Complicated Shadows (33 page)

American singer-songwriter John Henry (T-Bone) Burnett was his support act, and almost immediately the two men hit it off both personally and artistically. Burnett was a tall Texan, a born-again
Christian who had toured with Delaney and Bonnie (one half of whom was Elvis’s one-woman downfall, Bonnie Bramlett) and Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-’70s. He then
made several albums with The Alpha Band, before embarking on a solo career in the ’80s. In possession of a light, pleasant voice, Burnett favoured a rootsy, acoustic style of music which
sometimes bordered on the anonymous. More significantly, he was also becoming a sought-after producer, having recently finished work on the acclaimed Los Lobos album
How Will The Wolf
Survive?
.

Shortly into the tour, Burnett and Elvis formed a duo of mock-warring siblings called The Coward Brothers – loosely
based on The Everly Brothers – who had
supposedly reunited for one final fling. It was a simple conceit which allowed them to have some fun: each night T-Bone would join Elvis and they became Henry and Howard Coward, playing guitar and
harmonising on a number of classic covers: George Jones’s ‘Ragged But Right’ and ‘She Thinks I Still Care’; The Beatles’ ‘Baby’s In Black’; The
Byrds’ ‘So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star’; Scott MacKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)’; and Bobby Charles’
‘Tennessee Blues’. It was light-hearted escapism, a world away from the stresses and strains of London, and Elvis was clearly energised by the experience.

His rapport with the audience had changed enormously: he was funny, frequently a little silly, warmer, more vulnerable. There was a strong emotional current running through the shows, much of it
gaining its energy from Elvis’s voice, which in the more intimate environment was allowed to display far more of its range and colour. With just a guitar for accompaniement, he could let
himself swoop, or croon, or whisper, or sob at the end of ‘Alison’, where he frequently stopped playing completely and just let himself go.

It was a timely reminder of what a fearless, versatile singer Elvis could be, and as the tour went on, he began to stretch himself even further. The gigs grew longer and less predictable, Elvis
throwing more and more covers into the sets, searching for the songs and words which best summed up his mood on any particular night: June Tabor’s ‘Smiling Shore’; James
Carr’s ‘The Dark End Of The Street’; The Beatles’ ‘Yes It Is’; Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away’; numerous country songs, even The Band’s
‘Stagefright’ and Brendan Behan’s ‘The Captains And The Kings’. ‘I had a ball,’ he said. ‘I did songs one night and then never again. And the thing
with T-Bone also balanced out the sombreness of some of the songs.’
⁶

Bebe Buell remained in the picture. She had stayed with Elvis in Detroit on 22 April, and the couple spent more time together in San Francisco as April turned into May. At the Warfield Theatre
on 28 April, Elvis responded to
Buell’s presence in the audience by changing the opening three songs in his set to ‘You Little Fool’, ‘Human
Hands’ and ‘Somebody’s Back In Town’, pointed selections played nowhere else on the tour. No one was supposed to know about Bebe, and the couple enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger
nature of their affair. After the San Francisco show, Elvis expressed how ‘thrilled’ and ‘amazed’ he was that Bebe had been in the audience without anyone knowing.

They called each other Henry and Jane; occasionally Buell was Candy. In San Francisco, she spent much of her time sequestered in Elvis’s suite at the Miyako Hotel to prevent anyone finding
out about their relationship. In truth, despite the strength of feeling on both sides, it was hardly a conventional relationship at all. Elvis saw Bebe on perhaps five or six separate occasions
between July 1983 and May 1984, and he seemed determined not to put Mary through the same old heartache. ‘Elvis is a very honest man,’ said Buell. ‘He was obviously participating
in something he felt was wrong.’
⁷

At the end of the solo tour, Elvis left America and hooked up with The Attractions for dates in New Zealand, Australia and Japan. In early June, while in Japan, he watched from afar as both his
marriage and his relationship with Bebe finally fell apart.

In a bizarre set of circumstances which were almost farcical but far from funny, Mary Costello had found out that Buell was pregnant. Having read a misdirected letter which Bebe had sent to
Elvis in London, Mary phoned Buell and the two participated in a two-hour conversation which ranged from a shouting match to sisterly empathy. ‘She was just as puzzled as I was as to what our
roles were in this man’s psyche,’ claims Buell. Afterwards, Mary called Elvis in Japan; then Elvis called Bebe.

