Complicated Shadows (63 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1
. Ray Charles was later asked for his opinion on Elvis Costello’s comments, and showed the kind of maturity and restraint that few on either
side of the battle-lines had been able or willing to display. ‘Anyone could get drunk once in his life,’ said Charles. ‘Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the
paper.’

2
. The family’s surname was originally spelt with the Mc- prefix, rather than Mac-, but by the time Declan’s father Ross married in 1952
it had morphed into the latter spelling, traditionally Scottish rather than Irish. This may have been an attempt to escape anti-Irish prejudice.

3
. Pat’s stint in the US is celebrated in the final verse of ‘American Without Tears’ on
King Of America
, where the
singer tenderly evokes his grandfather ‘walking the streets of New York’.

4
. The perennially popular Joe Loss Show ran on the BBC light service and later Radio One between 1933 and 1968.

5
. Beaulieu Close was firmly within the west London/Middlesex axis within which, two teenage years in Liverpool notwithstanding, Declan would spend
the remainder of his formative years and continue well into adulthood: Twickenham, Whitton, Hounslow, Roehampton, Richmond, Chiswick.

6
. The purchase is celebrated in the mathematical autobiography of ‘45’, from 2002’s
When I Was Cruel.

7
. Ross and Sara finally married in 1975, and went on to have four children: Ruari, Ronan, Liam and Kieran, who currently play in London group
Riverway.

8
. By the time Declan moved to Liverpool, his grandfather Pat had passed away.

9
. One poem ran, in part: ‘If you want to be the King/Lying on a bed of gold/Take the sceptre of the Old/Take the sword and wear the
crown/You’re in your robes and on the stairway/Looking down.’

10
. One of them ‘Maureen And Sam’, co-written with Mayes, would later turn up in rewritten form as ‘Ghost Train’ on the
New Amsterdam
EP, released in March 1980.

11
. So successful was the commercial that a Secret Lemonade Drinker fan club was set up, a R.Whites football team played their matches in pyjamas,
and there was even a Secret Lemonade Drinker handicap horse race held at Lingfield Park. In 2000, it was voted the seventh favourite advert ever in the UK.

12
. Pronounced ‘Mish’

13
. ‘Declan loved that set-up, as we all did,’ says Ken Smith. ‘I always thought The Band were the most convincing white band
doing music based on deep soul,’ Declan later agreed. ‘I thought they were the best. They kind of invented their own version of it, almost by accident. They were men, and yet they
weren’t dressing up as cowboys or anything. The sexuality was taken for granted. It wasn’t phoney.’
¹

14
. The factory building was directly off the Western Avenue, and his trip on the 105 bus to and from work every day took him past an art deco
building which housed a factory that made vacuum cleaners, a journey which later found itself literally transposed into ‘Hoover Factory’.

15
. ‘Rick Danko was my absolute hero. He had a unique style,’ Declan later said. ‘It was kind of nasal and it had a little bit
of what I now realise to be country in it, but at the same time it was just so unusual to me.’
⁶
He could be describing himself.

16
. One night at Dingwalls, Mary had a fight with Pretender’s vocalist Chrissie Hynde. One source claims that ‘Mary could start a
fight in a telephone box’, while Bruce Thomas agrees that ‘they used to go at it a bit, sometimes in restaurants and whatever’.

17
. The song’s first line is ‘Stop thief, you’re gonna come to grief.’

18
. Declan had been a fan of singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester since his Liverpool days, and Ken Smith recalls accompanying him to see Winchester
play in London and meeting the singer afterwards.

19
. Early on, Declan stated that: ‘I don’t want to be successful so that I get a lot of money and retire. I’m just interested in
playing.’
¹⁰
Indeed, he has never been prone to the traditional rock star trappings of mansions in the country, or fleets of flash cars.
‘I don’t think money has ever been his motivating force,’ says ex-Attraction Bruce Thomas.

20
. The significance of the address would not have been lost on Declan. ‘Cypress Avenue’ is a key track on Van Morrison’s
classic 1968 album
Astral Weeks.

21
. In part, this was because he later raided many of the lyrics for future songs and wasn’t particularly keen for anyone to trace the link.
‘Cheap Reward’ would later yield the key chorus phrase for
This Year’s Model
’s ‘Lip Service’. ‘Jump Up’ was also plundered for lyrics later
in his career, when the phrase ‘last night’s obituaries’ turned up amidst the two-minute riot of ‘Luxembourg’ on 1981’s
Trust
. The lasting legacy of
‘Poison Moon’ was again a snatch of lyrics – ‘starts with fascination, it ends up like a trance’ – which finally surfaced on ‘Party Girl’, while
‘Call On Me’ was used as a launchpad for both ‘Moods For Moderns’ and ‘Lipstick Vogue’.

22
. Declan certainly would have been aware of the American singersongwriter; indeed, he nominated Hardin’s 1966 album
Hang On To A
Dream
in his ‘500 Essential Albums’ list for
Vanity Fair
magazine in November 2000.

