Complicated Shadows (34 page)

The Pogues hadn’t toured before, but they already had a well-deserved reputation for causing mayhem and a certain amount of antagonism wherever they roamed. Elvis stepped in early on when
it appeared that a mixture of financial wrangles, missing equipment and deteriorating relations between the band and the Costello road crew would result in them leaving the tour. ‘Elvis saved
the day,’ says Philip Chevron. ‘I suppose he wanted Cait to stay.’

It was clear to everyone that Elvis had taken a real shine to the bass player, although initially it had seemed that the attraction might be one-sided. Elvis was well respected but something of
a figure of fun to all The Pogues, including Cait. He was thirty, stalled in his career, and considered a little
passé
by the band. They saw him chasing Cait on tour and dubbed him
‘Uncle Brian’, a suitably seedy nickname in their eyes for an older man running after a younger woman.

Not to be outdone, The Attractions were a little amused by this young, intense woman whom they watched Elvis admire from a distance and then at increasingly close quarters, and they christened
Cait ‘Beryl’, after the tomboy comic-book character Beryl The Peril. It was all good sport,
until Cait and Elvis surprised everybody by embarking on a love
affair. ‘One night I got on the bus and there they were: very much an item,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘We’d been joking about her and then all of a sudden it got serious. And
Elvis gave me a look of absolute shit-eating defiance, as if to say: “Don’t you make a joke, don’t you even fucking
think
it, pal. This is no-go area”.’

It was one of two blossoming relationships which would help hammer the final nail in the The Attractions’ coffin. Although singer and band would stagger around in a fog of confusion and
resentment for over two years, working together occasionally in a pretence of unity, it would never be the same again.

With a divorce already pending, Elvis wasn’t sure if he could afford to keep a band who received royalties from the records on top of a yearly retainer which kept them on-call and
permanently available to him. It was an expensive business. His disaffection with the group was also taking on an increasingly personal edge. Elvis now felt protective of his feelings for Cait and
wary of The Attraction’s response. He withdrew, severing the few remaining emotional and fraternal ties with the group in the process.

T-Bone Burnett became his closest musical ally. Almost as soon as The Pogues tour had finished, Elvis went back out with T-Bone in tow. They played all over Europe between 9 November and 9
December, finding time to write an Everly-esque tribute called ‘The People’s Limousine’ together as they rode through Italy.

The concerts were becoming mammoth undertakings, ever-changing and veering wildly in mood and content from night to night and song to song. At London’s Royal Festival Hall on 3 December,
Elvis played over forty numbers, including a beautiful new piano ballad called ‘Having It All’, written for Julien Temple’s film
Absolute Beginners
but never used.
Mid-set, The Coward Brothers re-united – one last time, folks, until the next time – for a rag-bag of country covers and ’60s classics. Many of the stronger songs from
Punch
The Clock
and
Goodbye Cruel World
in particular were transformed in their simple guitar and
piano arrangements, while Elvis’s singing was deeper, more
emotionally resonant than ever before.

Captivated by his friend’s solo shows, T-Bone encouraged Elvis to record his next album using his voice and the acoustic guitar as the primary textures, allowing the tenderness in his
music to shine through relatively unadorned. ‘I [knew] how to write songs already,’ said Elvis. ‘What I learned from T-Bone was when to leave them alone.’
¹¹
After the over-cooked debacle of
Goodbye Cruel World
, he needed little persuading.

Seeking a sound palette to complement the mood of the new songs, in January 1985 the two men flew to Hollywood to make some trial recordings. A veteran of the Los Angeles session scene, this was
Burnett’s patch, and Elvis allowed himself to be lead towards the A-list session men at Sound Factory: bassist David Miner and drummer Ron Tutt, previously of Elvis Presley’s ’70s
band, known to all as the TCB Band – ‘Taking Care of Business’.

The first item on the agenda was to cut The Coward Brothers’ ‘The People’s Limousine’, to be released as a one-off single later in the year. The sessions were quick,
light-hearted, and recorded live, a world away from the laborious and fractious atmosphere of
Goodbye Cruel World
. As a B-side they knocked off Leon Payne’s classic
‘They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me’, with high, keening harmonies and twinkling mandolin. ‘It was very cool, feel-good stuff,’ Ron Tutt recalls, and it became the
blueprint for the way the next record would come together.

