Complicated Shadows (25 page)

Lyrically, there were nods to the ‘Columbus Incident’ and the many small, sour betrayals and temptations of life on the road, but often
Get Happy!!
was so dense as to be
almost indecipherable. Elvis devoured books, specifically biography, happily scrutinising the minutiae of someone else’s life, and among his most significant recent reading matter was a work
on the hidden meanings of Picasso’s paintings. The book explained the various devices that the artist employed to squirrel codes and secret messages in his work, usually to his lovers. As was
normal with any idea he liked, Elvis had decided to try it for himself, with the result that his relationship with Bebe Buell was heavily – if obscurely – documented on
Get
Happy!!
: ‘Beaten To The Punch’, ‘Riot Act’ and the slow-burning regret of ‘Motel Matches’ were all reflections on the theme of that doomed romance, while
‘Men Called Uncle’ specifically referenced a furious argument towards the end of their relationship, where a desperate Elvis had found himself
grabbing onto
Buell’s ankles in a darkened hotel room.

It was a brave, berserk record, less artless than it sounded but as emotionally open and as musically joyous as anything Elvis had recorded. He has always regarded it fondly, declaring it five
times the record
Armed Forces
was. The
NME
cottoned on immediately. ‘Twenty tracks, fifty minutes, with the single first, just like Motown,’ gushed Paul Rambali, who
appeared to have fallen foul of Elvis’s deliberately ambiguous labelling on the original album. The CD re-issue later revealed ‘Love For Tender’ as the album’s opener.
Praising the pared-down sound of The Attractions and the more expressive, less polished vocals, he concluded: ‘It’s a record you didn’t expect. Elvis has gotten off the treadmill.
Get it.’
Melody Maker
was less sure, griping about the ‘uneven’ material and the retro ’60s-style production, which only proved that some people found it harder to
get happy than others.

In the US, there was little hint of any hubris hanging over from the previous year’s antics. Robert Palmer in the
New York Times
was positively brimming with positivity.
‘The stylistic range, emotional depth, melodic richness and verbal invention displayed on
Get Happy!!
make it Mr Costello’s most satisfying album,’ he wrote, with that
odd formality that some American critics insist upon.

In
Creem,
Jeff Nesin simply concluded, ‘If you care at all about rock ’n’ roll you must have this album.’ Eve Zibart’s review in the
Washington
Post
was one of the few that commented on the haphazard production, which she felt let the record down. ‘Where Phil Spector painstakingly built a wall of sound, producer Nick Lowe has
constructed a chain-link fence. It works to the advantage of several numbers, but Lowe overdoes it.’ But then Nick Lowe always did.

Following the release of
Get Happy!!,
Elvis and The Attractions hit the road for the first time in almost a year at the end of February. It was a UK tour with a difference, loosely hung
around the theme of playing seaside towns and places lying outside the normal concert circuit. They soon found out why. Taking in such pop-starved outposts as Cromer, Matlock, Fishguard, St
Austell, West Calder and
Dunfermline rather than London, Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow, it was an exercise in eccentricity which – although performed in good
faith – probably did little to aid the commercial progress of the new record.

Support was provided by Clive Langer and The Boxes. As well as ‘opening’ for the band in May on the Royal Iris ferry, Elvis had recently produced their cover of the ’60s hit
‘If Paradise Was Half As Nice’ for their debut album
Splash!
and now wanted to introduce them to a wider audience.

Touring with The Attractions was not for the fainthearted, although at least one member had pulled back from the abyss. Bruce Thomas had come to his senses upon his return from Holland, when his
wife saw him lying on the floor, pale and listless, and had screamed because she thought he was dead. ‘It was after the
Get Happy!!
sessions that I thought I’d better just cut
back to six bottles of wine a day, rather than two bottles of vodka,’ he says. ‘I stopped taking drugs at that point, too.’