23
. Ironically, that is exactly what happened. A little over a year later, CBS were alerted by the success of Elvis Costello in the UK and signed
him to an American deal.

24
. A companion piece to ‘Less Than Zero’, inspired by a late-night discussion with John Ciambotti at the Nashville Rooms. With its
‘Calling Mr Oswald’ refrain, Ciambotti was convinced that ‘Less Than Zero’ was about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK. Suitably inspired by this misreading,
Elvis wrote ‘Less Than Zero (Dallas Version)’. Ciambotti later heard the ‘Dallas Version’ in concert and allowed himself a small amount of credit. ‘Maybe I put a bug
in his ear.’

25
. He was fined £5 by the magistrate for the incorrect charge of ‘selling records in the street’. Not having enough money with
him, Elvis asked for time to pay, which he was granted.

26
. His clothes may not have helped. ‘Elvis was wearing this kind of biker outfit,’ says Wreckless Eric. ‘It got described in
one of the reviews as a “poofy biker outfit”, some sort of leather jacket and trousers combination. He only wore that once!’

27
. Elvis and The Attractions also played versions of Bacharach and David’s ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’to
work again!’” ; Richard Hell’s ‘Love Comes In Spurts’; and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Six O’Clock’ on the Stiff tour.

28
. The tour provided Steve Nason with his enduring stage name, after he wondered aloud what a groupie was. ‘The first few tours we did, I
was just out of school and looking for a wild time,’ he said. ‘I can’t really recall much about them.’
¹³
He didn’t
stay naive for long, but he would be ‘Nieve’ from then on.

29
. The US version included ‘Watching The Detectives’.

30
. The real-life protgaonists of ‘Party Girl’ never had sex, apparently because the girl’s skin lotion smelt of coconuts and
Elvis’s ardour was dimmed.

31
. Two of the songs would end up on the
New Amsterdam
EP in June 1980, while ‘Hoover Factory’ would appear on the B-side of
the ‘Clubland’ maxi-single in December 1980.

32
. These can be found on the
Sisters
album, released in 1982. The Bluebells later had a No. 1 single with ‘Young At
Heart’.

33
. Only his work on the Various Artists soundtrack for
The Courier
has ever been credited to his real name, although a one-off single
was credited to The MacManus Gang in 1987.

34
. The line, ‘If you’ll wear it proudly through the snakepits and the cat-calls’ seems to draw on Elvis and Cait’s
on-tour experiences with the band.

35
. The US tour between 15 April and 2 May again involved the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. In Washington, Elvis rigged the wheel: ‘If you
can’t cheat in Washington, D.C. where can you cheat?’, he joked.

36
. They came up with at least a dozen new songs in all: ‘My Brave Face’, ‘You Want Her Too’, ‘Don’t Be
Careless Love’, ‘That Day Is Done’, ‘Mistress And Maid’ and ‘Lovers That Never Were’ appear on McCartney’s
Flowers In The Dirt
and
Off
The Ground.
‘Playboy To A Man’, ‘So Like Candy’ and ‘Shallow Grave’ made it onto Elvis’s
Mighty Like A Rose
and
All This Useless
Beauty.
In addition, ‘I Don’t Want To Confess’, ‘25 Fingers’, ‘Tommy’s Coming Home’ and, in all probability, several more exist, but have never
been officially released.

37
. Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas became part of the house band on Jonathan Ross’s weekly TV show
The Last Resort
, while all three
Attractions were involved in session work with the reformed Madness and Andy White, among others.

38
. Spike Jones was a ‘musical comedian’ who worked in the ’30s and ’40s, assembling a group of fine musicians whom he
trained to play toilet seats or tune gunshots to C-sharp. Mixing learned instrumental virtuosity with sonic hi-jinks, they blended comedy and music in a way that was unique, funny and sometimes
slightly disquieting. Elvis seemingly recognised a similar quality in his own recent music.

39
. In the mid-’80s, Elvis stated categorically that he ‘wasn’t Irish’, but later changed his view to one of ambiguity.
‘I talk about “we Irish”,’ he later said. ‘I love to tease by virtue of my mixed nationality. I say that the problem with you English is that we’re younger,
smarter, better educated and eventually will be richer than you, because we’re not insular like you are.’
¹⁶
On 13 May, 2001 he played
U2’s ‘Please’ and his own ‘Heart-Shaped Bruise’ at the Irish Festival at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, introducing himself as an
‘accidental Englishman’.

40
. A form of ballad.

41
. Elvis also cut a version of the Grateful Dead’s ‘Ship Of Fools’, which would be left off the final album, appearing instead
on
Deadicated
, a tribute record released in 1991.

42
. The film finally appeared in 2001 with both songs on the soundtrack. Elvis’s small role as a ‘despairing teacher in a leaky
school’ seemed to have been cut at the editing stage.