Complicated Shadows (59 page)

On the opening night in Amsterdam, ‘Accidents Will Happen’, ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’, ‘You Belong To Me’, ‘Pump It Up’,
‘Chelsea’ and ‘Lipstick Vogue’ were all aired, alongside ‘Man Out Of Time’, ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and ‘I Want You’. They stuck
to this template throughout the April shows, occasionally adding ‘Beyond Belief’ or ‘Uncomplicated’.

Typically hyperactive, Elvis had another project planned for the two-week gap between the end of the brief April tour and the beginning of the world onslaught in mid-May. He had been keen to
capture the
Il Sogno
score on record for some time, and had continued working on the piece since 2000, making significant changes and ensuring that the music was no longer reliant on the
dance movements to carry it along.

In the first week of May, he ducked into Abbey Road Studios with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra to record the score. Paul Cassidy dropped in to say hello and
was blown away by the strides his friend had made in the past decade. ‘Elvis has got a score the size of a table, handwritten by him,’ he recalls with amazement. ‘We’re
talking “Second cor anglais, fourth cornet, harp”. It was really astonishing. Eight years ago he didn’t know what a piece of manuscript looked like, and there he is writing out by
hand a fullscap score for 120-piece orchestra.’

As with most classical recordings, the cost of keeping a large orchestra in the studio precluded lengthy sessions, and the work was done quickly. Elvis would spend the next two and a half years
searching for a suitable release date.

* * *

The world tour for
When I Was Cruel
kicked off at the Roseland Theatre in Seattle on 18 May and swaggered through North America until 24 June. America had loved
the record. ‘Costello’s latest album makes a master’s gifts matter again,’ said
Rolling Stone
, while the
New York Post’s
Dan
Aquilante claimed that ‘Costello will not only satisfy his old fans with this record, he’s going to win a new generation’s devotion’. He wasn’t wrong.
When I Was
Cruel
had entered the UK charts at No. 17 in April and had continued to sell well, but it was a much bigger story in the States. The record had debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard chart,
Elvis’s best-ever first-week position, and went on to sell over 200,000 copies. It also gave him a No. 1 record on college radio.

One of the earliest dates on the tour was at the UCLA’s Ackerman Grand Ballroom, the second and final instalment of Elvis’s disappointing tenure as Artist in Residence at the
university. After Meltdown, David Sefton had hoped for great things from the union, but he had caught Elvis just as his musical pendulum was swinging back into a conventional solo career. With a
hit college record, Elvis was reaching a new, younger audience, and felt compelled to continue touring to capitalise on his relative success, with the result that the UCLA collaboration did not go
to plan: the proposed US premier of
Il Sogno
with Aterballetto at UCLA was cancelled when Elvis’s touring commitments meant he would be unable to attend, and overall David Sefton had
been dismayed at the lack of focus and commitment that Elvis was able to bring to the flagship plan, which had been heavily publicised in the US.

‘To be frank, what happened was that
When I Was Cruel
became a much bigger thing for him and his pop career than had been anticipated or allowed for,’ says Sefton. ‘He
simply ended up doing other stuff. In terms of the record industry, when someone says you’re going on tour to Japan because you can sell a lot of records, you can’t really say,
“No, I’m going to LA to do an esoteric chamber theatre project!”. It unquestionably didn’t work out.’ In the end, Elvis simply brought his touring show to town on 28
May at the end of the academic year. It wasn’t anywhere close to what had been planned.

The tour was as close to an Attractions reunion as there
was ever likely to be. Davey Faragher had a more laid-back style than Bruce Thomas, but with Elvis, Pete and Steve
in place, the sound was inevitably going to lean in that direction. In concert, the
When I Was Cruel
material benefited from Steve Nieve’s vast repertoire of textures, deliberately
reined in on the record. Elvis was also getting re-acquainted with the tremelo arm and the reverb pedal on his guitar, which couldn’t help but evoke reminders of 1978. The echoing beats were
still in place, however, ensuring that this band ultimately sounded unlike any other Elvis had toured with.

