Complicated Shadows (26 page)

Elvis showcased some of the new material in festival appearances in Orange, France and at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in July. Steve was back in the swing after his LA car-crash,
and paid his professional respects
to Squeeze’s keyboard whizz Jools Holland in three concerts at the Albany Theatre in London on 12–14 August. Holland was
leaving the band for pastures new, and Elvis and The Attractions, cunningly disguised as Otis Westinghouse and The Lifts, supported Squeeze each night and joined them on a few of their own songs as
well.

The two bands’ paths had crossed before on
Top Of The Pops
and other television shows, but they had become firm friends earlier in the year after stumbling upon each other in a
hotel bar in Buxton in the north of England while on tour. ‘We stayed up until the sun came up,’ recalls the band’s guitarist, singer and lyricist Chris Difford. ‘Talking
about country music, old music, management, record deals and God-knows-what.’

The result of the meeting was significant in many ways. Squeeze were having problems with their manager Miles Copeland, and Jake – ever the knight in shining armour – stepped into
the breach. Soon his managerial responsibilities were being shared between Elvis and Squeeze, the beginning of a working relationship which would span the next few years.

Festival appearances were dotted around the summer. A performance at the Edinburgh Festival in August – a greatest hits set with a live debut for ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ thrown
in for good measure – was followed by an appearance at the Heatwave Festival in Toronto on 23 August, the one and only trip to North America the band made in the twenty months following the
‘Armed Funk’ tour.

The trip to Canada coincided with the release of
Taking Liberties
, a record specifically designed for the US market, mopping up stray B-sides, UK album tracks and unreleased out-takes.
Taking Liberties
was only intended to be available on cassette in Britain, with a slightly altered track listing and under the name
Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How’s Your
Fathers
, but vinyl imports soon made their way across the Atlantic.

At twenty songs, it was an impressive – if incoherent – collection of material which was by no means second-rate: ‘Radio Sweetheart’, ‘Stranger In The House’,
‘Night Rally’,
‘Chelsea’, ‘Girls Talk’, ‘Hoover Factory’ and covers of ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Getting
Mighty Crowded’ were all on offer. A minor addition to the canon, more than anything
Taking Liberties
was a useful document in tracking Elvis’s changing musical obsessions over
three years of enormous creativity. ‘The harried Costello fan can pause and actually weigh up the pros and cons of the man’s work to date,’ wrote Nick Kent in the
NME
,
before concluding: ‘I’m glad I’ve got this record.’

* * *

Elvis and The Attractions demo-ed material for the next album at Eden Studios throughout September, and work began in earnest at DJM studios in Holborn in central London the
following month, with the old team of Nick Lowe and Roger Bechirian still in place. Working practices had changed somewhat. Lowe would produce for two or three days at a time on his own and then
Roger Bechirian would take charge for a few sessions.

The difference in the two men’s techniques and the lack of consistency didn’t help the album’s progress. Relations within the band were also beginning to fall apart. They
arrived in the studio following several days spent rehearsing in the country, which had soon collapsed into an exercise in alcoholic futility. ‘By that point, I think everybody was just fed
up with seeing each other,’ says Bechirian. ‘There was a real sense of animosity, a cloud over the project. It was just a real struggle, because nobody seemed to care about
it.’

In this mood of extreme disillusionment and disenchantment, the songs Elvis was writing were mired in ‘sour and rotten doings,’
²
detailing a very English pre-occupation with sleaze, cheap assignations and corruption when the lights are dimmed. The Conservative Party had recently come back to power, and the looming shadow of
Thatcherism infiltrated the songs and contaminated the mood in the studio. In addition, Elvis was at a personal low. His marriage to Mary had once again reached a point where it was approaching
‘terminal fracture’ and he was
‘close to nervous collapse on a diet of cider, gin and tonic, various powders, Seconal and Johnnie Walker Black
Label.’
³

The atmosphere at DJM was predictably dire. The sound was dry and lifeless, ill-suited to the more expansive music that Elvis wanted to make. The band were drinking their way through the
sessions and generally the prevailing mood was that they were getting nowhere fast. As with
Get Happy!!
, it was swiftly decided that a change of scene would help. This time, the
familiarity of Eden Studios seemed attractive, and once there, the record began to take shape.

