Complicated Shadows (24 page)

When not in the pub with The Specials, Elvis was demo-ing fleshed-out versions of his own new material. Usually, he would bring his songs to the band and play them through on the guitar, letting
the arrangement develop organically between the four of them. However, for many of the new demos he went into tiny eight-track studios like Archipelago in Pimlico and played all the instruments
himself, producing sometimes eccentric versions of ‘Black And White World’, ‘Riot Act’, ‘Five Gears In Reverse’, ‘Love For Tender’, ‘King
Horse’, ‘New Amsterdam’ and ‘Men Called Uncle’.

He had grown to hate
Armed Forces
, the slickness, the preconception, and was casting around for a solution. However, the answer didn’t lie in the solo
demos. Although he enjoyed the process, and the tender ‘New Amsterdam’ would eventually make the final cut, they were a little too idiosyncratic to be seen as potential tracks for a new
album.

When The Attractions joined Elvis in September and October to rehearse and begin taping the new songs in trial sessions at Eden Studios, his frustration grew. Most of the new record was written,
but both he and band were well aware that the material was not coming together the way they wanted it to. Having had little time or energy on the US tour to do anything to the new songs except
learn them and play them in a similar style to
Armed Forces
, when Elvis brought the tracks back home and played them live and in the studio, he found they sounded thin, lacklustre, and
derivative.

‘We sounded like The Jags,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘Bad Elvis and The Attractions impersonators, basically, who played everything fast and in eights.’ Elvis was equally
unhappy with the ‘wretched’
¹³
performances. The classic Attractions sound had been worked to death, with the organ pushing to the front
and lots of tremolo guitar. Their initial attempt at ‘B-Movie’ sounded like a desperate attempt to rewrite ‘Oliver’s Army’. They were becoming a parody of
themselves.

The solution presented itself one afternoon over a few post-rehearsal drinks. ‘We went to the pub and said, “What are we gonna do?”,’ recalled Elvis. ‘Why
don’t we try playing some of these songs slower, and use more rhythmic accompaniment, instead of these tricky, nervy kind of backings.’
¹⁴

He had always been up-front about the way in which he used other songs as launchpads for his own material; by the time he had mixed in his own ideas and added The Attractions, it was normally
nigh on impossible to trace a link back to his original inspiration. This time, Elvis moved away from the clean, European line of the Bowie and Abba records which had previously dominated his
turntable, and instead immersed himself in the soul music he had loved
as a teenager. Perhaps the answer to hs troubles lay in the grooves of the classic songs of Stax,
Atlantic and Motown?

Elvis raided his own record collection and spent a further £50 on classic soul singles from Rock On record shop in Camden Town. Then he distributed tapes to the band, making sure everyone
was getting into the same feel and musical frame of mind. ‘Elvis dug out
Motown Chartbusters: Volume III
and said, “Listen to this, get this dynamic in your head, this is where
we’re going this time,”’ recalls Bruce Thomas.

It was probably not meant as an overt apology to the black acts he had bad-mouthed in Columbus, but subconsciously it seemed to acknowledge that there was room for a little more warmth and
emotion, a little more vulnerability in his music. Nor was it meant to be a direct case of adopting a wholesale genre or sound – that would just be flirting with another kind of parody
– rather it was an attempt to tap into the freshness and vitality at the heart of ’60s soul music to bring the new songs, and probably Elvis as well, alive again.

In the studio, this working method rapidly refined itself until the band were playing each new Elvis song in the style of a soul classic, using it as a template for the mood and rhythm before
letting the new song burst through. ‘I was literally taking the songs and saying, “OK, what song are we going to play this like?”,’ said Elvis. ‘Each song I could go
through and tell you which band we were being: Al Green on one, The Four Tops on another.’
¹⁵
To which he might have added The Supremes, Martha
and The Vandellas, Booker T and The MG’s, Garnet Mimms, Eddie Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Betty Everett, Curtis Mayfield and – on ‘Human Touch’ – his more recent
collaborators, The Specials. ‘We were actually listening to those records to get us in the mood before we put a track down,’ says Bechirian. ‘And suddenly the whole feel of it
changed.’

This approach met head on with the traditional Attractions wallop to make some wildly exciting music, with the loose punch and swagger that Elvis was searching for. On some songs – such as
‘Love For Tender’, ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Secondary Modern’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Clowntime
Is Over’ – the debt was
more overt than on others, but each and every song felt the benefit in approach if not always directly in style.

