Complicated Shadows (28 page)

Instead, Billy Sherill seemed amused, suspicious and dismissive that an English ‘punk’ singer would want to come to Nashville and record faithful versions of songs which he
considered old and unable to yield any new surprises. ‘I entered into the thing totally in the dark,’ he admitted. ‘I really wasn’t into him that much. I didn’t know
what I could contribute.’
¹¹
One day in the control room, Sherill wheeled around and asked John McFee, ‘What the hell does this guy think
he wants to make a country record for?’ ‘I kinda went, “Huh?! Well, actually he really loves country music”,’ says McFee. ‘“He’s totally sincere, I
think he’s a great singer, and he wants to make a real country record”.’ But I thought that was kinda rude!’

It was almost immediately clear that what Elvis wanted to do was the direct opposite of what the producer was expecting, or willing to deliver. He had produced and written some of
Nashville’s most enduring songs, among them Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ and Charlie Rich’s ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World’. As such, he was
a man who had a tried and tested – and wildly successful – formula for producing hit records. In the eyes of The Attractions, however, his artistic sensibilities didn’t seem to
stretch far beyond dollar signs and buying a new speedboat.

If Sherill was not particularly interested in Elvis and The Attractions’ crumpled cloth, neither were the band particularly enamoured with him. Although both Pete and Steve enjoyed country
music, and Steve in particular relished the genre-style piano parts he was asked to bring to each song, Sherill’s manner was a marked departure from the genial enthusiasm of Nick Lowe. In
general, the producer was distant and uncommunicative. He didn’t always make it into work every day and when he did he was inscrutable.

He became more animated when Elvis and The Attractions tore through an 100-mph trashing of Hank
Williams’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To
Do?’, after which he suggested that the band played the song again, exactly mirroring the first take, to give a full double-tracked performance. It was a novelty which amused both Sherill and
The Attractions, but which did nothing for the music, as a disgruntled Elvis noted. ‘I think Billy Sherill double-bluffed us on that one,’ he said after the session. ‘He realised
we were setting out to outrage him and so he deliberately went over the top.’
¹²

Ironically, it was the one track that fitted into the producer’s preconceived idea of what he thought Elvis wanted. ‘I loved it,’ laughed Sherill, who seemed to be intent on
simply making things fresh for himself. ‘I’ve heard that song since I was eight weeks old and it’s the only time I’ve ever heard it done that way. In fact, it’s what I
thought
he was going to do with all the songs.’
¹³

The many frustrations and disappointments on both sides were exemplified in the attempt to get one of Elvis’s own recent compositions – ‘Tears Before Bedtime’ – up
and running. The song was half-formed, the playing poor and the singing slack, and Sherill had little inclination to try and work any magic with it. Instead, he left the studio, insinuating –
correctly, as it transpired – that it was not a country song and didn’t fit the mood of the record. Elvis was stymied. Reluctant to admit defeat or come down too hard on Sherill, he was
caught between frustration at how badly things were turning out and a genuine and touching desire to ‘impress’ Sherill out of his nonchalance. He never did.

* * *

The sessions for
Almost Blue
ended on 29 May, after which it was a relatively quiet summer. The band played the festival circuit in Europe, with concerts in Ireland,
Belgium and Sweden. At the end of July they played a one-off gig at the Metro Hotel in Aberdeen, intended to showcase Elvis and The Attractions’ country excursion in a true country
environment. John McFee came along for the ride. The other concerts were more business-like. Elvis slipped
some of the country material into the sets, but it was primarily
the ‘traditional’ Attractions music which took precedence.

Come August, it was abundantly clear that Elvis’s self-imposed songwriting hiatus hadn’t lasted too long. He had started using the baby grand piano as his principal writing tool,
searching for new melodic structures, relishing the fact that he was a comparative learner on the instrument and therefore by neccesity had to avoid the tried-and-tested compositional tricks and
licks so easy to fall into on the guitar.

