Complicated Shadows (36 page)

The problems soon affected Cait. The taunts and abuses heaped upon Elvis continued even in his absence, and when The Pogues arrived in America in February 1986 she was feeling increasingly
isolated. By the time the tour reached New York in late February, she had tired of the relentlessly masculine atmosphere in the band, and was feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the first real rush
of fame. The Pogues were taking New York by storm, feted by the critics and meeting the likes of Matt Dillon and Robert De Niro, who loved the band. Twenty-one-year-old Cait was swept up and almost
away in the excitement. Taking a lot of cocaine and drinking ‘for twelve hours straight’
²⁰
in the VIP lounge of the Limelight Club, she
eventually broke down. ‘Cait was going way off the rails, she was just like a kid in a sweet shop,’ recalls Mat Snow, the
NME
journalist who accompanied The Pogues on that
tour. ‘Wasn’t sleeping, was just getting a little bit psychotic.’

Back in Britain, Elvis was concerned by the reports coming back to him. He arranged for Bill Flanagan, a New York-based journalist and MTV supremo whom he’d been friends with for many
years, to visit Cait at the hotel, take her to JFK Airport and put her on the next flight back to London. The first The Pogues knew about it was waking up the next day and finding that their bass
player was nowhere to be found. They were far from pleased.

Cait returned to America in early March to complete the tour, having reportedly slept for two days straight. She clearly needed the break, but the covert manner in which
it was taken would prove to be the beginning of the end of her involvement in the band.

BY THE TIME
K
ING
O
F
A
MERICA
was climbing the nursery slopes of the
charts in the spring of 1986, Elvis was back making a row with The Attractions. It would ultimately prove to be a valedictory reunion, but in truth the band hadn’t really been missed on the
new record. Their sole contribution on ‘Suit Of Lights’ was sober and dignified, but it would be difficult to imagine them improving on the finished album.

Finally released in February 1986,
King Of America
showed a bearded Elvis on the cover, decked in a gaudy, brocade jacket and wearing a crown. He wore almost-round, wire-rimmed
spectacles and looked both older than his years and slightly bemused, daring the audience to laugh at his world-weariness. The name Elvis Costello didn’t appear anywhere on the record, which
must have delighted Columbia. Instead, it was lumberingly credited to ‘The Costello Show featuring The Attractions and The Confederates’, co-produced by Declan Patrick Aloysius
MacManus. The sleeve dedication was to all four of his grandparents.

It was a beautiful record, restrained, sad and personal, featuring some of Elvis’s very best writing and monochrome, Dylan-esque shifts in the music. The smart word games and hedged bets
had all but vanished, replaced with a compelling honesty. The bitter-sweet ‘Indoor Fireworks’ was a book-end to the domestic pain of ‘Home Truth’,
and
a fittingly tender goodbye to Mary, while ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’ was a defiant declaration of his love for Cait, with a dig at The Pogues buried in its centre.
³⁴
In between, there were break-neck country canters, minor-key folk songs and heartbreaking ballads, while lyrically it spanned the lacerating social side-swipe of
‘Little Palaces’ to the laugh-along ‘Glitter Gulch’, all played with impeccable style and grace by the disparate band of musicians.

Not everything worked. The most unrepresentative and least alluring cut from the record had been released as a single in January. A clumpy, footsore complaint, ‘Don’t Let Me Be
Misunderstood’ reached No. 33 in the UK, backed with the third-rate Attractions tear-up ‘Baby’s Got A Brand New Hairdo’. Elsewhere, the callow R&B of ‘Eisenhower
Blues’ was simply uneccesary, while the bouncy, puppylike charms of ‘Lovable’ wore thin.

