Complicated Shadows (58 page)

The real treat of the evening, however, came at the end, when the screen was pulled back to reveal a drum kit and a bass. Pete Thomas and US session-man Davey Farragher stepped out to join Elvis
and Steve, and the ensemble lashed into ‘Man Out Of Time’, followed by seven more classic Attractions songs, only one of which – a deadly, deaf-defying ‘Honey, Are You
Straight Or Are You Blind?’ – was recorded after 1978. ‘It seems he does care after all, handing out sugar lumps for those who’ve stayed the course,’ sighed
The
Independent.
‘And thus the devious Costello, grinning like a ferret, triumphs again, drat him.’

After fully five years, Elvis was finally back in band mode, reconnected to the primal impulse of the most basic of beat music. ‘I had done some things that were very concentrated and very
disciplined, whether it was working with Burt Bacharach or Anne Sofie Von Otter,’ he explained. ‘And then, suddenly, all the liberties of [rock ’n’ roll] appealed to me
again.’
¹

The quartet made their second live appearance supporting Bob Dylan at Nowlan Park in Kilkenny on 15 July, although this time there were no new songs in evidence. Instead, it was a unashamed and
breathless ‘greatest hits’ set, beginning with ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ending with ‘Pump
It Up’ and ‘(What’s So Funny
’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’. With all the linear career landmarks – ‘Less Than Zero’, ‘Alison’, ‘Lipstick Vogue’,
‘Chelsea’, ‘Oliver’s Army’, and ‘Good Year For The Roses’ – assembled in order and fired off into the air, this was clearly an opportunity to mould
new bassist Davey Farragher around the two remaining Attractions. Inevitably, no offer was extended to Bruce Thomas, although Pete and Steve had initially lobbied to get him on board. In Kilkenny,
Elvis chose to respond by playing ‘How To Be Dumb’.

Shortly after the Dylan show, Elvis finally went into Windmill Lane in Dublin to record his long-awaited ‘beat’ album. Essentially, he planned to make a rock ’n’ roll
record, but one with a tight and inflexible rhythmic pulse at the core of many of the songs, which would then stretch outwards towards the melody and harmony, rather than vice versa.

Whether the songs had been written simply and traditionally on guitar, or their origins had been more rhythmically propelled, melody would be secondary to feel throughout, in the manner of
modern hip-hop and R&B records. There had been such a lot of melody, anyway, on
Painted From Memory
, that Elvis was ready to take a rest from it.

Straying into somewhat uncharted waters sonically, he needed a production team who were comfortable with the modern studio technology he wanted to use on the record, such as MIDI and digital.
With this in mind, he assembled a young team of engineers and producers in Dublin who could work at speed, with a confident command of the latest possibilities that the studio now offered.

They consisted of Ciaran Cahill, the assistant engineer on
All This Useless Beauty
; Leo Pearson, who had programmed for The Corrs and U2 among others; and Kieran Lynch, who had worked
with Shania Twain, which obviously didn’t put Elvis off. Broadly speaking, each had a defined role. Cahill took care of the engineering, Lynch oversaw the editing and musical
‘housekeeping’, while Leo Pearson looked after the rhythm processing, perhaps the most important element of the record.

‘If we created a sound and we wanted it twisted a little bit to give it a little more character or a little more grit, Leo usually had that job,’ admitted
Elvis. ‘We tried to work as a team. Obviously, I’m governing the thing, from the point of view I’m writing the songs and I know what I want to hear, but I allowed them
responsibilities for different areas.’
²

Elvis had originally envisaged it as a solo record, but the Dylan show convinced him that he might as well use the band, who were now all in Ireland anyway. Once that decision had been made, the
primary production task became finding a way of welding the electronic textures central to the sound of the record with the traditional shape and sound of a four-piece, combo-style band.

Some of the simpler, more traditional songs such as ‘45’, ‘Doll Revolution’, ‘My Little Blue Window’, ‘Tart’, ‘Dissolve’ and
‘Alibi’, were laid down with the minimum of fuss, Elvis playing his guitar through a cheap fifteen-watt Roebuck amp, happy with the rough sound it produced as he bounced off the
band.

