Complicated Shadows (44 page)

Almost immediately, the Brodsky Quartet realised that Elvis was not some bored, dilettante rock star, dangling his toes in classical music for want of anything better to do. ‘We thought
that maybe he knew a wee bit about this and a wee bit about that, but the fact that he could talk about orchestral pieces or a Stravinsky ballet was the extraordinary thing,’ says Paul
Cassidy. ‘It was fascinating for us to find that Elvis was not only aware of the music of Shostakovich, for instance, but knew it intimately and was able to say, “You know that bit in
the
Fourteenth Symphony
, that’s the sort of thing that turns me on”.’ According to violinist Michael Thomas, ‘Elvis [knew] more about classical music than we
did.’

Similarly, Elvis was excited and a little relieved to discover that the Quartet were not confined to the cloistered world of classical music. Not only did they know his
own music well and had attended many of his concerts, but they also had a wider awareness of the more innovative artists in pop and rock. ‘We were able to say to him,
“Don’t you think Brian Wilson is a genius?”,’ confirms Cassidy. ‘We were aware of Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell and Meredith Monk and Bjork and he was aware of the sort
of people we were building up.’

It proved to be an almost perfect mixture of personalities and interests. Before breaking up for a Christmas hiatus in December, they agreed to reconvene in January and February and begin
writing together. Already, they had settled on a format. Cait had read a newspaper article about a professor in Verona who had taken it upon himself to reply to the thousands of letters that came
addressed to Juliet Capulet, the heroine of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet.
The professor started replying to each letter, until one day he was subjected to allegations of
impropriety in the Italian press and subsequently dropped the project. As such, there was a vacancy, and an advert in the British newspapers requested applicants for the job of replying to
Juliet’s anonymous correspondents. Cait saw the story and showed it to Elvis, who in turn brought it to the attention of the Brodsky Quartet, and they all agreed that it provided a good
starting point as a focus for the project: the letter form.

* * *

By his return in mid-January, Elvis had achieved two new personal landmarks: he had learned to read and write music; and – perhaps just a little less remarkably – he
had written an entire album for Wendy James.

In the late ’80s, British trash-pop band Transvision Vamp had launched a minor pop career based on James’ overtly sexual pose and the ability to come up with a decent quote. At the
Feile festival the previous August, James had watched Elvis from the wings with admiration and envy as the last seconds of her fifteen minutes of fame ebbed away. ‘I could see that everything
he was saying and doing were in my heart and mind as well,’ she later said. ‘People
might take at face value the music of Transvision Vamp and the way I had
behaved in the past and the way Elvis conducted himself and think we were poles apart, but we’re not.’
²

Having decided to leave the band, Wendy James put her rather optimistic theory to the test. When she bumped into Pete Thomas in America while on an autumn promotional tour, Pete had suggested
– without any promises – that she contact Elvis if she was interested in his work. A little later, James claims she sat down in Washington and wrote Elvis a letter. ‘It was a bit
like a letter to an agony aunt,’ she said. ‘I wrote down all the reasons why I wasn’t really a happy person – not with my emotional life, but with my musical life. I simply
said, “I need to get better, and you’re what I consider is better. So can something be done?”.’
³

Within two weeks, Pete Thomas called to tell Wendy James that Elvis and Cait had written her an entire album. It had been composed between Friday evening and Sunday night, a weekend diversion
for their own amusement as much as anything else. With its echoes of The Stones writing for Marianne Faithfull, or Lee Hazelwood for Nancy Sinatra, it’s likely that the Svengali-ish nature of
the project also appealed to him. ‘We did it as a kind of gag,’ Elvis admitted. ‘I just took some fragmentary things from the odd newspaper article which told me what she was
supposed to represent and then invented a character for her which she could probably play.’
⁴

The songs were short and simple, closest in feel to
This Year’s Model
out-takes and a world away from anything Elvis had written recently. Lyrically, they referenced a litany of
London landmarks, and baited James into conceding that her wildly ambitious, loud-mouthed public persona was something of a joke, and not a very good one at that. The first song was called
‘This Is A Test’. Another, ‘Puppet Girl’.

