Complicated Shadows (31 page)

As soon as rehearsals began in early 1983, it became obvious that the new production team would have a more active role in the creative process than had been usual in the
past. While Emerick had largely left Elvis to his own devices, Langer and Winstanley demanded a far greater degree of discipline.

They shaped the songs, applying a jerky, rhythmic logic to them, structuring each one in a way that left little room for improvisation. Langer was ruthless about getting The Attractions to play
the same things over and over again, and much time and attention was taken over the contribution each instrument made to each song. It was a way of working that was alien to the traditional happy
spontaneity of Elvis and The Attractions. ‘Langer and Winstanley favoured the building block method of recording,’ Elvis recalled. ‘Retaining very little from the original live
take and tailoring each instrumental overdub to best serve the arrangement.’
¹²

In rehearsal, these methods teased out an arrangement of ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ that was unlike anything they had ever recorded. ‘It’s like a Beatles song, but Elvis
would come in and say, “I’m listening to Marvin Gaye, can we go in this direction?”,’ says Langer. ‘I was really excited by the idea that Elvis Costello could make a
calculated pop record. I wasn’t very interested in recording the band, you know, as just a
band.
I was interested in the whole idea that Elvis could make incredible pop
music.’

The challenge of making a gung-ho pop album with contemporary rhythms and lots of instrumental hooks affected the way Elvis wrote. Having used the piano to compose the bulk of the
Imperial
Bedroom
material, he had initially continued in this vein for the new songs, picking out soft melodies and melancholy ballads. Although Elvis later claimed that
Punch The Clock
was an
upbeat, outward looking record, it was clear to Langer that the familiar woes weren’t far away from the surface. ‘I thought there was a lot [of issues] from his first marriage when I
worked with him,’ he confirms. ‘‘TKO’ and things like that, I thought they were based on domestic issues. We did talk about it at times.’

Langer cajoled him into picking up a guitar to write some more lively material. ‘The Element Within Her’, ‘The Greatest Thing’ and ‘Let Them
All Talk’ were all written to fulfill this criteria, bold slices of bright pop which complemented the preordained sound they were after. In some instances, Elvis even wrote with the new horn
section in mind. ‘I wrote at least three songs on the album leaving the gaps,’ he said. ‘I used to go “ba baba, ba baba!” when I sang.’
¹³

This process was not without calculation. The perky ‘Love Went Mad’ was an example of a slight song that was included on the final record at the behest of Langer, even though its
author had serious reservations about it. Such were the compromises in creating a record with one eye on current trends and the other on the pop charts. However, Clive Langer stresses that making
the record was a mutually creative process. ‘Elvis was up for it. At certain times I would have control, other times I’d just let him do it, but if he really didn’t like something
it wouldn’t go on, it was as simple as that.’

The producers brought many of their own ‘house’ musicians and trademark musical reference points into the mix: backing vocalists Caron Wheeler and Claudia Fontaine, known as
Afrodiziak, had worked with them several times, and became a central part of the
Punch The Clock
sound. Dave Plews apart, all of the horn section – now dubbed the TKO Horns –
had been involved with Langer and Winstanley on the last Dexy’s Midnight Runners album; string arranger Dave Belford had also worked with Madness.

For the first time in the studio, the fiercely independent Attractions were sharing musical space with a number of session musicians. ‘I think the band enjoyed the process of that
album,’ says Langer. ‘The more difficult it was, the more of a challenge it was. There was a discipline, because I had a certain amount of control which they weren’t used to.
Normally Elvis had control.’ Nevertheless, neither Elvis nor the band were ever completely convinced of the merits of their producer’s highly calculated approach to making the record.
‘Those trendy production values,’ recalls Bruce
Thomas with a shudder. ‘Everything gated together, very bright and shiny. It wasn’t our thing, but it
worked on a couple of tracks.’

Ironically, the two stand-out tracks on the record were the sparsest, the ones that mostly steered clear of sonic gimmicks. ‘Pills And Soap’ was a stark, stabbing piano track based
on Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, rush-released as a single in May on Elvis’s own IMP label and then supposedly deleted – in actual fact, it never was – on
the eve of the 1983 general election. Loosely inspired by a film about the abuse of animals which had made Elvis turn vegetarian, it hid a scabarous – if obscure – political viewpoint
beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, ‘Shipbuilding’ stood up against the very best of his recorded output. While always conceding that Robert Wyatt’s version was the original, Elvis liked the song so
much he wanted it to be heard by the widest number of people possible. To make his version even more distinctive, he visualised a trumpet solo on the track.

