Complicated Shadows (53 page)

Effectively, for the last three weeks of the tour, The Attractions were simply working their notice. Everyone knew it was the end, and by the time the tour dropped anchor in Osaka in Japan on 6
September, the mood had turned unbelievably sour, far worse even than the first time the band had imploded. Elvis and Bruce hadn’t spoken to each other for nearly a month, and the expression
of animosity had descended to primary school levels. ‘In the end I was blowing raspberries at Cait, or she would walk into the lift and stand with her back six inches from my face,’
admits Thomas. It was a terribly undignified way to end.

Elvis, for his part, was displaying signs that the whole experience had left him somewhat dejected. In Minneapolis on 18 August, he had walked into his room in the Whitney Hotel and decided that
the windows were too narrow, moving instead to the Presidential Suite at the Marquis Hotel at a cost of $2000 a night. Bruce also alleges that Elvis believed the bass player was badmouthing him,
feeding snippets of (mis)information and hostile propaganda to Costello fanzines.

It all ended, mercifully, on 15 September at the Kinro-Kaikan in Nagoya. There seemed to be a kind of release, The Attractions ratcheting up the intensity as they neared the finish line, racing
down the final furlong with a searing
blast of ‘The Beat’, ‘Man Out Of Time’, ‘Mystery Dance’, ‘Red Shoes’, ‘This
Year’s Girl’ and a final – perhaps ironic – ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. Elvis introduced The Attractions one last time
and they were gone: ‘Good night. God Bless. Sayonara!’

They at least exchanged a tepid handshake after the show. ‘Whenever,’ Bruce shrugged. ‘Yeah, whenever,’ replied Elvis. And that was that. There would be no sentimental
rapprochement this time. ‘You won’t see them again,’ swore Elvis. ‘I had a slight feeling of sadness on the last night that we played. It was like the last night of your
childhood. I knew I wouldn’t do that again. When somebody is deliberately fucking it up, you have to get rid of them. It’s as simple as that.’
⁸

E
LVIS DIDN
’
T JUST SAY GOODBYE
to The Attractions in Japan, he effectively waved farewell to the notion of taking any
further part in the commercial circus of rock ’n’ roll for several years. Following the disappointment of
All This Useless Beauty
– which a year on from its release had
sold a mere 97,000 copies in the US – and Elvis’s less-than-complimentary remarks about his record company over the last couple of years, the relationship with Warners was entering its
death throes. ‘I’m sick of working as hard as I do for no reward in terms of selling records,’ he later said. ‘That had to stop.’
¹

Amid allegations that Elvis had stormed into the Warners building in Los Angeles and resigned, it became clear that the next record would be his last for the label. ‘I just think
he’s done all he could do with us and he’s looking to start over and find some new blood,’ said Warners spokesman Bill Bentley, with the usual corporate diplomacy.

However, Elvis was unwilling to hand them any new material, and it was agreed that his final record for Warners would be a compilation, scheduled for release in the autumn of 1997.

He was exhausted with the limitations of the rock band format, and wouldn’t tour again with a band until 2002, so sincere and thorough was his disillusion following the demise of The
Attractions. He was also unhappy with his
own writing, thinking deeply about the lasting worth of what he was doing and what he had done, and looking at different means of
expressing himself. He talked about using electronic instruments in a new way or eventually making instrumental music so expressive it required no explanation. ‘I’ve been troubled by
the relationship between word and thought and what use it is to me,’ he admitted. ‘I’m troubled by what the point is in saying anything else. Why add a single wasted word to the
stack of wasted words? My ambition is to write no words at all.’
²

Preoccupied with a sense of futility, Elvis effectively took a year off, spending some time decompressing at home in Ireland with Cait and considering his options. He was far too creatively
hyperactive to sit still for long, but the ensuing eighteen months were largely to be a period of patchwork activity: small pieces, fun collaborations and impromptu live appearances.

