Complicated Shadows (20 page)

* * *

The new album was released on 5 January. Now called
Armed Forces
after CBS flinched at the idea of trying to sell a record called
Emotional Fascism
to Middle
America, the record was an audacious upping of the stakes. From Barney Bubbles’ garish, complicated fold-out sleeve to the smoother sounds within, it was clearly a declaration of a vaulting
ambition. It also revealed Elvis as both master and maniac of the word game, throwing puns, double
entendres, double-bluffs and non sequiturs into the air like confetti,
almost like a form of textual Tourette’s.

There was an element of the emperor’s new clothes in all of this: the dense, encoded language and scattergun wordplay was dazzling on a surface level, but a closer inspection revealed
little to grasp onto; the technique became an end in itself. It certainly
felt
like there were some deeply felt personal pre-occupations being exorcised, but what were they exactly?
‘Either he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s talking about, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about himself,’ concluded Bruce Thomas, and he had a
point.

The impact of the self-lacerating ‘Big Boys’ and ‘Busy Bodies’ – side swipes at Elvis’s own promiscuity – and the desperate tour postcards of
‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ‘Goon Squad’ (‘Mother, Father/I’m here in the zoo’) was partially dulled by the military imagery, not to mention the feverish
switching from first to second person mid-song and often mid-verse; but then disorientation and obscurity was precisely the intention.

‘I got fascinated with words and playing games and disguising things, and I’ve written some really good songs that are not about literal things, because they’re not trying to
be,’ he later said. ‘The big lie is that everything has to make sense.’
¹⁷

Some were disturbed by this lack of clarity. The material drew a sometimes haphazard line connecting individual acts of emotional violence and deceit to global and military atrocities, a conceit
which Elvis later admitted was wildly flawed: ‘Betrayal and murder are not the same thing.’
¹⁸
In particular, ‘Oliver’s
Army’ and ‘Sunday’s Best’ came in for criticism, partly for using such incendiary terms as ‘nigger’ and ‘darkies’ amidst such emotionally charged
material. ‘At best it’s feeble, at worst it’s offensive,’ reprimanded
Melody Maker’s
Tony Rayns, although it was a mere blip in a broadly positive review.
Elsewhere, Rayns commented accurately that Elvis’s voice and phrasing had improved considerably, while singling out Steve Nieve for special mention. ‘[His] keyboards have a range and
bite unique in contemporary rock. It falls to him to introduce
most of the gorgeous cross-melodies that distinguish many of the songs, and he brings it off every time with
terrific finesse.’ In the same issue,
This Year’s Model
was voted ‘Album of the Year’ for 1978.

In the
NME,
Nick Kent declared
Armed Forces
‘Costello’s most fervent declaration of intention yet for the title of great ’70s pop subversive. The only
comparisons even worth making are with The Beatles and Bowie, and they scarcely scratch the surface.’ This was a little too much. The record was bursting with brashness and confidence, and
sounded unlike anything Elvis had done before, but perhaps that was half the problem. Beneath the gimmicky touches and lyrical gymnastics,
Armed Forces
was only half the towering pop
masterpiece it proclaimed itself to be. Aside from ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Accidents Will Happen’, only another four tracks – ‘Green Shirt’,
‘Party Girl’, ‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Two Little Hitlers’ – were truly great pop songs. The remaining half-dozen were inventive, lyrically mesmerising at
times, beautifully performed and sung, but the nagging sense remained that they were more reliant on a varied palette of sounds and textures than might have been advisable. The end result was often
brilliant but contrived, and date-stamped in a way which
This Year’s Model
has managed to escape. In the
NME,
Charles Shaar Murray concluded with the warning that Elvis may
simply be trying too hard to fulfill a role others had mapped out for him. He would soon come to a similar conclusion himself.

* * *

Armed Forces
hit the album charts at No. 2, promoted by a poster campaign of Elvis with a shotgun in his mouth. It would stay in the charts for a further six months.
Although happy enough to make a somewhat incongruous appearance as a ‘pop star’ on the children’s TV show
Tiswas
and turn up on local radio, the print media blackout was
still in full effect, as Nick Kent discovered when he caught up with Elvis at Sheffield City Hall on 18 January, midway through his most extensive British tour to date.
Kent
found the band in ‘magnificent’ form after the damp squib of the Dominion shows, but his exaltation of ‘the real return of the prodigal’ didn’t help him get any nearer
to an interview.

The inter-band chemistry was as volatile as ever. Increasingly, violence seemed to surround the band, and when nerves and tempers frayed things often got physical. Elvis in particular was
susceptible to blacking out and punching blindly when he was drunk, but they were all involved in fist fights with each other at some point. On this occasion, matters reached a head after the show
in Cardiff on 27 January. Pete was good friends with Welsh singer and guitarist Andy Fairweather-Low, and they set up in the hotel room with amps and a little drum kit and started having a jam
session through the night. ‘I wasn’t having this,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘So I knocked on the door and Pete said, “Oh, have you come to join us?” and smack! I
bruised his ribs. The next morning Elvis found out. Pete was sitting there with a bottle of claret, red wine with his cornflakes, and Elvis dived over the breakfast table and whacked him again.
“You’re fired”.’ As ever, Pete was re-instated before the next gig.

By the end of the tour they were all exhausted. Jake had hastily arranged a final date at the Hammersmith Palais on 30 January, a sentimental return to his father’s old work place for
Elvis and an attempt to atone for the Dominion shows a month earlier. Although Elvis was trying hard to meet the expectations of being both a critically acclaimed artist and a genuine pop star
– a tightrope act which meant playing the singles as well as throwing new songs like ‘Opportunity’, Steve Nieve’s tender ‘Sad About Girls’ and rare live
renditions of ‘Chemistry Class’ and ‘Two Little Hitlers’ into the set – there was no disguising the fact that both he and The Attractions were feeling the pace and the
pressure. ‘Elvis and his boys are completely dead on their feet,’ fretted the
NME’s
Charles Shaar Murray. ‘Wiped out, drained. Trying to be dynamic but the starter
won’t start.’

Furthermore, the fatigue and the fame were beginning to make Elvis question himself and the motivations of his
audience. ‘I saw people responding without any kind of
understanding or consideration,’ he later said. ‘We’d play a set where we’d play brilliantly all night and then we’d do our hit single and people would go crazy. Yet
they would be bewildered by the rest of what we were doing.’
¹⁹

Much of this was attributable to the unprecedented success of ‘Oliver’s Army’. Gaining radio exposure throughout January, the single was released in early February and climbed
to No. 2 in the chart in March. ‘Oliver’s Army’ marked the pinnacle of Elvis’s ability to be all things to all people: a subversive, challenging songwriter who melded
serious lyrics to insanely catchy pop hits and sold almost 500,000 singles in the process. It was reminsicent of nothing so much as Dylan in the mid-’60s.

In his rather disheartened frame of mind, however, Elvis was aware that it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was able to take some solace from the fact that ‘we managed to get a pop record about
militarism to No. 2,’
²⁰
but he was also aware that to this day, most people have no idea what the song is saying. ‘Of course, you could
sing along with the chorus without ever thinking what it was about,’
²¹
he admitted, sadly. Such things were beginning to trouble him.

Ross MacManus in 1960, leading the Joe Loss Orchestra from the front.

(Centre)
Nos. 15 and 16 Beaulieu Close, Twickenham Park. No. 16
(the top right flat)
was home to Ross, Lilian and Declan from 1961-1970, and Ross continued
living there after the break up of his marriage. No. 15
(the bottom right flat)
was home to Declan, Mary and Matthew between 1975-76.