Elvis went into Pathway with Pete, and over two days they knocked the ten songs together in single takes, Elvis playing guitar and bass and a little piano, and Pete on drums. When James returned
to Britain from the US in December there was a demo tape of an entire album’s
worth of material waiting for her at her flat. ‘I thought I’d landed in
heaven,’ she said. ‘It was only later it dawned on me that it was now down to me to do something with it.’
⁵

Despite her public enthusiasm, James was reportedly a little reluctant to record all the songs as a piece, but Elvis’s all-or-nothing ultimatum eventually forced her hand. When the album
was finally released in March 1993, entitled
Now Ain’t The Time For Your Tears
, it failed to have the impact that she desired. Her voice hadn’t improved any, the songs sounded
tinny and badly produced, and it would prove to be the last record she would make. As Elvis had had nothing to do with the making of the album other than writing the songs and letting James get on
with it, he claimed not to care one way or the other.

Learning to write music, in contrast, was serious stuff, and the minimum commitment Elvis felt was required to make his work with the Brodskys an equal and enjoyable collaboration. He had
resisted making the leap into notation for some time, wary that he might be disconnected from the impulse of simply creating music by instinct. ‘I didn’t want to lose sight of the other
way of writing songs,’ he admitted. ‘Just picking up a guitar and making a noise and getting something out quick.’
⁶

However, neither did he want the frustrations he felt when relying on Richard Harvey to orchestrate his ideas on
GBH
, or Fiachra Trench on
Mighty Like A Rose,
to compromise him
on this project. So he taught himself – with the help of a tutor in Ireland – the basic craft of reading and writing music in about a month. Although Elvis was some way down the road to
musical notation already, and initially he was only able to work painstakingly slowly, it was nevertheless an astonishing accomplishment. ‘It’s a very complicated process,’ says
Paul Cassidy. ‘It’s something I learnt over the years, gradually.’

Composition with the Brodsky Quartet began in earnest in the New Year of 1992. They were already tentatively thinking in terms of an album, but primarily the ensemble were simply playing for
their own amusement. They approached it systematically. On any given day they would
go home and write a love letter, the next it would be a begging letter, or a chain letter,
or a postcard, a thank you or a suicide note, coming in the next morning with their homework from the night before. Then they would mesh all the ideas together into something that worked as a
whole. ‘One of the best ways to work was for one person, namely myself, to be the editor,’ explained Elvis. ‘Everybody would come with these things and I’d say,
“That’s great, that bit, that whole paragraph there is really the way his character speaks, and it can be juxtaposed with this”. Little by little it came to make up a
text.’
⁷

Sometimes, they used extracts from real letters which had been sent to Elvis from fans. The lyrics for the second part of ‘I Thought I’d Write To Juliet’, for example, were
taken verbatim from a letter that was sent to Elvis from a young female soldier called Constance, serving in the Gulf War: ‘If I do get home alive, I imagine I will think again,’ she
wrote. The music itself came organically. When Jacqueline Thomas conjured a siren sound on her cello, it was incorporated into the song.

There was the odd track that Elvis brought in completed, but on the whole they used the same approach that a rock band might take if it were jamming. ‘I remember Elvis coming in one day
and sitting down and saying, “I’ve got this really nice little thing I want you to hear”,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘It was literally a four-bar idea, which subsequently
became a little part of ‘A Letter Home’. He’d play it on the piano a little bit, someone else would come in with a little riff, and the songs grew.’

The process moved quickly, but it was not without its own particular stresses. It was the first time that any of the Quartet had tried to write original songs, their background being one of
interpretation and performance rather than composition, and the emotional vulnerability of providing words in particular proved difficult. ‘You can imagine sitting next to one of the greatest
lyricists of all time and going, “Your eyes are like the stars,” y’know!’ Cassidy laughs. ‘It was tricky, because you’re dealing with another side of each other.
If someone comes in and says, “Jesus, sorry, but that lyric’s really embarassing,” you’re touching something else.
That was something that we as a
quartet had to deal with, that undeniably created a lot of tension.’