According to Buell, Elvis reacted angrily to the news that she was pregnant, allegedly refusing to have anything to do with the baby. ‘I don’t believe in abortion, but I will not
help you with the child,’ he reportedly told her. ‘I will not be involved with this pregnancy.’
⁸
Everything unravelled. The two
didn’t speak again for over a year,
until a brief phone conversation in Los Angeles in September 1985, while Elvis was making
King Of America
. He asked what
had happened to the baby and Buell lied, telling him she had had a miscarriage. In fact, she had had a termination. It was the last time they spoke.

* * *

However much he didn’t want his marriage to break up, it had now become inevitable. Elvis finally succumbed to the fact following his return from the tour of the Far East
in June 1984. Mary filed for divorce, and he moved out of the family home in Chiswick and was soon ensconsed in a two-bedroomed flat in Holland Park, west London.

Almost immediately, his love life took an even more tumultuous turn. Keen to keep an eye on the prevailing trends in London, Elvis asked Philip Chevron to act as his musical guide. Chevron took
him along to gigs by The Men They Couldn’t Hang and
outre
German cabaret act Agnes Burnelle, both of whom would soon become IMP acts. But there was one band in particular that he was
adamant Elvis should check out. ‘I said, “You gotta see The Pogues”,’ recalls Chevron. ‘“They are
the
happening band in London at the
moment”.’

On 22 June, Elvis dutifully went along to the Diorama in Euston to see the rag-bag group of Anglo-Irishmen and women who melded traditional Irish folk music to punk, with chaotic but often
electrifying results. He loved them straight away. ‘But what I didn’t quite realise until a bit later when the penny dropped, was that he kept talking about the bass player,’ says
Chevron. ‘“She’s sensational, isn’t she? Look at her! Look at her!” Next thing I knew, Elvis had booked The Pogues to support him on tour.’

Elvis had inadvertantly stumbled upon his next, life-changing romantic encounter. Over ten years younger than him, Cait O’Riordan – pronounced Cot – was nineteen at the time
Elvis first saw her. Born in Nigeria on 4 January 1965, her father was from Lahinch, County Clare, Ireland and her mother from Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, in Scotland. She had grown up near
Heathrow airport in west
London, not that far from Elvis’s old stamping ground, and later lived amongst the Irish diaspora in Camden and Kilburn.

In her teens Cait bought a bass guitar. Although she didn’t learn to play it for some time, a chance meeting with The Pogues’ maverick singer-songwriter Shane MacGowan in Rocks Off
record shop – the sister shop to Rock On in Camden Town – led to her joining the band in 1983, probably more on the strength of her look and her Irish heritage than for her musical
ability.

Elvis was smitten with both the band and its tall, skinny, black-clad bassist, and The Pogues were invited to support Elvis and The Attractions on their upcoming UK tour, which would begin at
the end of September.

First, there was the pressing matter of
Goodbye Cruel World
. Having played many of the songs from the record on his solo US tour, finally unearthing the kind of naked intensity he had
been searching for all along, Elvis had little enthusiasm for his new album by the time of its release in June. ‘I hated the record,’ he admitted. ‘I knew we’d got most of
it wrong.’
⁹
Clive Langer received his finished copy and shared similar thoughts: ‘I remember listening to it and saying, “Oh fuck,
it’s no good.” It’s a crap album.’

Allan Jones in
Melody Maker
begged to differ. ‘From where I’m sitting, it sounds like the most approachable Costello LP since
Trust
,’ he wrote, concluding
that it ‘isn’t just a great album, it’s a great Elvis Costello album’. Everyone else had less enthusiasm for the record. And with good reason.

Some albums that meet with critical dismay upon their release are later hailed as lost, overlooked gems, but
Goodbye Cruel World
will never be one of them. It opened with ‘The
Only Flame In Town’, a mediocre, pun-laden number made almost excruciating by its thin saxophone and anaemic rhythm, and it got little better.

The handful of decent songs – ‘Home Truth’, ‘Worthless Thing’, ‘Peace In Our Time’, ‘The Comedians’, ‘Inch By Inch’ and
‘Deportee Club’ – would later be redeemed and reborn in stripped down, acoustic solo versions in concert, or in sympathetic cover versions. The lifeless ‘I Wanna Be
Loved’ was also transformed in concert in 2002. On record, however, the incoherent production left the songs shapeless and muffled, drifting off into inconsequence.

