Complicated Shadows (49 page)

* * *

By the time the tour reached Japan on 17 September, the set had begun to loosen up a little. Elvis was playing a lot of very loud and haphazard solo guitar, a tactic which had
begun on the US tour and had increased in Japan, and did little to add to the songs. However, The Attractions had become something approximating the mercilessly well-oiled unit of old, and were
more than ready for their first extensive tour of the UK since 1984.

Before the tour kicked off on 3 November, there was a welcome distraction. While working with the Brodsky Quartet in 1992, Elvis had appeared on BBC Radio Four’s
Desert Island
Discs
, choosing his eight all-time favourite pieces of music: ‘At Last’, sung by Ross MacManus with the Joe Loss Orchestra, had featured, alongside Beethoven’s ‘Opus
35’; Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’; Mozart’s ‘Marriage Of Figaro’; The Beatles’ ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’;
Schubert’s ‘B-flat Sonata’; ‘Dido’s Lament’ sung by Anne Sofie Von Otter; and ‘Blood Count’ by Bill Strayhorn and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He
had wanted to include a recording of his son Matthew playing guitar, but feared it would make him cry.

Two years on, Elvis finally got to sing ‘At Last’ with Ross at a tribute to Joe Loss at the Barbican on 30 October. It was a brief, sentimental journey, directly at odds with the
full-throttle Attractions shows. Once again, Elvis was playing a little residency on the tour: four Friday nights at
London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire throughout
November. In between, they were playing theatres and small halls around the 2000 capacity mark, but even then most shows were far from being a sell-out.

There was a significant amount of new blood in the set. ‘I Want You’ quickly replaced ‘No Action’ as the opener, a choice guaranteed to grab any audience by the throat.
In Manchester and Glasgow, Elvis threw up ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ and ‘Good Year For The Roses’ as back-to-back encores, and on the second night
in Glasgow on 16 November he acceded to an audience request by playing Leon Payne’s ‘Psycho’, a real note from the underground.

Ultimately, however, the tour was marred by the problems Elvis was having with his voice, which eventually forced him to cancel the show in Exeter on 20 November, and led to walk-outs from some
disgruntled audience members in Bristol the following night. In truth, Elvis’s insistence on keeping the concerts as raw as possible began to seem slightly self-defeating. It was as though he
were pre-empting any criticism of having mellowed by racing through everything as fast and as furiously as possible. With the sound mixes frequently terrible, it was often to the detriment of the
material.

Part of his frenzy was aimed at rousing audiences who were tame and usually didn’t fill the halls. By the time the tour reached Oxford Apollo on 27 November, Elvis gave up any pretence at
civility. ‘You can’t stand up for sitting down,’ he screamed sarcastically during ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’, ending it all with ‘Good night, God
bless, God help you!’

However, by far the most interesting and significant feature of the tour was the inclusion of ‘new’ songs: at Poole on 8 November, The Attractions showcased two tunes Elvis had
written for other people: ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’ for The Dubliners’ Ronnie Drew and ‘Complicated Shadows’, which had been written for – and was rejected by –
Johnny Cash. By the second Friday at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on the eleventh he was also playing ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’, a slow ballad which he had reportedly
written the previous night, with a piano melody based on – or more accurately, stolen from – Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. The following Friday in
London, Elvis opened alone with ‘All This Useless Beauty’, the song he had written for June Tabor’s 1992 record,
Angel Tiger
, and a week later at the final London show he
and Steve opened with ‘I Want To Vanish’, another song written for June Tabor, this time for her
Against The Streams
album. All this was heading somewhere.

* * *

Much of Elvis’s schedule in the opening six months of 1995 was tailored to fit around his massive commitment to curate the annual Meltdown Festival at the South Bank
Centre at the end of June. During his stay at Dartington Hall in 1992, Elvis had received an offer to become the first non-classical artistic director of the festival. It would prove to be a huge
undertaking, but it was both an opportunity and a ringing endorsement he had been happy to accept.

