Complicated Shadows (54 page)

At the same time as news was leaking concerning the new deal, Elvis was fulfilling the last part of his contract with Warners.
Extreme Honey: The Very Best of The Warner Brothers Years
,
covering songs from 1989–97, was released on 17 October. Featuring tracks from
Spike, Mighty Like A Rose, The Juliet Letters, Brutal Youth
and
All This Useless Beauty,
the
only two rarities were the Eno collaboration ‘My Dark Life’ and ‘The Bridge I Burned’, a new song based on a bastardisation of Prince’s ‘Pop Life’.

The latter was significant not so much for its mildly unhinged nature and its kiss-off sentiments – which could reasonably be said to be directed towards both The
Attractions and Warners – but for the fact that it was the first recorded collaboration between Elvis and his son.

Matt was now in his early twenties and a jobbing bass player, propagating the fourth generation of MacManus musicians. He had already appeared on the personnel for
All This Useless
Beauty
, credited with ‘rhythm research’ on ‘It’s Time’. ‘Elvis strongly wanted to involve his son,’ recalled Pete Thomas. ‘What [Matt] did was
find out if his impressive collection of Detroit soul and funk had a loop for a song. After a while he came to me with many a loop and we listened to them all together.’
⁸
On ‘The Bridge I Burned’, Elvis took the father-son partnership further. They produced the song together, MacManus Jr playing bass and providing a
drum loop. Also involved was Matt’s friend Danny Goffey, the drummer from Supergrass.

The promotion budget provided by Warners for
Extreme Honey
was $1000, a ‘calculated insult’, according to Elvis, who lamented the ‘shoddy treatment’ he had
received over the past two or three years. Right at the death, Warners’ president Stephen Baker tried to stem the flow of bad blood. ‘However our relationship ended, everybody here
really loved being in business with him,’ he said in a statement. ‘Whether he was happy or sad or whatever, I was talking to an artist I totally respected, and it was a thrill for me
and for Warner Brothers Records.’

For Elvis, comfort probably couldn’t have come any colder. Even so, he did his bit for the promotion of
Extreme Honey
, appearing on Clive Anderson’s talk show in the UK and
playing ‘So Like Candy’ on David Letterman’s show on 18 November in the States, but unsurprisingly the record failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. Most fans already had
the songs, while those with a merely passing interest in Elvis probably didn’t even know the record existed.

He was, in truth, travelling very far away from the pop charts, and mainly under his own steam. A short tour of northern Italian opera houses wasn’t every record label’s idea of
sound commercial practice. Nevertheless, Elvis set off at the beginning of 1998, with Steve Nieve in tow. His
relationship with both Steve and Pete Thomas had survived the
fall-out from the final Attractions tour, and he and Steve had become especially close. ‘He is a great friend,’ said Elvis. ‘We spent so much time touring with The Attractions and
he never had the opportunity to show what he could do. He has gained a lot of confidence in the last few years.’
⁹

Elvis remained keen to pursue the potentially rich music the two of them had begun making, and the Italian tour was a romantic undertaking, playing in small theatres with almost perfect
acoustics between the 3–16 February. Close reading of the dates revealed that Elvis was using the tour as something of a Trojan Horse, to catch as many shows as he could by Italian opera star
Cecilia Bartoli, who was also touring Italy at the same time.

The duo were somewhat under-rehearsed, but as the tour went on they took the chance to mine the deepest seams of Elvis’s songbook. In particular, he seemed to have been listening to
Punch The Clock
again: rarely heard obsurities such as ‘King Of Thieves’, ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Mouth Almighty’, as well as ‘Kid About It’,
‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’, and ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ sat alongside versions of Shakespeare’s ‘O, Mistress Mine’, ‘Gigi’, ‘My
Funny Valentine’ and a new song called ‘Bright Blue Times’, written for a BBC television series.

It was a genuinely energising experience. Elvis judged the results to be some of the freest and most rewarding shows of his career, and within six months he would receive the Tenco Award, the
most prestigious recognition for a foreign musician in Italy. The tour was also a healing process after the desultory mood of the last Attractions tour. The sense of gloom and futility was
beginning to lift. ‘I’ve rediscovered a love of playing live and an affection for performing a broad range of my own catalogue,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a pride in it that
I didn’t have a few years ago.’
¹⁰

* * *

On 8 April, Elvis and Cait travelled to New York to appear with a gallery of stars at Burt Bacharach’s ‘One
Amazing Night’ tribute
concert at the Hammersmith Ballroom in Manhattan. At the show, which also featured Dionne Warwick, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow and Luther Vandross, the audience were given a brief filmed preview of
the pair working together, before Elvis came on and sang one of their new tracks, ‘This House Is Empty Now’.

