Complicated Shadows (51 page)

Elvis was satisfied, too. As well as having direct repurcussions for at least three of his subsequent solo records, Meltdown set in motion a number of small explosions, opening up numerous
possibilites which he continues to explore to the present day. In the ensuing months and years some of Elvis’s more esoteric sidelines, collaborations and lower-profile projects could be
traced back to Meltdown:
Deep Dead Blue
, the limited edition – only 10,000 copies – seven-song memento of the concert with Bill Frisell would be rush-released on 14 August
1995, a permanent record of a concert played with just a single rehearsal. Elvis would work with Frisell again on the songs for the
Painted From Memory
record in 1998, and beyond.

There were numerous other connections: he recorded his own song ‘Aubergine’ on the Jazz Passengers’ next record and performed with Debbie Harry and the band several more times,
as well as collaborating with saxophonist Roy Nathanson. He finally cut a version of ‘That
Day Is Done’ that did the song justice on The Fairfield Four’s
I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray
record. He worked with saxophonist John Harle on his
Terror And Magnificence
album, released in October 1996, singing three settings of
Shakespeare songs from
Twelfth Night
: ‘O Mistress Mine’; ‘Come Away, Death’; and ‘When That I Was and A Little Tiny Boy’. Elvis also toured with Harle
and used him for the recording of his first ballet score,
Il Sogno
, in 2002. He sang on Donal Lunny’s
Common Ground
record, while Fretwork recorded his Purcell-inspired
composition ‘Put Away Hidden Playthings’ on their album,
Sit Fast
. Elvis would continue to work with the Brodsky Quartet off and on over the next decade, which would in turn
smooth the way for collaborations with Anne Sofie Von Otter.

Perhaps most significantly, and certainly most gratifyingly, Elvis finally realised at Meltdown that there was a huge amount of potential in working as a duo with Steve Nieve. It had only taken
eighteen years. Elvis would also work with David Sefton again on an album of songs for Ute Lemper in 1999, and in Sefton’s new role at the UCLA in 2002. ‘So much came out of
Meltdown,’ says Sefton. ‘It’s nice, that’s the purpose of it. We made the time and space, he made the time and space, and he was able to do a lot of things that he
wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.’

OVER THE PREVIOUS DECADE
, Elvis had amassed dozens of songs that had either been recorded by other people, or indeed hadn’t been recorded at all.
He had become adept at tailoring tunes for other artists, enjoying the craft of writing for another style of voice or musical genre. He was also happy to collaborate with anyone he found
interesting, and these diversions had thrown up some excellent results. ‘I realised that if I don’t address the songs I’d written for other people soon, it’ll become an
unweildly repertoire,’ he admitted. ‘It’s already something like forty songs.’
¹

There was indeed a vast array to choose from: ‘Shadow And Jimmy’ (Was (Not Was)); ‘The Miranda Syndrome’ and ‘Shamed Into Love’ (Ruben Blades); ‘The
Other End Of The Telescope’ (Aimee Mann); ‘Miss Mary’ (Zucchero); ‘I Want To Vanish’ and ‘All This Useless Beauty’ (June Tabor); ‘You Bowed
Down’ (Roger McGuinn); ‘Hidden Shame’ and ‘Complicated Shadows’ (Johnny Cash); ‘Why Can’t A Man Stand Alone’ (Sam Moore); ‘Dirty Rotten
Shame’ (Ronnie Drew); ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’ (Mary Coughlan, also recorded as ‘I Wonder How She Knows’ by Charles Brown); ‘Punishing Kiss’
(performed by Annie Ross in Robert Altman’s
Short Cuts
); not to mention the collaborations with Paul McCartney, the ten songs he wrote for Wendy James, and a selection he had quietly
kept to himself.

Elvis had played many of these songs in concert over
the years and had aired a large number of them during Meltdown. Now he planned to make a record using the pick of the
litter, under the heading:
A Case For Song
. Elvis’s initial ideas for his new record had been heavily influenced by his ongoing involvement in organising Meltdown. He wanted to make
a double album, using several different types of musical accompaniment: string quartet, The Attractions, jazz ensemble, gospel quartet, whichever style suited each individual song.