While in Los Angeles, Elvis also took the opportunity to record some rough demos of his new songs with just voice and guitar at Sunset Sound. These included ‘Poisoned Rose’,
‘Indoor Fireworks’, ‘American Without Tears’ and ‘Suffering Face’. The songs were musically straightforward but very strong, radically different in style and
approach to those on the last two records, with the emphasis placed firmly on naked, emotional honesty. ‘I started thinking more about the songs and much less about the records,’ said
Elvis. ‘It became clear to me that I had to write very, very simple songs. It just seemed a lot easier for me to say something straight out.’
¹²

Elvis drank a lot of whiskey during the session, and the next morning another new song – ‘The Big Light’ – popped out of the empty bottle,
complaining of suffering ‘a hangover with a personality’. However, despite the ragged nature of the demos, he returned to Britian convinced he had found a template that would give him
an escape route from the cul-de-sac he and The Attractions had backed themselves into.

Satisfied, he turned his mind to more personal concerns. Following the autumn tour, Jake Riviera had informed Pogues manager Frank Murray that Elvis would be interested in producing the band.
This was partly down to a genuine enthusiasm for the music, which dovetailed neatly with his regained enthusiasm for roots music, acoustic instruments and raw energy; it was also undoubtedly a way
of spending more time with Cait.

Their relationship intensified in the studio. ‘They’d come in together and leave together, that was on-going,’ says The Pogues sound engineer, Paul Scully. Their blossoming and
very tactile romance may have been the focus of a certain amount of ridicule – often affectionate, sometimes with a harder edge – from the band, but by and large it didn’t get in
the way of the recording process. ‘Elvis was extremely professional and certainly commited to the project the whole time,’ says the session engineer Nick Robbins. ‘[Although] the
occasional evening may have been spent chasing Cait around the studio!’

Initially, Elvis was only meant to be producing two songs: ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’, intended for a single. However, the sessions at Elephant Studios
in Wapping, east London, stretched on through January and beyond as Elvis agreed to produce the whole album. He was hands-on, supplying equipment, adding acoustic guitar to the backing tracks,
altering Cait’s bass part, and suggesting changes in instrumentation and song structure. The Pogues were in many ways tyros in the recording process, and they were impressed by Elvis’s
ability to augment the songs without adding layers of production effects or tampering with the unique style and balance of the band.

It was clear, however, that the album wouldn’t be completed in one sitting. The Pogues had dates booked throughout 1985 and Elvis was often hopping on to planes to
hook up with them as they toured Europe throughout April and into May and June. ‘He would just turn up in places,’ says Philip Chevron, who had now joined The Pogues on banjo and
guitar. ‘We would play Kenmare in Ireland and he’d be there with rough mixes of the album. He and Cait were an item, so that kind of gave him licence to turn up anywhere. He became
literally part of the entourage then.’

The record – now titled
Rum, Sodomy & The Lash
– was happily pieced together between the scattered tour dates. ‘It was a great, sort of fresh time,’ says
Paul Scully. ‘There were some great musical ideas going down, and I seem to remember Elvis having a big input.’ Indeed, he even played some of the bass parts on the record, which some
of the band construed as him showing off to Cait. Nobody seemed to mind.

While The Pogues were becoming Elvis’s new gang, The Attractions had been busy twiddling their thumbs. ‘He still hadn’t decided whether he wanted to split the band up or
not,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘We were all on wages doing nothing.’ Although Elvis seemed determined to break out of the age-old album-tour-album-tour cycle which he had rigidly and
exhaustively adhered to since the middle of 1977, he was keeping his options open. He wasn’t yet ready to completely sever his links with his old band.

Following the hard lessons of working with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, Elvis had brought back Nick Lowe for a one-off session with The Attractions at Eden Studios towards the end of 1984.
They’d attempted versions of ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and Sam Cooke’s smokey ‘Get Yourself Another Fool’, but while it was a distinct improvement on the
Goodbye Cruel World
material, the old spark proved difficult to locate.

It was some months before Elvis coralled the band again for a concert at Logan Hall in London on 9 March, a benefit for the miners involved in a long and bitter industrial dispute with the
Conservative government. The set
included pointed, politically motivated versions of ‘Big Sister’s Clothes’, The Beat’s ‘Stand Down,
Margaret’, ‘Oliver’s Army’, ‘Shipbuilding’, and ‘All You Thought Of Was Betrayal’ – a very early blueprint for ‘Tramp The Dirt
Down’.