Now, he was taking the music he had been exposed to as a child – jazz, the popular standards of the ’30s and ’40s, even classical music – as inspiration for many of the
new songs: Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra’s midnight albums
Only The Lonely
and
In The Wee Small Hours
, Miles Davis, Erik Satie and Debussy were key touchstones. The results
were melodically ambitious pieces that included ‘The Long Honeymoon’ and ‘Boy With A Problem’, both of which he felt he was unable – or unwilling – to write
lyrics for.

‘The Long Honeymoon’ had started as an abstract piano piece, which Elvis had demo-ed in the spring as an instrumental. With typical fearlessness, he had sent the somewhat rambling
demo to the legendary Sinatra lyricist Sammy Cahn in the hope of interesting him in a collaboration. A bewildered Cahn eventually responded but politely declined, unable to find a suitably coherent
melodic structure to work on, so Elvis tightened the song’s structure himself and added his own pointed words, about a decaying marriage and an absent husband.

For ‘Boy With A Problem’, Elvis looked closer to home for help, borrowing the talents of Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford, who took Elvis’s unfinished draft lyric and rewrote the
bulk of the song. ‘He accepted it, just changed one or two lines,’ says Difford. ‘There was one line I had which he threw out: “I won’t bore you with the
problem/I’ve got all the snow but no toboggan.” He thought it was a reference to cocaine.’ Elvis’s sensitivity to the line may have been down to the fact that he was
cleaning up his own
act at the time, and at some point between the summer of 1981 and the spring of 1982 he would stop taking drugs, apparently for good. Still, Difford
denies that there was anything personal or knowing in the lyric. ‘It was about a boy who had snow and no toboggan!’

On 21 and 22 August Elvis crept into Pathway Studios to cut full demos of some other new songs: ‘Shabby Doll’, ‘You Little Fool’, ‘Town Cryer’ and ‘Man
Out Of Time’. The chorus line of the latter had come to Elvis as a rhetorical question on a suitably dramatic moonlit night on the tour bus in Sweden. The remainder of the song had been
written in a Scottish country house hotel outside Aberdeen, where he had been staying in preparation for the gig at the Metro Hotel and which reminded him of ‘a scene for a scandal in fiction
or in the newspapers. A picture of decay, corruption and betrayal.’
¹⁴

Elvis had clearly got the thirst for interpretation out of his system with the recording of
Almost Blue.
At least many critics hoped so. His country record was released in October 1981
and received by far the harshest critiques of his career. Not all of them were justified, but it was true that
Almost Blue
was a mis-step; above all, The Attractions were ill-used,
neutered almost throughout, a crackling A-league band reduced to second-rate country session men. It sounded like they were sleepwalking through most of the material, so palpable was the confusion
and lack of enthusiam. Only the closing ‘How Much I Lied’, laced with Steve’s distinctive piano motif, hinted at the riches that a great beat group playing classic country songs
in their own style could unearth.

Meanwhile, after the rich, multi-faceted vocal expressions of
Trust
, Elvis often sounded one-dimensional, melodramatic and shrill, his voice overwhelmed by the material. Sometimes, such
as on ‘I’m Your Toy’, the record’s standout ballad, he succeeded in pulling the genuine torment of both song and singer out into the open, but it was a rare jewel.

There was little invention in the arrangements. Billy Sherill had added his requisite Nashville fairy dust to proceedings: harps, strings and the Nashville Edition vocal
group sugared ‘Sweet Dreams’, ‘Good Year For The Roses’ and several other tracks, papering the cracks of some ragged performances, but even at a little over
half an hour,
Almost Blue
dragged. The melancholy that Elvis was searching for proved elusive, and instead the album merely sounded funereal and oppressive. Even the up-tempo numbers like
‘Honey Hush’ and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ were lumbering rather than fleet of foot.