Chet Baker wasn’t the first choice. Langer recalls that Wynton Marsalis was discussed but wasn’t in the country, while a typically undaunted Elvis had Miles Davis as his original
first pick, but it so happened that Baker was in London in May playing a residency at The Canteen. His melancholy, melodic trumpet sound and remarkable good looks had made him a 1950’s poster
boy, but he had since descended into a grim cycle of cocaine and heroin addiction which gripped him until his death in 1988.

By his own admission, Baker had never heard of Elvis Costello, but when Elvis sounded him out at The Canteen, he quickly agreed to play for scale. ‘It was a cash deal,’ recalled
Elvis. ‘He just came in; it may well have been the next day.’
¹⁴
Elvis offered to double the jazzman’s standard union fee, and few
could doubt he was worth every penny.

‘One of the best things we ever did was ‘Shipbuilding’,’ recalls Bruce Thomas, still moved by the experience many years on. ‘That was probably one of the musical
high points. Chet Baker, this wizened corpse on death’s door, strung out, just
played.
He followed this bass line and played his solo, so simple, with so much soul in it. It really
touched me. It
was one of those things that really made me think about how you judge people.’

While Langer concurs that Baker’s final contribution as heard on the record was inspirational, he remembers the session being a tough one. ‘We recorded the track live, but he kept
blowing bum notes when we got to his solo. He was going, “This isn’t jazz!” so he couldn’t quite get it. That solo is three whole takes – the band as well –
edited together, to get it to work. He was pretty spaced out.’

* * *

Elvis and The Attractions embarked on a short and rather hastily arranged tour of Ireland and England in June. During the album sessions, Elvis had found time to participate in
a couple of shows at London’s Dominion Theatre in March as a guest of Madness, and a few days later had popped over to Sweden with The Attractions to showcase three new songs –
‘Invisible Man’, ‘Charm School’ and ‘Shipbuilding’ – on a TV show. But that was the sum total of his live work until the summer.

The aim of the low-key tour was to play in the new material and get tight with the TKO Horns, who joined each gig midway through and held on until the end. It was a rather ragged affair, and
most concerts were far from sold out. It ended on 28 June with an appearance at Dingwalls’ tenth birthday charity bash, where Elvis and The Attractions joined a stellar pub-rock line up which
included Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack and a for-one-night-only reunion of Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers, with Pete Thomas back behind the drum stool.

Revisiting one of their earliest haunts, Elvis resisted the temptation to wallow in nostalgia, both on- and off-stage. ‘Oliver’s Army’ was the only pre-1980 song aired, and Ken
Smith recalls a brief, cool meeting with his old Flip City friend. ‘I went up to him and he sort of said, “Hello mate”, and shook my hand, but that was it,’ he says.
‘I had a chat with Mary, but he wasn’t bothered.’

Following the end of the tour, Elvis took the chance to
add to the IMP repertoire. Having started the independent label because he couldn’t get ‘Pills And
Soap’ out in desired time span through the regular channels, Elvis recognised an opportunity for releasing other interesting works that lacked an obvious mainstream outlet.

Former Radiators From Space man and future Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron was working in Rock On in Camden, the same record store where Elvis had stocked up on his Stax and Motown records prior
to recording
Get Happy!!
Elvis remained a regular customer, and as the two chatted one day Chevron outlined an idea he had for a version of ‘The Captains And The Kings’, from
Brendan Behan’s play
The Hostage.
‘Everybody I knew in the business were saying, “You can’t approach Elvis that way, you have to talk to Jake, you gotta go through
the usual channels”,’ remembers Chevron. ‘I thought, “Fuck that, I’ll just ask the guy!”.’