He was certainly no stranger to the South Bank, the hub of London’s contemporary arts scene. He had spent an inordinate amount of time there since 1989 watching and listening to classical
music, and had recently been commissioned by Graham Sheffield, the Music Department Director at the South Bank, to write a piece for viol and counter-tenor as part of the tercentenary celebrations
of Henry Purcell later in the year.

However, Meltdown was on another level entirely. The week-long festival was in its third year, but this was the first time that a non-classical composer had been approached to oversee it: in the
previous two years the artistic directors had been British composer and conductor George Benjamin and Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, both little known outside contemporary classical circles.
Elvis was sufficiently worldly-wise to be aware that his name was being used as a bait for a bigger audience than a classical festival would usually attract, but he also recognised an opportunity
when he was handed one.

‘What I wanted to do was bring it to a wider audience,’ admits David Sefton who, as Producer of Contemporary Culture at the South Bank, was in charge of
Meltdown. ‘Elvis was such an obvious choice for the first non-classical composer, from the point of view of somebody who had worked so broadly across so many different worlds and clearly was
interested very widely in music.’

For Elvis, this was the chance to finally synthesise all – or at least several – of the disparate strands of his musical interests over the past five or six years. Having had three
years to plan the itinerary, he spent the time ensuring that he got it right. Initially, it was simply a case of discussing loose ideas and the range of what might be possible. From making a
conceptual wish list, it was then a case of everyone getting together periodically to discuss the options. ‘We’re obviously going to bring in other kinds of music [aside from
classical], as I don’t belong to any particular field,’ said Elvis at the end of 1994. ‘We’re still planning it but hopefully it will lead to some new collisions and happy
accidents and maybe some further collaborations on my part.’
⁷

Anything seemed possible. Meltdown provided the perfect opportunity for Elvis to express his own feelings on how accessible most of the music he loved could be, and anyone involved in its
organisation who felt that he was simply there to puff up his ego and increase his own muscial credentials was swiftly disabused of the notion. ‘He was very, very involved,’ says
Sefton. ‘He personally invited a lot of the artists to take part, he was in dialogue with a lot of them about what they would do and the content of what the evening would be. He would sit in
meetings and discuss not just pieces of classical music, but specific recordings of pieces of classical music. I mean, Elvis knows more about classical music than the guy who programmes the Proms,
I know that for a fact.’

As discussions progressed, Elvis began to focus on what might be realistically possible, as opposed to simply what he wanted to do, which he insisted included a duet of honking horns performing
from either side of the Thames. Nobody was entirely sure whether he was joking.

The festival would begin on 23 June, and as it drew closer Elvis upped his usual frantic pace, expecting others to do the same. ‘There were times when I was on the
phone at 2 a.m. as he had another idea,’ sighs David Sefton. ‘You kind of think, “Well yes, but I really want to go to sleep now!”.’

Elvis also had other varied commitments to squeeze in. On 7 March he was back at the South Bank for another landmark: the performance of ‘Put Away Forbidden Playthings’, a
composition inspired by Purcell’s ‘Fantazias’, written by Elvis for the Purcell tercentenary.

It was in two parts: an instrumental opening and closing section to be played by the viol ensemble Fretwork and a lyric for counter-tenor Michael Chance in the middle. Elvis wasn’t playing
or singing, but he was in attendance at the Purcell Room to watch the performance of his work, one of six specially commissioned for the event and something he described as ‘one of the three
most terrifying moments of my life’. He neglected to mention what the other two had been, but he needn’t have worried. The performance went smoothly enough for the
Daily
Telegraph
to call it ‘the loveliest of all six. This seemed a genuine homage’. Elvis would sing the text himself a month later with Fretwork at an AIDS benefit, and would also
reprise it during Meltdown.

Following a brief tour of Spain with the Brodsky Quartet between 23 –28 January as part of the
Grande Conciertos 1995
series, Elvis and the Quartet teamed up again on 23 March,
for a charity performance with Paul McCartney in aid of the Royal College of Music.

