Complicated Shadows (17 page)

THE NEXT EIGHTEEN MONTHS WERE MIND-NUMBING.
A non-stop, alcohol-and-chemical-fuelled trek around the globe which took a huge toll on Elvis and The
Attractions. It was the American tours that really damaged the psyche. In Europe, they were usually away for a little more than a month at a time and much of that was in Britain, where the
landscape and customs were familiar. But in America it was very different. The journeys between gigs were gargantuan, the cultural and geographical changes immense, the sense of isolation and
loneliness limitless. ‘You’re sitting on a bus, looking out the window at a country you’ve never been to but have only read about, listened to and absorbed through your
imagination,’ said Elvis. ‘Suddenly, it’s out there, and it’s somewhat different to what you thought. You get strange people offering you this, that and the other. It all
gets mixed up.’
¹

There was growing professional pressure. By the end of January 1978,
My Aim Is True
had climbed to No. 32 on the Billboard chart, a hit record in anyone’s book. Elvis was a wanted
man, promoting the record through radio interviews rather than the print media, which he already felt was painting him into a one-dimensional corner. He may even have helped them. His newspaper and
magazine silence would – with a few very notable exceptions – last until the early ’80s, helping to build a certain mystique, yes, but also an intrinsic mistrust and
misunderstanding between artist and media.

But there’s no denying that America was new and largely fun, for the time being at least. The Attractions were like a particularly debauched incarnation of The
Monkees, grabbing any opportunity to get up to mischief, getting drunk and following any whim. Pete and Steve roomed under the names of Vince Posh and Norman Wisdom, and legendary drinking would go
on between them. At a CBS convention in New Orleans, the first order that went down to room service was eight quart bottles of vodka. On another occasion in Dallas, one member of the touring party
had to be ‘sprung’ from jail.

‘He got hold of a load of “leapers” [speed],’ alleges Bruce Thomas. ‘He stole them off some girl and ended up getting arrested. I got the police report: “Mr
So-and-so attempted to fondle Miss Simpson’s derrière.” He got put in the detox tent; he had to swallow a load of stuff just as he was getting thrown in the hold, and we had to
bribe a judge $20,000 to get him out.’

The shows themselves were a standard sixty-minute mix of
My Aim Is True
material and
This Year’s Model
, with the odd cover and B-side thrown in. Elvis was writing all the
time: ‘Chemistry Class’ and ‘Moods For Moderns’ were the first to show up, quickly slotted into the set towards the end of the tour following soundcheck renditions.

By the beginning of March, Elvis and The Attractions had become a truly awesome spectacle, both in concert and on record. The
NME
caught up with Elvis’s final show of the North
American tour at El Mocambo club in Toronto on 7 March, and witnessed scenes of utter rapture. One besotted female fan mopped Elvis’s brow as he sweated out his demons on stage. The audience
punched their fists and sang along to almost every word. Charles Shaar Murray watched this ‘exportable proto-superstar’ and reported the madness with an exhilaration which still leaps
off the page today. ‘Something’s happening. I don’t care what else goes down this year: Elvis Costello and The Attractions are the band to watch. Everybody else is so far behind
that they’d have to double their speed just to choke on his dust.’

In Britain, ‘(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea’ b/w ‘You Belong To Me’ was released to huge acclaim, the first, swaggering taster for
This
Year’s Model.
‘The single’s so good, the very act of releasing it amounts to bragging on a colossal scale,’ said the
NME.
‘Chelsea’ quickly hit the
Top 20. The following week, on 17 March,
This Year’s Model
was released, the first 50,000 copies coming with a free single of ‘Stranger In The House’ and The
Damned’s ‘Neat Neat Neat,’ a little 45 rpm slice of country and punk bookending the classic, updated beat-pop of the album.

