Complicated Shadows (30 page)

Lyrics in hand, Elvis’s arrival back from Australia preempted Langer’s return from America, and he took the opportunity to put down a guide vocal, before going into the studio to
record Robert Wyatt’s vocal over the original backing track. When Langer returned, they all got together and mixed it. The result was ‘Shipbuilding’, the Wyatt version – the
original. ‘When I heard the final mix I just left the studio and burst into tears,’ says Langer. ‘It was the most amazing thing. The whole track was beyond my dreams.’
Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’ reached No. 36 in May, 1983, by which time it was being re-visited by Elvis both in concert and on record.

* * *

Imperial Bedroom
arrived on the back of a promotional campaign consisting of one simple word: ‘Masterpiece?’ It may have flirted with the truth but probably
riled as many people as it attracted. Elvis stared from the back cover of the record wearing half-moon spectacles and a straw boater, looking both bored and a little mischievous, all traces of
malevolence wiped away.

To complete the sober, grown-up image, he began talking to the press again. ‘In the beginning [of my career]
I did a few interviews, and I didn’t feel they
went very well, so I just stopped doing them,’ he explained. ‘Why be a conspirator in this nonsense they’re writing? Then when the time went by, and I felt there were some things
that were perhaps necessary to explain, I changed my mind.’
⁸

There were other, more practical concerns. Giving interviews was an almost essential part of publicising any new album release. The lack of cooperation on Elvis’s behalf hadn’t
helped flagging sales, and his consent to giving interviews was part of a sustained charm offensive designed to run parallel with the US tour. But primarily it felt like he wanted to clear the air,
specifically regarding the Columbus incident, about which he had remained silent since that combative press conference in New York in 1979.

The most significant of all the interviews he gave was with Greil Marcus in the July 1982 issue of
Rolling Stone
, which served as both an apology and an explanation for that drunken
brawl in the bar of the Holiday Inn. ‘It’s become this terrible thing, hanging over my head,’ he admitted. ‘It’s horrible to work hard for a long time and find that
what you’re best known for is something as idiotic as this.’

He was even more candid in the
New York Times.
‘A lot of people were very angry, and rightfully so. If you make a career out of contriving anger up on stage, whether you’re
feeling angry or not, sooner or later you’ll find yourself saying things, using words you don’t mean. But I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses. There aren’t
any excuses for saying things like that.’ He repeated the apologies in the
LA Times
and in
Newsweek.
It must have been hard medicine to swallow for a man as proud and wary
of press hypocrisy as Elvis, but he surely must also have realised that if he had said those simple, heartfelt words three years earlier, he would have spared himself a lot of heartache.

In any case, the critics were already in a forgiving mood.
Imperial Bedroom
was lauded almost universally. In
Rolling Stone
, Parke Puterbaugh awarded it four-and-a-half stars
out of five, praising Elvis’s imaginative use of his voice and the crisp production. The
Village Voice
cared
less for The Beatles touches but loved the songs,
applauding the new humanity in the writing by concluding: ‘The Elvis Costello we know may have made his last record. Could that radiant entity have been merely the chrysalis of an emerging
Declan MacManus?’ Robert Palmer evoked Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart in the
New York Times
, concluding that ‘the album seems to be a concious attempt to get away from rock
entirely, to write pop songs worthy of a Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald’.

Perhaps the comparisons to the great songwriters and singers of the ’30s and ’40s were taken too far. After all, only a handful of the songs on
Imperial Bedroom
–
‘Long Honeymoon’, ‘Almost Blue’, perhaps ‘Kid About It’ and ‘Town Cryer’ – could legitimately be said to have been composed or performed in
anything approximating that style.

The pre-rock influence was more overt in terms of the instrumentation, the restraint and detail in the music, and the compassion in the voice which coloured most of the record. For despite its
myriad influences and restless insistence on shunning all the easy options,
Imperial Bedroom
was ultimately an album of fantastic, richly drawn pop music. Crafted, instantaneously
beguiling and bewildering at the same time, it endlessly rewarded repeated listens in a way that
Armed Forces
or
Trust
simply couldn’t. There was nothing that bore
comparison with the angry swagger of
This Year’s Model
or the bare-knuckled punch of
Get Happy!!.
This was something new. Brighter than
Trust
, frequently humourous,
grown-up without being dour or unadventurous, it was a coherent, audacious fulfilling of much of Elvis’s immense potential.