Elvis had tired of playing up to the angry, aggressive stereotype, and he and The Attractions finally located the heart of the record in the wiped-out, resigned lushness which characterised the
mood of the strongest tracks. Much of the credit for this fell to Steve Nieve, who – having come close to quitting after
Get Happy!!
– was determined to exert more influence
this time around. His piano and organ work dominated the songs, lending a sense of poise and calm restraint which belied the miserable mood of the sessions. In many ways he held the record
together.

The previously frantic demo’s of ‘Watch Your Step’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’, slowed down and performed with a new, held-back power, benefited most from Steve’s
attentions, but ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’ and ‘Black Sails In The Sunset’ were all enriched by Nieve’s ‘lead’
piano playing. Vocally, Elvis experimented with a low, quiet croon, first utilised on ‘Secondary Modern’ on
Get Happy!!
and now developed into a silky, lascivious moan, at once
amused and disgusted. It was very effective.

The on-going friendship with Squeeze further energized the record. With both acts now managed by Jake, Elvis had already agreed to produce the band’s new record upon finishing his own
album, and vocalist Glenn Tilbrook was happy to return the favour. During the sessions, Elvis’s voice was often suffering from the cumulative effects of a little too much hard living, and on
one such occasion Tilbrook offered to sing a guide vocal for ‘From A Whisper
To A Scream’ to enable The Attractions to cut the backing track. ‘The effect
was so impressive that we decided to cut the song as a duet when I recovered,’
⁴
said Elvis.

By early November the record was finished, and right until the end the atmosphere was fraught. ‘I remember when we were mixing there were fights,’ says Roger Bechirian. ‘Bruce
Thomas walking out of the control room, leaving the band and Jake chasing after him. The whole thing was mental.’ In the end, the darkly ironic title of
Trust
was considerably more
apt than the original title:
Looking Italian.

On his return from a short tour of Sweden and Norway, which mixed songs from
Trust
and
Get Happy!!
with only a selection of old favourites, Elvis was back in the studio to
co-produce Squeeze’s
East Side Story
with Roger Bechirian. Initially Jake had planned for Squeeze to make a double album with Paul McCartney, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and Elvis
producing a side each, but although all parties were willing, logistically it proved impossible for everybody to find the time.

It was left to Elvis and Roger to spend the six weeks preceding Christmas 1980 producing the entire record, which was eventually scaled down to a single album. Loosely speaking, Elvis filled the
Nick Lowe role as all-round creative inspiration while Roger Bechirian covered the technical aspects, although Bechirian articulates the distribution of talents a little differently. ‘Elvis
sat there and pontificated a lot about this, that and the other and I got on with getting the stuff down and rallying the band. I mean, Elvis did have an influence to some extent, but it
wasn’t that great.’

Thankfully, the band were a little happier to have Elvis in the studio. For Chris Difford and vocalist Glenn Tilbrook in particular, sparring with him was an experience that was both slightly
terrifying and wildly inspiring at the same time. ‘I was in complete awe of working with him,’ admits Difford. ‘It was a great challenge to come in every day with a lyric that
would be better than the one that he might come up with. I worked diligently and furiously to get the lyrics in such a shape that he would be
pleased with them – and me
too. I mean, I wasn’t just doing it for him! But it really raised the bar. I could tell which were the weak ones just by looking at his face.’

A shrewd judge at spotting an apt cover version when it came to his own career, Elvis proved particularly adept at seeing the potential in material that the band were disenchanted with. Later
becoming a hit single for the band, ‘Labelled With Love’ was destined for the scrap heap until Elvis heard it and immediately recognised a hit. He bullied and cajoled the band into
having a second stab at it until they succumbed, in a way that a conventional producer might not have been able to.

Halfway through the recording, John Lennon was shot dead in New York, on 8 December 1980, and work on the album ground to a halt. ‘We went into the studio and a dozen or so musicians just
dropped in,’ recalls Difford. ‘We cracked some beers and just played John Lennon songs the whole day. It was highly emotional. We’d lost somebody that we looked up to, a father
figure, and one way that we knew how to demonstrate how loved he was was to play his songs in the studio.’

