Complicated Shadows (16 page)

Women, drink and drugs played a big part on the Stiffs tour. Alcohol would always be a core constituent of The Attractions’ touring antics, but the drug use would soon escalate. This time
around it was primarily amphetamines, the quintessential punk drug.

Perhaps more damaging was the convoluted sexual affair which unwound as the tour went on. An American girl fond of calling herself Farrah Fuck-it-Minor – a pointed reference to
Charlie’s Angels
star Farrah Fawcett-Majors – was travelling on the Stiff bus, ostensibly as the companion of Steve, whom she would go on to live with for many years and with
whom she also has two children.

During the tour, Farrah had flings with both Elvis and Bruce Thomas, both of whom reportedly fell for her quite hard. The mess culminated in Newcastle on 4 November. Following the gig at the
Polytechnic, Elvis wrote ‘Pump It Up’ on the hotel fire escape of the Swallow Hotel, scrawling pages and pages detailing his love-hate relationship with rock ’n’ roll
excess, viewed from both the outside and the inside. At the heart of the song is his barely concealed disgust at how easily he has been seduced by the lifestyle. ‘It was getting so ugly I was
compelled to write ‘Pump It
Up’,’ he later said. ‘Well, just how much can you fuck, how many drugs can you do before you get so numb you can’t
really feel anything?’
¹⁶

Among other things, ‘Pump It Up’ can be interpreted as a thinly-veiled account of the escapades involving Farrah Fuck-It-Minor, the ‘bad girl’ who is ‘like a
narcotic’. He ends with the resigned acceptance that he can do little else but succumb: ‘No use wishing for any other sin.’ True to form, the song underwent drastic editing the
following day and was unveiled that evening – Bonfire Night – at Lancaster University, the tour’s final calling point. From there, all concerned crawled home. It had only been
four weeks, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was only the beginning.

Within a matter of days Elvis and The Attractions were heading off on their first trip to the United States. Starting on 15 November, the four-week Stateside trek took in shows in most of the
major cities, beginning in San Francisco and ending at the semi-legendary Stone Pony at Asbury Park, New Jersey, the club where Bruce Springsteen had made his name.

If Elvis’s rise to fame in the UK had been swift, his ascendence in the US was supersonic, when taking into account the vastness of the country and the fact that less than five months
previously he had still been working at Elizabeth Arden. As the tour went on, he attracted the kind of attention usually reserved for genuine rock stars:
Time
and
Newsweek
magazines were tailing him, and he was approached to appear on NBC’s flagship TV show
Saturday Night Live.

My Aim Is True
had initially been available only on import, but the newly minted deal that Jake had secured with Columbia ensured the record gained a full release to coincide with
Elvis’s shows; indeed, it had sold a remarkable 100,000 copies by the middle of the tour, helped by strong reviews from every organ that mattered:
Rolling Stone,
the
Village
Voice,
the
LA Times,
the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post.
‘I can hum them all, but I don’t understand any of them,’ mused the
Post’s
Mark Kernis wryly.

The paper’s reviewer Tom Zito was already marking ‘that special moment when the cult figure reaches the brink of fame’s jettison’, as he watched
Elvis perform with ‘unbelievable fury and rage and angst’ in front of 600 screaming kids in Philadelphia on 7 December. The set at the Hot Club was broadly representative of the tour as
a whole. The band kicked off with ‘Welcome To The Working Week’. Elvis – for the time being – was seemingly amenable to the idea of plugging ‘the product’ on
this side of the Atlantic, and played another fifteen songs: eight from
My Aim Is True,
²⁹
one cover – Ian Dury’s ‘Roadette
Song’ – and seven from the yet-to-be recorded next album.

Although the
New York Times
remained ambivalent about this thrift-shop rocker and his band, few shared its reservations. The shows at The Bottom Line in New York were sold out, the
crowd clamouring for standing room. There was just something about Elvis and The Attractions that clicked. He could really
sing
, which has always been important in America, his tight,
forceful voice crackling and snapping through the music. He could obviously write, too. ‘
My Aim Is True
got me listening to rock ’n’ roll again,’ says country-rock
star Steve Earle, who first heard the record in late 1977. ‘It was just that level of songwriting on a rock record was kind of a revelation until then. He was one of the handful of
songwriters who from day one could knock down the facadium and never be a slave to any particular song form.’