In order to aid the selection process, Elvis had popped up as an unannounced support act for Bob Dylan in the spring, playing solo and testing out new material. In Paris on 24 March, Brixton
Academy on 29–31 March, and Dublin on 11 April, he strolled on-stage and played a dozen songs to generally sympathetic crowds.

Opening each night with ‘Starting To Come To Me’, a spry country shuffle which dated back to the
Mighty Like A Rose
sessions and owed something to Dylan’s ‘Lily,
Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’, Elvis added several other ‘new’ or unrecorded songs over the five nights: ‘Complicated Shadows’, ‘All This Useless
Beauty’, ‘Shallow Grave’, ‘I Want To Vanish’, ‘It’s Time’, ‘The Other End Of The Telescope’ and ‘You Bowed Down’ had all been
written either as collaborations or with other artists in mind, while ‘Distorted Angel’, ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’ and ‘Little Atoms’ were fairly recent
compositions – the former had been kicked around with The Attractions at the
Brutal Youth
sessions. All eleven would end up on the next record.

Also debuted on the closing night in Dublin was ‘God Give Me Strength’, a genuine work-in-progress which at the time of the concert was still being co-written with Burt Bacharach for
the film
Grace Of My Heart
. The collaboration had been suggested by the film’s musical supervisor Karyn Rachtman, but when a scheduled songwriting session in Los Angeles was
scrapped, the pair had to find another way of working together to fit the tight deadline. ‘I was in this extraordinary situation where I was coming home from the last show I did with Bob in
Dublin at 2.30 in the morning and ringing Burt when it was still afternoon [in LA] and working on the song,’ said Elvis.
²

As an ice-breaker, Elvis had written the plaintive, characteristically Bacharach-esque intro of the song and nervously played it onto Burt’s answering machine,
fearing it was too close to pastiche. Bacharach loved it, adding his own harmonies and structural changes to the blueprint. In this eccentric manner – using telephone, fax and answerphone,
ideas criss-crossing the Atlantic between Dublin and Los Angeles – the track was quickly completed. Then Elvis wrote the words. The minute it was finished, he knew he had a winner. He played
it again at Meltdown with Steve Nieve, and at every opportunity thereafter, like a boy eagerly displaying his favourite new toy.

‘God Give Me Strength’ was one of the songs Elvis had in mind for the next record, but although Meltdown had prepared him for the more esoteric side of the record, The Attractions
needed warming up. There had been only two live performances with Elvis in 1995, the second coming at Denmark’s Roskilde festival on 2 July, and both had been limited to showcasing old songs
and
Kojak Variety
material.

To get inside the material, Elvis scheduled five shows over six nights with The Attractions in New York’s Beacon Theatre in early August as ‘open rehearsals’. It was another
bold and novel idea, although in truth it was also one born of a growing and uncharacteristic amount of uncertainty about what the new record should sound like. In New York, he was hoping to
stumble upon something.

Elvis had originally wanted in-demand American producer Brendan O’Brien to produce his new album, but they had failed to agree over budgets. Instead, he decided to reunite the production
team of Geoff Emerick and Jon Jacobs, who last worked with him on
Imperial Bedroom
in 1982. The two engineers were in New York to record all the shows between 2–7 August, on hand to
capture anything spectacular on tape before they all went into Windmill Lane in Dublin later in the month to begin recording.

Over the residency at the Beacon, Elvis and The Attractions played seventeen new or unrecorded songs: all of the twelve tracks that would eventually make up the
album were
performed, as well as ‘God Give Me Strength’, ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’, ‘Almost Ideal Eyes’, ‘Puppet Girl’, and an eight-line fragment called
‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’.

Although the concerts were played and performed – and priced – as proper shows, the idea of an ‘open rehearsal’ was no joke; these were most definitely work-in-progress
sessions. During the opening night, the audience were often looking at bowed heads and squinting eyes, as the notes and lyrics placed on music stands on stage were given plenty of attention by each
of The Attractions. Gradually, these were dispensed with over the five nights as the band grew into the material. In addition to the new songs, there was the odd nice surprise as well.
‘Opportunity’ got its first – fairly ragged – airing since the early ’80s, while Marc Ribot joined the band on the last night to play on ‘Hidden Charms’
and ‘Pump It Up’.

