Complicated Shadows (56 page)

When he and Steve resumed their ‘Lonely World’ tour in the States the fruits of his summer labour were beginning to appear. Less emphasis was placed on the
Painted From
Memory
material, now a year old, and the new songs crept in. He performed ‘45’ on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
before the tour began, and at the opening night at the
Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on 30 September, there were three new songs in the set. ‘Alibi’ opened – as it would throughout the tour – played without stage lights as
Steve and Elvis conjured up a brooding, demi-Attractions sound in the dark with a clattering electro-rhythm, snarling guitar and a full sneer in Elvis’s voice. ‘I Dreamed Of My Old
Lover Last Night’ and ‘45’ were also debuted.

By the end of the US tour on 31 October, Elvis had played ten new songs in total. In addition to the above, ‘Couldn’t You Keep That To Yourself’ was a bluesy lounge song,
piano-heavy and lyrically wry, that Elvis had had lying around for a while. He was pushed to finish it when a call came from David Sefton at the South Bank asking if Elvis had any songs for an
album Sefton was producing for German cabaret chanteuse Ute Lemper. ‘Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter’ was a stark tale of domestic disharmony co-written with Carole King, while ‘Suspect
My Tears’ was a big, poppy piano song that sounded like a
Painted From Memory
out-take, or at least a nod to Bacharach. ‘It’s good to go on the road when you’ve
written a few new songs,’ said Elvis. ‘It’s a great opportunity, if you’ve got the audience’s confidence in you.’
¹⁹

Steve and Elvis continued to play a winning combination of old and new songs when the tour reached Britain
in November and December. ‘Alibi’ was still the
throat-grabbing opener, usually followed by ‘Man Out Of Time’ and ‘Talking In The Dark’. Then the sets skidded all over the vast expanses of Elvis’s career; by the
penultimate show of the UK tour in Glasgow on 7 December, he and Steve were playing three-hour concerts which compared favourably with anything Elvis had ever done on a stage. ‘An evening
shot through with smiles and spit, cries and whispers and history,’ raved Damien Love in
The Scotsman
. ‘A reminder that the luckiest archeologists of tomorrow will stare at the
stretch of Costello’s output and wonder – a truly, truly great concert. Absolutely staggering.’

WHILE NEARING THE END
of the
All This Useless Beauty
sessions back at the beginning of 1996, Elvis had travelled to Stockholm for two shows on
6 January with Sweden’s Radio Symphony Orchestra and Anne Sofie Von Otter, the classical star. It was another exercise in wish-fulfilment for Elvis, who had been an admirer of the Swedish
mezzo-soprano since the late ’80s and had made no secret of both his love of her voice and his desire to collaborate with her. He was by no means alone in his admiration. ‘In the
classical world, she is
it
,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘She’s one of the greatest voices there has ever been.’

That night, a palpably nervous Elvis sang Bill Frisell’s arrangement of ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’ and Richard’s Harvey’s arrangement of ‘The Birds Will
Still Be Singing’ with the Orchestra. Then – apparently unscheduled – he joined Anne Sofie to sing ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ and
‘Without A Song’, with just a piano accompaniment. Later, they sang Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost In The Stars’, and encored with ‘My Ship’ and ‘Every Time We
Say Goodbye’.

It was a low-key, fun engagement and both singers enjoyed it immensely. ‘There’s something about him when he performs that is terribly moving, really,’ said Von Otter
afterwards. ‘I like his voice very much, it has a lot to say, the colour in it. It’s a privilege to have got to know him
a little bit.’
¹
The two became friends. Elvis and Cait went out for dinner with Anne Sofie and her husband and frequently popped backstage after her concerts, and almost a
year later, they collided again.