The shows were strong, taking in the full sweep of Elvis’s four records but focusing primarily on
This Year’s Model
and
Get Happy!!.
Despite their extended absence
from the road, The Attractions soon revved up to full speed. ‘I was amazed by them live,’ says Langer. ‘The power. They would just come out of the dressing room and
attack.’

As if to punch home the renewed heart in his music, Elvis introduced a smattering of soul and R&B covers into the set, including ‘Help Me’, Sly Stone’s ‘Dance To The
Music’ and Smokey Robinson’s ‘One More Heartache’, which he hadn’t performed since the penultimate Flip City gig in November 1975. ‘Watch Your Step’ also
made its live debut during the tour.

However, for the first time Elvis’s excesses on the road were beginning to directly interfere with his ability to perform. ‘Whatever enthusiasm he’d started out with had
dissipated after three or four numbers and reached its nadir when he came to a grinding mental halt at the start of ‘Alison’,’ reported a review of the show at Hastings Pier
Pavillion on 4 March. ‘He stopped and started blankly, scratched his head again. The band carried on through the
verse and a roadie stepped up to Elvis and after a
short consultation removed his guitar and led him out.’

‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’ had recently been released as a single, and by the time the tour hit Hastings it was well on its way to its chart peak of No. 4. The
attendant celebrations throughout the day had got severely out of hand, and left Elvis in an advanced state of disrepair. He eventually returned to finish the show, but he was in poor voice,
forgetting lyrics and looking mentally disorientated all the way through to the end.

It all ended in Nottingham on 1 April, on the surface a long way down the road from the madness and malice of the previous year’s ‘April Fool’s Day Marathon’ in New York.
Even so, Elvis was feeling perhaps even more dejected than he had twelve months earlier. It seems clear that his use of drugs and alcohol had escalated to the point where the arrogance and
certainty of old had been replaced with self-doubt and a weariness about the whole business. Disillusioned, he made the decision to quit.

Elvis frequently told members of the band that he was throwing his hand in, usually a short-lived impulse brought on by fatigue and a self-confessed taste for melodrama. However, this time he
was more adamant, despite the fact that he had a European tour scheduled to begin a mere two weeks later.

Steve Nieve didn’t need a second bidding: he took a holiday in America, where as a passenger he was almost immediately involved in a serious car accident in Los Angeles which laid him low
for some time. By the time Elvis had eventually and somewhat inevitably come to his senses and decided to press on, he found himself without a keyboard player. It would be June before Steve was
well enough to rejoin The Attractions.

The initial Plan B had been to adapt to Steve Nieve’s absence by playing as a trio. This was overly optimistic, considering Elvis’s considerable shortcomings as a lead guitarist, and
was swifly jettisoned after the opening two warm-up gigs on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey proved to be catastrophic, the songs badly battered by layers of ill-used guitar effects.

Before the European tour moved to Holland, Germany and Belgium in mid-April, Elvis decided to augment the remaining two Attractions with The Rumour’s guitarist
Martin Belmont. The setlist was adapted by neccessity. Without Steve’s warm organ sound, only a handful of songs from
Get Happy!!
made the cut. ‘High Fidelity’ was
usually included, having been released as a single in April, alongside covers of Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have To Go’, Smokey Robinson’s ‘Don’t Look Back’
and Presley’s ‘Little Sister’. The concerts were ragged, and those members of the audience coming to the shows before deciding whether to buy
Get Happy!!
were unlikely to
have been persuaded to storm their local record shop.

Such pitfalls were not helping the promotion of the record.
Get Happy!!
had proved a considered commercial success, but those expecting the carefully sculpted pop music of
Armed
Forces
were inevitably disappointed. The record climbed to peaks of No. 2 in the UK and No. 11 in the US – both highly creditable chart placings – but it didn’t sell anywhere
near as many copies as its predecessor. ‘Jake actually laughed about having a
Get Happy!!
house in his garden made with all the unsold records,’ recalls Roger Bechirian.

