Complicated Shadows (50 page)

That evening, Marc Ribot and avant garde pianist Keith Tippett performed ‘Music Out Of Film’, the kind of event that, for good or ill, could only happen at a contemporary arts
festival: Ribot played live guitar over a 1920’s Soviet science fiction film called
Aelita, Queen of Mars
, while Tippett improvised over several animated shorts.

Elvis’s opening showcase as a performer fell on Sunday the twenty-fifth. In the early evening he took part in ‘Waterloo Sunset’, a performance of pieces from the Composer
Ensemble’s 300-strong songbook which included arrangements of works by Shostakovich, Brahms, Lizst, Madness, Brian Wilson, Peter Gabriel and the Pet Shop Boys. Elvis selected a closing
version of Ray Davies’s ‘Waterloo Sunset’, before departing for the Queen Elizabeth Hall for a concert entitled ‘Old Flowers In New Dirt’.

It was a show of many parts, unashamedly ambitious and illustrating something of the variety and lack of boundaries of his artistic reach. Elvis initially took to the stage alone and played six
songs on acoustic guitar, half of which were unrecorded: ‘Starting To Come To Me’, ‘All This Useless Beauty’, ‘Complicated Shadows’, ‘Indoor
Fireworks’, ‘Little Atoms’ and ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’.

Once the venerable gospel quintet The Fairfield Four had performed a selection of gospel standards, Elvis returned with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. He had worked briefly with Frisell a few
years previously on ‘Weird Nightmare’, a track on a Charles Mingus tribute record, and had later sought him out at the Village Vanguard club in New York.

The songs that had emerged as the strongest in their one brief rehearsal tended to be among the least accessible – and most neglected – of Elvis’s repertoire: ‘Poisoned
Rose’, ‘Poor Napoleon’, ‘Baby Plays Around’, ‘Love Field’, ‘Shamed Into Love’, plus an incongruous cover of ‘Gigi’, and a new
collaboration with Frisell, called ‘Deep Dead Blue’, where Elvis added words to Frisell’s music.

It was a sparse, uncompromising vocal-and-solo-guitar
performance, adding extra dimensions to the material, most of which hadn’t been heard in concert for many
years. Although one-paced and not entirely successful, the concert was put together with just a single rehearsal, an indication of just how confident Elvis had become in trusting his own instincts.
‘He takes a lot of risks,’ observes Frisell. ‘He likes to put himself into situations where he’s not sure what’s going to happen: to play in that kind of naked
circumstance with just guitar and voice, where there’s nothing else there to hold things together. He just goes in there wide open and lets it happen, and that’s the way you learn the
most, rather than trying to mould it into something that you already know.’

When Frisell departed, Elvis played a number of songs with just Steve Nieve on piano. More obvious choices like ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, ‘Just A Memory’, and
‘Shipbuilding’ lined up alongside the recently composed ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’ and a magnificent reinterpretation of ‘Temptation’ as a stately ballad. To finish,
The Fairfield Four joined Elvis and Steve for an
a capella
treatment of Van Morrison’s ‘Full Force Gale’ and a closing ‘That Day Is Done’, both ranking among
the most emotionally uplifting performances of his career.

It was a truly remarkable evening of music, all the more so when considering the fact that, as artistic director, Elvis was also running around making sure that all the events were going
smoothly. ‘Seeing him functioning was unbelievable,’ says Bill Frisell. ‘I couldn’t believe how somebody could deal with that much information all at one time.’ To add
to Elvis’s considerations, he learned over the weekend of the cancellation of Friday night’s main act, Pakistan’s Sabri Brothers, after one of them had been injured in a car
crash. On hearing the news, Elvis called Donal Lunny and asked for help in putting together a band of traditional Irish musicians for Friday’s show, a concert which would now have to be
rehearsed from scratch.

Elvis watched the Brodsky Quartet perform Szymanski and Shostakovich in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, a little nostalgic reminder of how he came to be there in the first place. The
following evening Bill Frisell played
again, starting his set solo and then expanding to a trio of trumpet and violin. He included a sweet version of Elvis’s
‘Sweet Pear’, obviously one that didn’t make the final cut for their collaboration.

On the night of Wednesday the twenty-eighth, Elvis made the second of his three major contributions to Meltdown as a performer, prefaced by a solo piano recital by Steve Nieve in the Purcell
Room.