The
NME
’s Richard Cook observed that ‘the obsessive little misanthrope has been displaced by a cooler commentator’, and noted astutely that ‘Costello has finally
achieved a synthesis of words and music’.
Melody Maker
was a rare dissenting voice, yearning for a little less cleverness and a little more ‘raw passion’ and songs which
really stick. ‘Frankly Elvis,’ concluded Adam Sweeting, ‘I expected more.’

* * *

The US tour kicked off in Santa Cruz on 14 July, and it was clear that Elvis’s new-found charm had not deserted him on stage. His high spirits,
apparent throughout the tour, peaked at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia on 25 August. It was his twenty-eighth birthday, and before the final encore, Jake came on stage and announced to
the audience that ‘a dangerous animal has escaped from the zoo’. The Attractions then returned to the stage followed by Elvis wearing a full gorilla suit, jamming the microphone inside
the gorilla head to sing a jazzy R&B cover of Percy Mayfield’s ‘Danger Zone’.

A funky, R&B flavour was evident throughout the tour: regular covers included James Brown’s ‘I Got You’, The O’Jays’ ‘Backstabbers’ and The
Youngbloods’ ‘Pontiac Blues’, a Flip City live staple from way back in ’73 and ’74. Elvis played somewhere between thirty and forty songs a night, primarily focused
around
Get Happy!!, Trust
and
Imperial Bedroom
material, but finding room for everything from the country material to ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Waiting For
The End Of The World’, both of which made a rare appearance during the first of two nights at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre on 20 July. ‘Shipbuilding’ was the only
‘new’ song on display.

With a larger body of work to draw on, catering for all aspects of the audience’s tastes proved problematic. In San Diego on 24 July,
Newsweek’s
Jim Miller found that
‘most of Costello’s new material seemed to sail right past the restive young crowd. What grabbed the fans was the jackhammer beat of ‘Pump It Up’ – one of those angry
songs out of Costello’s past.’ Elvis admitted that pleasing everyone as well as himself was becoming something of a conundrum. Previously, he would have played whatever he wanted.

But representing all the extra nuances and textures of his most recent recorded work on stage was the greatest challenge. As he stretched himself in the studio, trying to reproduce
Imperial
Bedroom’
s subtleties of voice, instrumentation and style in an hour-and-a-half was nigh on impossible. He had fewer options in concert, both with his vocal stylings and The
Attraction’s arrangements. The shows were often powerful, but the power came at a price:
‘. . . And In Every Home’, ‘Beyond Belief’ and
‘Man Out Of Time’ in particular were proving tricky to pull off live.

The tour ended on 6 September, and Elvis and The Attractions immediately flew home to do it all again in Britain. There had been no hit singles in the UK, and although the album reached No. 6
– but only No. 30 in the States – it quickly dropped. ‘
Imperial Bedroom
got some of the greatest reviews imaginable, [but] it didn’t sell more than any other
record,’ said Elvis later. ‘The record company couldn’t find any obvious hit singles on it, though I thought it had several.’
⁹

He had legitimate cause for complaint. In America in particular, Columbia still hankered after the golden age of
Armed Forces.
They had little appetite for the new, cultured Costello,
at least not musically, and Elvis felt they were shamefully timid in promoting the record. However, the stuttering sales of
Imperial Bedroom
also marked the beginning of a dedicated
Costello campaign, devoted to blaming the record company for any number of woes. Largely through his own appetites, Elvis had become an artist with a loyal core audience, but his career now
operated on the fringes of commercial viability. With only a few exceptions, the music he made from this point on was too varied, too challenging and often too downright bloody-minded to attract
huge audience numbers or score hit singles. He couldn’t have it both ways.

