex a little, and almost half of North was debuted, as well as ‘North’ itself, a tongue-in-cheek number left off the album, which espoused the joys of Canada, and one Canadian in particular.

  In the end, it seemed to be an album people could either instinctively feel and hear, or which left them cold. After the rowdy and successful When I Was Cruel there was a general feeling that Elvis had failed to capitalise on the renewed momentum his mainstream career had gained. As ever, he had simply followed the music. Very much a mood piece, North’s initial impact was minimal; as grey and monchrome as the picture of a forlorn, rain-soaked Elvis on the cover, it was hard to hear any tunes. It was also difficult to escape the nagging sensation that Elvis was showing off to his new girlfriend, displaying his versatility in a jazzy, piano-and-voice template which closely mirrored her own.

  However, repeated listenings – which many people failed to afford it – allowed the record’s fragile beauty to emerge. Musically and lyrically a less dramatic counterpoint to Painted From Memory, and aspiring to Frank Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours territory, North was designed for winter time, late-night-early-morning listening. Elvis’s voice was most effective when simmering at the lower ends of both volume and key, but strained and wobbled elsewhere.

  The songs themselves were split roughly down the middle: the first six appeared to dwell on Elvis’s break up with Cait, while the remaining five celebrated his new-found love for Diana Krall. Domestic detectives looking to apportion blame had plenty of material to sift through, but there was no malice in these songs. Just a genuine, surprised sadness. ‘I thought we’d make it all the way,’ he crooned on ‘You Left Me In The Dark’, while on the profoundly affecting ‘You Turned To Me’ he reflected on being ‘betrayed,’ before adding, ‘Both of us had strayed.’ The master of the double bluff hadn’t resigned his post just yet.

  Much of the lyrical content, however, bordered on the banal, a disappointment for those who had waited twenty-five years for Elvis to bare his soul. In the end, it seemed that trying to articulate the realities of love and loss rendered him as tongue-tied as everybody else, save perhaps for Smokey Robinson and Cole Porter. Some listeners regarded this as a positive. ‘He has never sounded quite so human,’ said the Evening Standard, and many of the reviews agreed. ‘With every play this album becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off,’ was the Guardian’s verdict. There were plenty more positive notices, but again, for many the record stood or fell on whether you enjoyed Elvis’s voice stretching itself with difficult, low-key material.

  Simmy Richman concluded a quite stunningly personal attack in the Independent On Sunday by stating that North’s ‘only purpose is to serve as a faux-classical showcase for that pompous and preposterous baritone crooning voice. This self-penned, soporific, pseudo-Sondheim sucks. With strings on’. Time Out expressed similar sentiments, directing its readers towards Songs For Swingin’ Lovers, In The Wee Small Hours, Only The Lonely or Come Fly With Me. ‘Already got them?’ it concluded. ‘Good. Now rest assured, you don’t need this.’

  As ever, Elvis took such criticism personally. Having decided to lay his heart on the line, he was stung – if not surprised – by the criticism. ‘There’s a rather unpleasant English personality trait,’ he proposed. ‘That of being uncomfortable in the presence of clearly expressed emotion.’15 Notwithstanding the fact that he had spent an entire career avoiding such ‘clearly expressed emotion’ until now, Elvis also seemed to overlook the possibility that people simply might not like the record on its own terms.

  North debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz charts and stayed there for five weeks, but it sold poorly, reaching only No. 42 in the UK and No. 57 in the US and notching up a mere 84,000 sales in the US in the nine months following its release. Many of the reviews had inevitably focused on the obviously autobiographical nature of the songs, and Elvis was anxious not to get into detailed discussions regarding the circumstances of the writing of the record. The eleven songs were the first and last statement he was prepared to make about the tectonic shifts in his private life. One interviewer mentioned Cait and he firmly stated his position. ‘It’s entirely at your discretion to mention her name, but I very much want to be respectful of her independence as a person,’ he cautioned. ‘And one of the things you have to say when you part with somebody is that they have the right not to be drawn into the consideration of your life. It’s really important that I don’t say anything that puts her in the public focus. It’s not fair, she didn’t ask for it.’16

  North, it seemed, was all the explaining Elvis was going to do. That particular bridge was burned, and there was no remaining contact between the two ex-lovers. It was perhaps telling, though, that Cait had picked up the threads of her musical life after eighteen years, as well as her defunct relationship with some of The Pogues. She remained in Dublin, and joined Philip Chevron’s re-formed Radiators From Space (Plan 9) in December for an appearance at Joe Strummer’s memorial tribute at the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin, and continued to gig with the band into 2004. She also sang the female part for ‘Fairytale Of New York’ at Shane MacGowan’s solo show in the same city a few days earlier. Perhaps most spectacularly, she went on to climb Mount Everest in the early summer of 2004.