The remainder of the tracks weren’t as bad as the album made them out to be, but neither were they as strong as Elvis seemed to think. ‘Room With No Number’, ‘Love
Field’, ‘The Great Unknown’, and ‘Joe Porterhouse’ were all hesitant and uncertain, virtually devoid of all feeling. It was a murky, depressing record, hamstrung by
compromise and uncertainty, and whose tinny, Muzak-like frills made
Punch The Clock
sound like
Blood On The Tracks
.

By and large, the critics were disappointed and those who had caught Elvis’s mesmerising solo shows in the States were especially confused. It was almost like watching two different
artists. ‘What the new album lacks is the sustained intensity of Costello’s performance on his recent solo tour,’ wrote Jim Miller in
Newsweek. ‘
The recording of
‘Peace In Our Time’ sounds heavy-handed; but in concert, the song had the immediacy – and impact – of a broadside.’

If the title of
Goodbye Cruel World
was an apt summing-up of a career low, it almost proved to be more personally prophetic. Not long after its release, the student-run WTJU radio
station in Virginia announced that Elvis had died in an aeroplane crash, before playing an hourlong tribute consisting solely of his records. The late-night DJ later admitted that he pulled the
prank to check if anyone was listening to his show. They were, and distraught Elvis fans called other media outlets before they were finally convinced that the story was untrue.

The DJ was subsequently sacked, but his stunt did little to boost the fortunes of the record. It sold poorly, limping to No. 10 in the UK and No. 35 in the US. However, Clive Langer’s pop
touch did succeed in keeping Elvis in the UK singles charts. ‘I Wanna Be Loved’ reached No. 25 over the summer, aided by a peculiar video shot during the Australian tour in May,
featuring a weary Elvis, slumped in a photo booth in Melbourne train station, whispering the lyrics to the song as dozens of unidentified men and women entered the shot to kiss him. It wasn’t
to
everybody’s taste. ‘I was in the dressing room and said, “Sorry, I’m off”,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘The other guys – when
there was still a bit of solidarity left – said, “We’re not doing it either then”, so he was left on his own.’ As a sop to the stroppy Attractions, the next video, for
‘The Only Flame In Town’, was shot in New York and the band featured heavily, but nobody was quite sure what was happening in terms of their long-term future.

Elvis seemed equally confused as he and The Attractions set off on their US tour, beginning in Florida on 3 August and snaking around the States until 16 September. The shows made the
fundamental mistake of trying to recreate the sound of the album: there was lots of thick, heavy synthesiser and a certain amount of instrumental show-boating. The sets were weighted in favour of
very recent, synthetic material and often sounded dull and lacking edge, while old songs were extended and rearranged. ‘Costello’s reworkings sometimes obscured his pointed associative
lyrics and showed the limits of his abilities as a melodist,’ wrote Jon Pareles in the
New York Times
, reviewing the show at Forest Hills, New York, on 18 August. ‘There were
also times when the band simply seemed to be doodling away.’ There was a certain amount of wilfulness in Elvis’s approach. He had tired of knocking out faithful versions of his songs
after experimenting in his live shows with the TKO Horns and his solo ventures. He was also tiring of The Attractions, and – increasingly – they of him.

* * *

As The Attractions and The Pogues rattled through the UK and Ireland in September and October, Bruce Thomas encountered Cait O’Riordan for the first time. ‘It was
quite strange,’ he remembers. ‘She was very like Elvis. Intense, volatile, pretty cerebral. I went in the room and she was shaving her head, she had little razor nicks all over her
scalp, and she carried a teddy bear all the time.’

It was to be an eventful tour in many ways, but musically it remained pedestrian. Most of
Goodbye Cruel World
was dutifully played in order to promote the record,
although a more promising new song called ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ featured throughout the tour. But Elvis was essentially treading water, going through the increasingly unsubtle
motions with The Attractions when his heart lay in his more intimate solo performances, which were often the highlight. He would perform ‘Peace In Our Time’, ‘High Fidelity’
and ‘Riot Act’ alone, or revisit many of the covers he had played in the US and adding new ones, such as Richard Thompson’s harrowing ‘End Of The Rainbow’. At the
penultimate show at London’s Dominion on 2 November, he showcased a beautiful new song called ‘Suffering Face’. The crowd, however, were loud and restless, and Elvis
couldn’t disguise his frustration. ‘We just hit the 2000 people who were prepared to pay £6 to hate our guts,’ he said. ‘I tried everything. I tried being nice to
them. I did the panic thing of playing a well-known number, but of course you just play it worse. We walked off.’
¹⁰