Immediately afterwards, the two men embarked upon their final songwriting – or more accurately, song-polishing – session before they finally began recording the songs in Ocean Way in
Los Angeles over June and July 1998. It was one of the hottest summers in living memory, and Elvis cut an eccentric figure in the Californian sun: receding hair brutally shorn and topped off with a
straw pork-pie hat, dressed in a thick black leather coat and tinted yellow shades, he was the antithesis of Bacharach’s immaculate West Coast cool.

The sessions were split into two. The basic tracks were laid down in the first half of the recording schedule, while the final two-week session was devoted to adding the layers of overdubs and
wealth of detail that characterised Bacharach’s recordings. There were a few familiar faces at Ocean Way. Elvis had insisted on putting together a core group to hold the songs together
– Steve Nieve played keyboards, Greg Cohen bass and Jim Keltner drums, while Kevin Killen was engineer – but although it was a genuine collaboration and a co-production, the songs
inevitably leaned far more towards Burt’s style than Elvis’s. ‘There was nothing to be gained in trying to prove the point that we could make some sort of Frankenstein’s
monster out of the most extreme edges,’ Elvis admitted. “The hybrid of ‘Pump It Up’ and ‘What’s New, Pussycat’ might seem like something of a road
crash.’
¹¹

It was arduous work. Even Elvis found the intensity of Bacharach’s focus astonishing, and ultimately the older man called the shots. They were still tinkering with the songs as they
arrived in the studio, with Bacharach continuing his zero-tolerance approach to the shape of the songs and especially the lyrics, fussing and fretting over misplaced commas and stray syllables.

Elvis was more assertive in terms of instrumentation: he weaned Bacharach away from the thick synthesiser sound that he had been using since the early ’80s and
towards more organic, emotionally resonant textures. Many of the vocals were sung live as Burt played piano and conducted the rhythm section of Jim Keltner and Greg Cohen, ensuring that there was
an emotional heartbeat at the record’s centre.

The lushness of the final album was achieved at the second recording session, where a twenty-four-piece orchestra overdubbed string arrangements written and conducted by Bacharach; female
backing singers were added to most of the songs, as well as brass and woodwind; and a whole day was devoted to adding tuned percussion touches. Finished by the end of July, the record was scheduled
for a late September release, and Elvis came away from the sessions exhausted but beaming. ‘Just watching him work like that has been an inspiration,’ he said. ‘I’m
blessed.’
¹²

While Elvis and Bacharach were recording in Ocean Way, Bill Frisell was hard at work in New York on a unique parallel project, recording instrumental versions of the same set of songs at the
same time without having the faintest clue what Elvis and Bacharach were coming up with. ‘They gave me the music as they had finished writing it,’ says Frisell. ‘It was just Elvis
singing the songs, standing next to Burt Bacharach who was playing the piano. I had this cassette of what sounded like classic songs that no one had ever heard before, it was just
amazing.’

Although neither knew what the other was doing, there were odd resonances in the finished project. Frisell might give the melody to the trumpet on a particular song, and later find Elvis and
Bacharach had done the same, while Elvis later came and added vocal parts to ‘Toledo’ and ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’.

Called
The Sweetest Punch,
Frisell’s album was due to be released on Polygram’s jazz label, Verve, at the same time as the main album hit the shops, in order to showcase the
duality and versatility of the new songs. However, that plan proved unworkable and eventually it was released
on Decca, another arm of Polygram, in autumn 1999, undeniably
deadening the impact of the venture.

Painted From Memory
– as this dark, regretful record was now aptly called – was released on 28 September 1998 on Mercury. The essence of the record was melody and
melancholy, two touchstones which neither artist had much of a problem locating. ‘In The Darkest Place’, ‘Toledo’, ‘I Still Have That Other Girl’ and ‘God
Give Me Strength’ were as good as anything Elvis had written over the last decade, and certainly matched anything Bacharach had done since his ’60s heyday. Both ‘My Thief’
and the title track were truly mesmerising torch songs, worthy of Sinatra at his most forlorn, while ‘The Sweetest Punch’ zipped along, the one example of Elvis in pop mode.

