Complicated Shadows (41 page)

‘Tramp The Dirt Down’, meanwhile, was a consciously crude and one-dimensional response to ten years of Tory misrule, which – by choosing to eschew a politically correct moral
– hit its target with merciless precision. And ‘Veronica’ – the touching tribute to Ross’s late mother Molly – may have divided loyalties with its crisp pop
production, but it was a huge commercial success as a single, due in no small part to Evan English’s memorable video. It eventually became Elvis’s biggest-ever single in the US, hitting
the Top 20 in the spring, as well as reaching No. 31 in Britain.

On the back of the single and a determined marketing campaign from Warners,
Spike
sold in numbers that Columbia must have once dreamt about, becoming the most successful record of
Elvis’s career. It reached No. 5 in Britain and No. 32 in the US, sticking around for some time, and the reviews were almost universally strong.
Melody Maker
noted the
‘detached and objective’ feel, but concluded that although perhaps too versatile, the record was ‘thoughtful, furious, eloquent and witty’. The
NME
had no such
reservations, awarding
Spike
ten out of ten, calling it ‘an exciting, inspiring, bewildering and bloody frightening record which could well be regarded as his most accomplished
yet’. Andy Gill in
The Independent
simply reckoned that ‘it may well be his masterpiece’. The beloved entertainer had been missed.

It was always going to be a tricky record to replicate on stage. Rather than try, Elvis elected to go out on the road alone between 31 March and 24 April with just his guitar, an electric piano,
and Nick Lowe – naturally – for company. Instead of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, this time he brought along a red satin heart, cracked down the middle. It was marked with thirteen
and a half deadly sins, the seven originals and six and a half new ones, including ‘Awesomeness’; ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’; ‘Doing Lunch’; ‘Getting Caught
Again’; and ‘Trump’ – as in Donald, the current and seemingly randomly selected focus of Elvis’s ire.

For the final encore, Elvis – as Monsignor Napoleon Dynamite – would emerge in a red velveteen jacket clutching a plastic pitchfork. Audience members, usually women, were dragged
on-stage by a man in a wolf costume, blindfolded, and asked to drive the spike into the heart. They were then asked to pick a song that most represented whichever sin they pierced.

This somewhat laboured, time-consuming rigmarole was more fun in theory than in practice, and not particularly rewarding in terms of the music. Not everyone in Elvis’s audience was adept
at picking out a long-lost gem from his back catalogue. Most of them only knew the classics. In Kingston, Rhode Island on 1 April the red heart threw up ‘Alison’, ‘Red
Shoes’ and ‘Pump It Up’; on 5 April it was ‘Pump It Up’, ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Almost Blue’. By the time the tour reached Greenvale on 9
April, Elvis was forced to spring an ambush, undercutting the jollity of the proceedings with his own choice: ‘I Want You’.

Spike
had played well with the Americans.
Rolling Stone
called it ‘an ambitious sampler of his astonishing musical creativity’, but although the songs from the
record seemed to open up and come alive in concert, Elvis often played less of the album than might have been expected, sometimes as few as four songs.

Nevertheless, it was a well-oiled solo act. There was little
mention of The Attractions. Elvis had become something of a showman, who had mastered the tightrope walk
between intensity and droll geniality, deftly reeling the audience in. The true dramatic centrepieces of many shows were medleys of ‘Radio Sweetheart/Jackie Wilson Said’ and ‘New
Amsterdam/You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, where Elvis would sometimes take up to ten minutes exploring musical links and crescendoes. The loose structure allowed him to take a few
considered risks, throwing musical quotes from Dylan, Abba, The Beatles, Van Morrison, Buddy Holly and even
West Side Story
into his own songs and embarking on long, surrealistic
monologues in ‘God’s Comic’. Nick Lowe would join him for a few numbers on the first encore, nodding to ‘the other Elvis’ on ‘His Latest Flame’ and
sparring on the songs they stole from each other: ‘Indoor Fireworks’ and ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’.

The British leg opened at the London Palladium on 7 May, the first night of a four-week-long ‘Month of Sundays’ residency in the capital. The sets were similar to the US shows, and
perhaps a little comfortable and lacking in surprises for most fans. They could also be very long. Aware of the vagaries of the British public transport system, a sizeable portion of the audience
had often gone home before Elvis had exhausted his repertoire.