By the beginning of March the musicians had all but brought a halt to the writing process, fearing that it would soon become unwieldly. Further time was then spent getting the songs into shape
and assembling them in such a way that they would hold together as a unified concept, with a rhythm and a sense of light and shade.

Already, the plan had formulated to record it as an album, but first – as with most classical works – it would have to be performed. The first public flowering of an intense six or
seven-month period of work came with the debut performance of this ‘work in progress’ on 1 July. It took place at the Amadeus Centre before a largely invited audience of about 400
people, including family, friends, and Alan Bleasdale. By the time of the performance the song sequence had been christened
The Juliet Letters
in honour of its original inspiration, and
arranged in the order in which it would finally be recorded.

Elvis was shorn of both locks and beard and seemed physically to be something approaching his old self, but he was nervous at the prospect of his first-ever foray into live performance in the
classical sphere. And rightly so. ‘I caught this feeling at the Amadeus Centre,’ says John Woolrich, co-founder of the Composer’s Ensemble and a friend of the Brodsky Quartet.
‘There was a sniffiness there all right, and quite a lot of “Elvis
who
?”.’
⁸

The evening was split in two, with an intermission after the opening seven songs, and Elvis stilled any dissenting voices by singing beautifully throughout. He was also unamplified, an acoustic
quirk that caused some problems as the adrenalin levels rose. ‘We came off for the interval and Elvis just went, “What the fuck?!! What are you doing?? It’s so
loud!”,’ recalls Paul Cassidy. ‘This was someone who had spent his life in a rock band.’

With an electric instrument, the same noise will emerge unless the volume knob is turned up, which clearly isn’t the case with an acoustic instrument. Elvis had been playing with the
Brodsky Quartet for six months, but he had never heard them in performance mode, and as soon as he was
standing in the middle of the group in concert, the energy levels
– and hence the volume – exploded. So did the audience, who gave this unclassifiably seductive music a standing ovation and called them back for an encore, which consisted of the
repetition of three songs. They had no other material they could perform together.

Much of the rest of the summer was spent at Dartington Hall in Devon, a sprawling estate that incorporated an arts society. The Brodsky Quartet were in residence at the Dartington International
Summer School, an annual gathering which encompassed composing masterclasses, workshops, courses and concerts. It was here, in the fourteenth-century Great Hall on 13 August, that Elvis and the
Brodsky Quartet played their second concert in front of their classical peers. It was the same set as the one they played at the Amadeus Centre – the songs and order having been established
– but Elvis began the second encore with a new song, the freshly minted ‘Favourite Hour’, written on piano in a silent rehearsal room. It may have been the most beautiful –
if ominous – combination of lyrics and melody he had ever composed.

On either side of the performance at Dartington, Elvis – as plain Declan MacManus – spent time teaching the songwriting class, working diligently and making no attempt to pull rank
by explaining who he was. ‘He offered a refreshingly new perspective on songwriting,’ said John Woolrich, who was a fellow contributor to the course. ‘The odd thing was that after
two weeks many of our students were still unaware that the talkative guy in horn-rimmed specs, who had been acting as midwife to their hesitant attempts at songwriting, was Elvis
Costello.’
⁹
He found the experience and relative anonymity of Dartington energising. It gave him a tiny glimpse into a life he might have
chosen, had music not taken him over at such an early age. ‘I never went to university, so it was like a little flavour of university life, sitting on the croquet lawn on a sunny afternoon or
in the pissing rain,’ he said. ‘It was very enjoyable and there were lots of great concerts.’
¹⁰

Played-in and perfected at Dartington,
The Juliet Letters
was recorded quite painlessly in September and early October at Church Studios in Crouch End in London.
Produced by Kevin Killen, it was essentially a live recording of the concerts, and the only real technical problem was ensuring that Elvis’s voice didn’t overpower the
instruments in the small studio.