Complicated Shadows (43 page)

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‘The Other Side Of Summer’ was released as a single on 2 April 1991, heralding the arrival of
Mighty Like A Rose
three weeks later. A deliberately
over-the-top Beach Boys pastiche, the single reached No. 43 in the UK charts, a faintly disappointing result for one of his most commercial songs for years. In retrospect, the video of Elvis
looking like a busker on Brighton beach may not have helped.

The album was a more unified affair than
Spike
, with stronger songwriting, but it was a dense and difficult record, undeniably burdened by the bleakness of the mood which inspired it.
Elvis’s harsh, contrary singing in particular meant that many of the tenderest songs on the record – ‘All Grown Up’, ‘Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4’,
‘So Like Candy’ – failed to get the vocal performances that the richness of the music and melodies deserved.

This juxtaposition of grimness and beauty was deliberate, but the over-riding sensation was of melody and the song being sacrificed in a dizzying maze of vaulting and often misguided ambition.
‘You hear the further outreaches of his musical mind on it,’ admits Mitchell Froom. ‘I thought a few things were successful; maybe
a few things were
overdone.’ Just maybe. The opening five-song assault was amongst the most all-encompassing litany of social and cultural scepticism Elvis had ever recorded, but the production turned the
songs into overstuffed sofas, uncomfortable, misshapen, the springs poking out all over the place.

Elsewhere, ‘After The Fall’ was simply dreary and depressing, ‘Georgie And Her Rival’ was far too busy, its bright pop melody lost in an avalanche of detail, while it was
a struggle to hear how songwriters of the calibre of Elvis and Paul McCartney could have spent more than a solitary lunch break on ‘Playboy To A Man’. Fittingly, Elvis barked the vocal
through a metal pipe.

Even when the album reached a kind of exhausted and very personal hopefulness on the trio of songs that ended the record, the gorgeous melody and genuine regret of ‘Couldn’t Call It
Unexpected No. 4’ was saddled with a circus-like arrangement which did the song few favours. All in all, there were far too many layers, too many curves. The end result wasn’t dazzling,
just heavy, difficult and misconceived. Not a record for the faint-hearted.

There were plenty of favourable reviews, but generally (aside from
Almost Blue
)
Mighty Like A Rose
attracted the worst notices of Elvis’s career. The
NME
seemed
to view the orchestral flourishes as a signal that this was some kind of follow-up to
Imperial Bedroom
, and measured it harshly against old glories. ‘Even the “good”
tracks – a lamentable four out of thirteen – would pant with shame if forced to socialise with the bulk of his back catalogue,’ said Barbara Ellen. ‘The music for the most
part is self-indulgent and sour, or lazy and glutinously sweet. Worst of all, it’s dull.’
The Independent
struggled to find ‘crumbs of melodic comfort. It’s a case
of too many cooks cluttering up nearly every song.’
The Times
laced an utterly negative review with the preface that Elvis had swapped his ‘wimpish geek look in favour of a
more organic, got-10p-for-a-cup-of-tea-mate image’.

Many of the reviews in Britain made much of the dramatic change in Elvis’s appearance, used as apparent evidence of a general loss of focus or a sign of rock star
megalomania. ‘I apparently let some people down who didn’t want me to change my image,’ mused Elvis. ‘I’d successfully buried the geek guy for good. But
it’s my life and my body, and if I want to fuck myself up and have a beard and wear my hair long, that’s my business. I have my own reasons for that change of image – some of them
personal, some of them just damn wilful.’
⁸

Even Warner Brothers, generally supportive in the early part of their working relationship, were somewhat dismayed by his change in his appearance. Executives from the record company began
dismissing
Mighty Like A Rose
as the ‘beard record’.

