Complicated Shadows (14 page)

* * *

Elvis and his new band rehearsed a little in London before heading west to a disused RAF base near the village of Davidstow in Cornwall for an intense week of rehearsals. Away
from the glare of the capital, they would play their first shows and begin to take stock of each other. ‘With Elvis, you never knew whether he was copping an attitude, doing an act or
adopting a stance,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘I remember driving halfway down to Cornwall and he was muttering, “Too many fucking trees, too many fucking trees!”.’

The other three members of the band were equally idiosyncratic. Pete was a drummer, through and through, with all that that implies. Bruce was slightly world weary and cynical, but still
possessed the ability to thoroughly enjoy himself. Steve was the baby of the band, a little quiet, eccentric and impossibly eager to lose his innocence.

From the outset, it was clear that this would never be
a group with an unbreakable bond or a shared sense of identity. When it came to making music, they relished the
collective sense of us-against-the-world antagonism which flowed directly from Elvis, but the reality of the personal relationships within the band was rather different. They got on well enough,
and leaned on each other over the years during the molten pressures of constant touring, but Elvis never lost his remoteness. This was his career, they were his songs, and he was the leader of the
band. It would always be one-plus-three.

Musically they gelled quickly, hitting on a style which Elvis, easily and unashamedly the least technically accomplished of the quartet, adapted to by very often staying out of the way.
‘Bruce is a very melodic bass player and Pete is a very rhythmic drummer,’ he said later. ‘That meant we could almost get away with being a trio, because an awful lot of the time
I didn’t play. Rather than making a bad job of trying to play well, I was quite happy to exploit the simple things I could do.’
⁵
The wild
card was Steve, whose combination of technical ability and lack of schooling in conventional pop nuances meant that they had a truly unique twist. ‘We had a thing nobody else had,’ said
Elvis. ‘We had a
really
good piano player.’
⁶

What emerged was a lean, muscular outfit, able to complement both the ’60s classicism of Elvis’s songwriting and the pushy, punkish energy of his attitude. It was almost immediately
apparent Elvis had found, virtually by chance, through the lottery of auditions, a truly great
band
. They hung together as a unit, boasting a rare blend of virtuosity stripped of any
extravagant tendencies. It was never really apparent whether he sufficiently appreciated his good fortune.

It may have been the overall sound of the band that really captured the imagination, but their input made an appreciable difference to the structure of the songs as well. Elvis favoured the
‘immaculate conception’ approach to songwriting. He didn’t like to reveal or share his working process, almost always bringing his songs to the group fully formed. But although
there was precious little jamming or consultation involved in the actual writing,
there was often plenty of give in the style and the arrangements, and the band relished the
process of claiming as their own both the songs from
My Aim Is True
and the newer songs he was writing.

The fruits of their creative process can be heard in the evolution of ‘(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea’, a pointed dig at the shallow charms of swinging London. Many of
Elvis’s early songs were explicitly modelled on others, and in the case of ‘Chelsea’ it was The Kinks’ ‘All Day And All Of The Night’. Originally acoustic and
played much slower, the song really took shape in the hands of the new rhythm section: the churning, arpeggiated bass riff and the choppy drums transformed it into something up-beat, distinctive
and effortlessly modish. A hit, in other words.

They had a set together in a week, but took longer to find a name: the three low-key gigs at the Penzance Winter Gardens on Thursday, 14 July, Plymouth Woods on the fifteenth and Davidstow
village hall on the sixteenth were simply billed as Elvis Costello. Even in this far flung corner of England, there was already sufficient media interest in Elvis for
Record Mirror
to send
their reviewer Chris Rushton down to the Plymouth show. He returned impressed by the ‘slightly stroppy creep of a school prefect’ and his backing band. ‘It’s difficult to
label Costello,’ he wrote, before praising the ‘tight lyrics, smooth aggression and power’ of the performance. Jake also watched the shows and was typically forthright:
‘You’re a world-class band,’ he told them at the end of the week. For once he wasn’t exaggerating.