  Meanwhile, Elvis returned from the North tour to make plans for his marriage to Diana Krall. The tour had quite sensibly featured just Elvis and Steve, kicking off in Japan on 1 October. Most of the new record was aired, and the songs seemed to become more effective when played in groups of two or three rather than as a whole, where their similarities tended to merge into one. In concert, with just Steve’s piano and Elvis’s voice, they were allowed to soar. ‘Costello croons with passion and style, conjuring intimacy with a flickering hand, sparking audience participation and backing off the mic to sing without amplification,’ said the Observer, reviewing the show at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on 7 October. ‘He has made a middle-aged man in young love look dignified and rather glorious.’

  Wedding banns had been posted at Marylebone Town Hall in mid-October, and Elvis and Krall spent much of their time in London, staying at a suite in Claridges and dining at The Ivy while they fulfilled their residency criteria and organised themselves. The marriage final
ly took place on 6 December, a statement confirming that it was ‘a private event with close friends and family in attendance’.

  Nonetheless, there was a distinctly showbiz buzz about it all. The wedding took place at the mansion home of Elton John in the Surrey countryside, with Paul McCartney and his wife Heather Mills, David Letterman and Canada’s Consul General to New York, Pamela Wallin, among the 150 guests. The Chieftains were the house band, a safe bet for getting everyone on their feet and dancing. The newlyweds were spotted a few days later, strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, before returning to their new home in Nanoose on Vancouver Island in Canada. Elvis was heading north, after all.

  * * *

  He moved into 2004 with the usual incessant energy of ideas, the customary planned projects and side-steps. Elvis had become increasingly well-connected in TV and film in the States, and in recent years there had been the odd ironic toe dipped into the mainstream, popping up for brief cameos in the Spice Girls film Spiceworld, The Larry Sanders Show and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. It would be fair to say that the camera had always stopped some way short of loving Elvis, and the luckier viewers often blinked and missed him. In 2003 he had – rather nervously – guest-presented David Letterman’s show, on which he had appeared numerous times throughout his career; while there remained industry talk of a US television sitcom called The Arc Angels, based on a treatment Elvis had written in 2001 with his long-time friend, the US TV producer John Mankiewicz. Elvis had originally composed ‘Doll Revolution’ and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’ for the show, which was reportedly being developed by Ron Howard’s company Imagine. According to Elvis, the basic plot line was a kind of proto-feminist take on The Monkees, and concerned four Russian supermodels who come to the US and become the world’s biggest rock band. Nobody was necessarily holding their breath for that one.

  More significantly, Elvis made his first appearance at the Academy Awards on 29 February, nominated with his old friend T-Bone Burnett in Best Original Song category for their co-composition ‘Scarlet Tide’, sung by bluegrass artist Alison Krauss and taken from the Anthony Minghella film Cold Mountain. Burnett had already scored a huge hit for Lost Highway records in 2001 by producing the wildly successful soundtrack album for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and had gone on to launch the DMZ record label in association with celebrated film-makers the Coen Brothers the following year. Elvis sat on the board of advisors at DMZ alongside such luminaries as Sam Shepard, Bono, Tom Waits and Wim Wenders, hence his involvement in the Cold Mountain soundtrack and his appearance at the Oscars. Willingly playing second fiddle to Alison Krauss’s stunning voice, the erstwhile Coward Brothers reunited to perform ‘Scarlet Tide’ in front of a global television audience of a little under a billion people, with Elvis looking oddly adrift, clutching a ukelele and occasionally playing it. It didn’t win, but ‘Scarlet Tide’ became a regular in Elvis’s sets throughout the rest of the year.

  He was becoming distinctly at ease among the red carpets, popping flashbulbs and the grinning, posed celebrity photo opportunity. He even seemed to be enjoying it. Cait had rarely savoured the limelight and had usually shunned it, but Diana Krall was used to the hot gaze of the cameras and Elvis readily succumbed. He was even seen shopping for CDs with Elton John in Los Angeles.

  The newlyweds had a direct influence on each other. Diana Krall’s record, The Girl In The Other Room, was released in April and debuted at No. 4 in the UK album charts. Elvis had coaxed, cajoled and pushed his wife into composing for the first time, and the record featured six original co-compositions written by Krall and her husband. His fingerprints were evident throughout a record which – though it had far more heart and personality than any of Krall’s previous jazz-lite output – was ultimately a strangely mismatched and melancholic experience. Alongside a straight, respectful version of Elvis’s own ‘Almost Blue’, there were covers of songs by Tom Waits, Mose Allison, and Joni Mitchell – Costello favourites one and all.

  The cross-fertilisation continued away from the music. After years of effectively managing himself, Elvis signed up with Krall’s business team of Macklam-Feldman Management, who also looked after Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones and The Chieftans. It was a further sign that all the important elements of his life and career had moved across the Atlantic.

  There were continuing performances with Steve Nieve throughout February and March, including three superb shows with the Brodsky Quartet in Boston, Nashville and New York at the end of February. The collaborative relationship with the Quartet had now lasted longer than the initial incarnation of The Attractions, and continued to yield huge creative bounties.

  However, following the gentle, personally fulfilling detour of North, the most significant creative development of 2004 was taking The Imposters back into the studio. In early 2003, Elvis had planned to keep running with the impetus created by When I Was Cruel by making an impromptu album with the band, playing new songs on tour in the American south and then going into local studios to capture them on tape while the feel was fresh. However, North had got in the way, in the nicest possible sense. Elvis picked up on the idea a year later, and his US concerts with The Imposters in March threw up a batch of new – or at least, unheard – songs in the encores.