There was undoubtedly a degree of myth-breaking in the new image. ‘Quite rightly, he invented a look [in the past] that a whole lot of people wanted to copy, but the problem is that the
mask can turn on you and strangle you after a while,’ says Marc Ribot. ‘It’s good to break it, and if it pisses people off, well, fuck ’em.’ However, the fuss created
over the new image was in reality something of a smokescreen. Elvis wasn’t the first man in musical history with a very clear and identifiable image to have shunned the barber. Ask The
Beatles. If people were having trouble relating to the man with the beard and the long hair, it was principally because Elvis had released an album that was almost impossible to warm to. Far from
burying the ‘geek guy’, it was the long-haired Elvis incarnation who took on the status of an imposter – and eventually got buried instead.

He rehearsed in California through May in preparation for the ‘Come Back In A Million Years’ tour, breaking cover for a TV appearance on
Saturday Night Live
in New York on
18 May, where he performed ‘So Like Candy’ and ‘The Other Side Of Summer’. Then it was on to the rest of America.

There was a rigidity about the shows, largely unanimated affairs focusing on material from
Spike
and
Mighty Like A Rose
, with a smattering of the ‘Barbados’ covers
thrown in. Elvis usually opened with a contemplative take on ‘Accidents Will Happen’, backed by a truncated Rude 5 featuring Pete Thomas, Larry Knetchel, Jerry Scheff and Marc Ribot,
but there was a limited and generally
predictable display of old Attractions material. Only the occasional inclusion of ‘Suit Of Lights’, ‘Watch Your
Step’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head’ could have been considered surprises, while for some reason, ‘The
Other Side Of Summer’ had been transformed into an uptempo waltz, sacrificing most of its melody in the process.

Yet there was a darkness and anger in the performances that hadn’t been heard for some time. Ironically, despite the beard, the baggy suits and the dearth of old material, there was more
here that bore comparison with the withering disgust of the younger Elvis Costello than might have met the eye. Only this time it was global, rather than personal.

Five dates into the tour Elvis was already apologising for the hoarseness of his voice, and when he came to tape a show for MTV’s
Unplugged
programme on 3 June he was in even
poorer vocal shape, with the result that a mere twenty-four minutes of the set was eventually broadcast. By the time he reached New York’s Madison Square Gardens on 22 June, however, he
seemed to be back-firing on something approaching all cylinders. Stephen Holden from the
New York Times
found the music ‘richly fleshed out and at moments even operatic. If
Costello’s world view is still forbiddingly gloomy, his music has expanded into something much larger than post-punk minimalism.’

It was when the tour reached Europe in July that the battle really commenced.
Mighty Like A Rose
had managed a respectable No. 5 placing in the charts in Britain, but it had not sold
terribly well and had already had something of a critical savaging. Following a near-fifteen-year run of critical adulation in his homeland, the time seemed ripe for some extra scores to be
settled.

Even before it came to reviewing the music, there was already resentment in the air. It was the first time that The Rude 5 had performed in Britain, and there seemed to be some residual
animosity about the fact that The Attractions weren’t there, as if this new, classical-loving Costello was somehow looking down upon his past and the band that did so much to create it. This
basic hostility may not have
been helped by the relative paucity of old songs in the set, and fact that
GBH
– featuring Elvis and Richard Harvey’s
classical score – was airing on Channel Four as the tour progressed. Furthermore, Elvis’s ragged appearance and weight gain were almost constantly referred to: ‘Long-haired,
bearded bum’; ‘eccentric uncle’; and ‘Elvis Costello these days resembles a continent’ were just some of the jibes.

But these were only peripheral factors. The primary fact remained that the shows were often uninspired, and many critics and fans alike simply didn’t have time for much of the new material
Elvis was playing. On the first of six nights at the Hammersmith Odeon on 1 July, the response veered from lukewarm to openly hostile; the audiences were strangely undemonstrative, seemingly unsure
of who it really was beneath the beard.