It’s likely that the ‘Columbus Incident’ had something to do with the disappointing sales, if not directly. Vast numbers of people hadn’t suddenly stopped buying Elvis
Costello records on the strength of that one moment of madness, but the events of March 1979 undeniably had a knock-on effect. CBS were unwilling to market the record with any great fanfare;
indeed, according to Roger Bechirian, ‘they were horrified with
Get Happy!!’.
On top of it all, Elvis had decided not to tour America this time around, unquestionably a
reaction to the madness of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour.

However, the story wasn’t that simple. The legal dispute with Warners had muffled a little of the record’s initial punch, but the drop in sales was primarily attributable to
Elvis’s rough-and-ready, radical switch in musical direction. In the States especially, a country that has always liked its music neatly labelled and pigeonholed, this was
clearly not the polished new wave sounds of
Armed Forces
, and radio stations were unsure what to do with it.

The net result was not promising. ‘F-Beat was running into financial struggles at that time,’ admits Andrew Lauder. ‘We had overpressed on the album based on the sales of
Armed Forces
, which was a platinum album. We had a situation where we were shipping out lots of records and they were all coming back. Having paid for all the advertising and all the
publicity, financially it was a tough one to make work.’ With a promotional campaign which included 100,000 free posters, over 500 record shop window displays, double-page magazine adverts
and radio and television exposure, the cost of failure was high.

E
LVIS HAD RELEASED FOUR FULL-LENGTH ALBUMS
in the space of two-and-a-half years; had toured the world almost constantly, and become one of the foremost
musical figures of his generation. Throughout it all, he had been under no illusion that playing to the hilt the ‘Elvis Costello’ character established in the opening months of his
career would provide the quickest route to success. He had stuck to it, cutting his musical cloth as simply and efficiently as he could, adhering to the somewhat one-dimensional template that the
public recognised. It wasn’t really artifice, it was simply that he restricted himself to displaying only a certain side of his personality: the vengeful, cocksure, embittered side, which
undoubtedly existed. But he was finding the parameters frustrating.

Get Happy!!
had marked the first step away from that persona, and now he felt the urge to add even more of himself to the music. ‘There was really the need in me to reflect
something else: a bit more tenderness, a bit more regret, because you make mistakes in your life and you have to sing about those as well as the things you’re very confident or cocky
about.’
¹

He was looking back to move forwards. Earlier in the year he had cut eccentric versions of old D.P. Costello songs ‘Ghost Train’, ‘Hoover Factory’ and ‘Dr
Luther’s
Assistant’
³¹
at Am-Pro and TW studios in Fulham. They were beguiling doodles, floating around without a beat,
not songs that could easily be played with The Attractions. He was also picking up on threads of songs and lyrics he had written in the mid-’70s. ‘Different Finger’, ‘New
Lace Sleeves’, ‘Luxembourg’, even a short instrumental piece called ‘Weeper’s Dream’ were all dusted down and rearranged, a sure sign that he was beginning to
change direction, focusing on the wider musical ambitions he had set aside in 1977.

Elvis’s musical frame of reference had always been immense, but only a fraction of it had been suggested in his musical output to date. This was set to change. He had bought a baby grand
piano at the beginning of the year, which had an almost immediate impact on his songwriting process. Although it would be a full year before he began to feel his way around the instrument with
enough confidence for it to become his principal compositional tool, he quickly wrote ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, a restrained, almost formal piano piece which would later become a live
tour de force.

His mind was already on the next record. He envisaged it combining the melodic lushness of
Armed Forces
with the rhythmic drive of
Get Happy!!
, and throughout the summer he
stockpiled songs with this template in mind: ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’, ‘Lovers Walk’, ‘Clubland’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Watch Your
Step’ and ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ were already written and demo-ed, although some of them would change dramatically during the album sessions: at this point, ‘Watch
Your Step’ was a raucous rocker and ‘New Lace Sleeves’ a swaying, reggae-tinged number laced with melodica.