Complicated Shadows (61 page)

The cross-fertilisation continued away from the music. After years of effectively managing himself, Elvis signed up with Krall’s business team of Macklam-Feldman Management, who also
looked after Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones and The Chieftans. It was a further sign that all the important elements of his life and career had moved across the Atlantic.

There were continuing performances with Steve Nieve throughout February and March, including three superb shows with the Brodsky Quartet in Boston, Nashville and New York at the end of February.
The collaborative relationship with the Quartet had now lasted longer than the initial incarnation of The Attractions, and continued to yield huge creative bounties.

However, following the gentle, personally fulfilling
detour of
North,
the most significant creative development of 2004 was taking The Imposters back into the
studio. In early 2003, Elvis had planned to keep running with the impetus created by
When I Was Cruel
by making an impromptu album with the band, playing new songs on tour in the American
south and then going into local studios to capture them on tape while the feel was fresh. However,
North
had got in the way, in the nicest possible sense. Elvis picked up on the idea a
year later, and his US concerts with The Imposters in March threw up a batch of new – or at least, unheard – songs in the encores.

On 2 and 3 April, Elvis and The Imposters played four sets at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, Mississippi, a tiny bar with a stage a mere twelve inches off the floor. It was like the very,
very
old days, the smell of sweat and beer in the air. By the time the gigs took place, Elvis and the band were already recording at Sweet Tea Studios in town, under the auspices of the
owner and engineer Dennis Herring. The concerts were necessarily experimental affairs, rowdy, rough and intimate and, in the case of ‘Heart-Shaped Bruise’, sometimes featuring two
arrangements of the same song back-to-back in order to clarify the decisions they had been making in the studio.

Many of the new songs had been culled from the long-mooted
Delivery Man
project, and there was a heavy, bluesy vein running through a significant proportion of them: ‘Button My
Lip’ was a churning reminder to think before you speak, while the ominous ‘Needle Time’ sounded as though a bastard combination of Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters had sneaked onto the
tiny stage and started jamming ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’. ‘Delivery Man’ and Elvis’s straight, heartfelt reading of Peter Green’s ‘Love That Burns’ were
also coloured deepest blue.

Highlights over the four shows were plentiful. ‘Bedlam’ was a rowdy riot in six minutes, which would have fitted snugly onto
When I Was Cruel
, while the poppy, piano-laced
stripper’s song ‘She’s Pulling Out The Pin’ – ‘She came out high and kicking/While the band played ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’ was the prize-winning
line – sounded like a refugee from the
Trust
sessions. The reflective ‘Nothing
Clings Like Ivy’ was a kissing cousin to The Beatles’
‘She’s Leaving Home’; ‘In Another Room’ was a rolling, sorrowful ballad; while the rollicking upbeat country rock of ‘There’s A Story In Your Voice’
featured Elvis in Dylan mode, reeling off a litany of character faults which by the end amounted to assassination. The two indisputable diamonds in the rough were ‘Monkey To Man’, a
scratchy, instantly catchy re-writing of Darwin’s theory of evolution – ‘For all of the misery that he has caused/He denies he’s descended from the dinosaurs’ –
and the magnificent ‘Country Darkness’, a tear wringing country-soul number and close companion to ‘Motel Matches’.

Also featured at Proud Larry’s were songs that Elvis had performed in concert several times before but had so far left unrecorded: ‘Heart-Shaped Bruise’, ‘Suspect My
Tears’, ‘Unwanted Number’ and ‘Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter’. As was normal when Elvis was testing out swathes of new material, he peppered the set with treats, rewarding
the audience’s patience. Mostly, crowd-pleasing candidates from his first three records were the order of the day: a snatch of ‘Moods For Moderns’ was the trainspotter’s
favourite this time around. Nothing from
When I Was Cruel
or
North
featured.

Elvis and the band returned to the studio over the following days to continue recording the album for Lost Highway, the ultra-hip branch of Universal Records. The sessions – which featured
guest appearances from Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris and John McFee on pedal steel – were kept raw and unadorned, with plenty of Steve Nieve magic on Moog, modulators and even the
theremin. The rawness of the recordings had shades of
Blood & Chocolate.
‘The same sound system we used in the club [was] set up in the studio,’ explained Nieve.
‘There are no headphones in sight. If we need to replace a line of vocal or overdub a guitar, or piano, the direct sound on tape goes back down through the monitor speakers to recreate the
“spill” of the live band on all the mics, as the overdub is recorded. So even the overdubs have the sound of everyone playing on them, and match up with the
original.’
¹⁷

Following the Sweet Tea sessions, Elvis and the band resurfaced at the Hi-Tone Café in Memphis for four more low-key gigs, again pregnant with new material, on 16
and 17 April. The band then went back into the studio, squeezing in a session at a vintage studio in Clarksdale, Mississippi. ‘[The] studio is an old room with old tiles, and it will give the
music a different quality and a different character,’ said Elvis. ‘It’s nice and vivid.’
¹⁸

Then it was on to Europe for a sprinkling of duo shows with Steve Nieve in England, Portugal and Italy. The sole UK show in Bournemouth on 30 April was a strange affair. It was relatively short
– a little over ninety minutes in total – and Elvis didn’t say a single word to the audience until he introduced Steve at the end of the main set. He then performed ‘Nothing
Clings Like Ivy’ solo at the piano. There were no ‘good evenings’, ‘good nights’ or ‘thank-yous’. It was all rather odd, although Elvis later claimed that
he was suffering from a throat infection. From England, he and Steve travelled on to Lisbon, Porto, Catania and Cagliari, where the shows typically opened with ‘45’, followed by
‘Accidents Will Happen’, ‘Brilliant Mistake’, ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ and ‘This House Is Empty Now’. There was an unusually high incidence of
Goodbye Cruel World
material on display: ‘Home Truth’, ‘Love Field’, ‘Peace In Our Time’ and ‘Inch By Inch’ all featured. He would
invariably end with the wracked soul classic, ‘The Dark End Of The Street’, a song which had also featured heavily in his solo shows back in 1984.