He was using his older songs to build momentum for his newer songs. In this way, a spectral ‘Watching The Detectives’ would set the mood for ‘Spooky Girlfriend’, while
‘Brilliant Mistake’ lead into ‘Tart’. In New York, there was a very rare ‘How To Be Dumb’ and versions of ‘All This Useless Beauty’ and
‘Clubland’. Elvis also premiered a declamatory new soul song called ‘The Judgement’ on a few dates on the US tour, written to order for the return-to-the-fray album by soul
legend Solomon Burke.

By the time Elvis reached Japan and Australia in the middle of July, the sets were beginning to loosen up. ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Human Hands’ and ‘God Give Me
Strength’ all featured at Sydney’s Elmore Theatre on the thirteenth, while ‘Miracle Man’, ‘Little Triggers’, ‘Possession’, ‘Almost Blue’
and ‘All The Rage’ made appearances over the next few nights.

The band were becoming more subtle and attuned to the delicacies of the material they were serving. They could morph easily from the rabble-rousing racket of ‘Honey, Are You Straight Or
Are You Blind?’ into the downbeat, sample-laden twists of ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’, from the dense clatter of ‘Uncomplicated’ to a gloriously crisp ‘Man Out Of
Time’; or take flight on extended, echoing codas at the end of ‘Watching The Detectives’; ‘15 Petals’ – a somewhat crazed love song for Cait – had also
become a highlight, a huge wave of rhythm with an almost muezzin wail at its heart from Elvis.

From Australia they returned to Europe for the first
time since April, playing the festival circuit throughout July and August. Festivals had never been Elvis’s
favourite live experience – the conservative setlists, disinterested audiences, poor sound and time restraints held little appeal for him, but then the money was often spectacular. At the
V2002 festival at Chelmsford on 17 August he came face-to-face with the generation gap and didn’t like what he saw. ‘All these sullen little Thatcher’s children, looking up and
sneering because we were old,’ he sighed. ‘We played abominably, it was the longest fifty minutes of my life.’
⁷

The tour proper revved up again in September, with a full European leg kicking off in Dublin on the second, before he returned to the US for his most extensive tour for a number of years.
Halfway through the tour Elvis released
Cruel Smile
, a companion piece to
When I Was Cruel
featuring recent live versions, radical re-mixes, two versions of ‘Smile’,
and ‘When I Was Cruel No. 1’, an entirely different song to its namesake, and almost as magestic. It must only have been left off its namesake album as punishment for its obvious
similarities to bygone glories, or perhaps for its near-the-knuckle lyrical admissions: ‘Why did you leave your happy home,’ he ponders rhetorically, ‘So you could sleep with
strangers?’ It was perhaps a pertinent question.

* * *

Throughout the summer there had been rumours circulating about the state of his ‘marriage’. By September, he and Cait had agreed in private to separate permanently.
However, the end of their relationship wasn’t announced until the end of the US tour, in a brief statement issued on 25 November which stated simply: ‘It is regretfully announced that
the marriage of Elvis Costello and Cait O’Riordan has come to an end. The parting is amicable and it is hoped that the privacy of the individuals will be respected.’

The statement and unofficial announcements from ‘friends’ were at pains to make it clear that nobody else
was involved in the breakdown of the relationship,
instead blaming the disorientating effects of touring. However, by the time the statement was released, Elvis was already involved with Diana Krall, a glamourous, talented and highly successful
Canadian jazz artist ten years his junior.

In recent years, Elvis had been a regular attendee of the annual Grammy Awards in New York; back in February, he had co-presented the Song Of The Year award with No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani
and Diana Krall. ‘[It’s] essentially a beauty and the beast type of presentation,’ he joked, looking less than pristine in heavy leather jacket, stubble and loose shirt next to
the two blonde women.

However, it would prove to be an auspicious occasion for Krall, a genuine star and previous Grammy winner in her own right. ‘I saw him at the Grammys and he was so kind in helping me get
over my nervousness,’ she said the following month. ‘We clicked. And I think he’s the coolest guy.’
⁸
Their meeting seemed to
spark Krall’s curiousity about someone she knew very little about musically; friends claimed she was smitten, and she seemed inclined to agree. ‘It’s great,’ she said.
‘All of a sudden, I’m up at three in the morning and I’m surrounded by Elvis records.’
⁹

Their relationship would remain officially unconfirmed until the New Year, but quite quickly, it seems, Elvis’s feelings for Krall grew. He attended a recording session with the Brodsky
Quartet in November for an album project they were working on, involving a number of performers singing on a string arrangement of one of their own songs. Those involved included Paul McCartney,
Randy Newman, Bjork and Elvis himself.