Elvis liked both Philip’s approach and his demo, and devised an ‘Elgar-meets-Palm Springs Orchestra’ arrangement of the song. Moving quickly before the US tour kicked off in
early August, he and Chevron recorded the song at Jam Studios in north London, with Colin Fairley as engineer. ‘I loved his attitude in the studio, which was: nothing but the best,’
says Chevron. ‘He got in Dave Bedford [who had arranged strings on ‘Shipbuilding’] to orchestrate it, we got the best studio possible for the sound he wanted for the orchestra,
and then like an old-fashioned independent label in America, we skimped on the B-side! It’s Elvis playing everything and me singing, and we did that in an hour including all his ad-hoc
overdubs. That’s a great way to work.’

‘The Captains And The Kings’ was released on IMP in October and gained a little media attention and even a degree of airplay. It also cemented a friendship and working relationship
between Elvis and Philip Chevron which would continue for a few years. From that point on, Chevron effectively became the de facto A&R man and sometime producer for the IMP label.

* * *

Punch The Clock
was released in the first week of August. Elvis had been uneasy about the record even as he was making it, unsure whether he
actually liked it or not. ‘He was a bit freaked out when we mixed it and he heard it back,’ admits Clive Langer. ‘“Fucking hell, what have we done? Created this pop
album”.’ He had to go on
Top Of The Pops
and buy a Gucci jumper.’

It was, of course, exactly what he had set out to do, but by the time of the album’s release, Elvis’s unease had grown into significant reservations.
Punch The Clock
became
one of the few records that he publicly and categorically stated his dislike for: he bemoaned its lack of heart, its misplaced arrangements, acknowledging that it was not a record which was
necessarily designed with longevity in mind. ‘A lot of the planning, the imaginary production of the record relates to pop music of the moment,’
¹⁵
he conceded, as good as admitting it wouldn’t stand the test of time. Later, he would be more unforgiving, lambasting the ‘passionless fads of that charmless time:
the early ’80s.’
¹⁶

Many of his criticisms held water. The record had a clear identity and a unified sound throughout, but it was thin and contrived. The Attractions were stripped of much of their personality,
while Afrodiziak and the TKO Horns were filtered into the mix with very little subtlety. But it was not all down to the production. These were self-evidently not the greatest batch of songs Elvis
had ever written. The rambling ‘King Of Thieves’, the insipid, forced jollity of ‘The World And His Wife’, and the worryingly high number of mediocre tunes jarringly welded
onto their choruses (‘Love Went Mad’, ‘Mouth Almighty’, ‘TKO’) all lacked the craft and melody of the vast majority of Elvis’s previous output.

It wasn’t all gloom, however. Aside from the peaks of ‘Shipbuilding’ and ‘Pills And Soap’, the slinky ‘Charm School’ retained its sultry slouch in the
face of the unsympathetic production, while ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Let Them All Talk’ and ‘The Greatest Thing’ were all fine pop songs. And ‘Everyday I Write
The Book’ was a fantastic song in any guise, perhaps the closest Elvis ever came to matching
the witty word-play and universal melodic reach of Smokey Robinson. But
even then, both the song’s initial live incarantion with a full-pelt Attractions, and its later acoustic transformation, outstripped the poppy recorded version.

The reviews were generally strong, if a little cautious. The
NME
heard ‘a hit, but not quite a knockout’, before astutely wondering ‘whether Elvis hasn’t
sacrificed a degree of emotional resonance in his bid for pop acceptability’. The
New York Times
praised the record for its ‘surprising textural contrasts that sound commercial
but not cliched’.

Having made a consciously populist record, Elvis made sure he was more accessible than ever before. An unprecedented amount of promotion was conducted for the new record in Europe and America.
He gave over 100 interviews in total, and became a virtual fixture on radio and television. Throughout May, June and July, Elvis would pop out at unsuspecting viewers, finding his way on to
everything from
Top Of The Pops
to BBC 1’s
Breakfast Time
, where he reviewed the morning papers with a typically acerbic eye.

It all paid off. Despite its flaws,
Punch The Clock
achieved its goals. It arrested the commercial slump, attaining gold status on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming Elvis’s
best-selling album since
Get Happy!!.
In addition, ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ gave him his biggest US single yet, climbing to No. 32 in the autumn of 1983. In America in
particular, the accessibilty of
Punch The Clock
– coupled with the previous year’s round of polite, contrite press interviews – finally laid the one-dimensional truculent
persona of old to rest. In a country that positively revels in
mea culpa
and the subsequent happy ending, however contrived, Elvis was firmly back in the good books. Now his problems were
to be found closer to home.