It is always tempting to view landmark records through the benevolent lens of nostalgia, but
This Year’s Model
effortlessly stands up to scrutiny today. The tunes are tight and
instantly memorable (although the appeal of ‘The Beat’ has always proved elusive), probably because Elvis was confident enough in his writing and his band to let his influences not so
much peek through as strip off and run around naked. ‘You Belong To Me’ sparked off the riff from The Rolling Stones’ ‘The Last Time,’ ‘Pump It Up’ took
Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and bludgeoned it to death, while the bridge to ‘This Year’s Girl’ was a shameless steal from The Beatles’ ‘You
Won’t See Me’. No matter. Nick Lowe’s production had given the songs a thick, powerful fuse on which to burn, and while Steve Nieve’s organ danced and jabbed around the
songs like a boxer, the rhythmic invention reached an exhilarating crescendo on the breathless bass and drum sword-fight at the centre of ‘Lipstick Vogue’. Elvis sang it all with 100
times the depth and range that he had shown on
My Aim Is True.

The album title was knowing and the cover image, once again, iconic: Elvis hunched behind a camera and tripod, expressionless, both observed and observing. The reviews were superlative, and
rightly so. The
NME
and
Melody Maker
brought out their Elvis big hitters – Nick Kent and Allan Jones respectively – to try to articulate the sheer breadth of the
achievement. Kent claimed that ‘there’s simply no one within spitting distance of him,’ calling the record ‘too dazzling, too powerful, to be ignored’. Jones covered
the same waterfront again.
This Year’s Model
, he
claimed, ‘promotes its author to the foremost ranks of contemporary rock writers. Clear out of sight of
most of his rivals and comparisons (so long, Bruce, baby).’

Few critics in Britain dwelled too long on the lyrics, but as time went on
This Year’s Model
would be a record that regularly attracted accusations of misogyny. In the US, Jon
Pareles’s review in
Crawdaddy
judged the record ‘so wrong-headed, so full of hatred, so convinced of its moral superiority’ in regards to its view of women. It is true
that Elvis almost always assumed the moral high ground in these songs: ‘I am right and you are wrong, therefore my response – no matter what it is – is justified,’ an
attitude which was beginning to spill out from the grooves of his records and into his personal life.

But cries of blanket misogyny were oversimplistic. An easy confusion can be made between misogyny and somebody who has an extremely vehement position on the battle of the sexes in terms of
specific relationships. Being hostile or angry or vengeful towards one woman in a song is not the same as being contemptuous towards all women. It was also a misreading based on mistaking the
attitude of the
performances
on the record for the true sentiment of the words as written rather than sung, as well as a general reaction to the way Elvis looked and presented himself to
the public: the bitter geek, the guy who never got the girl. ‘If you’re a laddish sort of singer, you can get away with all sorts of stuff and people think you’re great,’ he
later said. ‘The Stones wrote ‘Stupid Girl’ and they’re heroes. I wrote ‘This Year’s Girl’, saying that fashion is a trap, a much more compassionate song,
and everyone said I was a misogynist.’
²

Rolling Stone
made the record its lead review, and the considered praise of the magnificent music came with a more astute ear for the lyrical nuances. ‘For all his surface
cockiness,’ recognised reviewer Kit Rachlis, ‘Costello is a man who’s trembling underneath.’ From the opening ‘No Action’, taking in the masochistic rough and
tumble of ‘The Beat’, ‘Living In Paradise’, ‘Lipstick Vogue’ and ‘Little Triggers’, the album is littered with Elvis’s
‘trembling’.

The record’s searing disgust comes from a colossal
disappointment at what passes for real emotion. Or to put it another way, ‘Sometimes I almost feel/Just like
a human being’. The desperate double-bluffs of male and female interaction are dealt with in bluntly honest fashion; insecurity and duplicity exist on both sides, but clearly what the singer
is searching for throughout is something approximating genuine feeling rather than a pale imitation of the real thing. ‘A lot of the songs early on were more disappointed that anybody could
fall for that cliché of romance or fashion or a cheap version of love,’
³
he later said. ‘That’s a constant theme. I see right
through imaginary gutter romance.’
⁴

He might have seen through it, but he was not immune to its appeal. Rachlis’s review uses ‘(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea’ as the prime example of the
attraction-revulsion dynamic which exists in many of the songs. ‘Costello can describe Chelsea with such precision because he knows its splendours. If the disdain in his voice appears a
little too measured it’s because it takes all of the singer’s resolve to resist Chelsea’s temptations.’