However, other tracks needed a more ambitious and less immediately straightforward approach. ‘Leo would start off getting a groove together, picking out some sounds, and we just kept
layering,’ says Ciaran Cahill. ‘There are many different approaches to recording, from putting the band in a room and letting them go at it full-tilt, to looping up something that Pete
Thomas was playing.’
³

The most startling and easily the most successful example of this experimental approach was ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’, a seven-minute near-masterpiece which was as sonically
adventurous as anything Elvis had ever put on one of his records, using samples, loops and pre-programmed rhythms to create a genuinely unsettling and yet beautiful musical landscape. ‘It
started with a ’60s Italian pop record by Mina,’ explained Elvis. ‘It’s a two-bar loop that’s just put through this little kind of kids’ sampler, and
there’s a little bit of backward bass that’s also on that.’
⁴
Over the top, Steve added impressionistic piano, Elvis twanged a
baritone guitar and added a mesmerising
lyric and serpentine melody, until the track gelled into something wonderous and haunting.

Despite the new, experimental approach to recording, Elvis had been working on many of the songs for some time and he knew exactly the sound he wanted. As a result, the recording sessions were
fast and furious. ‘Alibi’ was recorded in one take, and all the basic tracks were finished by the end of August.

The following month, on 24 September, Elvis was in Avatar Studios in New York with Kevin Killen, laying down brass overdubs for ‘15 Petals’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Spooky
Girlfriend’, while Bill Ware of the Jazz Passengers played vibraphone on ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’. Elvis also recorded a version of the old Charlie Chaplin song
‘Smile’, commissioned for a Japanese television programme. ‘It just came out of the blue,’ he shrugged. ‘‘Smile’ is a famous song in Japan, in lots of
different renditions, and they just for some reason decided they wanted me.’
⁵
He cut the song live in a three-hour session with old hands like
Marc Ribot and Greg Cohen, as well as a string octet for which he had written and orchestrated an arrangement.

He was pleased to see them all. Both New York sessions took place less than a fortnight after the 9/11 attacks, and Elvis and Kevin Killen discussed at length whether they should cancel the
pre-booked studio time, but decided to press on and immerse themselves in music rather than dwell on the alternatives.

While in New York, Elvis also rehearsed with the Charles Mingus Orchestra for shows in Los Angeles. Earlier in the year, in his position as Head of Performing Arts at UCLA, David Sefton had
approached Elvis about becoming Artist in Residence for the 2001–02 academic year, beginning in the autumn. Elvis agreed. It was designed as a natural progression from Meltdown, with Elvis
engaging on a roughly quarterly basis, with the idea that he would be present at regular intervals throughout the year. ‘Really, the template was as loose as that,’ says Sefton.
‘I didn’t really want to impose any real rigours on it.’

The first fruits of the proposed year-long residency were
two full concerts with the Charles Mingus Orchestra on 27 and 28 September at the Royce Hall. Elvis had jumped on
stage with the Orchestra on several occasions, but this would be the first time that he would lead them through a full concert, as well as the first time that they would be playing adaptations of
original Elvis songs alongside their own material. He added ‘Long Honeymoon’, ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’, ‘Stalin Malone’, ‘Chewing Gum’,
‘Watching The Detectives’ and ‘Almost Blue’ to the Orchestra’s traditional set, without diluting the essence of the ensemble.

The shows were sold out and the two evenings were generally deemed to be a highly successful opening collaboration to his year as Artist in Residence. ‘When Costello performed it was not
merely as singer, instrumentalist, songwriter or former new wave rocker anthropologizing in the big, sophisticated world of jazz,’ ran the review in the
LA Weekly.
‘It was,
instead, as a bona fide bandleader, welding dizzyingly complex tunes to weird lyrics and singing them all like he’s squeezing passion from a narrow-necked tube. His fans are forever
vindicated.’

* * *

Elvis returned to Dublin in the autumn to mix the new record, taking care not to sanitise the tracks: he wanted a raw, densely packed rock record with harsh electronic beats.
There was spillage and distortion on some songs, but – as with the making of records as diverse as
My Aim Is True
and
Blood & Chocolate
– any technical
imperfections were deemed secondary to the feel of the final recording. ‘If something was going down that was passionate and had a vibe and had emotion and carried the message or idea of the
music, that’s more important,’ said Leo Pearson. ‘There were other mixes of tracks that were more sonically correct but that just didn’t have the same vibe to them. And we
want to tip our hat to Elvis for hammering that home.’
⁶
If the production team of Cahill, Lynch and Pearson had taught Elvis much about the
most advanced production practices, he had taught
them plenty about the inexact art of making records in return.