It would be the last Attractions concert appearance for well over a year. When the call came for Elvis to play at Live Aid on 13 July, he performed alone, stepping on stage at Wembley Stadium
with just an acoustic guitar and a scraggy beard for company. Introducing an ‘old northern English folk song’, he played a sing-along rendition of one of the most famous songs in the
world. ‘I remember beforehand saying to him, “Fine, do anything”,’ recalls Live Aid organiser Bob Geldof. ‘And then when he did ‘All You Need Is Love’, it
was fucking great. He has such great taste, it was a really wonderful moment.’ With lyrical prompts scribbled on his hand, Elvis’s pared down version of The Beatles’ classic was a
deliberately ironic choice. ‘I thought it was entirely appropriate,’ said Elvis. ‘Because [love] is transparently
not
all we need.’
¹³

Nobody had to tell that to The Attractions. A few days earlier, at T-Bone Burnett’s solo show at the Duke of York Theatre on 7 July, a member of Elvis’s road crew finally let slip to
the band that they were pencilled in to play on only a section of the new record. Steve Nieve in particular was extremely upset at the news, not to mention the manner in which it had been
delivered. He had always seen Elvis and The Attractions less as a singer-plus-hired-help, and more as a unit, like The Rolling Stones. The insensitive and somewhat underhand way in which they were
now being sidelined hurt him badly, and at the Duke of York he drunkenly and publicly harangued Elvis about the plans. It looked increasingly like a band entering its death throes.

* * *

Recording for
King Of America
began in Los Angeles in July, 1985 immediately after Live Aid. It was a piecemeal affair, spread out through the summer and autumn; Elvis
wasn’t using the same band for all the sessions, and anyway, he was reluctant to spend large amounts of concentrated time in Los Angeles, a city he remained far from
fond of.

The identity of the record had formed during Elvis’s solo tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan in June and early July. Again, T-Bone Burnett was supporting, in every sense.
‘There was a tremendous amount of planning that went into that record,’ said Burnett. ‘We had pages and pages of production notes.’
¹⁴
On the long flights to and from the Far East, he and Elvis had started scheduling sessions for the album, drawing up lists of musicians, tailoring the musical line-up to suit
the specific needs of each song.

Elvis had already demo-ed most of the new material, and the tour was a chance to play-in the songs and settle on their arrangements. Nine of
King Of America
’s thirteen original
songs featured, and each one indicated beyond any dissent that Elvis had found a new lease of life in his writing. Lyrically, Cait was proving an inspiration. ‘Jack Of All Parades’ and
‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’, in particular, were unabashed declarations of love for his new girlfriend. Elvis was a romantic at heart, and having spent so long looking for the real
thing, he was finally allowing himself to admit in his songs that he might just have found it. Always an incessant chatterer on the telephone, he reportedly spent a total of almost $5000 on daily
telephone calls to Cait while he was in Australia. On one occasion, they co-wrote ‘Lovable’.

The first session for the album took place at Ocean Way studios, with T-Bone Burnett and Larry Hirsch co-producing with Elvis. They started with what became the core band on the record: Ron Tutt
on drums, Jerry Scheff on bass and James Burton on guitar, all of whom had been members of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band in the ’70s. Burton had also worked with Gram Parsons, a particularly
seductive addition to his CV.

If he was initially nervous and probably a little sceptical about playing with a band consisting entirely of session men with such mainstream – if stellar – pedigrees, the laid-back
virtuosity of the musicians soon put Elvis at
ease. The four-piece quickly settled in, cutting finished versions of ‘Our Little Angel’, ‘The Big
Light’ and ‘American Without Tears’ in the first few hours of recording.

The musicians were quick to pick up on the song’s needs and generous in putting aside any tendencies to show off their musical prowess, instead simply and selflessly serving the nuances of
each number. ‘He told me that when we first got together on
King Of America
he was sort of waiting for us to have an attitude about it,’ admits Jerry Scheff. ‘And none of
us did, although he did say that there was one thing that got him: when we got through playing the first really high intensity song [‘The Big Light’] he was really out of breath when he
finished, and I told him, “Yeah, well even the ballads were like that with Elvis Presley!”.’