The concert took place at St James’s Palace in front of Prince Charles, and required Elvis to set aside his deeply held antipathy towards the Royal Family. However, he studiously avoided
meeting the Prince of Wales. ‘There’s people who want to meet him and it’s a big deal to them, but it ain’t a big deal to me,’ he said. ‘I was there at
Paul’s invitation, not his.’
⁸
It was Elvis’s first public performance with McCartney, and the two duetted happily with acoustic
guitars on ‘Mistress And Maid’ and the old Beatles song ‘One After 909’. Having already performed ‘I Almost Had A Weakness’, ‘The Birds Will Still Be
Singing’ and ‘God
Only Knows’ with the Brodsky Quartet, Elvis then left the building as quickly as he could.

The run-in to Meltdown was further complicated by the release of
Kojak Variety,
which had finally been slotted into Warner’s schedule for 9 May, almost exactly five years since it
had been recorded in Barbados. The intervening years had done little to perk up an already jaded piece of work, but Elvis was keen to ensure that the record wasn’t simply passed over as old
news.

To coincide with the album’s release, there was a one-off gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 17 May, featuring The Attractions and the two guitarists from the record: Marc Ribot
and James Burton. By the time the gig came round Elvis’s voice was in trouble after over-energetic performances on Jools Holland’s and David Letterman’s television shows, and the
set never really took flight.

He began with three solo songs to warm up, but thereafter all the songs were from
Kojak Variety
– which wouldn’t necessarily have helped to rouse the audience – except
for ‘Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down’ and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ from
Almost Blue
, specifically included to showcase James Burton’s
searing country licks. It ended with predictable encores of ‘Alison’ and ‘Pump It Up’. ‘The level of chat among the crowd told a sorry story,’ said Max Bell in
the
Evening Standard
. ‘The concert proved to be a labour of love for both the artiste and the audience – accent on the word labour.’
Kojak Variety
only limped to
No. 21 in the UK, and failed to chart in the States.

Elvis was disappointed with both the set and the reaction, but in the months leading up to Meltdown he had become accustomed to dealing with criticism. His stewardship of the festival provided a
perfect opportunity for all manner of snipes and jibes, ranging from cries of ‘pretentiousness’ about the venture from the pop end of the spectrum, to accusations of ‘dumbing
down’ from the hard-line classical fraternity. In the end, most of it boiled down to:
‘Who does this guy think he is?’

‘That’s the kind of deadening hand of anti-intellectualism,’ says David Sefton. ‘You’re not allowed to experiment, it’s
the anti-arts
stance. The only acceptance comes when you’re being told that you’re not being very much like yourself, when your name is used as a stick to beat your back with. I think that’s
the same with any pop star trying to do anything unusual. It’s definitely no-win.’

As it was, the final line-up for the festival was hugely appetising to anyone with a thirst for interesting and unique musical adventurism. It was a truly ambitious sweep across the boundaries
of modern music, with Elvis seemingly everywhere at once. In the words of David Sefton: ‘He knows no fear.’

* * *

Meltdown opened on the evening of Friday, 23 June with a performance by the Rebirth Brass Band, followed by London ensemble Afro Blok, a wall of drummers spanning the entire
stage. Then – in the spirit of sometimes wilful collaboration which was to define the festival – the Rebirth Band returned to the stage and the two acts played together.

The main act of the opening night was New York’s Jazz Passengers, an eclectic and consciously post-modern collective of saxophones, trombones, vibes and strings, with Marc Ribot’s
skewed guitar lines thrown in for good measure. Guest vocalist Debbie Harry stole the show early on, before departing to make room for Elvis to sing half-a-dozen songs, including ‘Man Out Of
Time’ and ‘God’s Comic’. The evening ended with a closing duet between Elvis and Debbie Harry, the long-since abdicated King and Queen of new wave, on Blondie’s
‘The Tide Is High’. It undeniably became the first high spot of the week.

The National Film Theatre was running a ‘Celluloid Jukebox’ season, and the next day Meltdown took film as its theme, screening some of Elvis’s favourite music movies: two
Thelonius Monk documentaries, The Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night, This Is Spinal Tap
, Jimmy Cliff in
The Harder They Come
and the Marx Brothers’
Duck Soup
among them. Elvis dropped in to chat about his own videos, and used other film extracts to illustrate his points. He also
previewed five minutes – sadly, all that would
ever be completed – of the animated feature
Tom Thumb
, for which he was scoring the music.