The release of the new album was delayed slightly to make way for a short tour that Elvis undertook in January 2002. The Concerts For A Landmine Free World took in Belfast, Dublin, London,
Glasgow, Stockholm and Oslo between 13–20 January, and Elvis shared the stage with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, John Prine and Nanci Griffith, taking it in turns to sing and play their songs
and occasionally joining in on each other’s.

Thus he got to duet with Emmylou Harris on heartbreaking renditions of ‘Indoor Fireworks’ and ‘Sleepless Nights’, or enjoy the attentions of A-grade ensemble backing
vocals for ‘American Without Tears’. ‘Elvis loved it and he had a great time doing it,’ recalls Steve Earle, who was mesmerised by watching Elvis sing at close quarters.
‘He’s one of the best singers alive. My favourite singers are Costello, David Hidalgo and Aaron Neville – he’s
that
good a singer.’

Entitled
When I Was Cruel
, a gloriously self-referential in-joke, the new album was finally released on 15 April 2002, credited to Elvis Costello and The Imposters and released on
Island/Def Jam, the hip-hop wing of Universal. This wasn’t a nod to Elvis’s new-found rhythm method, but rather a bizarre indication of just how much reshuffling had gone on in the
record industry in recent years.

The record was accompanied by a feverish media campaign throughout February, March and April which was designed to let everyone know that Elvis was firmly back in the ring. It was not an easy
album, nor was it a return to a particular familiar sound in the way that parts of
Brutal Youth
had been. There may have been faint echoes of
This Year’s Model
and
Blood
& Chocolate
in particular, but it was defiantly more of a fresh departure than a homecoming: an angry, rowdy, bruising, often brilliant affair, bass-heavy and densely rhythmic, with very
little of Steve Nieve’s trademark swirling organ and stately piano.

It was also consciously far less melodious than most people expected from an Elvis Costello record, again a
trait it shared with
Blood & Chocolate.
Only the
stuttering ‘45’, ‘My Little Blue Window’, ‘Spooky Girlfriend’, ‘Tart’ and ‘Alibi’ had tunes which really stuck in the head. This lack of
melodic invention did eventually wear the listener out, not least because the record was much too long.
When I Was Cruel
could probably have lost at least a quarter of its sixteen tracks
without deadening any of its impact.

The sound of the record was really defined by the sparse, unsettling beats and bleak lyrical visions of ‘Dust’, ‘Oh Well’, ‘Soul For Hire’ and ‘Radio
Silence’. Mercifully, there was no hint of an artist desperately trying to sound contemporary. The songs had been written to weather the intense rhythms and they did so without the feeling of
artificial studio surgery. And in ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’, Elvis had a killer song that would grace any
Best Of
collection, a hypnotic crawl through the small, sour vignettes
of an industry wedding, Elvis confronting everyone’s
sotto voce
sneers and latent hypocrisies, not least his own.

But it wasn’t a truly
great
Elvis Costello record. It only sounded like one if you hadn’t played a great Elvis Costello record in a while. Nonetheless, it was greeted with
predictable fervour by the media, finally happy to hear Elvis making some noise again, with the sneer firmly back in the voice. ‘Alone among his peers, Costello forges ahead, his snarl and
his relevance intact,’ said the
Guardian.
‘These are punchy, throaty, bloodrush tracks which effortlessly overshadow all the little Spiritualiseds, Radioheads and Starsailors
blubbing and boo-hooing out there in Poor Me Land,’ said
Uncut.
‘The veins at Costello’s temples are throbbing again,’ reckoned
Q.
It was, truly, the
return of the prodigal.

A brief, promotional tour was organised to coincide with the record’s release, a precursor to the mammoth world tour scheduled for the remainder of the year. Between 15 and 28 April, Elvis
and The Imposters played club gigs in Amsterdam, London, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, bedding in the new material. It was clear that apart from the
When I Was Cruel
songs, much of
the new setlist would revolve around
This Year’s Model
and
other classic Attractions material. There may have been a degree of spoon-feeding in this approach,
but Elvis was also hungry to play a lot of those songs again.