By this point in the proceedings they had tired of Eden Studios in London and decamped to Phonogram’s studio complex in Wisseloord, in Holland. Situated in the forest, away from the
traumas and temptations of working in the middle of a city, the change of scenery was initially refreshing, but it soon became apparent that the hard personal lessons of the ‘Armed
Funk’ tour hadn’t been learned.

For the first time they began drinking in the studio, and soon the sessions took on an edge of frantic desperation. ‘It was pretty wild,’ admitted Nick Lowe. ‘It was just like
you had your foot flat down on the accelerator. Swallowing life down, guzzling it down.’
¹⁶
Literally. At one point Jake flew over to Holland
to confront Elvis and the group after they had run up a bar bill worth thousands of pounds, whilst, according to Roger Bechirian, ‘everything was a cocaine haze’.

Matters swiftly reached the point of emotional meltdown, particularly for Steve Nieve. ‘You would have him slamming the piano lid down: “I’m not playing any more of this
goddamn monkey music”,’ says Bruce Thomas. The general pace of life and the increasing excess was a major contributing factor in the organist’s unhappiness. He was still only
twenty-one, a little more introverted than the rest of the band, and creatively had pushed himself hardest to explore the outer limits of his capabilities. At one point he broke down, sobbing over
the piano, simply burnt out.

There were also musical problems. On Elvis’s first two records with The Attractions, the tracks had been played-in on tour and most of the arrangements set in stone by the time they went
into the studio. This time around, the songs were being pushed and pulled into different shapes with the tape running and very little time for reflection. This was exactly what Elvis wanted:
disillusioned with the studied smoothness of
Armed Forces
, he was trying to capture the music as it spilled out, with as little forethought as possible. So having written
‘Possession’ in a
Dutch taxi after drunkenly ‘falling in love’ with a waitress in a bar in Hilversum, it seemed logical that The Attractions should
learn and record it the same night. It was the kind of ‘method’ which could yield sometimes stunning results, but it was a stress-filled way of working for everybody.

There were other issues. Pete Thomas was unhappy about his drum sound, while Bruce Thomas ‘hated’ his bass sound. ‘The whole thing was just an endless catalogue of “I
don’t like this”, “I don’t like that”,’ says Bechirian. ‘It wasn’t pleasant at all. You could see the seams coming apart at that point.’ The
band argued over the merits of recording the Sam and Dave ballad ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’, Bruce Thomas insisting it was one of the worst songs Sam and Dave ever did
and it would never be a hit in a million years. He was proved quite spectacularly wrong.

Meanwhile, behind the producer’s console and in as bad shape as Elvis and the band, Nick Lowe was obsessed with prising a 1950’s-style reverb sound out of Phonogram’s
state-of-the-art studio, often putting Elvis in the booth designed for recording string instruments to keep his vocals raw. ‘[The studio] was extremely Euro,’ Lowe recalled. ‘It
was like trying to make a record as the Eurovision song contest was going on all around you.’
¹⁷

Despite – or perhaps because of – the excess, the fraught atmosphere and the musical struggles, the songs were infused with a compelling emotional intensity which was light years
ahead of the versions the group had cut in Eden Studios. Somehow, the record was finished through the fog, but it was painstaking and emotionally exhausting work. In the end, the title of the
record seemed more a desperate hope than a playful instruction.

With the record wrapped up, Elvis was left kicking his heels. There were legal problems surrounding the release of
Get Happy!!.
Jake and Andrew Lauder had left Radar in late 1979 and
formed a new independent record company called F-Beat. However, because Radar had been financed by Warner Brothers in the UK, any act signed to Radar was also technically signed to Warners as well.
As
such, Warners weren’t particulary keen to simply let Elvis and Nick Lowe walk away from under their noses to join F-Beat without any recompense.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that Elvis had never put pen to paper on a contract with Radar. ‘It was difficult,’ says Lauder. ‘The deal between Radar and
Elvis [and Nick Lowe] was never actually signed. So it ended up potentially getting a bit messy.’ Jake and Andrew negotiated the possibility of F-Beat forming a new relationship with Warners,
but talks broke down and Warners took the matter to court. The release of any new Elvis product was hamstrung until the matter was resolved.

