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Elvis Costello’s long suffering fans in Britain – as distinct from his long suffering fans around the rest of the world – who’ve always been denied any access or insight to the man’s personality or his methods, got to see something of the way a Costello album is made.
Sunday night’s South Bank Show followed Mister Co and the Attractions recording their new LP Almost Blue with the legendary C & W producer Billy Sherill in Nashville.
Despite the fact that the programme remains almost bland and refuses to dig too deep into the Costello psyche, there’s one area of his personality that comes out. It’s been mainly his record and management people that have put across his image as a nasty hostile little man, and no doubt Elvis has gone along to ensure he maintains his privacy.
But in the interviews he does on camera, Costello comes across as articulate, well researched in his statements and is even nervous when he meets Sherill. The latter is rich, opinionated and sees sessions as a conveyor belt. He rarely gets excited about anything. When the sessions aren’t clicking he doesn't actually reprimand anybody; he just leaves for about half an hour.
At one point in the filming, when they’re cutting Charlie Rich’s “Sittin’ And Thinkin’” (Sherill cut the original version twenty years ago) the Nashville cigar-chomping good old boy notices that Elvis has substituted the word “drunk” for Rich’s loaded.” “I wouldn’t use the word loaded” argues Elvis. The next time we hear the song, Elvis is singing “loaded.”
The special starts off with Elvis in his living room, plunking out “Good Year For The Roses” on his acoustic guitar. Then it’s flashback to the heyday of punk, with Costello, his snarl and his band thundering through “Lip Service” and “Watching The Detectives”.
The flashback is an attempt to bring the country in-roads into perspective. Journalist Allan Jones of Melody Maker comes on screen (green shirt, can of beer in hand) to explain that the fact that Costello ends up cutting a country album should really come no surprise to us.
After all, he harnessed the raw power of punk while writing bittersweet and accurate statements about true relationships. Country music’s been a strain in his music right from the start: witness featuring Clover on My Aim Is True and the “Stranger In The House” track which was given away as a freebie with This Year’s Model. In the joyful simplicity and emotional purity he was aiming for in Get Happy!!!! and Trust, it was inevitable he’d go straight to a raw, simplistic style like country.
Costello then shows he’s acutely aware of why he wants to get into country – because he wants to “say things with sound as opposed to just words.”
Later on, he says he also wants to push his voice forward, because most people don’t think he can sing.
About the legendary Gram Parsons, who wrote the LP’s “I’m Your Toy” he says he was living the entertainer’s romantic ideals of living fast and dying young. “It’s a myth which I don’t subscribe to – yet.”
Personally I think that the documentary could have probed further. Sherill is a flamboyant character but, taken in between the lines, really doesn’t care too much about what went down. “I loved it, I really did. I may become an Elvis Costello fan after all.” Later when quizzed about the possibility of the record being successful, he replies, “I hope so, I’ll buy another boat.” Success, in his book, is in monetary terms only.
But where the programme really falls down is when it cuts to a genuine C & W club in Aberdeen with the band doing “I’m Your Toy” before genuine redneck ramblers. It would have been interesting to see what their spontaneous reaction was to have Costello do with their style of music.
And when Elvis tells the camera, “I think this business sucks you in eventually… I’d had the disturbing impressions that my work has been based around the perversion of truth for quite a while, “ surely it was almost imperative to zero in and ask him what he meant.
But then again, if the producers merely wanted to do just a documentary of the Nashville scene, its mentality and the quest of an artist trying to cross through boundaries, then they’ve succeeded. I hope some TV channel or rock show in Australia picks it up.
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