Nonetheless, Elvis appeared relaxed and amiable throughout ‘The Bedroom Of Britain’ tour, letting fans backstage to meet and talk to the band, signing autographs, posing for
photographs and handing out kisses. As one observer noted, ‘no angry words, no sneers, just smiles and jokes’.

On the opening night in Southampton, he played for well over two hours, cramming in nearly forty songs. Aside from his own interpretation of ‘Shipbuilding’, the only other new song
unveiled during the four-week tour was ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, written quickly in a Derby hotel room on 23 September as a Merseybeat spoof, and performed the following evening at
Leicester De Montfort Hall. Just like the old days.

Elvis spent part of the time following the end of the tour on 6 October in the studio, producing six tracks for The Bluebells,
³²
who had provided support on the tour. He was writing new material, wrestling with a way of putting on a more sophisticated live show that could cope with the complexities of his most recent
songs.

Having watched
Imperial Bedroom
die something akin to a commercial death despite a keen promotional campaign, rave reviews and a successful tour, he was eager to change direction once
again with the next record. With The Attractions in tow, he road-tested some of the songs for what would become
Punch The Clock
in late 1982 with a single show at the Royal Court Theatre
in Liverpool on 21 December and two shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh.

Each night, as the shows reached their conclusion, The Attractions were augmented by the Imperial Horns, the brass section from Dexy’s Midnight Runners: Big Jim Paterson on trombone, Paul
Speare on tenor sax, Jeff Blythe on alto sax, plus newcomer Dave Plews on trumpet. ‘I had the idea of getting some horn guys in and they were available,’ he said later. ‘So we
[rehearsed] songs going back over the last two or three albums and did arrangements for those. It worked out so well that I was keen to have them come in and play on the new
album.’
¹⁰

He had already used a ‘thrown together’ brass section on the November single ‘Party Party’, a dreadfully jaunty number written and recorded quickly to accompany a truly
forgettable film of the same name. Now Elvis planned to make horns an integral feature of his new sound.

The handful of new songs on show at the Christmas concerts – among them ‘Mouth Almighty’, ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, ‘The Comedians’, and ‘The
World And His Wife’ – bore scant relation to the versions that would eventually appear on the next record. The early, storming live version of ‘Everyday I Write The Book’,
for example, showcased the song in the traditional, bustling Attractions
mould, while ‘The World And His Wife’ was originally played solo as an acoustic
ballad.

However, it became clear that everything was open to change, similar in a sense to the spirit that Elvis and the band had harnessed during the
Get Happy!!
sessions. While that record
had been a breakneck, drug-fuelled sprint through every rough-and-ready soul styling in the book,
Punch The Clock
was to be a slicker, more calculated take on the pop-soul sound.

It would not be a record where critical plaudits were high on the list of priorities. For all his belief that success wasn’t measured in terms of shifting units, Elvis badly wanted a hit
single. Rather like a film actor who deigns to star in the occasional Hollywood blockbuster in order to fund his more heartfelt independent efforts, from this point on he would always insist upon
trying to pick up the threads of his pop career after spells of single-minded experimentation; partly to show that he could, and partly because he understood how the realities of the business
worked. ‘Counting
Trust
, we’d gone three records without any substantial hit apart from ‘Good Year For The Roses’,’ he later admitted. ‘You have to
consider if you allow that contact with the mainstream audience to be severed for too long, you may lose the freedom to do what you want to do.’
¹¹

From the very start,
Punch The Clock
was a conscious attempt to reconnect, and Elvis needed a production style to match his ambitions. Having satisfied his more sprawling, cerebral
cravings under the tolerant gaze of Geoff Emerick, he sought out the services of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. They were undisputably the hottest pop producers of the day, and had recently
scored a US No. 1 single with ‘Our House’ by the quintessentially English pop group Madness. The fact that Elvis’s old friend Langer was the dominant partner in the axis was an
added incentive, but the duo’s Midas touch in the charts accounted for the major part of their appeal. ‘I think he accepted that that’s what we did as producers: [have]
hits,’ says Langer. ‘He always reacts against what he’s done before, so we went for it. We tried to get singles.’