As he was leaving the session, the Brodskys began playing their arrangement of ‘Real Emotional Girl’ by Randy Newman, a song Elvis loved and had wanted Anne Sofie Von Otter to sing
on
For The Stars.
By coincidence, he had just given Diana Krall a cassette tape with Newman’s version of the song at the beginning. Without a word, Elvis returned to the microphone
and sang the song through. Then he simply burst into tears.

Spurred by the huge upheavals in his private life, Elvis had been writing prodigiously throughout the final leg of
the US tour and on into the remaining months of 2002.
The new songs were simple piano ballads, directly influenced by the breakdown of his marriage to Cait, and the fact that he had fallen in love with someone else.

For all his forthrightness, Elvis had never really covered clearly expressed emotion terribly well. He’d written dozens of beautiful, emotive songs, but the very simplest declarations of
love and regret had never come easy. ‘I’ve always looked for the escape hatch from feeling, the get-out clause,’ he admitted. ‘That isn’t the way I’m feeling
right now.’
¹⁰
He seemed to be writing directly from his heart, with little desire to edit or disguise or obscure his meanings with codes or
double-bluffs. For perhaps the first time in his career, Elvis was facing his own emotions head on, without distance or irony.

Paul Cassidy was one of the first people to hear demos of the songs. ‘I am forever touched, because no matter what it is he does, he always sends me a copy of his demos to see what I
think,’ he says. ‘And these songs were the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever heard. Sixteen tracks of him on an old pub piano. Massive. I’d never heard Elvis like that.
I’d never heard anything like it.’

Elvis spent much of December in New York, where Krall had an apartment. In early January he was spotted with her in Nello’s restaurant on Madison Avenue, holding hands and sharing lunch.
The meeting was widely reported in magazines and papers on both sides of the Atlantic, and by early February the relationship was fully out in the open. The two played together at a charity
fundraiser at London’s Old Vic on 2 February. Elton John – someone Elvis seemed to have recently discovered an unlikely appreciation for – was chairman of the Old Vic, and during
the concert Krall and Elvis duetted on John’s ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’, Elvis singing as Krall played piano.

Clearly in love, Krall admitted to being excited about the upcoming Grammy Awards on 22 February in New York, marking a year since she first met her new man. ‘The thing I’m looking
most forward to is being with him because that’s where we met,’ she said. ‘It has significance
for me almost more than being nominated.’
¹¹
Elvis himself was nominated for three Grammys and arrived for the show a day early, rehearsing with a supergroup including Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl,
Steve Van Zandt and Pete Thomas, firming up a tribute to Joe Strummer, who had died of a heart attack just before Christmas. The next night they played a punchy version of The Clash’s
‘London Calling’ at the ceremony, as images of Strummer flickered behind them. Under the circumstances, it didn’t really matter that he went home empty-handed.

* * *

The batch of ballads he had recently written demanded an outlet. Wanting to get the songs down quickly before he lost his nerve, Elvis booked studio time in New York for April.
However, there was one piece of old, unfinished business to attend to before he could begin. To celebrate twenty-five years since they first started recording, Elvis and The Attractions were being
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland on 8 March. Elvis had initially been characteristically sceptical about the notion of a Hall of Fame for modern musicians, pondering
whether ‘putting rock and roll in a glass case would choke the life out of it’.
¹²
However, in a philosophical frame of mind, he
eventually decided that it would be ungracious to decline.

Implicit in the invitation to perform was the tantalising hope against hope that Elvis might reunite The Attractions for one last send-off, much as The Police had agreed to do on the same night.
Elvis hadn’t forgiven or forgotten that easily. ‘I’m not going to get into any phoney reunions or insincere forgiveness,’ he said unequivocably. ‘I only play with
professional musicians. I always speak with respect of Bruce Thomas and his playing but he’s a fairly unbearable human being and I don’t want to spend any more time with
him.’
¹³