On 2 December 1997, Elvis watched Anne Sofie perform three pieces he had composed for her and the Brodsky Quartet in Paris’s Cité De La Musique. Entitled
Three Distracted
Women
, the songs – ‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’, ‘Spiteful Dancer’ and ‘April In Orbit’ – had been pieced together over a two-year period.
‘Speak Darkly, My Angel’ had been performed by Elvis as a song fragment at the Beacon Theatre shows in New York the previous August, but each had been specially written to suit Von
Otter’s voice and the Quartet’s style.

The Paris premiere was followed by a brief European tour, including dates in London, Madrid and Bologna. In London, Nicholas Williams of
The Independent
rated
Three Distracted
Women
as among ‘the evening’s most substantial offerings – part concert aria, part reflection on the seventeenth-century consort song’.

Ever since, Elvis had been talking to Anne Sofie about the possibility of a recording collaboration. She was keen, and throughout 1999 and into 2000 they discussed suitable ideas and possible
songs, exchanging cassettes and letters, finally settling on a non-classical template.

Unlike the collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach, this time Elvis was bringing much more of his own musical background to the partnership, including some of his own songs,
both new and old. Von Otter’s varied personal tastes included folk music, standards and pop, but it was Elvis who was taking her into his own musical heartlands. On 19 February, he travelled
to Stockholm for a few days to make some demo recordings with Anne Sofie. Having worked on ten songs and decided that they were compatible, they both consulted their hectic diaries and set aside
time in October to start work on an album.

* * *

In contrast to the concert fireworks of the previous year, 2000 would prove to be a year of few public appearances but much activity behind the scenes,
most of it on the classical side of Elvis’s increasingly schizophrenic career. With so much varied work, and still uncertain about manouevres within the record company, Elvis again shelved
his own plans to record a ‘beat’ album that year, putting it on hold indefinitely. Instead, throughout the rest of the spring he concentrated primarily on tackling perhaps the most
ambitious project of his life.

In January, Elvis had flown to Perugia to attend a production of
Paradiso
by the Aterballetto, a well-established dance company based in Reggio Emilia in north Italy. He had recently
been approached by the company to collaborate on their forthcoming production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, but Elvis felt ballet lay outside even his range of experience and
ambition, conceding that he danced only in his mind. However, he was curious enough to attend, and after watching the performance of
Paradiso
and being ‘overwhelmed’ by it, he
agreed to take on the commission of writing a score for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(
Il Sogno Di Una Notte Di Mezza Estate), Il Sogno
for short.

The work would hold Elvis’s attention for the better part of the year. He composed many of the basic themes for
Il Sogno
based on the motifs of Shakespeare’s original play,
with distant but frequent consultation with the Aterballetto’s Mauro Bigonzetti, Nicola Lusuardi and designer Fabrizio Plessi, as well as some help from a bilingual colleague of the company.
Elvis speaks passable Italian but it wasn’t up to this kind of dense, fine-toothed discussion.

With the preliminary work done, Elvis travelled to Reggio in July with his demos and his piano melodies to ponder the finer details of the production face-to-face with members of the company and
the creative team. ‘Every aspect from the dramatic outline and choreographic intention to the stage design was examined in relation to the musical content,’ said Elvis. ‘I then
returned home to Dublin to write and orchestrate each scene in the production.’
²

After ten weeks of intense work at home throughout the late summer, the score began to take shape. Working originally on piano and then transcribing his work into musical
notation, the constraints of time meant that, towards the end, Elvis had to begin orchestrating directly from his head onto manuscript paper for the sixty-piece orchestra. All the work was done
manually with a pencil. Still, despite all the preparation, there were elements of the process which relied on a combination of serendipity and a degree of artistic telepathy. ‘I had to go
away and compose and then hope that [they] could make use of what I wrote,’
³
he admitted. At the end of the ten-week stretch of intense
activity, Elvis had a score ready for performance later in the year.

As soon as he was finished with the compositional side of
Il Sogno
, recording could finally begin with Anne Sofie Von Otter. Elvis travelled to Stockholm towards the end of September to
familiarise himself with the musicians and his surroundings. They were recording at Atlantis Studios, where Abba had cut ‘Dancing Queen’; the famous grand piano which had inspired Steve
Nieve to add his distinctive part to ‘Oliver’s Army’ many years earlier was still in the room. Now, the pianist finally got the chance to play it.