Almost Blue
was a difficult record to love. Nonetheless, it provided Elvis with one of his best-loved and widely known songs: ‘Good Year For The Roses’ became an unlikely UK
hit single in November, rising to No. 6 in the charts. Billy Sherill proved that – whatever else – he still knew how to produce a Top 10 country song. The success of ‘Good Year
For The Roses’ also provided an interesting statistic: for all his undoubted and celebrated prowess as one of Britain’s finest songwriters, two of Elvis’s three Top Ten UK hit
singles to date have been achieved with cover versions, while a disproportionately high number of his other Top 40 singles – ‘I Wanna Be Loved’, ‘Don’t Let Me Be
Misunderstood’, and ‘She’, his first Top 20 hit for over fifteen years – were also covers. His initial and brief spurt of singles success notwithstanding, it seemed there
was something inherently and stubbornly obtuse in Elvis’s music which prevented enduring commercial returns, at least in the ever-fickle singles market.

In Britain, where country music was something of a novelty and the songs were fresh to most listeners,
Almost Blue
got a reasonably positive hearing. In
Melody Maker
, the ever
loyal Allan Jones predictably gave it the thumbs up, concluding that ‘it’s a relief to know that passion isn’t completely out of fashion’. Paul Du Noyer’s
NME
review was also on-side. ‘Costello and company cut through the layers of smart prejudice to find the music’s enduring values: its sly humour, its lyrical craftmanship, its melancholic
dignity. The tunes are lovely as well.’ On the back of the single success and the
South Bank Show
documentary, which was aired on LWT in early November, the album reached No. 7, a
respectable showing considering the
nature of the material and that there was no real tour to support it.

It was a very different story across the Atlantic, however. The American notices were caustic, the record regarded with a mixture of incomprehension, suspicion, venom and dismay. Negative
reviews in the
Village Voice
,
Trouser Press
and a decidedly mixed one in
Rolling Stone
reached a crescendo in
Creem.
‘Time after time he comes off like
some hack lounge singer coming to fingertip grips with heartbreak,’ wrote Craig Zeller. ‘Only thing is, the heartbreak is drowning in a sea of clicked saphead, angst-vocal
mechanisms.’

Boo Browning in the
Washington Post
was even more troubed. Raising the spectre of the ‘Columbus Incident’ in the opening lines of his review, he misread
Almost Blue
as some kind of extension of a perceived assault on traditional American values, or at best an attempt to win back record buyers. It was clearly neither. ‘Costello has invaded the trusting
soul of country music and made a mean-spirited mess of it,’ he claimed. ‘I don’t expect him to have any shame about this; I just want him to go home.’

Even the less jingoistic reviews tended to agree that Elvis was not an accomplished enough vocalist to take on many of these songs and win the fight. The release of
Almost Blue
marked a
career low in America, selling a mere 50,000 copies and crawling to only No. 50 in the charts, while also proving that the events in Columbus had not been entirely forgiven. ‘They
didn’t understand the motives behind it and they sort of resented us playing their music,’ said Elvis. ‘Maybe it was the aftermath of 1979, maybe that was the final exorcism of
all the unhappiness.’
¹⁵
And not before time.

THE
‘
MASTERPIECE
’
WAS ORIGINALLY CALLED
Music To Stop Clocks.
Then it changed to
This Is A Revolution Of The Mind
, taken from James Brown’s ‘King Heroin’. Finally, Elvis settled on
Imperial Bedroom
, the title of a new song which was
eventually left off the record.

Setting aside an unprecedented twelve weeks to pull together all his disparate influences and make an ambitious, melodic record which paid little heed to current pop trends, Elvis booked AIR
Studios in London to record with Geoff Emerick in late October and November. Although initially he wanted to record most of the album live with only minimal overdubs, after
Trust
Elvis
realised that the tried and tested methodology of Nick Lowe and Roger Bechirian had reached the end of the road. ‘I remember feeling a bit hurt by the fact that we weren’t going to be
involved in it,’ admits Bechirian. ‘It was something I really wanted to do. I know [Nick] wasn’t terribly happy.’