As the tour moved on, he added only a few eyebrow-raisers to the set and no new songs. In Bristol on 9 June he opened with the McCartney duet ‘You Want Her Too’, spinning around the
microphone to give the impression of two different voices, and also played another two McCartney collaborations, ‘That Day Is Done’ and ‘So Like Candy’.

By the time the final show at London’s Palladium had come around on 28 May, it seemed that Elvis was tiring of the acoustic format. For the final encore he was joined by Nick Lowe on bass
and Pete Thomas on drums, and the three-piece clattered through raucous versions of ‘Pads, Paws And Claws’, ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, ‘Lovable’ and
‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. On his final night of three shows at the Royal Albert Hall
on 2 June he once again
‘went electric’, adding Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford to the Lowe-Thomas rhythm section.

For some time, Elvis had been thinking about touring
Spike
with a band, and following festival dates in Europe throughout June and a smattering of dates in Japan in July, he assembled
The Rude 5 for a five-week US tour beginning on 8 August in Clarkston, Michigan. The group were put together at speed. Elvis rented the Metro club in Chicago for a week prior to the tour and they
learned the entire set in seven days, meaning that there was very little room for deviation from the setlist once the tour got under way.

Energised by his recent cameos with Elvis and always the Attraction with the least residual resentment, Pete Thomas came in on drums. The others were picked for their ability to cope with the
nuances and musical subtleties of the material: Confederate Jerry Scheff on bass and tuba; Michael Blair on percussion; Larry Knetchel on keyboards; Steven Soles on various textural additions,
including mandolin, acoustic guitar, vocals and trombone; and Marc Ribot on guitar and E-flat horn.

Simple arithmetic revealed that The Rude 5 were actually six, seven if you included Elvis, but that was the only gimmick this time: there were no spinning wheels or pierced hearts. They were
looser than The Attractions, but Elvis surely knew that few bands could better his old group when it came to playing the majority of his back catalogue. On most nights, less than half a dozen
pre-1986 numbers were played, and those that made the cut were often radically reworked. ‘Some of the [old tracks] he was happy to rearrange, if people had a new idea,’ says Marc Ribot.
‘At that moment he really wanted to try a lot of new and different things and take it as out as far as he felt like taking it.’

The likes of ‘Pump It Up’ had little scope for wholesale reinterpretation, but the airy, slightly threatening take on ‘Clubland’ added layers of shade to the original.
‘Watching The Detectives’, on the other hand, managed the ‘improbable fusion of walking bass line, a jazzy disonant breakdown and a heavy metal blitz’, in the words of Jim
Sullivan
of the
Boston Globe
, reviewing the show in Great Woods, Massachusets on 18 August.

The results were mixed. Sometimes, as with ‘Watching The Detectives’ or an oompah version of ‘Let Him Dangle’, the rearrangements appeared wilfully obtuse, using
experimentation for the sake of it, while the smaller sonic augmentations – the glockenspiel parts on ‘Alison’ and ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love &
Understanding’, for example – grated. Furthermore, the sound mix at many of the concerts was so poor that the brass, extra guitars and more sophisticated arrangements were rendered
virtually impenetrable.

In general, however, the
Spike
songs were improved by the fact that Jerry Scheff could recreate the tuba part on ‘Miss Macbeth’, and that the full, jazzy lushness of
‘God’s Comic’ could be brought to life. The Rude 5 offered a much fuller palette of sounds than The Attractions; Elvis just hadn’t yet learned how to use them most
effectively. It’s debatable whether he ever would.

* * *

Elvis and Cait had made the decision to leave London for Ireland in 1988. They made good on their promise the following year, fitting the move around Elvis’s touring
schedule for
Spike.
Their new home was called Waymark, a house situated on the Ballyedmonduff Road in Stepaside, about ten miles outside Dublin at the foot of the Wicklow mountains, and a
move away from the city which necessitated the need for Elvis to learn to drive. The white-walled, three-bedroomed bungalow was modest enough for a rock star, although the grounds stretched to
almost four acres and featured both an ornamental lake and a tennis court, as well as spectacular views over Dublin Bay.