Following the derailment of The Attractions in mid-September, there had been some piecemeal classical commitments. Spread thinly throughout October and November, Elvis had participated in a
brief UK tour with John Harle in support of the saxophonist’s
Terror And Magnificence
album. Part of a line-up which included soprano Sarah Leonard and saxophonist Andy Sheppard,
Elvis appeared in Aberdeen, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and London, where his contribution included singing the three songs from
Twelfth Night
that he had performed on Harle’s
record, plus renditions of John Dowland’s ‘Flow My Tears’ and his own ‘Shipbuilding’. It was a rather strange affair and, aside from the show at London’s Royal
Festival Hall, most of the other dates were sparsely attended and Elvis’s involvement passed off virtually unnoticed.

There were two more similarly low-key classical engagments in 1997: three Spanish concerts with the Brodsky Quartet in Malaga, Jerez and Valencia on 8, 9 and 11 January, and the world premiere
of his score for the animated film,
Tom Thumb
, on 3 July.

Elvis had written and recorded the original score in
1993, but the film – which was to have been narrated by John Cleese – was never finished. However Paul
Pritchard, a member of the studio ensemble who had played at the session, suggested that Elvis might like to adapt the score for a concert performance with a small orchestra, staged by the Academy
of St Martin’s In The Field chamber orchestra.

Performed in the lashing rain at the Thorndon Country Park in Essex, ‘Tom Thumb’ was effectively the warm-up act for the main production. Elvis declined to narrate the piece himself,
merely introducing his work before leaving the stage and letting children’s TV presenter Zoe Ball do the honours. The music was simple, light and often cartoonish, specifically designed to
give children an interest in different musical instruments and textures, but Elvis had given the piece his full consideration. ‘I try to go against type,’ he explained. ‘I
didn’t make Tom Thumb a piccolo. He’s a bassoon because he’s always trying to be bigger than he is, huffing and puffing.’
³

Much of the rest of the year was spent in America. There were numerous appearances across the Atlantic, cameos with the likes of The Jazz Passengers, the Charles Mingus Orchestra, Ron Sexsmith,
The Fairfield Four and Ricky Skaggs, who hosted a TV show where Elvis performed with George Jones. On that occasion Elvis was – according to Skaggs – ‘nervous as a cat’ as
he sang Jones’s ‘The Last Town I Painted’ and ‘The Big Fool Of The Year’. He also played Gram Parsons’ ‘That’s All It Took’ and his own
‘Indoor Fireworks’ on the show. Elvis had written the latter back in 1985 with Skaggs in mind, but the singer passed it up, wary of the song’s ‘drinking, cheating lines. I
wasn’t really doing that kind of country,’ he explains. What other kind of country is there?

It was all enjoyably hectic, largely free of all the hassles and responsibilities of being in charge of a band on the road. He simply turned up, learned his lines and sang his songs.

However, there was something more significant brewing. During all his many trips to the States in 1997, a collaboration with Burt Bacharach was uppermost in Elvis’s
mind. Following the undeniable creative success of ‘God Give Me Strength’, he and Bacharach were now actively planning an album-length collaboration, at Elvis’s
initial instigation.

Their first public appearance was on the David Letterman show at the end of February, playing ‘God Give Me Strength’ together for the first time. The following night, Elvis and Burt
popped up at the Grammy Awards to co-present an award, and they found time in March to meet again in Los Angeles.

The writing process finally began in May, at Bacharach’s home in California. Initially, the plan was for an album partly made up of old Bacharach songs augmented with some co-written
songs, satisfying Elvis’s instincts as a fan as well as his natural and ever-present inclination to create something new. However, when the two men discovered they were equally driven when it
came to writing music, the ambition of the project intensified. ‘He’s someone who lives like I live,’ Bacharach said in the summer. ‘Someone who can be writing a tune at
four in the morning.’
⁴

When Bacharach played London’s Royal Albert Hall on 1 July, Elvis was there, and over the course of the year they came together about four or five times to write, sitting at keyboards or
pianos in Burt’s music room in Santa Monica or in a suite at the Regency Hotel in New York, trading ideas for days at a time.