And The Attractions were becoming an extraordinary group, locked down tight on a superbly solid but flexible rhythmic base, another major part of the reason America took to them so readily.
After the let-down of the Sex Pistols and the thin, sexless, four-square monotony of most of punk, here was a band – and they really
were
a band, they effortlessly transcended the
sum of their parts – who truly packed a punch.

In short, Elvis and The Attractions were made for America: different but not too different; a little punky, but firmly grounded in an accepted historical lineage which
incorporated Dylan, The Beatles, Van Morrison and Springsteen. It was the latter’s name which kept springing up most often, not so much in terms of the style of the music, but
in the genuine, something-is-happening-here excitement Elvis was generating. It was hard to comprehend. But then so was America. Like most artists visiting the United States for the first time,
Elvis found the country an endlessly fascinating source of confusion, inspiration and alienation. He was soaking it all up, filling notebooks that would go on to provide the lyrics for future
albums.

Band relations were companionable, but edgy. On the road and away from home, they were thrown into each other’s lives and became something like a gang, albeit one with a recognised leader
who would pull rank whenever necessary. One of the early concerns was over billing, with The Attractions often being consigned to anonymous backing band on the publicity for the US dates. There
were spirited discussions between the group and Elvis and Jake: ‘Is it Elvis Costello and The Attractions doing these gigs or is it Elvis Costello?’, they asked. ‘Are we going to
be clear about how this is going to be billed?’ The situation was soon resolved, but it did little to foster inter-band harmony. Often, Elvis would simply retreat behind his headphones and
stare out of the window of the bus, lost in his own thoughts. This was his show after all.

It was a strangely schizophrenic tour. Reactions ranged from ecstatic in the hipper cities like San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and New York to the surly indifference of New Orleans and
Atlanta, where they shared a bill with Talking Heads. At the final show in Asbury on 16 December, Elvis treated the audience to one-off versions of The Everly Brothers’ ‘The Price Of
Love’ and Nick Lowe’s ‘Heart Of The City’, before introducing Bruce Thomas as ‘The Real Future of Rock ’n’ Roll’, a pointed reference to that
‘other’ Bruce from those parts. The cocky Englishman’s jibe apparently went down so badly that they had to lock themselves in their dressing room to escape vengeful
‘Boss’ fans after the gig. At least he now knew not to try a similar stunt in Memphis.

The following night they were back in New York. Elvis and The Attractions had been booked to make their US television debut on
Saturday Night Live
as a
replacement for the Sex Pistols, who had pulled out at the last moment, which at least explained Pete Thomas’s ‘Thanks Malc’ T-shirt. Having performed ‘Watching The
Detectives’ at the start of the show, they were midway through the original version of ‘Less Than Zero’ when – in some conjoined spirit of perversity and mischievousness
– Elvis called an unscheduled halt to the proceedings.

‘Stop! Stop!’ he shouted to the band, cutting the song short by slicing his hand through the air. ‘I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, there’s no reason to do this song
here,’ he said, before counting The Attractions into the unreleased ‘Radio, Radio’, with its ‘I wanna bite the hand that feeds me’ refrain.
Saturday Night
Live
producer Lorne Michaels was far from happy, both with the unannounced change of plan – which threw the floor crew into a panic – and also with the song’s sentiments. As
the show was live there was little option but to let him finish the song. Elvis had made his point. ‘Evidently it’s not
that
live,’
¹⁷
he later sneered, admitting that he was sick of being ‘bullied’ into playing tracks from
My Aim Is True.
He wouldn’t appear on live US televison
again until the ’80s.

* * *

By the time Elvis returned from the States for Christmas, he had signed with Radar Records, a new independent company financed by Warner Brothers. Jake had an amicable and
long-standing relationship with Andrew Lauder, previously of United Artists and a man who had dealt with both Jake and Stiff in the past. Lauder had decided to leave United Artists and form Radar
Records at around the same time as Jake decided to take Elvis and Nick Lowe away from Stiff.