But overall
King Of America
was a triumphant return to the fray, fighting it out with
Get Happy!!
and
Imperial Bedroom
as Elvis’s finest record. In
Melody
Maker
, Nick Kent (who had crossed the floor from the
NME)
heralded him as ‘still this blighted isle’s finest songwriter, a force who, at his best, is simply beyond
peer’. The
NME
seconded the motion. Both reviews placed perhaps undue significance on the name change, reading ‘Suit Of Lights’ in particular as the burial of Elvis
Costello and the rebirth of Declan MacManus. In the US,
Creem
astutely praised Elvis’s musicianship, rightly placing his austere, undulating rhythm guitar-playing at the heart of the
album. Elsewhere, the majority of the critics were pleasantly surprised at the warmth and compassion on show, the all-encompassing excellence of the songs and the playing.

But it was the same old story: rave reviews, poor sales.
King Of America
reached No. 11 in the UK and No. 39 in the US, and Elvis was becoming increasingly disillusioned with what he
perceived to be Columbia’s growing indifference to his career. Believing that the record company still regarded
This Year’s Model
and
Armed Forces
as the
commercial template for the kind of music he should still be making, Elvis decided to tackle them head- on. The new songs he was writing suited the particularly no-nonsense recording
approach of his initial records with The Attractions. He already had ‘Blue Chair’, ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and ‘Next Time ’Round’ left over from
the
King Of America
sessions, and he wrote several more songs quickly on guitar.

The generic style of the new tracks was brutally simple and rhythmically primal, often featuring little more than two or three chords. ‘Uncomplicated’ – something of a theme
tune for the record – was written in the middle of the night by Elvis banging his hands on his kitchen table and singing into a tape player, dispensing with any musical accompaniment at all.
Under such circumstances, who else could he call but Nick Lowe and The Attractions?

The tentative rapprochement began with a one-off session at Eden Studios, cutting a hastily co-written song called ‘Seven Day Weekend’ with reggae legend Jimmy Cliff for a film
called
Club Paradise
. The presence of Cliff probably kept everyone on their best behaviour, but it was always going to be an uneasy truce.

The ‘air of suspicion and resentment still lingered’,
¹
according to Elvis, when they went into Olympic Studio One in Barnes, London,
in March to begin work on the album. ‘It was a much more uptight situation,’ said Nick Lowe. ‘It wasn’t a gang feeling. I never really knew what their internal arguments
were, but they had plenty of that, Lord knows.’
²

The idea was to get the songs down on tape before the personal chemistry became so negative that they would have to abandon the whole project. Taking the ‘uncomplicated’ maxim as far
as they could, Elvis and the band played the songs loud and live through a stage PA with no separation, ensuring lots of spillage in the sound. It was a unique approach, essentially like recording
a live concert in a cavernous studio with a few microphones dotted around the room. Subsequently, the denser songs like ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’, ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You
Blind?’, ‘Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head’
and ‘Uncomplicated’ became thick, dark blocks of noise, each part virtually inseparable from the
other.

‘It was a total mess,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘There were no screens, no separation on the drums, the bass, nothing. It was a soup.’ They often captured a track in a single
take, usually taking no more than three stabs at each song before moving on. There was little deliberation. The few overdubs that were required were usually completed straight after the best take
had been decided upon. The album’s title,
Blood & Chocolate
, seemed to perfectly sum up the texture of the music.

These techniques might have created the kind of claustrophobic effect that Elvis was looking for, but it was not a particularly rewarding experience for the band, and did little to ease personal
tensions. ‘I thought it all added to it, the fact that there was a little bit of bile in there,’ admitted Nick Lowe. ‘In fact, I used to rather encourage it.’
³
Elvis, too, was rarely happy if the atmosphere was too easy-going in the studio, although he sometimes had trouble recognising when to let go of the compulsion
to create tension. In Olympic, he stirred up the sour atmosphere to accentuate the primitive, violent music they were making. ‘He created situations where you just basically wanted to
strangle the bastard,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘You’d be just about to walk out and he’d say, “What’s the problem? What’s wrong?”. So you’d stay and
do the take and he’d get the angst that he wanted, but then you’d go away for two days thinking: “Fucking bastard”. I suppose it was an artistic device, and maybe now I can
see it a lot more than I did at the time.’

