Complicated Shadows (57 page)

Perhaps the highpoint of the recording – indeed, probably the album itself – was the collaboration with Abba’s Benny Andersson on ‘Like An Angel Passing Through My
Room’. Anne Sofie knew Andersson from old and invited him to the sessions, and he ended up playing piano and synclavier on the new version of his own composition. ‘It was amusing; these
two high dignitaries of pop smelling each other out,’
⁸
she said.

The work was swift. They recorded twenty-seven songs in just two weeks, concluding on 21 October. Eighteen would be used for the final record, and Elvis would return to Stockholm in mid-January
to mix the record.

Meanwhile, there were more pressing concerns. From Stockholm, Elvis travelled to Italy in the last week of October to put the finishing touches to
Il Sogno,
attending the final
rehearsals and the press conference, before the Aterballetto premiered the ballet at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 31 October. Steve Nieve was in attendance
at the
premier, popping along for moral support; it was all a long way away from ‘Pump It Up’.

Elvis was terribly excited by the end product. As an artist who was primarily recognised for his ability with words,
Il Sogno
marked the fulfilment of a deeply held desire to write a
major work of instrumental music, and he found the final synthesis of music and movement profoundly rewarding. ‘I couldn’t believe I’d imagined all this music,’ he admitted.
‘I put things in the music which I hoped were going to be useful in the choreography, and then you see them and think, “Wow, how did he know I meant
that?
” Every time it
is what I hoped, but much, much more.’
⁹

The review in Italy’s
La Stampa
was generally positive: ‘Elvis Costello was able to show that he knows cultured music and knows also how to write it, from Debussy,
Stravinsky, Mozart, jazz, big bands of the last fifty years, music from cinema and other areas.’

Aterballetto’s
Il Sogno
tour then continued through northern Italy over November and December, reaching France and Germany in 2001, where it was again warmly received. Elvis
expressed his desire to capture the score on record some time soon.

* * *

He was back in Stockholm for a few days on 15 January to mix the new album, now called
Anne Sofie Von Otter Meets Elvis Costello: For The Stars.
The next few weeks were
taken up with promoting the record, which was being released on Universal’s classical label, Deutsche Grammophon. The launch for both the classical and popular music media took place in
Vienna on 25 February, where Elvis and Anne Sofie played a live set featuring most of the album with the studio musicians. A little later, ITV screened a
South Bank Show
documentary on the
making of the record, and there were numerous joint interviews. However, no amount of hype could make the record work. Released on 19 March 2001,
For The Stars
was far from successful.
Despite the best efforts of all
involved, the basic premise failed: to coax a naturalistic, unstudied vocal performance from a classical singing star. Anne Sofie Von Otter
had trouble negotiating many of the songs, often sounding stiff, mannered and uncomfortable, while the subdued tone of the record was almost unwavering throughout, washed-out and depressed rather
than melancholic.

Elvis’s new original songs – with the exception of ‘Green Song’ and the closing title track, which at least showed a little life – were little better than mediocre,
and some of the cover versions wildly ill-judged. Von Otter simply didn’t have the kind of grain in her voice necessary to make sense of the sultry, weary sadness of ‘The Other
Woman’, not to mention ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’, ‘Take It With Me’ and ‘For No One’. The occasional interjections from Elvis at
the top of the mix only proved conclusively that their voices should never have appeared within a mile of each other.

Only on Abba’s glacial ‘Like An Angel Passing Through My Room’, and Elvis’s ‘Shamed Into Love’ and ‘For The Stars’ did the record really show
glimpses of what might have been. In retrospect, it would have been considerably more rewarding and exciting to have persevered with Anne Sofie Von Otter’s intial desire to create an all-out
pop album. On the up-beat title song, the results were actually quite exhilarating.

Even some of Elvis’s closest collaborators and admirers conceded that they found little to love in the record. ‘I don’t get much relief from it,’ admits the Brodsky
Quartet’s Paul Cassidy. ‘It feels like it’s in a certain place and it’s determined to stay there, and I don’t really know why that is. I would have thought that with
his imagination and his incredible encyclopedic knowledge of song and music in general that he would have presented her with many more options.’

