Complicated Shadows (37 page)

Blood & Chocolate
had been finished in May with everybody just about still on speaking terms, and although the mood within the camp was frosty, European festival dates had been
booked throughout early July. The relatively short sets featured only a handful of the new tracks, usually ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’ and
‘Uncomplicated’.

The album was scheduled for a September release and Elvis had the summer free of muscial responsiblities. He popped over to America to join Cait and The Pogues in Chicago on 12 July, getting
rip-roaring drunk with Tom
Waits and his band after-hours at Holsteins folk bar. Much of the rest of his time was spent making a film.

Elvis had done tiny pieces of acting before: he had appeared as Earl Manchester in
Americathon
as early as 1979, and had recently had speaking bit-parts as a family member in the TV
series
Scully
and as bungling magician Rosco de Ville in
No Surrender
, both written by Liverpudlian Alan Bleasdale. But
Straight To Hell
was his first feature film.

The film had been conceived by British director Alex Cox, featuring The Pogues, Joe Strummer, Courtney Love and Elvis, as well as ‘proper’ actors such as Sy Richardson, Kathy Burke
and Dick Rude. Cox had recently directed The Pogues in the video for ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’, and was fresh from the success of
Sid And Nancy
, his biopic of Sid Vicious and
Nancy Spungeon.

A political animal to the bone, Cox had organised a benefit gig for Nicaragua at the Brixton Fridge in 1985, at which most of the musicans taking part in the film had played. Initially, he had
planned to get all the acts to play a similar concert in Nicaragua in solidarity with the freedom movement there, before releasing the footage as a concert film. However, no one seemed willing to
put up the funds for such a blatantly politically motivated venture, and eventually the project fell through, with the result that, according to Cox, ‘there was an embarrassing hole in
everybody’s schedule which I was really responsible for’. To plug the gap, the director proposed
Straight To Hell
as an alternative, a homage to the Sergio Leone spaghetti
westerns that he loved, to be filmed in searing heat in Almeria in Spain in August and September 1986.

The script for
Straight To Hell
had been knocked off in a matter of days and the filming wrapped up in about four weeks. The speed of both the film’s conception and execution was
glaringly apparent. ‘I should have worked harder on the script and not just dashed it off,’ admits Cox. The film was an extravagant exercise in pastiche which capitalised on the fame of
its main participants (there were also cameos from Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper) while making little impact beyond that.

Elvis played Hives, the obsequious butler. Cox was impressed with his ability and clearly saw something in his performance which most people missed. ‘He really
stands up next to Kathy Burke, next to real professional actors,’ he says. ‘He was very studied, and very thoughtful and serious about it. He thought what his character would do and
came up with improvisations for extra scenes. He took it very seriously.’

For Elvis,
Straight To Hell
was fun for a short while and then became a drag. His presence in Spain was essentially as a companion to Cait, and despite Cox’s comments, his role as
the subservient butler appeared to have been loosely thrown together as a dramatic extension of his real-life role as the most put-upon member of The Pogues entourage. ‘It was quite
interesting actually, the way things were played out as a sort of parallel to real life,’ says The Pogues’ multi-instrumentalist Jem Finer. ‘There was a scene where Elvis was
tortured which was cut out, and he was a sort of bullied character, a loser. In a sense it was almost like Alex Cox and maybe everyone else – in some sort of collective consciousness –
played out the things that they would like to do in real life.’

The most significant fall-out from the shoot in Spain was Cait’s departure from The Pogues. It had been coming for some time, spreading slowly through the year. When Elvis flew to Los
Angeles in late September to prepare for the start of his tour with The Attractions, Cait posted AWOL and accompanied him, instead of meeting The Pogues at Eezihire Studios in London to rehearse
for their imminent tour. Eventually, she showed up for rehearsals a week late and stayed for a day, before taking her bass home. Two days later she was back with Elvis in Los Angeles, and phoned
the band to say she was leaving, this time for good.