  On 2 and 3 April, Elvis and The Imposters played four sets at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, Mississippi, a tiny bar with a stage a mere twelve inches off the floor. It was like the very, very old days, the smell of sweat and beer in the air. By the time the gigs took place, Elvis and the band were already recording at Sweet Tea Studios in town, under the auspices of the owner and engineer Dennis Herring. The concerts were necessarily experimental affairs, rowdy, rough and intimate and, in the case of ‘Heart-Shaped Bruise’, sometimes featuring two arrangements of the same song back-to-back in order to clarify the decisions they had been making in the studio.

  Many of the new songs had been culled from the long-mooted Delivery Man project, and there was a heavy, bluesy vein running through a significant proportion of them: ‘Button My Lip’ was a churning reminder to think before you speak, while the ominous ‘Needle Time’ sounded as though a bastard combination of Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters had sneaked onto the tiny stage and started jamming ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’. ‘Delivery Man’ and Elvis’s straight, heartfelt reading of Peter Green’s ‘Love That Burns’ were also coloured deepest blue.

  Highlights over the four shows were plentiful. ‘Bedlam’ was a rowdy riot in six minutes, which would have fitted snugly onto When I Was Cruel, while the poppy, piano-laced stripper’s song ‘She’s Pulling Out The Pin’ – ‘She came out high and kicking/While the band played ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’ was the prize-winning line – sounded like a refugee from the Trust sessions. The reflective ‘Nothing Clings Like Ivy’ was a kissing cousin to The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’; ‘In Another Room’ was a rolling, sorrowful ballad; while the rollicking upbeat country rock of ‘There’s A Story In Your Voice’ featured Elvis in Dylan mode, reeling off a litany of character faults which by the end amounted to assassination. The two indisputable diamonds in the rough were ‘Monkey To Man’, a scratchy, instantly catchy re-writing of Darwin’s theory of evolution – ‘For all of the misery that he has caused/He denies he’s descended from the dinosaurs’ – and the magnificent ‘Country Darkness’, a tear wringing country-soul number and close companion to ‘Motel Matches’.

  Also featured at Proud Larry’s were songs that Elvis had performed in concert several times before but had so far left unrecorded: ‘Heart-Shaped Bruise’, ‘Suspect My Tears’, ‘Unwanted Number’ and ‘Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter’. As was normal when Elvis was testing out swathes of new material, he peppered the set with treats, rewarding the audience’s patience. Mostly, crowd-pleasing candidates from his first three records were the order of the day: a snatch of ‘Moods For Moderns’ was the trainspotter’s favourite this time around. Nothing from When I Was Cruel or North featured.

  Elvis and the band returned to the stud
io over the following days to continue recording the album for Lost Highway, the ultra-hip branch of Universal Records. The sessions – which featured guest appearances from Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris and John McFee on pedal steel – were kept raw and unadorned, with plenty of Steve Nieve magic on Moog, modulators and even the theremin. The rawness of the recordings had shades of Blood & Chocolate. ‘The same sound system we used in the club [was] set up in the studio,’ explained Nieve. ‘There are no headphones in sight. If we need to replace a line of vocal or overdub a guitar, or piano, the direct sound on tape goes back down through the monitor speakers to recreate the “spill” of the live band on all the mics, as the overdub is recorded. So even the overdubs have the sound of everyone playing on them, and match up with the original.’17

  Following the Sweet Tea sessions, Elvis and the band resurfaced at the Hi-Tone Café in Memphis for four more low-key gigs, again pregnant with new material, on 16 and 17 April. The band then went back into the studio, squeezing in a session at a vintage studio in Clarksdale, Mississippi. ‘[The] studio is an old room with old tiles, and it will give the music a different quality and a different character,’ said Elvis. ‘It’s nice and vivid.’18

  Then it was on to Europe for a sprinkling of duo shows with Steve Nieve in England, Portugal and Italy. The sole UK show in Bournemouth on 30 April was a strange affair. It was relatively short – a little over ninety minutes in total – and Elvis didn’t say a single word to the audience until he introduced Steve at the end of the main set. He then performed ‘Nothing Clings Like Ivy’ solo at the piano. There were no ‘good evenings’, ‘good nights’ or ‘thank-yous’. It was all rather odd, although Elvis later claimed that he was suffering from a throat infection. From England, he and Steve travelled on to Lisbon, Porto, Catania and Cagliari, where the shows typically opened with ‘45’, followed by ‘Accidents Will Happen’, ‘Brilliant Mistake’, ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ and ‘This House Is Empty Now’. There was an unusually high incidence of Goodbye Cruel World material on display: ‘Home Truth’, ‘Love Field’, ‘Peace In Our Time’ and ‘Inch By Inch’ all featured. He would invariably end with the wracked soul classic, ‘The Dark End Of The Street’, a song which had also featured heavily in his solo shows back in 1984.