But there were inevitable problems with the record. At either extreme of the collaborative spectrum, ‘Such Unlikely Lovers’ and ‘The Long Division’ strayed into the
middle-of-the-road territory covered in Bacharach’s terminally over-cooked ’80s collaborations with the likes of Christopher Cross, while some of the more inventive word-play one might
have expected from Elvis was missed on a record with such an unvarying mood. The instrumentation could also grate: the polished guitar solo on ‘This House Is Empty Now’, the Moog-break
on ‘The Long Division’, the keyboards on ‘Such Unlikely Lovers’, the ultra-smooth, somewhat syrupy backing singers. There was a sense that few writers other than Bacharach
would have been able to get such banal textures onto an Elvis Costello record.

In the end, the album was saved as an emotionally involving document by the strength of the songs and Elvis’s singing: dramatic, passionate, raw and deeply felt, his live vocals provided
the perfect counter balance to the smooth sophistication of the music. His voice wasn’t what it used to be: what it had gained in richness, it had lost in crackle. It had widened and
loosened, but had lost its laser-like precision and its ability to cut through in the process. It also often wobbled alarmingly, as though there was a whammy bar at the back of his neck.

But those reviewers who desired a more technically
accomplished singer missed the yearning at the songs’ hearts, and if his voice was sometimes straining at the very
top of his register or occasionally even cracking, very few singers could have wrung so much genuine and affecting emotion from songs like ‘My Thief’ or ‘God Give Me
Strength’, even if it did make for an exhausting listening experience. ‘We’re not making an easy-listening record,’ said Elvis. ‘We’re making a passionate,
emotional record the way we always intended to.’
¹³

Even so, Andy Gill in
The Independent
wasn’t alone in finding Elvis’s voice and vibrato the sticking point. ‘The arrangements feature the familiar Bacharach trademark
touches – the discreet brass, the piano, the solitary French horn – but it is like trying to gaze at a beautiful vista whilst a huge lorry belches diesel fumes in your face.’

With such a unique collaboration there was bound to be a certain amount of huffing and puffing from the critics. ‘Sumptuous arrangements, artful songwriting, timeless
sophistication,’ said the
Observer
. ‘Costello’s ballads are top-drawer, showing none of his usual verbal contrivance, while Bacharach’s arrangements only
occasionally become somnambulent.’ The
NME
called it a ‘powerful and occasionally elegiac reminder of the art of song’, while
The Sunday Times
heard ‘a
compromise – classic instrumentation with glossy modern production’.

In the States, it was a similar story, most reviews split according to whether they felt Elvis’s voice was an attraction or an aberration.
Music Week
called it ‘a match made
in musical heaven. Bacharach’s lush, sweeping sound finds a perfect foil in Costello’s frail yet distinctive voice. The enduring appeal of both these artists should pay dividends in the
charts.’

Indeed, Mercury were expecting big things commercially from the record. Bacharach was cool again – albeit in a consciously kitsch way – following years of being dismissed as little
more than a purveyor of plastic lounge music, while Elvis had a name which still resonated across musical boundaries. ‘Every year or two there is an album that crosses several demographics
and brings together musical styles that galvanize audiences: we think this is one of those
albums,’
¹⁴
said Danny
Goldberg, the CEO of Mercury. The promotional campaign was aggressive, including dozens of interviews, TV appearances on the
Late Show with David Letterman
in the US and Chris Evans’
talk show in the UK, in-store appearances, a proposed television special and, most significantly, a mini-tour of five dates in the US and Britain.

Opening on 13 October at the Radio City Music Hall in New York and ending at the Royal Festival Hall in London on the twenty-ninth, the structure of each concert was virtually identical every
night. Elvis began by singing the opening verses of ‘Baby, It’s You’ off-stage, before introducing Bacharach over the PA. Then the two strolled onto the stage, Elvis looking more
like an ageing boxing referee than a bobby-sox crooner in his swish tuxedo and bow-tie, Bacharach sliding smoothly behind the grand piano. It was pure showbiz.