Complicated Shadows (60 page)

Nonetheless, Bruce intended to be in Cleveland to collect his award. ‘I wrote to his office and said, “Look, I’m not going to cause any bother but I’m going, so deal with
it
however you want to deal with it. You can’t write me out of this one”.’

As it transpired there was little time for recriminations. The Attractions were united briefly on stage, but only to collect their awards from Elvis’s new friend Elton John, whose speech
inevitably focused on Elvis’s talents rather than the band’s, somewhat understandable given that he had played with The Attractions for less than fifteen of his twenty-five years as a
professional musician.

On stage, Elvis clapped Bruce Thomas on the back and admitted: ‘This is not the place for airing my petty grievances,’ before calling The Attractions ‘a great, great
band’. ‘Thanks for the memories,’ said Bruce Thomas, adding ‘That’s it,’ as he walked away. There were no backstage hugs or buried hatchets. It was absolute
minimal contact. Thus it was The Imposters who played ‘Pump It Up’, ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’/‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ and ‘(What’s So Funny
’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’ after the handing out of the gongs. Bruce Thomas simply stood in the crowd and watched somebody else being him.

* * *

North
was recorded a month later, engineered by Kevin Killen in Avatar Studios in New York during April and May. The city was now effectively Elvis’s new adopted
home; Waymark was up for sale, and would be sold for €1,300,000 before the end of the year. While in New York, he and Diana Krall joined Willie Nelson on stage at the Beacon Theatre to sing
‘Crazy’ on 9 April, but for most of the month Elvis was squirrelled away in the studio.

The songs were simple and stark, all whispers and sighs, and needed the subtlest of touches rather than a beat band. As such, most of the record was played in a four-piece, jazz quartet format:
Elvis singing, Steve Nieve playing simple piano, Peter Erskine on muted drums and Michael Formanek on bass. The tracks were then augmented with various shades of brass and string colours – a
forty-eight-piece orchestra, flutes, French horns. All the orchestrations
had been written by Elvis, which he then conducted. He was keen to keep it simple. ‘There are
strings, but used very sparingly,’ he said. ‘They might only play three notes on a song. There are only twelve bars of electric guitar in the whole thing.’
¹⁴

The Brodsky Quartet appeared on ‘Still’, playing live in London while Elvis sang live in New York, brought together in the moment by the magic of technology. Elvis sat at the piano
and sang the closing ballad ‘I’m In The Mood Again’ alone, a very personal ending to his most naked album to date. He recorded quickly, wanting to stay true to the immediacy of
the songs.

By the first week of May the record was being mixed, and by the time he went back on the road with The Imposters in July it was ready for release. However, there were no new songs on show until
the tour reached the Canadian border, where for four concerts it was just Elvis and Steve on-stage. The stripped-down format allowed them to flex a little, and almost half of
North
was
debuted, as well as ‘North’ itself, a tongue-in-cheek number left off the album, which espoused the joys of Canada, and one Canadian in particular.

In the end, it seemed to be an album people could either instinctively feel and hear, or which left them cold. After the rowdy and successful
When I Was Cruel
there was a general
feeling that Elvis had failed to capitalise on the renewed momentum his mainstream career had gained. As ever, he had simply followed the music. Very much a mood piece,
North
’s
initial impact was minimal; as grey and monchrome as the picture of a forlorn, rain-soaked Elvis on the cover, it was hard to hear any tunes. It was also difficult to escape the nagging sensation
that Elvis was showing off to his new girlfriend, displaying his versatility in a jazzy, piano-and-voice template which closely mirrored her own.

However, repeated listenings – which many people failed to afford it – allowed the record’s fragile beauty to emerge. Musically and lyrically a less dramatic counterpoint to
Painted From Memory
, and aspiring to Frank Sinatra’s
Wee Small Hours
territory,
North
was designed for winter
time, late-night-early-morning
listening. Elvis’s voice was most effective when simmering at the lower ends of both volume and key, but strained and wobbled elsewhere.

