Complicated Shadows (2 page)

Elvis was feeling the pressure. Uneasy about the way fame was making him feel and allowing him to behave, he seemed a heavily fuelled mixture of nerves, paranoia and arrogance. The tour matched
his mood. Characterised by a series of nasty stand-offs and set-tos, the slow-burning sense of menace finally ignited on 15 March, following a show at The Agora Club in Columbus.

It took more than a week for details of the Holiday Inn incident to spread. Stills’ backing singer Bonnie Bramlett had been a witness to the outburst, and wasn’t inclined to dismiss
Elvis’s behaviour on the grounds that it had arrived in a moment of private, drunken idiocy. She began relaying details to the local press, and within a few days the
Village Voice
,
New York’s highly influential
and righteously liberal commentator, was running the story, openly accusing Elvis of racism.
People
magazine and other nationals
rapidly picked up the baton, with the result that the records began disappearing from radio playlists, and even from some shops.

As the furore gathered pace, Elvis adhered to his long-standing
omerta
towards the press. But by the time he arrived in New York on 30 March, he – and more significantly CBS
– realised that something had to be done to counter-act the tide of negative publicity and ill-feeling. As well as the material damage to his career, an estimated 150 death threats came
flooding in. In the circumstances, Elvis was left with no other option but to accede to Columbia’s insistence for an emergency press conference. It was finally time for him to face his
pursuers. And himself.

The conference was conducted in the appropriately soulless surroundings of the fourteenth floor of CBS headquarters on 57th Street in Manhattan. Part suicide, part mass-execution, it was
witnessed by a throng of journalists who had been roundly ignored, alienated, and, at times, physically threatened by the Elvis camp over the course of the tour. Summoned with only a couple of
hours’ notice, over fifty New York journalists had made the trip to the press conference, relishing the chance to take a retaliatory swipe at the man who had declared himself virtually
untouchable.

‘Because of the attitude he’d had previously towards the press, he really set himself up,’
Rolling Stone
writer Kurt Loder later said. ‘Here he is touring
America, putting down Americans. There were some people – definitely – who were ready to push him on this one.’
²
And push him they did,
right over the edge.

Elvis arrived expecting a rough ride. ‘I never – ever – thought I’d be in this position,’ he began nervously, and from the outset the articulacy so evident in his
songs deserted him. He appeared to the world jumpy, wired, still trying to punch his way out of a corner despite the odds being stacked so heavily against him. It was standard practice for Elvis to
up-the-ante whenever he felt he was under attack, and here he opted for a combative approach rather
than a conciliatory one. Snapping at photographers and journalists alike, at
no point did Elvis ever try to deny his remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles, although he did question whether they were reported verbatim.

‘In the course of the argument, it became necessary for me to outrage [Stills and his people] with the most obnoxious and offensive remarks that I could muster,’ he explained.
‘I said the most outrageous thing I could possibly say to them – that I knew, in my drunken logic, would anger them more than anything else. It was in the context of an argument that I
used certain words and that is not my opinion, and that’s what I’ve come here to say.’

He then expressed regret ‘if people got
needlessly
angry about it’, but made it clear he was offering no apology to Stephen Stills or Bonnie Bramlett, ‘who now seem to
have chosen to seek publicity at my expense by making it a gossip item’. Nor was he going to say sorry to anybody else. ‘As I’m not a racist, why do I have to apologise?’ he
asked.

The press corps were quick to pick up on the overtones of the statement, which echoed the ‘please don’t ask me to apologise’ stance from
This Year’s
Model
’s ‘Hand In Hand’. Inevitably, having spent such a long time being denied access to Elvis, they were not especially inclined to believe that he went around in private
saying things that he didn’t believe.

Playing such a dangerously high-handed game with the media throughout the tour had left little room for manoeuvre. When Elvis complained that his words had been quoted out of context, that
nobody had bothered to contact him for an explanation, the full pent-up resentment of the press corps came back at him.

‘You weren’t available for comment,’ shouted Richard Goldstein from the
Village Voice.
‘I tried for hours to reach you.
You
made yourself unavailable!
Don’t blame it on the press. It’s not the press, it’s
you
! You said it and you were unavailable to clarify it.’

If there was more than a hint of
schadenfreude
in the room, it was only to be expected. To many present, the remarks tallied neatly with the kind of bully-boy attitude
that the Costello camp had made their speciality. Indeed, his behaviour in the Holiday Inn seemed to complement the withering contempt of much of his music, and soon the lyrics of
Armed Forces
were being artlessly picked over – particularly the references to ‘darkies’ in ‘Sunday’s Best’ and ‘white niggers’ and
‘itchy triggers’ in ‘Oliver’s Army’ – in the hope that they might take on more sinister connotations in the current context. As ever, Elvis showed no appetite
for debate or dissection, which did little to help his cause. He simply kept repeating his mantra, over and over. ‘I am not a racist. It ain’t the truth, and that’s all I’m
gonna say.’

Even those members of the press who accepted his explanation still couldn’t understand why it was so necessary to offend Stills and his friends. Where did all this hostility come from?
When asked why he didn’t just leave the bar and walk away, Elvis pondered: ‘I
suppose
you can always get up and leave,’ as if the thought of avoiding confrontation had
only just occurred to him. Maybe it had. There were a lot of ‘whys’ flying around the room, but they could all be distilled down to one essence: ‘
Why are you so
angry?’