* * *

The UK and Irish tour began in Dublin on the eve of the album’s release. For most of March the band tore through roughly the same set as had been making America weak at
the knees, before introducing slivers of the next record, already forming in Elvis’s mind. After Dublin came Belfast. This was Elvis’s first visit to the trouble-torn city, where he saw
‘mere boys, these children, walking around in battle fatigues carrying machine guns, knowing that the lads who got the least marks in the exam usually joined the army’.
⁵
On the plane back to London, Elvis began working on his ideas for ‘Oliver’s Army’, using Oliver Cromwell’s brutal occupation of Ireland
in the seventeenth century as a historical stepping stone which allowed him to examine England’s more recent imperialist past and Ireland’s continuing woes. Elvis later admitted to
Time Out
magazine that Cromwell had been portrayed as ‘the devil incarnate’ during his Catholic schooldays, and his legacy had
obviously made a lasting
impression. By the end of the tour he would be playing a tentative version of the song live.

The tour was beset by problems, mainly due to the fact that Bruce Thomas had cut his hand while demonstrating – not very well, presumably – the correct ‘bar-room method’
of smashing a bottle following a gig at Rafter’s in Manchester on 6 April. ‘That was just me being pissed,’ he says. ‘Getting hold of a bottle and breaking it and finding it
wasn’t made of sugar glass, it was made of extremely thick glass and it was sticking out.’ He needed eighteen stitches, although with the pain came the happy consequence of two
weeks’ leave from their gruelling schedule.

The constant travel and attention wasn’t necessarily doing Elvis much good either. His moods were becoming increasingly dark. Ken Smith recalls visiting Cypress Avenue and finding Elvis
watching a documentary on the Third Reich, listening to heavy dub reggae with a guitar on his lap, controlling the volume with his foot. The trickle-down effect was obvious in the new songs he was
writing: ‘Two Little Hitlers’, ‘Goon Squad’, ‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Oliver’s Army’. Already, he was toying with calling the new record
Emotional Fascism.

Nick Lowe deputised on bass for the remainder of the tour dates, with the result that the shows were understandably erratic. At Portsmouth’s Guildhall on 12 April, Lowe was delayed getting
to the venue, and Elvis came on an hour late and played the first six songs solo with just electric guitar. He seized the opportunity to perform some new numbers, opening with a salvo of
‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Sunday’s Best’, ‘Big Boys’ and ‘Green Shirt’. By the final shows at London’s Roundhouse on 15 and 16 April, he was
showcasing embryonic versions of two of his most significant new compositions: ‘Accident’s Will Happen’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’, accompanied only by Steve Nieve.

With another US tour kicking off on 19 April – a mere three days after the end of the UK tour and only six weeks on from the end of the last American trip – Elvis was left without a
bass player for the opening dates of his most
important tour to date. The Attractions were no longer merely a backing band. With Elvis at the front, this was now a four-piece
group with its own unique chemistry, and to remove one component part left a gaping hole.

To fill it, Jake called John Ciambotti, Clover’s bassist, and asked him to help out for a few dates, starting with the opening show at Minneapolis State Theater on 19 April. ‘I had
one day’s rehearsal,’ he says. ‘I had these charts plastered to the side of my amp, and Elvis saw me looking at the stuff during rehearsal and he said, “What’s this,
then?” And I said, “Those are my charts.” And he just took them off the amp and threw them away. “Don’t worry about the notes, just throw the shapes.” We had a
ball. The band was so loud and the crowd was so loud that nobody cared.’