The songs themselves were split roughly down the middle: the first six appeared to dwell on Elvis’s break up with Cait, while the remaining five celebrated his new-found love for Diana
Krall. Domestic detectives looking to apportion blame had plenty of material to sift through, but there was no malice in these songs. Just a genuine, surprised sadness. ‘I thought we’d
make it all the way,’ he crooned on ‘You Left Me In The Dark’, while on the profoundly affecting ‘You Turned To Me’ he reflected on being ‘betrayed,’
before adding, ‘Both of us had strayed.’ The master of the double bluff hadn’t resigned his post just yet.

Much of the lyrical content, however, bordered on the banal, a disappointment for those who had waited twenty-five years for Elvis to bare his soul. In the end, it seemed that trying to
articulate the realities of love and loss rendered him as tongue-tied as everybody else, save perhaps for Smokey Robinson and Cole Porter. Some listeners regarded this as a positive. ‘He has
never sounded quite so human,’ said the
Evening Standard
, and many of the reviews agreed. ‘With every play this album becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off,’
was the
Guardian’s
verdict. There were plenty more positive notices, but again, for many the record stood or fell on whether you enjoyed Elvis’s voice stretching itself with
difficult, low-key material.

Simmy Richman concluded a quite stunningly personal attack in the
Independent On Sunday
by stating that
North
’s ‘only purpose is to serve as a faux-classical
showcase for that pompous and preposterous baritone crooning voice. This self-penned, soporific, pseudo-Sondheim sucks. With strings on’.
Time Out
expressed similar sentiments,
directing its readers towards
Songs For Swingin’ Lovers
,
In The Wee Small Hours
,
Only The Lonely
or
Come Fly With Me
. ‘Already got them?’ it
concluded. ‘Good. Now rest assured, you don’t need this.’

As ever, Elvis took such criticism personally. Having
decided to lay his heart on the line, he was stung – if not surprised – by the criticism.
‘There’s a rather unpleasant English personality trait,’ he proposed. ‘That of being uncomfortable in the presence of clearly expressed emotion.’
¹⁵
Notwithstanding the fact that he had spent an entire career avoiding such ‘clearly expressed emotion’ until now, Elvis also seemed to overlook
the possibility that people simply might not like the record on its own terms.

North
debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz charts and stayed there for five weeks, but it sold poorly, reaching only No. 42 in the UK and No. 57 in the US and notching up a mere
84,000 sales in the US in the nine months following its release. Many of the reviews had inevitably focused on the obviously autobiographical nature of the songs, and Elvis was anxious not to get
into detailed discussions regarding the circumstances of the writing of the record. The eleven songs were the first and last statement he was prepared to make about the tectonic shifts in his
private life. One interviewer mentioned Cait and he firmly stated his position. ‘It’s entirely at your discretion to mention her name, but I very much want to be respectful of her
independence as a person,’ he cautioned. ‘And one of the things you have to say when you part with somebody is that they have the right not to be drawn into the consideration of your
life. It’s really important that I don’t say anything that puts her in the public focus. It’s not fair, she didn’t ask for it.’
¹⁶

North,
it seemed, was all the explaining Elvis was going to do. That particular bridge was burned, and there was no remaining contact between the two ex-lovers. It was perhaps telling,
though, that Cait had picked up the threads of her musical life after eighteen years, as well as her defunct relationship with some of The Pogues. She remained in Dublin, and joined Philip
Chevron’s re-formed Radiators From Space (Plan 9) in December for an appearance at Joe Strummer’s memorial tribute at the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin, and continued to gig with
the band into 2004. She also sang the female part for ‘Fairytale Of New York’ at Shane MacGowan’s solo show in the
same city a few days earlier. Perhaps
most spectacularly, she went on to climb Mount Everest in the early summer of 2004.

Meanwhile, Elvis returned from the
North
tour to make plans for his marriage to Diana Krall. The tour had quite sensibly featured just Elvis and Steve, kicking off in Japan on 1
October. Most of the new record was aired, and the songs seemed to become more effective when played in groups of two or three rather than as a whole, where their similarities tended to merge into
one. In concert, with just Steve’s piano and Elvis’s voice, they were allowed to soar. ‘Costello croons with passion and style, conjuring intimacy with a flickering hand, sparking
audience participation and backing off the mic to sing without amplification,’ said the
Observer
, reviewing the show at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on 7 October. ‘He has
made a middle-aged man in young love look dignified and rather glorious.’