David Sefton, who by now had left the South Bank to take up a post as Performing Arts Director at UCLA in California, felt that the record stretched to the limits Elvis’s ceaseless desire
and belief that anything is possible within music. However, there is often much to be taken from a
well-intentioned failure. ‘The fact that he knows no fear is a
positive thing,’ says Sefton. ‘Ambition and enthusiasm go hand in hand. I think there’s nothing wrong with overreaching.’

Many of the reviews proved the point by lauding the album, too easily enchanted by its charms. Nevertheless, there was an undeniable sense that
For The Stars
marked a natural last port
of call for Elvis’s roving enthusiasm for joint ventures. His limitless curiousity, ample ego and inate sense of
carpe diem
meant that he was often unwilling to turn down an
opportunity to work with someone he admired, but very occasionally he seemed to prolong the collaboration beyond its natural tenure, trying to bring it to life through sheer force of will.
For
The Stars
was one such instance.

Without an album of new songs under his own banner for five years, Elvis’s core audience were in danger of viewing his designated role in music as the man who ushered non-pop acts into
unlikely unions, while the media image of him had very firmly become that of someone hell-bent on chasing down every last musical nook-and-cranny until he had sated his thirst.

The numerous side-projects throughout 2000 hadn’t necessarily helped. Aside from writing a ballet score and making an album with a mezzo-soprano, Elvis had played Singleton: The Narrator
in New York and London performances of Jazz Passenger Roy Nathanson’s ‘jazz oratario’,
Fire At Keaton’s Bar And Grill;
and Drunkman in Steve Nieve’s
first-ever contemporary opera,
Welcome To The Voice.

The latter role demanded a degree of acting ability, while requiring Elvis to sing complex songs in both English and French. He more than coped, although he did hide a lyric sheet inside his
rather conspicuous newspaper prop. Dressed plainly in black shirt and trousers, he looked the part: crop-headed, unshaven, distinctly overweight, he attacked it with his usual animated ferocity,
acting out the part with abandon while Steve and saxophonist Ned Rothenberg improvised around the score.

The
New York Times
came away from
Welcome To The
Voice
with the observation that ‘a patch on the border between art music and pop is being
cultivated, and Elvis Costello is its chief gardener’. Maybe so, but the pop side of the lawn was becoming distinctly weed-ridden through neglect. Elvis was in real danger of losing his
connection with his core audience.

‘For the past few years, it has not always been clear what the point of Elvis Costello was,’ wrote Jonathan Romney in the
Guardian.
‘He has become an expert at keeping
himself interested, diversifying into umpteen left-field projects. It is obviously a healthy move for him, trading in the conventional solo role for gentleman-scholarhood, but he has also come
close to being a high-culture dilettante, [and] you sometimes wish he would just come out and, well, entertain us.’

Elvis was coming to similar conclusions himself, even if he would have vehemently disagreed, mostly with absolute justification, with any charges of dilettantism. One of the lasting legacies of
his career to date has been his enduring enthusiasms as a fan. In that capacity, he has written sleevenotes for re-issues of albums by Gram Parsons and Dusty Springfield, as well as published
appreciations of artists as diverse as Benny Green and The Beatles. A happy knock-on effect of these appetites is the way in which Elvis has helped to introduce his fan base to genres as varied as
country, northern soul and classical. On the down side, however, he hadn’t made a solo record since 1996, and he was keen to get back to it. ‘I know he got sick as being always seen as
the arch collaborator and experimenter, I think that definitely wore thin,’ says David Sefton. ‘You spend twenty years giving interviews as an advocate for everything from country music
to contemporary classical music, then in the end you just want to get on with making records.’

‘
I HAVEN
’
T A CLUE WHAT I
’
M DOING
,’ laughed the dishevelled-looking man as he
moved around the stage. Dressed down for the occasion in a floral shirt, combat trousers, trilby and trainers, Elvis was detonating distorted beats and slamming out electric guitar chords,
revelling in simply making a noise again.

