Melody Maker, February 6, 1993

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Your career, if you could dignify such an improbable procession of delicious accidents with such a term, is over. The band that you fronted to national stardom and global notoriety has split. The same media that was once only too happy to flog issues by the truckload on the back of your impeccably outrageous announcements and increasingly threadbare costumery, has rounded on you. Your comeback single entered the charts at about 52 with an anvil round its neck. The album that you spent the best part of a year working on has collected such a unanimous and unequivocal critical hammering that your label refused to release it in England. You’ve had it. Fourteen minutes 57, 14 minutes 58, 14 minutes 59 … goodnight, sunshine. “Next year she’ll serve her function in an Audrey Hepburn hat | It still won’t suit her much but she’ll get over that | She’ll be pale and feign indifference as they’re handing out the prizes | Spilling daddy’s pearls of wisdom and her ugly sister’s tranquilisers.” Here’s how the story’s supposed to stumble along from here: You might release a couple of under-produced solo records on a nowhere little label, which will serve no purpose other than to provide The Stud Brothers with some target practice. You might be called upon to make up the numbers on a game show, even “Wogan” on a slow night. Your birthplace, wherever that is, might be the subject of a question on a pub trivia game. You might even, as you approach a decade of dignified irrelevance, be asked to appear on “The Word”. You’ll be remembered, vaguely, and you’ll struggle, unsuccessfully, to content yourself with the thought that a has-been beats a never-was any day. But it’s not really a job, is it? “THE faint embrace of gravity is causing my delay | Yes, cancel my departure | Looks like I’m here to stay” BUT. Here’s the fun bit. It doesn’t happen like that, because you are Wendy James, 27, of Ladbroke Grove, and sticking to the script has never been your strong point. So when you do break cover following the decline and fall of your tinsel empire, you do it with rather more panache than most would have expected and many would have hoped. You’ve signed, solo, to MCA worldwide and to the unstoppable Geffen in the States. In your David Bailey press shots, you look fantastically sulky and interestingly aloof. Oh, and your actual album, the heroically titled “ Now Ain’t The Time For Your Tears”, comprises 10 new songs written just for you – and, to a large extent, apparently about you – by a certain Elvis Costello. You’ve, uh, kind of landed on your feet, Wendy. It’s a pretty unlikely story. “No,” she corrects me, looking up from her coffee. “It’s a magical story.” “HEY, little puppet girl| Now it’s time to dance and sing| We built your reputation to fade away the very day| You cut cut cut cut cut your string” TOWARDs the end of 1991, as Wendy trekked across America on Transvision Vamp’s valedictory tour, she bumped into Pete Thomas, former drummer with Elvis Costello’s mighty Attractions, in some drinking establishment or other somewhere on the West Coast. Wendy, already contemplating a future alone, asked, on the spur of the moment, if he thought Costello – whose work she had admired for years, but whom she had never met – could conceivably see his way clear to dashing off a song or so for her. Thomas shrugged. “You don’t ask, you don’t get,” he said. A bit over a year later, Wendy’s husky whisper takes up the story in wine bar in Holland Park. “Anyway. When I got to Washington, I sketched a letter to Elvis, reasonably long and reasonably philosophical, which served two purposes. One was obviously the communication with Elvis. The other was that it was just nice to be able to put it all down on paper, just as a means of assessing the pros and cons of where I was at that point, just talking to myself, really. So I sent it off, and tore up my copy of the letter, thinking nothing would ever come of this, it’s a ridiculous idea.” A fair enough thing to think, really. “I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then I got a phone call from Pete Thomas, saying you’ll-never-guess-what-but-I-can’t-tell-you… and that put a smile on my face. And then Elvis’s publisher rang up and said ‘Well, he’s written you an entire album, and if you like it, it’s yours.’” Just like that. “I was astounded. It’s like, if I say to you, imagine if your favourite artist or performer of all time has just written you, personally you, your very own album.” All that arrived on the messenger’s motorbike that day was tape of bare demo versions of the songs – which Wendy will be able to bootleg for thousands if all else fails – and a lyric sheet. The only time she met Costello, at a party after U2’s Earl’s Court concert, all she said was “Thank you”. All he said was “Have fun”. Weird. Melody Maker, February 6, 1993 Andrew Mueller interviews Wendy James. Jim Arundel reviews "The Nameless One." Images Page scans. Cover and clippings.

External links

• Wikipedia: Melody Maker