Steve, ex-Rockpile member Billy Bremner and Michael Blair added subtle touches to the final record, but the core studio ensemble were respected local Swedish players familiar to Anne Sofie, as
were the Swedish string quartet Fleshquartet, who also played on a handful of tracks. ‘In the end, rather than it being something that I presented her with completely formed, it was a proper
collaboration,’ Elvis explained. ‘Not in writing this time, but in choices: choices of instrumentation, choices of venue, choices of musical background.’
⁴

Elvis’s role was essentially that of producer and mentor, although he sang briefly on six of the eighteen songs and added a little guitar. He also brought two new bespoke tracks, called
‘No Wonder’ and ‘For The Stars’, to the sessions, and with typical collaborative zeal wrote three more while in Sweden. Two of them, ‘Rope’ and ‘Just A
Curio’, were co-written with Fleshquartet, Elvis adding words to their music. The third was ‘Green Song’, Elvis adding lyrics to the ensemble leader Svante
Henryson’s solo cello piece.

The final track selection included the five newly composed songs and four old Costello numbers – ‘Shamed Into Love’, ‘This House Is Empty Now’, ‘Baby Plays
Around’ and ‘I Want To Vanish’, ensuring that Elvis’s fingerprints were all over the record. In the end, they decided not to record the
Three Distracted Women
songs
that Anne Sofie had sung with the Brodsky Quartet in 1997, believing they were more suited to the stage than the album.

The nine remaining songs were covers of original material by Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Tom Waits, Abba, Jesse Mae Robinson, Ron Sexsmith and Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The sound was a loose
amalgamation of folk music and laid-back jazz with classical inflections, with some pop touches thrown in. The mood – once again – was autumnal, a restrained, melancholic hue, etched
with cello lines, soft piano, double bass and the occasional saxophone or pedal steel.

Overall, recording was a happy process, but there were tensions in the studio, brought about by the intrinsic cultural collisions of the project rather than any personality clashes. Elvis was
determined to coax Anne Sofie Von Otter out of her classical stylings: he demanded live vocals rather than compound takes, while experimenting with microphone techniques and shifting song keys to
force her into singing quietly, more naturalistically.

But some of the material caused problems: the two Tom Waits covers – ‘Broken Bicycles’ and ‘Take It With Me’ – were especially troublesome, primarily because
the singer had trouble locating the song’s melodies beneath the gruff, eccentric timbre of Waits’s voice. ‘Any song that Tom Waits sings is difficult for me to imagine that I
could ever sing,’
⁵
she admitted, with some justification. ‘Baby Plays Around’, meanwhile, was the one Costello song that Elvis had
brought to the session at his own instigation rather than Anne Sofie’s, and the contours of the melody
line gave her some difficulty. With the recording process so much
more time-consuming than it is in the classical field, she also found her attention span and patience started to wane after more than a handful of takes on each song.

There were other glitches that only came to light in the studio. Elvis had envisaged singing duets and harmony on many of the songs, but soon found that the blend of voices didn’t work on
tape. ‘With all respect to Elvis,’ admitted Anne Sofie bluntly, ‘I must say [our voices] don’t go together too well.’
⁶
Instead, they mostly sang in sequence, Elvis coming in to fill the parts where Anne Sofie had left spaces in the songs. ‘We developed this idea, I think quite wisely, that the way for me to
make an appearance was by taking up the story at a certain point in the song,’ said Elvis. ‘So there are only a few bars where we actually sing together.’
⁷
Some may have asked why there was any need for the producer to sing at all. On the final record, even Elvis’s brief interruptions – added at Windmill Lane in
Dublin and Westside in London in mid-November, away from Anne Sofie’s raised eyebrows – sounded utterly inappropriate.