The increasing strain in her relationship with The Pogues, not to mention the difficulty of maintaining a personal relationship in which both parties were successful musicians touring the world
had proved too much. Cait chose to bail out and support Elvis, and for the next decade and a half she was his almost constant companion on tour,
and occasionally on stage and
on record. ‘She actually faced up to the choice of being with the man she wanted to be with or being with the band,’ said Pogues banjo player Terry Woods. ‘When decisions get down
to personal levels like that then I think personal life takes precedent.’
⁶

* * *

Following the making of the twin polarities of
King Of America
and
Blood & Chocolate
within a few months of each other, Elvis constructed a stage show
designed to reconcile all the disparate elements of his career over the past two years: solo balladeer, roots revivalist, and spitting mad Attraction. He also wanted to have a little fun. He
planned extended residencies with both The Attractions and The Confederates in fifteen cities in the US and Europe, playing between two and five nights in each city, attempting to make each night
in each town a markedly different spectacle from the other.

This unprecedented and ambitious tour came on the back of
Blood & Chocolate,
released on 15 September. With a bizarre cover painting by Elvis’s transparent alter-ego Eamnon
Singer and a back photo featuring him as Napoleon Dynamite, those looking for an identity crisis could find plenty to shout about. But the sleeve attributed the record simply to Elvis Costello and
The Attractions, and the searing music held within left no one in any doubt.

Many listeners welcomed it as his most musically straightforward record since before
Get Happy!!
. Robert Hilburn in the
LA Times
made copious – if erroneous –
Armed Forces
comparisons, opining that it was the record fans had ‘been waiting seven years for him to deliver’. But a closer inspection revealed that this was something new.
Although
Blood & Chocolate
featured The Attractions at full volume and fundamentally unadorned, it was darker, less harmonically ambitious, and lyrically much more personal than
anything Elvis had done in the late ’70s. This was a subterranean record, with little emphasis on subtlety or melody. Most of the time, the band were
recorded as though
they were a single instrument, as brutal, blunt and effective as a club.

The record was roughly split in two, between the repetitive, mono-rhythmic nightmares of ‘Uncomplicated’, ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?’, ‘Home Is
Anywhere You Hang Your Head’, ‘I Want You’ and ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’; and the brighter pop of ‘Blue Chair’, ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’,
‘Crimes Of Paris’, and ‘Next Time ’Round’. Only the dreary, disjointed ‘Battered Old Bird’ and the atonal ‘Poor Napoleon’ failed to quicken the
pulse.

As an extended mood piece it worked brilliantly, but
Blood & Chocolate
required an element of faith from the listener. This was not easy listening, and reviews were mixed. In the
NME
, Adrian Thrills celebrated the ‘welcome resurrection of a tough, uncompromising streak that has been underplayed since the turn of the decade’, but
The Times
was
less impressed with the ‘maudlin songs peopled with morose, cobwebbed characters’, concluding that the record sounded as though it were conceived in a ‘bout of musical
agoraphobia’.
Rolling Stone
occupied the middle ground, singling out ‘I Want You’ as a career highlight, but viewing much of the rest of the record as ‘too often
glib and sketchy’.

It was easily the starkest record Elvis had made, and perhaps his truest, but the density and idiosyncracies of
Blood & Chocolate
ensured that he was increasingly destined to make
his big splashes in a small pond. Columbia viewed the record with some distaste, the long, murderous songs and murky production a world away from the clean, crisp pop of
Armed Forces
which
they still coveted. ‘They hated it and subsequently just fucking buried it,’
⁷
said Elvis, although he did little to aid his own
cause.

With pop songs of the calibre of ‘Blue Chair’ and ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ at his disposal, to release the doggedly uncommercial ‘I Want You’ and
‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ – both over six minutes long – as the first two UK singles was a wilfully perverse move on Elvis and F-Beat’s part. Elvis always expressed
surprise that ‘Tokyo
Storm Warning’ wasn’t a hit, clearly crediting the record-buying public with more adventurous tastes than they merited. It made No. 73.
Little wonder that
Blood & Chocolate
would be the last record Elvis would make with Columbia, and his least commercially successful, limping to a pretty disastrous No. 16 in the UK and
a truly awful No. 84 in the US. With typically contrary timing, Elvis saw this as the perfect moment to embark on the most creatively ambitious and financially draining tour of his career.