In early January 1980 a very limited edition of the single of ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’ came out on the Two Tone label, home of The Specials. ‘It was a bit of a
flanker, really,’ says Lauder. ‘Because we thought that was the last thing anyone would expect.’ With the ownership of Elvis’s recorded work under legal dispute, the single
was swiftly removed from sale following an injunction from Warners, and was later given away free at The Rainbow in September 1980, and at other Elvis concerts.

Just as the stand-off was poised to go to a potentially long and financially draining trial, in February F-Beat and Warners finally came to an edgy compromise. ‘We were faced with very
large bills,’ says Lauder. ‘We’d already started manufacturing
Get Happy!!
and there were singles and everything else. In the end we did end up doing a deal with Warners
for pressing and distribution. It was against their wishes, but as a way of resolving it that was what was done. Effectively [Elvis and Nick] were still within the Warners fold, but it was now
F-Beat instead of Radar.’

Get Happy!!
– originally scheduled for an early January release – wouldn’t hit the shops until mid-February. In retrospect, Elvis felt the dispute damaged the support
his subsequent records got from Warners. ‘That’s when things started to go wrong for us in this country in a business sense,’ he claimed. ‘I think we’ve paid dearly
for that dispute.’
¹⁸

As all this was unfolding, Elvis did his best to keep relatively busy. He was already writing and demo-ing new songs
at Nick Lowe’s Am-Pro Studio in Shepherd’s
Bush, putting down embryonic versions of ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Watch Your Step’, ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ and ‘Just A Memory’, which were in
various stages of completion. He also met Johnny Cash at Nick Lowe’s house on Boxing Day 1979. At that time, Lowe was married to Cash’s stepdaughter Carlene Carter, and Elvis was part
of a high-spirited session band which cut Lowe’s ‘Without Love’ and a duet of George Jones’ ‘We Ought To Be Ashamed’, which apparently proved an accurate
assessment of the day’s proceedings.

Since their return from America, live appearances had been few and far between. There had been a smattering of dates in France and Spain in mid-December and an appearance at the Rock For
Kampuchea benefit concert at the Hammersmith Odeon on 29 December, alongside Wings, Rockpile and comedian Billy Connolly. In the New Year, Elvis and The Attractions played for
NME
prize-winners at The Clarendon in London, before making a one-show-only trip to New Zealand to play the Sweetwater Festival on 27 January. The festival appearance was the first known occasion of
Elvis playing Elvis, as he and The Attractions ripped through Presley’s ‘Little Sister’, which would become a feature of their live set that year.

Taking advantage of the lull in proceedings, the trip to the Antipodes turned into an excuse for a brief, hedonistic break in the sun. ‘We were getting £70,000 for the gig,’
remembers Bruce Thomas. ‘Elvis said, “OK, we’ll share it all out. We’ll just have a good time and whatever’s left when we get back we’ll share it all out.”
Out of £70,000, we got just over £1100 each! We did about £15,000 apiece in two weeks, which would have bought a house back then.’ At least it bought a good time.

* * *

Get Happy!!
was released on F-Beat on 15 February, 1980. It was the
anti-Armed Forces
, crammed with twenty songs, a quarter of which were under two minutes
long and barely hung together. And it was a masterpiece.

The record showcased The Attractions at their rawest and roughest, with little of the sophistication of the previous album. This was not a record of stand-out individual
cameos; rather, it was the sound of a band sticking close together for protection, flying on instinct and intuition, feeding off their singer’s desperation and turning it into something
remarkable. Up front, Elvis’s voice ran the gamut from wracked hysteria on ‘Human Touch’ to a whispered soul croon on ‘Secondary Modern’, finally reduced to a ragged
bark on ‘Beaten To The Punch’.

Many of the songs were half-formed and empty-sounding, betraying the frenzied nature of the recording process, but the sense of drama and energy spilling out swept away any misgivings. The
up-tempo numbers were absurdly fast, the opening ‘Love For Tender’ shooting by in a blur of pilfered Motown bass riffs and frantic word association, while the few subdued tracks were
stripped painfully bare and laced with a new-found sadness. ‘New Amsterdam’ was the one oddity, culled from the solo demos Elvis had cut over the summer at Archipelago studios in
Pimlico, its quiet reflection and acoustic strum setting it apart from the manic mood of the rest of the record.