Wedding banns had been posted at Marylebone Town Hall in mid-October, and Elvis and Krall spent much of their time in London, staying at a suite in Claridges and dining at The Ivy while they
fulfilled their residency criteria and organised themselves. The marriage finally took place on 6 December, a statement confirming that it was ‘a private event with close friends and family
in attendance’.

Nonetheless, there was a distinctly showbiz buzz about it all. The wedding took place at the mansion home of Elton John in the Surrey countryside, with Paul McCartney and his wife Heather Mills,
David Letterman and Canada’s Consul General to New York, Pamela Wallin, among the 150 guests. The Chieftains were the house band, a safe bet for getting everyone on their feet and dancing.
The newlyweds were spotted a few days later, strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, before returning to their new home in Nanoose on Vancouver Island in Canada. Elvis was heading
north, after all.

* * *

He moved into 2004 with the usual incessant energy of ideas, the customary planned projects and side-steps. Elvis
had become increasingly well-connected
in TV and film in the States, and in recent years there had been the odd ironic toe dipped into the mainstream, popping up for brief cameos in the Spice Girls film
Spiceworld, The Larry Sanders
Show
and
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
It would be fair to say that the camera had always stopped some way short of loving Elvis, and the luckier viewers often blinked and
missed him. In 2003 he had – rather nervously – guest-presented David Letterman’s show, on which he had appeared numerous times throughout his career; while there remained
industry talk of a US television sitcom called
The Arc Angels
, based on a treatment Elvis had written in 2001 with his long-time friend, the US TV producer John Mankiewicz. Elvis had
originally composed ‘Doll Revolution’ and ‘Spooky Girlfriend’ for the show, which was reportedly being developed by Ron Howard’s company Imagine. According to Elvis,
the basic plot line was a kind of proto-feminist take on
The Monkees
, and concerned four Russian supermodels who come to the US and become the world’s biggest rock band. Nobody was
necessarily holding their breath for that one.

More significantly, Elvis made his first appearance at the Academy Awards on 29 February, nominated with his old friend T-Bone Burnett in Best Original Song category for their co-composition
‘Scarlet Tide’, sung by bluegrass artist Alison Krauss and taken from the Anthony Minghella film
Cold Mountain.
Burnett had already scored a huge hit for Lost Highway records
in 2001 by producing the wildly successful soundtrack album for
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
and had gone on to launch the DMZ record label in association with celebrated film-makers the
Coen Brothers the following year. Elvis sat on the board of advisors at DMZ alongside such luminaries as Sam Shepard, Bono, Tom Waits and Wim Wenders, hence his involvement in the
Cold
Mountain
soundtrack and his appearance at the Oscars. Willingly playing second fiddle to Alison Krauss’s stunning voice, the erstwhile Coward Brothers reunited to perform ‘Scarlet
Tide’ in front of a global television audience of a little under a billion people,
with Elvis looking oddly adrift, clutching a ukelele and occasionally playing it. It
didn’t win, but ‘Scarlet Tide’ became a regular in Elvis’s sets throughout the rest of the year.

He was becoming distinctly at ease among the red carpets, popping flashbulbs and the grinning, posed celebrity photo opportunity. He even seemed to be enjoying it. Cait had rarely savoured the
limelight and had usually shunned it, but Diana Krall was used to the hot gaze of the cameras and Elvis readily succumbed. He was even seen shopping for CDs with Elton John in Los Angeles.

The newlyweds had a direct influence on each other. Diana Krall’s record,
The Girl In The Other Room
, was released in April and debuted at No. 4 in the UK album charts. Elvis had
coaxed, cajoled and pushed his wife into composing for the first time, and the record featured six original co-compositions written by Krall and her husband. His fingerprints were evident
throughout a record which – though it had far more heart and personality than any of Krall’s previous jazz-lite output – was ultimately a strangely mismatched and melancholic
experience. Alongside a straight, respectful version of Elvis’s own ‘Almost Blue’, there were covers of songs by Tom Waits, Mose Allison, and Joni Mitchell – Costello
favourites one and all.