Beginning on 1 October 1986, at the Beverly Theater in Beverly Hills, California, the concerts were intended to showcase the full span of Elvis’s abilities and enthusiasms. The opening
night was a loosely based ‘Greatest Hits’ – or rather, best-loved – set with The Attractions, including a request slot and three tracks from
King Of America:
‘
Lovable’, ‘Jack Of All Parades’ and ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’. ‘The music itself was stirring,’ said Robert Hilburn of the
LA
Times
, which was on ‘Costello-watch’ and reviewing all five nights at the Beverly Theater. ‘Terrific songs sung with passion and played by The Attractions with captivating
force.’ However, the much-vaunted request slot was a mess and inherently unspontaneous, as Elvis rather comically rifled through the crumpled notes thrown on to the stage, before choosing the
one he wanted to play. It all ended – predictably enough – with ‘Pump It Up’.

The next night, Elvis performed mostly alone, featuring only a handful of songs that had been played the previous evening. Highlights included a tongue-in-cheek cover of the Psychedelic
Furs’ ‘Pretty In Pink’, a live debut for
Blood & Chocolate
out-take ‘Forgive Her Anything’, a beautifully rewritten ‘Deportees Club’ and a
stunning solo ‘I Want You’, which reduced the audience to silent awe.

After fifteen solo songs the mood changed, as T-Bone Burnett jumped on-stage and The Coward Brothers rifled through five songs, including The Beatles’ ‘Twist And Shout’. The
Confederates, consisting of
King Of America
stalwarts James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner and Mitchell Froom, joined in for the final ten songs, and the next night they had the whole
show to themselves.

The emphasis was on rootsy, good-time rock ’n’ roll and country. Most of
King Of America
received an airing, as well as well-worn R&B covers such
as ‘Sally Sue Brown’, ‘It Tears Me Up’ and ‘That’s How You Got Killed Before’. The original songs worked well in concert, but the handfuls of covers tended
to drag. Despite an increasing insistence on playing blues music, Elvis would never be particularly convincing handling such stodgy material, often sounding puffy and uninspired. However, mid-set
he slipped five gems into his solo spot: ‘Green Shirt’, ‘Party Girl’, ‘Heathen Town’, ‘Little Palaces’ and ‘American Without Tears’, the
latter with a brand-new lyric.

If night three was a gently swinging, somewhat middle-aged affair, then the following evening’s show was where the real fun erupted. Saturday, 4 October marked the debut of the Spectacular
Spinning Songbook, the dramatic centrepiece of the tour. The Songbook was a twelve-foot-high carnival wheel plastered with thirty-eight different song titles, from Elvis favourites to obscure or
bizarre covers like Prince’s ‘Pop Life’ and Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’.

Like a cheap TV game show, members of the audience were taken on-stage to spin the wheel, overseen by Elvis in the guise of MC Napoleon Dynamite, as well as any passing celebrity who happened to
be in the area. As the band played their chosen selection, the audience member could listen to the song in a section of the stage named The Society Lounge, or they could dance along in the go-go
cage. ‘It started as a flip suggestion for solving the problem of which songs to sing,’ said Elvis. ‘[But] it made for an interestingly random evening.’
⁸

Having strolled down the aisle towards the stage as Napoleon Dynamite, Elvis led The Attractions into a lashing ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ before the interactive festivities commenced.
Elvis’s personal assistant Paddy Callahan – to be known as Xavier Valentine for the evening – picked members of the audience to come up on stage to spin the wheel. They were
greeted by the two guest MCs, X’s John Doe and the exemplary Tom Waits. Replete with bowler hat, the gruff Waits in particular was a masterstroke,
hollering out the
evening’s entertainment with an intrinsic understanding of the ringmaster’s art. He set an impossibly high standard for the rest of the tour.

In Beverly Hills, the wheel threw up a few nice surprises: ‘Strict Time’, ‘Miracle Man’, ‘Motel Matches’ and ‘Temptation’ among others, but in
truth, Elvis’s long-standing predilection for changing his sets around on a nightly basis, throwing in rare old songs and brand-new ones, rendered the Spinning Songbook largely superfluous.
It was primarily there for Elvis and the audience’s amusement rather than to conjure any genuine musical oddities.