The main performance took place in two parts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. For the opening half, Elvis was alongside the Brodsky Quartet, playing a selection of songs from
The Juliet
Letters
, but also showing off their expanded repertoire: ‘Pills And Soap’, Michael Thomas’s new composition ‘Skeleton’, Tom Waits’s ‘More Than
Rain’, ‘God Only Knows’ and Jerome Kern’s ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’. In their own way, they had become as tight a pairing as he and The Attractions had ever
been, instinctive, able to improvise and surprise each other.

Perhaps the second set was less sure of itself. The Brodskys were augmented with an eleven-piece chamber orchestra directed by Diego Masson, featuring french horns, clarinets, trumpet, flute and
double bass. Interspersed with classics such as ‘New Lace Sleeves’ and ‘Long Honeymoon’ were rarities like ‘Having It All’, ‘Punishing Kiss’, and the
beguiling ‘Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue’, arranged by Bill Frisell. Proving there were no grudges left over from the
Goodbye Cruel World
debacle, ‘Shipbuilding’ had
a new arrangement, written by Clive Langer. ‘I had a good chat with him,’ says Langer. ‘It was great to see him. I always found him brilliant to work with, he’s interesting
and fascinating and he’s got a great mind.’

The second set was over-ambitious, with the larger chamber ensemble sounding slightly cluttered after the stripped-down, assured performances of Elvis and the Brodsky Quartet. But nobody could
claim that it didn’t make for riveting listening. ‘I’d be inclined to think more in terms of a “shared path” than the woefully inadequate “cross-over”
epithet,’ said Robert Cowan in
The Independent
. ‘This was quality stuff, and as significant for the
development of music now as anything we’re
likely to hear from the hard-line avant garde.’

On the Thursday, the London Philharmonic Orchestra provided eccentric and compelling entertainment. The daytime Children’s Concert featured John Williams’s film themes for
Superman
and
Star Wars
, as well as several of Elvis’s beloved cartoon tunes. In the evening, guest conductor Gunther Schuller led the orchestra – plus a scratch
seventeen-piece jazz band, saxophonist Martin Robertson and violinist Alex Balanescu – through a melange of different music, including a suite from Bernard Hermann’s score for the film
Taxi Driver
, Duke Ellington’s ‘Night Creatures’, Mark-Antony Turnage’s ‘Drowned Out’ and Korngold’s ‘Violin Concerto’, as well as the
world premiere of Elvis’s first orchestral work, a modest three-minute ‘thumbprint’ called ‘Edge Of Ugly’. The latter was slotted into the running order with typical
haste. ‘He sang it over the telephone to me the other day,’ Schuller laughed on the eve of the performance. ‘I could tell it was fine. It’s very short, a pot-pourri that
goes from a fanfare to a waltz, some cartoon music and ends with very fast swing.’
⁹

In truth, ‘Edge Of Ugly’ was hardly the highpoint of the festival, and left many fans and critics alike desperately disappointed at both its slightness and its brevity. ‘Two
wacky xylophone motifs and a brass passage resembling the theme tune to
That’s Life!
hardly amount to orchestral fare,’ sneered Rick Jones in the
Evening Standard
. But
then it was never intended to be. The LPO concert as a whole marked the outer limits of the festival’s experimentation, a wildly eclectic meshing of styles that took most of the concert to
find its feet. By the end, it worked, but only just.

Irish vocal group Anuna began and ended proceedings on Friday night, while in the middle, Elvis played with Donal Lunny and the All-Star Irish Band, thrown together at less than a week’s
notice after the withdrawal of the Sabri Brothers. They were still deep in rehearsal on the afternoon of the show. It was a fun, necessarily spontaneous evening of polkas and reels, reuniting some
of the musicians who had played on the
Spike
sessions in Dublin.
It also gave Elvis a rare chance to perform ‘Any King’s Shilling’ and ‘Tramp
The Dirt Down’ in their original recorded format, as well as ‘American Without Tears’.

Meltdown’s final day was a sprawling affair. The afternoon concert was almost a pastiche of collaborative zeal: John Harle, the London Saxophonic, London Brass, bassist Danny Thompson, and
the seventy-nine-year-old, legendary blind New York street musician Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, all performed together. Harle played pieces from his enormously eclectic repertoire for saxophone in
the first half, some dating back to as far as the twelfth century; then after a break, Moondog conducted the ensemble through his own compositions using a large bass drum.