Elvis hung on to his small two-bedroom flat in London’s Holland Park just the same. Matthew was now fourteen, living with his mother in Chiswick, and enjoyed a close relationship with his
father. The two shared holidays together to Russia and elsewhere, and Matt was an avid music fan, even if Elvis took a dim view of his liking for Guns N’ Roses and Public Enemy.

There were several reasons behind the move to Ireland. Cait had never made any secret of the fact that she wanted children and, according to press reports, she fell
pregnant in 1989, although sadly it seems that her pregnancy never reached full term. The couple needed more room than they had in their somewhat cramped flat, and house prices in Dublin were
eminently more affordable than in London. Cait was also a nature lover, fond of walks, solitude and peace away from the clamour of Elvis’s ‘other’ life, and her influence had
partially convinced her essentially urbanite partner of the joys of the countryside.

Although Ireland also offered favourable tax breaks for artists and a thriving creative community in Dublin, with friends such as U2 and Chrissie Hynde based nearby, Elvis had felt a push as
well as a pull. ‘I don’t want to live in a country run by this government,’ he said of Great Britain. ‘They’re doing their utmost to engineer a new society, and
it’s not one I want to live in.’
^15
39

Following the end of the
Spike
tour on 16 September, from the rural calm of his new home Elvis could look back upon a creatively satisfying and commercially successful year, topped off
with awards for Best Male Video from MTV for ‘Veronica’ and Male Artist of the Year at the New Music Awards. His only other public activity in the remaining months of 1989 was a
genuinely impromptu appearance at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 10 December, at a concert for the Temple Street Children’s Hospital. Elvis showed up backstage about an hour before the
concert was due to start and asked if he could play, later singing ‘Radio Sweetheart’ and ‘God’s Comic’ to a surprised and delighted audience.

At the Olympia, his appearance showed signs of change: he was sporting a beard and his hair was longer, and over the course of the winter the shagginess would become even
more exaggerated. He was entering a period of enormous change and evolution, and not just on the outside.

THE DEEPER
E
LVIS IMMERSED HIMSELF
in classical music, the more fascinated by its detail he became. It was like an entirely new
language, with its own sub-genres: folk, country, blues, rock and pop, all had comparable corollaries in classical music.

Typically, Elvis found something to savour in almost every aspect, just as he did in almost all popular music, but preferences emerged. ‘I tend to discover new composers by following a
particular performer or conductor,’ he said. ‘You get certain passions. For me, it was Schubert for a while. I went to all the London concerts and was hearing about half the sonatas for
the first time.’
¹
He was also absorbed by woodwind arrangements of songs from the late eighteenth century; he loved lieder
⁴⁰
recitals and string quartets; chamber music and solo piano pieces; he would often only go to opera if he was interested in the vocalist – such as Italian
mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli – rather than the entire spectacle.

Elvis had spent much of the early months of the year writing, planning to record over the summer with Mitchell Froom producing, and these new and diverse influences started impacting upon his
aspirations for his next record.

Envisaging that the new songs would contain many more live ensemble performances than
Spike,
Elvis wanted The
Attractions to be involved. This time it appeared
that his old group might be more amenable to the reunion, so he organised a farewell busman’s holiday for the group of American musicians he had been touring and recording with since 1985. It
may have seemed like an oddly sentimental idea, but despite his abrasive image and his often tempestuous relationship with The Attractions, Elvis has a well-deserved reputation for the respect he
accords fellow musicians. Virtually every individual or band who has ever worked with him – from Clover to Bill Frisell to the Brodsky Quartet – can do little but sing his praises.
‘Maybe it’s because his father was a musician and he’s aware of the older traditions, but he was always very respectful and professional with the musicians,’ says Marc
Ribot. ‘No bullshit. You see, Elvis isn’t just a songwriter; he’s a student of music in general, so he’s actually heard at least half of [the other players’]
discographies, and that’s very flattering. It gives Elvis and the musicians a common language right off the bat, even if they’ve never met, because he can say: “Well, you remember
that sound you got on such-and-such a song?” That’s how he deal with musicians.’