This was, appropriately enough, Total Meltdown. As part of the Royal Festival Hall’s fiftieth anniversary concert, many of the previous Meltdown curators were invited to play sets on the
night of 4 May 2001. Eschewing any notions of a ‘greatest hits’ set, Elvis plugged back into the Meltdown spirit and took the opportunity to experiment with a wild solo set of almost
completely unheard material, using electric and acoustic guitars, tape loops and drum machines.

A few months earlier, on the day before Valentine’s Day, Elvis had played a charity gig organised by Donal Lunny at Vicar Street in Dublin, where his set had included ‘Daddy, Can I
Turn This?’, ‘Oh Well’, ‘Soul For Hire’, and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’. At the Royal Festival Hall he added more new songs to the mix: ‘Dust’,
‘Alibi’, ‘When I Was Cruel’, and an encore of ‘I Want You’, the only previously recorded song in the set.

It was as gloriously shambolic as any work-in-progress offering should be, but there was no mistaking the singularity of purpose behind it all. It may have ‘veered
erratically between an acoustic guitar and a drum machine and box of tricks designed to make him sound like a one-man band’, according to
The Times
, but it was less
indulgent than it looked or sounded. Elvis was genuinely exploring ideas for his next record.

Over the course of the year there would be the usual generous scattering of eclectic cameos and dizzying array of guest appearances: a concert in Liverpool in March to launch a local compilation
record; two shows at UCLA in April, performing in tribute to legendary folk archivist Harry Smith; jamming on-stage with Roger McGuinn in Dublin in May; organised stage invasions at New York shows
with the Charles Mingus Orchestra and Lucinda Williams in June; and three more performances of Roy Nathanson’s
Fire At Keaton’s Bar And Grill
in London, Manchester and
Rotterdam during the same month.

Elvis also played his second – and last, to date – show with Anne Sofie Von Otter at the Hit Factory in New York on 6 June. It was an industry-only affair, in front of an invited
audience of 150 people, mostly sticking to the
For The Stars
material, although Elvis also sang ‘Almost Blue’ and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’.

But the most significant concerts of 2001 took place at the Royal Festival Hall. Following the constructive mayhem of Total Meltdown, Elvis returned for the Meltdown ‘proper’ on 26
June. This year the artistic director was Robert Wyatt, and Elvis duly sang ‘Left On Man’, ‘Caroline’, and of course ‘Shipbuilding’, at a concert showcasing
Wyatt’s songs on the twenty-fourth. The explosions of two nights later were another prospect entirely.

Elvis opened the show with ‘Alibi’ and ‘45’, played solo on acoustic guitar, before launching into the darkest depths of electronic exprimentation with Steve Nieve,
turning ‘Green Shirt’ into a long, meandering piece filled with loops, samples and echo. He was clearly not entirely in control of the differing technical elements on stage, and for
much of the time Steve was all but inaudible as the waves of electronica and distorted beats washed over the songs. ‘As deep house beats cascade and distant bells sound, with only the
occasional lyric, it feels like sitting
in on a radiophonic workshop and, well, I think he’s getting away from us,’ said
The Independent’s
reviewer. ‘The numbers are darkly anarchic but deeply distancing – there’s emotion in there but it’s lost in the random bleeping.’ The unsettling trio of
‘Dust’, ‘My Dark Life’ and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’ closed the opening set.

After a break, Elvis introduced the Brodsky Quartet for a short period of calm, including ‘Pills And Soap’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’, before returning alone to sing a very
rare rendition of ‘The Great Unknown’. He then took a deep breath and plugged in his beatbox again for ‘Hurry Down Doomsday’ and ‘When I Was Cruel’, two songs
which actually seemed to benefit from the additional electronica. He and Steve encored with ‘The Bridge I Burned’ and a straight, solemn reading of ‘Shipbuilding’, before
the Brodsky Quartet reappeared to run through ‘Rocking Horse Road’ and ‘Almost Blue’.