By the time Elvis entered Windmill Lane in Dublin with The Attractions a week after the final show, he at last had a firmer grasp of the songs he wanted to record for the album. ‘I had
already changed my mind about the contents of the record several times,’
³
he admitted, but now he had narrowed down the shortlist of suitable
songs to around fifteen. The gigs at the Beacon had also convinced him to set aside his initial concept of a double album featuring numerous different styles and forms of instrumentation, and focus
on a single album featuring just Elvis and The Attractions.

The sessions proved difficult. Elvis found that some of the songs he had written for others and now wanted to record for himself – such as Aimee Mann’s ‘The Other End Of The
Telescope’ – needed drastic rewriting in the studio. He was also finally feeling the pace after the energy-sapping sprint of Meltdown, and was struggling to capture the vocal
performances he wanted, while increasingly seeking solace in large amounts of alcohol. His uncharacteristic lack of decisiveness and propensity for self-criticism and self-doubt often infuriated
the band, who also found the basic nature of the material problematic.

At least half of the songs being considered were fragile, melancholic ballads, with disappointment and sadness
rather than fury at their hearts, and Elvis envisaged the
record as largely stripped down, with his voice and Steve’s piano to the fore. But progress was slow and the failure of the musicans to get close to the mood of the songs in the studio was
made all too clear by the inclusion of live excerpts – taken from one of the Beacon Theatre shows – on ‘Complicated Shadows’, and several aborted takes of ‘God Give Me
Strength’.

Geoff Emerick had a long-standing production commitment in the autumn of 1995 to record with Paul McCartney, and the sessions were put on hold in October to await his return. During the break in
proceedings, Elvis deliberated about where he wanted the album to go. While doing so, he performed a one-off concert with the Brodsky Quartet at St George’s Hall in Bristol on 7 November, and
also found time to record a song for a Warner Brothers album of songs inspired by the cult sci-fi show
The X-Files
, cutting the brooding and rather magnificent ‘My Dark Life’
between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 a.m. on 22 November with Brian Eno at the helm.

Elvis impressed – and rather annoyed – his collaborator with the sheer wealth of detail he brought to the studio. The session had originally been intended as a chance for the two men
to experiment together, but ‘My Dark Life’ was presented as ‘a completely (and minutely) written piece’,
⁴
according to Eno.
He ultimately felt rather surplus to requirements.

Elvis and The Attractions reconvened in December and January 1996 to finish recording the album, still provisionally titled
A Case For Song
. During the break in proceedings, Elvis had
decided to stop drinking alcohol. It had been a major part of his life for long periods over the last two decades, and had often exacerbated his blackest moods. Increasingly over the past twelve
months he felt it was getting in the way of his creative process, while doing nothing to lift a sometimes melancholic disposition. ‘I’m not afraid of it,’ he explained. ‘I
drank a lot and some of it inspired some very good songs, and then I got tired of it.’
⁵

Rejuvenated and clear-headed, Elvis cut many of his vocal tracks live in this second stretch of recording, while
the song list was again revised. He dropped ‘Almost
Ideal Eyes’ – a complex song in two time signatures that he had written with David Crosby in mind – and ‘God Give Me Strength’ from the running order, while
‘Dirty Rotten Shame’ was disregarded after Ronnie Drew – whom Elvis had originally written the song for – decided he wanted to record it for his own album.

With the final track listing reduced to twelve, Elvis decided to play to the songs’s strengths, emphasising the beauty of the melodies and the subtleties in the music, rather than
succumbing to more obvious arrangements that would merely remind people of past glories. As a result, less and less emphasis was placed on group performances. Pre-recorded loops were used on
‘Little Atoms’, ‘It’s Time’ and ‘Distorted Angel’, while Elvis rearranged ‘I Want To Vanish’ with Steve Nieve, a delicate performance augmented
with the Brodsky Quartet, string bass and some clarinet overdubs recorded at Westside Studios in London. Along with a little extra chamber instrumentation on ‘All This Useless Beauty’,
it was the closest the album came to its original blueprint.