‘[Radar] was set up without Elvis Costello and without Nick Lowe,’ says Lauder. ‘It was only when I sat down with Jake to say we’re leaving United Artists and starting
another record company, that he said “Do you want Elvis and Nick?”.’ At the end of their conversation in a Greek restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush, there
was a gentleman’s agreement that Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello would be joining Radar. And being a gentleman of a particular kind, Jake stuck to it.

Elvis’s parting shot for Stiff had at least provided both artist and label with their first hit. ‘Watching The Detectives’ had climbed to No. 15 in the UK charts in November
1977, the only one of Stiff’s first twenty-two singles to reach the Top 40. It was hailed by the
NME
as ‘one of the most important singles of the ’70s’, and it
certainly did much to fulfill the commerical promise of Elvis Costello. Until now, he had been a name to casually drop in hip circles. Now he had a hit record.

The recording of
This Year’s Model
was squeezed in between the end of the first US tour and the beginning of the next one, booked to begin towards the end of January. There were
also three dates at the Nashville Rooms immediately before Christmas. It was a punishing schedule, but Roger Bechirian – who engineered the album sessions at Eden Studios in London –
recalls Elvis coming off the tour radiating energy. ‘He was a star almost overnight, and I think he was quite bemused by it all, swept up with the excitement. I have a great laughing image of
him being fairly fresh-faced, like a little boy in a sweet shop.’

During the recording, Elvis stayed at Bruce Thomas’s new flat in Shepherd’s Bush much of the time. Mary was by no means oblivious to what he was getting up to on the road, and life
at Cypress Avenue was increasingly volatile. Indeed, the couple would soon separate. Nonetheless, Elvis was focused and the album came together easily. The songs had been thoroughly road tested and
required little in the way of studio embellishment. The Clash’s Mick Jones sat in on one session, playing guitar on ‘Pump It Up’ and ‘Big Tears’, but even his
contributions were deemed surplus to requirements for the final cut.

Nobody was looking for a polished record. The blueprint was mid-’60s Stones – specifically,
Aftermath
– early
Who and The Kinks. An accurate
singer in the studio, it was not unusual for Elvis’s live guide vocals to end up on the finished track, and there was very little in the way of additional over-dubbing: the odd keyboard part,
the occasional guitar, percussion and some harmony vocals. ‘We literally did the best tracks on the album – ‘Pump It Up’, ‘Chelsea’ – in one
afternoon,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘It was like Motown. We’d just go in, play them, and that was it.’

Nick Lowe was again an essential element in the creative process. He enjoyed playing the mad professor, pushing energy levels up to the max to extract the very best performances from the band.
Lowe had an impeccable ear for recognising when the band had nailed that special take with all the excitement and energy in it; no matter how much was added, it would still retain that elemental
thrill for the listener. He could be persuasive, and usually got his way. As the man who according to Elvis ‘had the task of making a sonic reality out of Nick Lowe’s directions, such
as “turn the drums into one big maraca”,’
¹⁸
Roger Bechirian played the straight-man, often taking charge when things became too
technical.

There was a firm distinction drawn between the touring antics and the more restrained behaviour in the studio. It was a sober and industrious working environment. The lights were always full up,
they would start at about 10.30 or 11 a.m. and finish around 9 p.m.; all going well, they would be in the pub by 9.30. ‘The whole thing was really good, it was really friendly, very
positive,’ says Bechirian. ‘Everyone was really excited because they were the stars of the moment.’

Taking a short break over the New Year, they reconvened in early January to complete the record. Elvis even found the time to put down rough demos of some new songs, including ‘Green
Shirt’ and ‘Big Boys’. It took eleven days in all. Still a relative tyro in the recording process, Elvis didn’t tend to be around much during the mix. He might stroll in at
some point during the day to hear what had been done and make a few comments, but at this stage he was still happy to defer the bulk of the responsibility to Lowe.

With
This Year’s Model
completed and scheduled for release in mid-March, Elvis and The Attractions warmed up for the US tour in January with a free concert
at London’s Roundhouse, where an ‘aggressive’ Elvis traded insults with members of the front row. They also fulfilled a long-standing commitment to play at a wedding in Davidstow
in Cornwall, a thank you for the rehearsal space they had used back in July of the previous year. Then came a true assault on America and then the world, not to mention the collective sensibilties
of Elvis and the band.