Sometimes, Elvis simply provided the words to Burt’s music, as on ‘The Long Division’ and most of ‘This House Is Empty Now’. But usually the songs were either a
joint dialogue, or created from the process of combining separately composed pieces. Musically, the combination of magpie and fan in Elvis was happy to bend more towards Bacharach’s
traditional style, and he later expressed delight that many of the more obvious ‘Burt’ touches were actually written by him. ‘Toledo’, for example, with its clipped time
signature, parping horns and ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ feel, was essentially a Costello composition.

Having written or presented the basic tracks face-to-face, much of the spade work was done apart. When Elvis was away on a jaunt or back in Dublin, Bacharach would
work on
the songs, altering harmony or structure or adding a bridge, while Elvis was constantly attending to the words. Lyrically, they had agreed that the songs would be loosely based on the theme of lost
love, luxuriating in melancholy. In actual fact, they ended up being much darker than that: tales of infidelity, divorce, despair and obsession. Elvis later claimed the songs were written to order,
essentially a craft job; if so, he showed himself to be a terrific actor.

Renowned within music circles as not just a perfectionist but an absolute obsessive, Bacharach was one of the business’s hardest task-masters when it came to the formalities of song
structure. Although he was impressed with his collaborator, the two embarked on a very amicable but bruising contest, in which the traditional Costello method of cramming as many words as he
desired into whatever structure could hold them was given short shrift by his partner. ‘He’s a very exacting person,’ Elvis admitted. ‘I’ve had to really think about
what I wanted to say in the lyrics, maybe get rid of the superfluous words.’
⁵

During the composition of ‘In The Darkest Place’, Elvis had come up with the line ‘That is the torch I carry.’ Bacharach, however, found the final syllable intolerable,
because he felt it didn’t fit snugly enough the melody he had written. Left to his own devices, Elvis would more than likely have bent the melody to fit his words, but this time there was no
give. Eventually, he went away and changed the line to ‘This is the torch I bear’.

This minute pruning of lyrical excesses fitted neatly with Elvis’s stated desire to let the music do the talking for much of the time, but even so it was undoubtedly a steep learning curve
for him, working out exactly what was and wasn’t necessary in a song. ‘We had the inevitable arguments, but I mostly went with his judgment,’ he admitted. ‘I found that the
changes he was suggesting weren’t just improving a line, but, two or three lines on, would pay off again. The shape of the melody, that’s really Burt’s bag.’
⁶

Following songwriting sessions in October and four further days in the middle of December, the duo had between ten to twelve songs written and were essentially
ready to
record. Indeed, they were already talking about touring.

However, their respective schedules dictated that it was going to be the summer of 1998 before they could start work on the record. The fact that Elvis was switching record labels also pushed
the recording back. His deal with Warners was dead, and throughout the year Elvis had been looking at the options for a new record company. During October, news leaked out that he had signed with
Polygram worldwide, although it would not be officially announced until the New Year.

Crucially, the deal confronted head-on one of the major problems that Elvis had encountered latterly with Warners: that of his growing diversity and his desire to release records outside of the
mainstream rock market, without the pressures of trying to shoehorn them into the preconceived company idea of what ‘Elvis Costello’ represented.

The new deal with Polygram would, in theory, allow Elvis the freedom to release records on Polygram’s affiliated labels, specifically designed to cater for – and sell records to
– specialist markets. His traditional rock releases would be released on Mercury; a mooted jazz-orientated project would come out on Verve; while classical-leaning work would appear on
Decca/London. It seemed the perfect set-up. ‘A company that has outlets to accommodate everything from Hanson to Cake, from Bryn Terfel to an Allen Ginsberg record, sounds like a place for
me,’
⁷
said Elvis, with uncharacteristic optimism.