Elvis didn’t really have an answer. Increasingly trapped in a persona that was so rigidly and aggressively combative it barely gave him room to breathe, he seemed almost consumed by the
need to express rage. What he would previously do only for effect, he now did by instinct. What had once been a defined image was now – perhaps – the person he believed he really
was.

The initial impression of the man facing his inquisitors that March afternoon in Manhattan was of someone who couldn’t quite grasp what all the fuss was about, and who possessed neither
the patience nor the inclination to explain himself fully to people he obviously despised. Only later did it become clear that not only the incident in Columbus and his desperate, back-to-the-wall
last stand at the press conference, but indeed the entire ‘Armed Funk’ tour, had been an exercise in subconscious self-sabotage, destroying much of what he and The Attractions had spent
two years creating.

Perhaps he had simply become disgusted at what he saw and at what it allowed him to be. With a wife and child back in England, a glamourous model girlfriend, an excess of
alcohol and cocaine in his bloodstream and a record at the top end of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, Elvis had become a very mainstream exemplar of everything he had once professed to
loathe. By the time he left CBS headquarters to return to the hyper-reality of the streets of New York, Elvis Costello – global rock star in waiting – was effectively dead. As he later
admitted: ‘The press were looking for something to crucify me with and I fed myself to the lions.’
³

Now he could be whatever he wanted.

PART ONE

The Great Unknown

IT IS ALWAYS HARD TO DETERMINE
exactly where genetic inheritance ends and destiny begins. Declan Patrick MacManus may have been raised in a household
filled with music, but he was never groomed to play the role of professional musician. There was no formal tuition or education. From birth, he was simply immersed in an ocean of wide-ranging
sounds as an integral part of a rounded, liberal and socially aware upbringing.

Among the first half-dozen or so words that Declan ever uttered, according to his mother Lilian, were ‘Siameses’ and ‘skin, mummy’; straightforward requests for Peggy
Lee’s ‘Siamese Cat Song’ and – more often – Frank Sinatra’s definitive version of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.

‘I used to request it before I could form proper sentences,’ he would later reflect. ‘I guess that’s a pretty young appreciation of Cole Porter.’
¹

But it would be entirely wrong to suggest that there wasn’t also pedigree in the MacManus genes. Born on 25 August, 1954, in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, west London, the new
arrival would – given time – simply become the greatest exponent of the family business.

The musical bloodline can be traced back to the early 1900s. Declan’s paternal grandfather Patrick Matthew McManus
²
was an accomplished trumpet
player who
learned his craft as a teenager at the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. The son of Irish emigrants, Pat was born in 1896 in the working-class,
shipbuilding town of Birkenhead, directly across the river Mersey from Liverpool, and almost exclusively Irish in character in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

There is little known or to be told about Pat’s parents. They hailed from the Ulster town of Dungannon, and there were later hints within the family that Pat’s father – a coal
merchant by trade – was embroiled in activities which may have eventually resulted in his murder. Whatever the exact truth, Pat was raised in an orphanage in Southall, north-west London,
before being sent on to Kneller Hall near Twickenham, about ten miles south-west of central London.

While there he learned to read music and became an accomplished player on the coronet. He also acquired an English accent. While still only eighteen, Pat was sent to France during the Great War.
He was shot and injured in action, and returned to recuperate at Beggar’s Bush Barracks in Dublin. It’s a supreme irony that the grandfather of the author of ‘Oliver’s
Army’ – that deceptively jaunty indictment of the English military’s brutalisation of Ireland – didn’t return to the Front upon his recovery, but instead found himself
as a non-combative soldier in the British Army in Ireland at the time of the rising Republican tide in 1916.

With many Irish friends and a strong Irish heritage, Pat was caught in the middle, a quirk of fate that didn’t sit easily with the McManus family, and indeed caused ripples and
repercussions much further down the generational line.

‘I was brought up with this anti-attitude,’ remembers Declan. ‘My father got that from his father, who was anti-English. He passed that on to my dad and my dad passed it onto
me.’
²

Pat became a military bandmaster in the army. Following de-mob, he made a living playing the trumpet
in ships’ orchestras on the White Star Line cruise liners that
made regular traffic between Liverpool and America. Apparently – and we must always be aware of the traditional Irish enthusiasm for turning a good story into a great one – Pat had
quite a time of it in 1920’s New York.
³
He socialised with boxers, bootleggers, and even shared a house with the gangster ‘Legs’ Diamond,
an East Coast demi-legend whose colourful past included army desertion, hijacking and car theft, and whose presence in Prohibition-era New York principally involved sating the public’s
illicit thirst for alcohol.

Pat’s ocean travels throughout the ’20s and ’30s also took in Japan and India, before he returned to England to become a pit musician with conventional orchestras. His home
base was 282 Conway Street, Birkenhead, where he lived with his wife Mabel McManus (
nee
Jackson), known as Molly, and whose middle names of Josephine Veronica would one day also inspire
Declan into song.