Perhaps mercifully, the evening concert returned to ‘The Song’, dedicated to showcasing a wide range of different voices and types of music back-to-back. It was a finale designed to
underscore the broad theme of the festival: that music from all ages and genres exists simply to be heard and felt, and needn’t be categorised and pigeonholed. However, for all its ambition,
in the end the evening couldn’t help but reflect the instincts and personality of the man who had put it together. It was essentially a melancholic choice of material and voices.

It opened with a set from one of Elvis’s favourite singers, June Tabor. After the interval a number of performers took the stage, sitting and listening when they weren’t called upon
to sing. To the backing of viol ensemble Fretwork and the Composer’s Ensemble, soprano Patricia Rozario sang pieces by Henry Purcell and William Byrd, vaulting rock singer Jeff Buckley sang
Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ and Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid In Earth’, Mary Wiegold sang a new composition entitled ‘Malicious Observer’,
which set Elvis’s lyrics to a tune written by John Woolrich, and Elvis sang his own recent Purcell tribute, ‘Put Away Forbidden Playthings’ and John Dowland’s ‘Can She
Excuse My Wrongs?’

The third and final section of the concert involved a rotating bill of Elvis, Tabor and Buckley singing to the backing of Steve Nieve and Marc Ribot. Elvis sang Randy Newman’s
‘I’ve Been Wrong Before’ from
Kojak Variety
, the
standards ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Glad To Be Unhappy’, a version of
‘Almost Blue’ which merged into ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, its original inspiration, and a sincere ‘Alison’, a song that had served Elvis well through the years. At
the end, Elvis thanked everyone for taking part in the festival and got as close to emotional as he ever does in public: ‘It’s been pretty fucking amazing, actually,’ he smiled,
encoring with a poignant ‘I Want To Vanish’. Whereupon he hugged Steve Nieve and went home. It was 1 a.m.

‘The final concert ended up running [for] about six hours, which was probably a little long,’ says David Sefton. In actual fact, it was a little over four hours, although it had
started almost an hour late. Nobody seemed to mind. The final day’s concerts were given an extra poignancy by the fact that both Moondog and Jeff Buckley would soon be dead. Moondog passed
away in 1999, while the prodigiously talented Buckley drowned in the Mississippi at the age of thirty in May 1997. It was the last time either man performed in Britain, and they were fitting
farewells. Buckley, in particular, undoubtedly stole the final show, and at his memorial at St Ann and Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn on 1 June 1997, Elvis sang a classical piece at the piano in
tribute. ‘He was fantastic,’ he said. ‘He gave everything.’

Meltdown proved a considered success. Generally, the ambitious and sometimes eccentric ideas that Elvis put together met with audience approval and enthusiasm, as well as inspiring rather than
alienating the musicians he was working with. There was little of the frictions or petty resentments that could sometimes occur when the worlds of pop and classical met, mainly because Elvis
– unequivocably – no longer regarded himself as part of any specific musical world, and had both the experience and confidence to follow his ideas through. He had become a consumate
collaborator, with an uncanny knack of choosing people who relished the opportunity to experiment.

The festival had been well attended and high-profile – famous visitors included Suggs, Eduardo Paolozzi, Terry Gilliam and Alan Bleasdale. However, there were the inevitable gripes and an
underlying sense that Elvis and
his robust ego had somehow hijacked the festival. ‘I suspect that even Costello’s most fervent well-wishers could hardly have been
prepared for the paean of self-aggrandisement which characterised the whole ethos of this year’s festival,’ wrote Antony Bye in the
Financial Times
. ‘The oversized
programme booklet set the tone, screaming out Elvis Costello in word and image on almost every page.’

It was, however, a two-way trade-off. Elvis wasn’t shy about proclaiming his talents, but he had attended every single performance during the festival, taking a personal interest in every
detail of the event. Such an unashamedly hands-on approach from a high-profile, no-holds-barred artist was inevitably going to make a dramatic and overpowering imprint on the festival. That, in
essense, was the entire point. Ultimately, the South Bank Centre were more than satisfied with the results, both commercially and artistically. ‘There certainly, to my memory, wasn’t a
bad concert,’ says David Sefton. ‘Some of the shows we did are still some of the best shows of his I’ve seen. I went on to do seven Meltdowns and I think of all of the people,
Elvis was the most hands-on. Everything you could want from a collaborator worked out.’