Elvis’s immediate response to Lennon’s murder was to write ‘Kid About It’, which name-checked the traditional song ‘The Leaving Of Liverpool’ and in its
original version contained the line: ‘Someone got killed/And he cried.’ He later changed it, but the sense of sadness and loss remained in the finished song.

Upon its release,
East Side Story
was hailed as a classic and remains arguably the best record the band ever made. ‘I think the sound they got was amazing on that record,’
says Roger Bechirian. ‘I’m really, really pleased with it. I think it’s one of the best works that I’ve been involved in.’ Difford agrees, arguing that Squeeze made
two great albums ‘and that’s one of them. Working with Elvis was obviously the major reason why’.

* * *

In a craft shop in Washington DC, they were selling stuffed-cloth Christmas tree decorations of Elvis, complete with
skinny tie, dark glasses and a
curling forelock, for a bargain price of $6. The slightly more valuable genuine article landed less than two weeks later, riding into town on the back of another Jake-inspired masterplan: The
English Mugs Tour. Six weeks in all, west to east, with Squeeze supporting Elvis and The Attractions throughout.

He arrived back in America with the knowledge that ‘Clubland’, the opening single from
Trust
, had stiffed at No. 60 in the UK charts. It broke a run of nine straight Top 40
singles, and effectively marked the end of Elvis and The Attractions’ flirtation with pop stardom. For the time being at least, he appeared unconcerned.

From the start of the tour in Vancouver on 4 January, the legacy of the ‘Columbus Incident’ was discreet but strong. There was tight security, with two guards on the bus most of the
time. ‘I just remember his feet hardly touching the ground when he walked through the lobby,’ recalls Chris Difford.

That aside, the contrast to the last time Elvis played North America was vast. The shows were often twice as long as they had been in 1979 – up to thirty songs a night, never less than
twenty – and evenly paced, with far more light and shade than before. During the tour he played over sixty songs, spanning his entire career, but almost every date opened the same way –
quietly, with ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ or ‘Just A Memory’, featuring just Elvis and Steve on piano, usually followed by the band crashing into ‘Accidents Will
Happen’ and ‘Strict Time’, or occasionally ‘Hand In Hand’.

One notable exception was Elvis and The Attractions’ first-ever Nashville show on 20 January, where they opened with revved-up versions of three Hank Williams songs: ‘Move It On
Over’, ‘Honky Tonkin’’ and ‘Mind Your Own Business’, which did little to impress a young Tennessee crowd who dismissed country as the music of their parents, and
were still seeking their new wave kicks in 1981.

Tellingly, there were several other country songs aired on the tour, including Billy Sherill’s ‘Too Far Gone’, Loretta Lynn’s ‘(S)He’s Got You’, and
Elvis’s own ‘Stranger In The House’. While in Nashville, Elvis took the opportunity to
record two songs at the legendary CBS Studio B, where he had sung his
duet with George Jones two years earlier. He and The Attractions cut ‘He’s Got You’ and ‘Too Far Gone’ in a day, with Pete Drake sitting in on pedal steel and Billy
Sherill producing. The session was significant: it would turn out to be a deceptively smooth dry-run for the
Almost Blue
album later in the year.

Throughout the tour, Elvis’s on-stage demeanour was generally amiable; he at last seemed pleased to be there. Cameo appearances from Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and also Martin Belmont
during many of the shows also added a bit of spark and sparring which was a million miles away from the surly, arrogant demeanour of old.

At his trio of concerts at the Palladium in New York in early February, Elvis even cracked a few weak jokes, responding to the crowd’s exuberance by ramping up the energy levels, tearing
into the new songs. Praising the tightness of the band and the contribution of Steve Nieve in particular, veteran Costello-watcher Robert Palmer of the
New York Times
concluded that
‘there isn’t another singer-songwriter today who can match Costello’s range, depth, richness of language or sheer productivity. It can only be hoped that he won’t wait two
more years to tour this country again.’