Following the duo shows with Steve, there was a single date with Bill Frisell – a second gig was cancelled at relatively short notice – at the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, Germany on
21 May, part of the ‘Century of Song’ series which also saw Frisell performing with Ron Sexsmith. ‘The idea is to feature Elvis’s songs, but then also to play songs that
mean something to him, like old standard songs,’ said Frisell beforehand. ‘Knowing him, it could be a huge amount of things to draw from.’ In reality, Elvis rather disappointingly
chose to play a set which drew almost exclusively from his own back catalogue and – although Elvis and Frisell were playing with a band, consisting of
Ron Miles on
trumpet, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Viktor Krauss on bass and Matt Chamberlain on drums – there were heavy echoes of their 1995 Meltdown collaboration in the song choices: ‘Gigi’,
‘Weird Nightmare’, ‘Deep Dead Blue’, ‘Love Field’, even ‘Sweet Pear’. However, in the end it proved to be a triumphant – if slow moving –
night of music, featuring a smattering of tracks from
North
as well as superb versions of ‘Radio Silence’ and ‘Poor Napoleon’.

The onset of summer heralded more characteristically eclectic twists and turns. He returned to Sweet Tea Studios in Mississippi in late May and June to mix the new record with Dennis Herring,
and also recorded a fine cameo on the new album by Los Lobos and a scatty version of ‘Let’s Misbehave’ for the soundtrack to the film
De-Lovely
, in which Elvis –
resplendent in white tuxedo and ironic grin – had a small part singing the Cole Porter classic.

More significantly, following shows with Steve and the Metropole Orchestra at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, on 17 July at Avery Fisher Hall in New York the
Il Sogno
score
was performed in full for the first time, played by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the same ensemble who had previously recorded Philip Glass’s acclaimed
Low Symphony.
The
landmark performance was the last of three New York concerts showcasing the strafing diversity of Elvis’s music: alongside
Il Sogno
, the Metropole Orchestra were featured on the
thirteenth and The Imposters on the fifteenth. The concerts with The Imposters looked forwards, a taster for a proposed full-blown tour to promote the new record, slated for towards the end of the
year. The inclusion of orchestral shows with the Metropole was more of a backwards glance, the result of Elvis’s nagging sensation that he hadn’t really toured the
North
material as extensively or as sympathetically as he could have, despite the fact that many felt the songs had benefited from the stripped-down duo arrangements.

The performance of
Il Sogno
in New York was particularly satisfying, a prelude to the long-delayed release of the studio recording of Elvis’s score made by the LSO in 2002 in
Abbey Road. The recording of
Il Sogno
had finally been scheduled to come out in September 2004, released
simultaneously alongside the new Imposters record. It was
called
The Delivery Man.

Also on the schedule was
The Secret Arias
, a chamber opera which Elvis had written especially for the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Part of a series of works commissioned to celebrate
the 200th anniversary of the birth of Danish story-teller Hans Christian Andersen in 2005, the opera explored Andersen’s infatuation with Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. Doubtless there were
already half-a-dozen other projects in stages somewhere between a seed in his brain and active pre-planning. However, as a marker of precisely where Elvis Costello was in 2004, the twin release of
rock ’n’ roll and orchestral works was as accurate a barometer as anything ever could be. As always with Elvis, it was difficult to predict where he might be in a year’s time. It
would probably be somewhere interesting, a road worth following him down. His sometime collaborator Richard Harvey concedes that Elvis has ‘a quarter eye on posterity’, and there
remains a sense that he is an artist whose almost pathological eclectism and fearsome drive was born of – and thereafter has been partially driven by – a keen awareness of his own
legacy, a desire to ensure that his musical obituary will be as monolithic and far-reaching as humanly possible. That said, one should never underestimate his genuine love of music.

As Elvis turned fifty in August 2004, there appeared to be no blunting of the appetite for musical discovery which had driven him through a professional career now approaching a tenure of three
decades, with almost unfathomable twists and turns. A complex character, as contradictory in his impulses and desires as any true artist worth their salt must be; as driven, controlling and
frequently as coldly calculated as the breadth of his ambition demanded, Elvis had pushed himself and those around him harder than most to get to this place – a place where he could follow
the never-ceasing music in his head to wherever it led, a place where the boundaries disappeared.

‘I have to go with what’s true to me, and I think the smart people appreciate and respect that I’m doing it for sincere reasons and that I’m not being perverse,’ he
said
in 2003. ‘I really believe that it’s all the result of curiosity and love. There’s a time in life for Hoagy Carmichael. There’s a time in life
for Claude Debussy. There’s a time in life for Jerry Lee Lewis. There’s a time in life for Destiny’s Child. All of these things have their moment.’
¹⁹

Unless otherwise credited in the text or below, all quotations are drawn from the author’s interviews, conducted between August 2002 and April 2004. All footnotes are
denoted by an * and are listed within the text at the bottom of each page, except in the Prologue, where the sole footnote comes at the end.

PROLOGUE: ‘Drunken Talk Isn’t Meant To Be Printed in the Paper’

CHAPTER ONE