It was astonishingly effective on ‘I Want You’. Perhaps Elvis’s darkest, bravest song, it was immeasurably enhanced by the uptight, quietly furious Attractions burning a slow
fuse behind six minutes of Elvis’s increasingly unhinged cravings. The primal studio technique added to the sense of drama, and in the final minute everything the listener hears is coming
through the vocal mike, the band bleeding onto the backing track to create a ghostly echo behind the choked voice. ‘The vocal performance sent shivers down my spine,’ admitted Colin
Fairley,
engineer on the sessions. ‘The mix used on the album is the original monitor mix thirty minutes after we cut the track, warts and all. I’m convinced this
performance from the whole band was achieved because of this unusual studio set-up.’
⁴

As the highly-strung sessions continued throughout March, April and May, The Attractions eventually succeeded in conjuring up a rolling pop sound on some of the more melodic songs: Steve
Nieve’s chiming keys turned ‘Blue Chair’ into a thing of considerable beauty, while Elvis did a passable John Lennon impersonation at the end of the bridge. Bruce Thomas’s
‘Taxman’ bass line finally nailed ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, while ‘Next Time ’Round’ seemed to take ‘La Bamba’ as its lift-off point.
Elvis often undercut the songs with a degree of malevolent humour and – when it worked – it made for some exhilarating music.

Cait was around, naturally. She provided backing vocals on ‘Poor Napoleon’ and ‘Crimes Of Paris’ and co-wrote the sweeping global nightmare of ‘Tokyo Storm
Warning’ with Elvis. Some of The Attractions were rather chauvinistically sceptical of this creeping ‘Yoko Ono’ factor, but her contributions to Elvis’s songs throughout
their relationship consisted of much more than suggesting the odd word here or there over breakfast. ‘It is a huge pity Cait wrote so little in those years,’ says Philip Chevron.
‘But it would be a mistake to underestimate the work she did do. Cait was very much an equal partner on those co-compositions. She genuinely is a great writer.’

Immediately after the sessions concluded, Elvis and Cait were ‘married’ on 17 May, 1986, the day of Self Aid, a well-intentioned if politically dubious attempt to provide charity for
Ireland’s unemployed, featuring U2, Van Morrison, The Pogues and Elvis and The Attractions. In true rock ’n’ roll fashion, the ceremony – such as it was – was
romantically squeezed in between the afternoon soundcheck and the evening performance at the RDS Showground in Dublin.

In fact, the marriage was not a legally recognised union at all. Elvis was still married to Mary, and although her
initial petition for divorce was decreed on 17 November
1986, the decree absolute did not take place until much later: 3 February 1988. As such, Elvis and Cait’s union was in name only. ‘It was a spiritual wedding,’ Cait later said.
‘Dec’s been married before so we didn’t get married in church, and a registery office would have been too cold.’
⁵
The fact
that neither of these options were legally available to the couple mattered little. They were very much in love, and instead of a formal ceremony, they held hands in St Stephen’s Green in the
centre of Dublin and exchanged rings by the duck pond, as firm and genuine a commitment as either of them required. They never would officially be man and wife.

That night, Elvis and The Attractions opened with ‘Leave My Kitten Alone,’ Little Willie John’s dynamic blues, recorded for
Blood & Chocolate
but left off the
final album. He dedicated the song to, ‘Cait, my kitten from Clare’. The rest of their short set was enthusiastic, but a little rusty. Having played just one gig prior to Self Aid,
there were definitely a couple more gear changes to be made. In Dublin, ‘Uncomplicated’ and ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ fought it out on stage with ‘Pump It
Up’ and a rough, misguided cover of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, but Elvis was in fine form throughout, teasing and working the 30,000 crowd like an old hand. As if
to herald the fact that he was making classically recognisable ‘Elvis Costello’ music again, he was clean-shaven, back in his trademark black horn-rims and dark suit.