Filled with confidence, they dropped briefly into London before heading north, making their big city debut at Manchester’s Rafters Club on 21 July, the eve of the release of
My Aim Is
True
. Earlier in the day, Elvis performed a solo version of ‘Alison’ for Granada’s regional programme
What’s On
, his first-ever television appearance. That
night, he played the entire album in the twenty-one song set, plus an additional eight numbers which were brand-new to the audience. Then it was back to London to watch and wait as the album
finally hit the shops.

Despite the spontaneous, piecemeal nature of its making,
My Aim Is True
held together with a cohesion which belied its hesitant inception. It was lovingly put
together, with a striking, iconic image of a knock-kneed Elvis clutching his Fender Jazzmaster on the cover, and the running order was carefully selected. Stiff and Elvis already had one eye firmly
on their market: the new wave weathervane dictated that strong, country-esque songs like ‘Radio Sweetheart’ and ‘Stranger In The House’, which would have added texture to
the record were deliberately dropped for fear of scaring away portions of the audience. The selectiveness also extended to the sleeve credits: there was no mention of Clover anywhere on the
record.

In ‘Alison’, ‘Red Shoes’ and ‘Less Than Zero’, the record contained at least three enduring classics, but many of the other nine songs – ‘Miracle
Man’, ‘Blame It On Cain’, ‘Sneaky Feelings’ and ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’ – were equally strong. The few weaker tracks were the ones that
sounded the most derivative (the kitschy ‘Leader Of The Pack’ rhythms of ‘No Dancing’, the easy-going pub-rock of ‘Pay It Back’, the excessive guitar workouts on
‘I’m Not Angry’), but the bulk of the record sounded extraordinarily fresh.

The sense of emotional intensity and self-laceration in the writing was only slightly curbed by the backing of Clover, which was discreet, but a little polite, embellishing the songs rather than
sharpening them. While Elvis would struggle to ever match the pained tenderness of the recorded version of ‘Alison’, it was the exception that proved the rule: later live incarnations
of the
My Aim Is True
material only served to give a glimpse of what a stunning record it might have been had The Attractions played on it. As it was, the album was an accurate and
compelling marker of where Elvis had come from, rather than a statement of intent of where he was now heading. It made him a contender.

Reviews were of the rave variety.
Melody Maker’s
Allan Jones – already hopelessly embroiled in a critical love affair with Elvis which would last the best part of two
decades – noted the preoccupation with ‘emotional violence’ and ‘sexual inadequacy’ in passing, but was primarily overjoyed – noted the preoccupation with
emotional violence and sexual inadequacy in passing, but was primarily overjoyed
at the fact that the album contained ‘enough potential hit singles to stock a bloody
juke-box. I can think of only a few albums released this year that rival its general excellence. Buy, buy!’

Roy Carr’s
NME
review was similarly positive, but more perceptive. ‘Costello must have taken a lot of emotional knocks to come up with such a powerful album. To the extent
that one is reticent to guess to what lengths he may have to go to enact a second instalment.’ The answer? As far as necessary.

* * *

With
My Aim Is True
shifting a reported 11,000 copies in its first three days in the shops, Elvis hit overdrive. He and the band cut a Radio One session for John Peel
on 25 July, playing ‘Less Than Zero’, ‘Blame It On Cain’, ‘Mystery Dance’ and ‘Red Shoes’. Their London debut came the next night.

True to form, the gig at Dingwalls didn’t go ahead without some Jake-inspired tomfoolery. On the day of the show, Elvis and a placard-carrying Stiff ensemble led by Riviera marched on a
CBS Records convention being held at the Hilton Hotel in Mayfair’s exclusive Park Lane. Setting up on the pavement outside the hotel, Elvis plugged into his battery-powered amp and began
performing. It was all another harmless exercise in hype, with the added incentive of attempting to drum up some interest in Elvis from Columbia executives. He was still only licensed in the United
Kingdom, and both Jake and Elvis knew that a US deal was the big prize.