The headline above a stunningly critical review in
Melody Maker
simply read ‘The Imposter’, while another proclaimed: ‘This Year’s Muddle’. The next night
at the Odeon, Elvis responded to a shout from the audience calling him a genius. ‘Ah, not yet I’m not,’ he replied. ‘That’s next week. And the week after that
I’ll be a fucking idiot again.’

The sets were merely solid rather than spectacular, similar in composition to the ones in the States, although ‘Oliver’s Army’ and ‘Watching The Detectives’ were
added to most concerts. There was a single rendition of ‘Shipbuilding’ in Glasgow and airings for ‘Almost Blue’ in London and Bristol. ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’
– virtually meaningless in America – also came into the British set, sung solo and complete with a post-Thatcher verse encompassing the ‘glove puppet’ Prime Minister John
Major, calling for him to ‘Kick the royal cuckoos out of the nest/And place the Queen Mother under arrest.’

On 16 July Elvis fulfilled a long-standing – and financially suicidal – commitment to return to the Shetland Isles with a band, playing the Clickimim Centre in Lerwick, where he
seemed to get a kick out of playing for locals rather than sneering critics. From there it was on to the rest of Europe, where there were a handful of cancellations due to poor ticket sales.

The torrential ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ became the new opening song on most of the remaining tour dates, first played at the Irish Feile festival on 3 August, and
carried over into the second leg of their American tour a few days later. The derision was becoming contagious. ‘Costello has the musical equivalent of Woody Allen Syndrome,’ said Fred
Schuster in the
Daily News.
‘He wants to be taken for a mature, serious artist; his public wants the funny songs.’ Schuster then went on to rate Elvis’s performance at
the Universal Amphitheatre on 17 August as exuding ‘all the passion and personality of a plate of cottage cheese. It hurts to say it: Elvis is dead.’

T
HE NEXT DECADE SAW
E
LVIS
C
OSTELLO
moving even further away from the solid ground of being
Britain’s greatest, most incisive songwriter, into less certain, less convenient territory. Along the way, he effectively ceased to be anything remotely resembling a pop star.

He was thirty-seven years old and keen to test himself further by exploring the outer reaches of his fascinations. Far from being daunted by the negative press for
Mighty Like A Rose
,
Elvis felt he was only beginning to touch the surface of his capabilities, and was as sure as ever of the intrinsic value of his artistic instincts. ‘Critcism just makes him more determined
in his own way to do whatever he wants to do,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘And
Mighty Like A Rose
gave him the confidence to do anything.’

The logical conclusion of Elvis’s obsession with classical music was to start working and writing squarely within that idiom. His on going enchantment with the Brodsky Quartet and his
frequent attendance at their concerts had not gone unnoticed by Warner Brothers, who were also the Brodsky’s record label. A meeting between the two parties was subsequently engineered
following one of their lunchtime Shostakovich concerts at the South Bank Centre in London in November 1991; the get-together between the Quartet, Elvis and Cait in the Archduke Wine Bar, proved a
spectacular success, each of
them quickly establishing a bond which had little to do with high-brow classicism, but rather was founded on personal chemistry and wide-ranging
musical enthusiasm. ‘From the first afternoon we met, we were discussing the possibility of collaboration,’ said Elvis. ‘It was a very natural thing.’
¹

The lunch meeting dragged on happily until seven o’clock in the evening, when everyone suddenly remembered they had other places to be. As they drifted out to the street to say their
goodbyes, the six began crossing the road back towards the Festival Hall. It transpired that they all had tickets for a performance of Mahler’s
Seventh Symphony
that night. ‘It
was really weird,’ says Cassidy. ‘We went to the concert and then went back to the wine bar! That was a Thursday, and we started work on the Monday.’

Throughout November and December they would meet in the Quartet’s rehearsal space at the Amadeus Centre in Maida Vale, north London, and quickly realised that musically they were all
coming from the same place. They compiled tapes of their favourite songs and instrumental passages, played music to and for each other, and talked constantly, trying to formulate a musical language
that they all understood.