Although the CBS execs who popped out at lunchtime to see what was happening seemed to be enjoying themselves, the combined effect of Elvis’s typically bug-eyed, full-throated performance
and the rowdy Stiff party worried the Hilton’s management sufficiently for them to call the police. When they arrived, the lawmen accused Elvis of busking, which by definition means
performing illegally for money. Ever the rebel in the three-button suit jacket, Elvis body-swerved all attempts to get him to stop
playing and was eventually arrested for his
impertinence and taken to the nearest police station, only to be rescued by his solicitor just as he was heading for the cells. ‘I don’t know what was said, but suddenly I was given a
cup of tea, they completed the paperwork, and [I] was released,’ he said. ‘It was no big deal.’
⁷

But the stunt worked. Elvis’s pavement performance brought him to the attention of CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff and made an impression on A&R man Greg Geller, who was instrumental in
signing him to Columbia Records in the US three months later. The legend told only part of the story, however: a combination of the frantic machinations of Jake Riviera and the fact that
Elvis’s profile in the UK was sky-high by the autumn of 1977 ensured that he would almost certainly have secured a US deal whether he had flirted with criminal noteriety or not.

Having escaped incarceration, the gig at Dingwalls that night should have been a cause for celebration. Elvis wasn’t in the mood, however, and later called the set a
‘disaster’. Indeed, it was not lost on observers that he was becoming increasingly difficult. At Dingwalls, the audience filled the space between the bar on one side and a restaurant
area on the other. This did not go down well.

‘People were eating,’ recalls Ken Smith, who was at the show. ‘Elvis said: “I can’t play while people are fucking eating.” That rather annoyed the management.
He hadn’t
quite
cracked it at that point.’ All this did nothing to dampen the fervour of the crowd who greeted the show with ‘hysterical enthusiasm’, according to
Melody Maker
. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t play Dingwalls again for six years.

Elvis dutifully arrived in court the following morning to take his punishment like a man,
²⁵
and that night he was back at the Hope and Anchor, a last
familiar stop before he embarked on his first steps into the madness of leading a professional touring band around the country. The Nag’s
Head in High Wycombe may not
have been the epicentre of rock ’n’ roll, but it was a start.

* * *

The tour was a disjointed affair. A five-week-long Sunday night residency at the Nashville Rooms meant that they had to be back in London at least once a week, but between 28
July and 4 September they also played in provincial towns and major cities all over Britain, as well as to a couple of continental festivals. By now the group had been christened The Attractions,
having initially and understandably resisted Elvis’s idea to call them The Sticky Valentines, a line from ‘Alison’ which most assuredly did not translate into global
superstardom.

By and large, the setlist remained the same throughout the tour: most of
My Aim Is True
reworked with The Attractions, plus at least half-a-dozen new songs. Towards the end ‘You
Belong To Me’ was added and ‘Radio, Radio’ made its debut as an Elvis Costello rather than a Flip City song. Another oldie, the atypically quirky ‘Hoover Factory’,
also made the odd appearance.

After the concert at Huddersfield Polytechnic on 29 July, Elvis and the band were drinking together at the hotel, and started chatting about what they aspired to achieve from their musical
careers. ‘I remember asking Elvis, “What do you want from all this?”, says Bruce Thomas. ‘And he just looked at me – he could be very arch – and said, “I
want to be able to buy people”.’ The tour highlight was a memorable ‘hometown’ gig with Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds at Eric’s in Liverpool on 2 August. At the
soundcheck Elvis caught up with his old Rusty sidekick Allan Mayes, who accompanied him back to Lilian’s house for a cup of tea and a chat. The two had kept in contact sporadically, and were
still on good terms. Indeed, Elvis had made sure Mayes heard
My Aim Is True
by sending him an advance copy of the album.

‘I don’t remember him changing,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember any obnoxiousness, I don’t remember any animosity.’ There was one problem, however. His old
friend
didn’t know what to call him, left flat-footed and a little embarrassed by the game of media cat-and-mouse which surrounded Elvis at the time. ‘That was a
nightmare for me, because nobody was supposed to know his real name,’ he admits.

The local paper’s review of that night’s gig at Eric’s was telling. Already, the praise came with a caveat. ‘Enough has appeared in print on this gawky wonder for the
time being,’ cautioned the reviewer, before succumbing: ‘The lad is great, and so is the band.’

And so they were, an explosive, ferocious live spectacle. Those who came to the shows expecting a reproduction of the chugging pleasantries of
My Aim Is True
were knocked backwards by
the sheer violence, energy and electricity of Elvis and The Attractions. This was something quite different from the record, a wild, furious unleashing of frustration, unsettling in its intensity.
It was irresistible.