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On November 8 the whole of London Weekend Television's networked South Bank Show is devoted to a documentary on the making of Elvis Costello's new Country & Western album Almost Blue in Nashville, the heart of American C&W.
As well as charting the somewhat doubt-ridden making of the album and confirming everyone's stereotypical images of Nashville, the film offers some rare insights into the normally militantly taciturn singer's life.
There's the nominal comment from an "authority", in this case the Melody Maker's Allan Jones, a good choice as he is both a total Costello enthusiast and a sympathetically intelligent advocate of Country music.
But there's little need for "objective" commentary when the man himself is so forthcoming. There's some brief footage of Costello & The Attractions performing "Watching The Detectives" live — as a reminder of just how good a singer he is anyway — before we're confronted with the relaxed admission that he feels his songwriting has become far too "precious and introspective" and that he wanted to take the risk of putting his ability to sing on the line by tackling Country material.
Costello comes across as an informed lover of C&W; hence his choice of stalwart Country producer Billy Sherrill for the sessions. Sherrill's credentials span a couple of decades from being an engineer at Sun Records to writing and producing "Stand By Your Man" and working with Costello's C&W hero and one-time singing partner, George Jones.
Sherrill and Costello worked on a couple of trial tracks in the middle of the Attractions last US tour. The laconic producer, opining from the wheel of a smart cabin cruiser, confesses that before that he'd "not been into him (Costello) that much."
One of the film's strengths is the way it documents Costello's own doubts as to Sherrill's motives in carrying on with the album when the trial recordings obviously made little impression.
Sherrill is upfront about it all. Asked if he forsees commercial success from the album he drawls, "I hope so — buy another boat." He admits that he's "weary of" the Country standards which Costello is recording, having worked on them repeatedly in the past.
What's missing, though, is some explanation of the business that must have gone on between Sherrill, who works for Costello's US record company CBS, and the singer's manager, the intractable Jake Riviera. As is already clear as we go to press, the dazzling "Good Year For The Roses" is going to break Costello's recent lack of hit singles—with a vengeance. There's no mention of that shrinking commercial profile in the film.
In compensation we have excellent sequences of studio work, with Costello winding himself up to give real vocal performances in a potentially numbingly workmanlike environment. He's.concerned with emotional content, as much as in his own more insidiously tortured songs, but talks about a vital distinction between "sad Country" and "wrist-slitting music".
Outside of recording, there's plenty of evocatively sleazy Nashville footage, hookers and obese cowboys on the street, no-hope C&W bands in every bar.
"It's the least comfortable I've ever felt in America," Costello admits. And with good reason; a couple of days after the band arrived in Nashville a musician was shot in a local bar — for not knowing a particular song.
Towards the end of the film we see Costello at home in exquisitely suburban looking surroundings, listening to a cassette of the final mixes after having left Sherrill and engineer Snake to work on what the producer refers to as "mixing and sweetening".
What this consists of becomes clear as the song emanating from the big cassette player is gradually overwhelmed by strings and backing vocals. The singer, though, seems well pleased.
Finally there are a couple of impressively heart-rending songs filmed at the one C&W gig he's done, in Aberdeen. The Attractions, augmented by Doobie Brother John McFee who played pedal steel guitar on the album sessions, have energised the music to a point somewhere between Sherrill's Southern langour and their habitual pumping style—the results are marvellous.
This is a judicious choice of subject for the South Bank Show, as the album is likely to effect a complete revitalisation of Costello's commercial career and will probably be the making of him in America. The film is directed with an appropriate eye for the minute personal dynamics of putting music together by Peter Carr, who made the excellent Born Fighters (Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe) and the harrowing City.
There's little indication from Elvis Costello as to the future direction of his career, though he does say — when referring to the self-destructive vein in C&W lyrics — that he doesn't subscribe to "the idea that it is somehow romantic to live fast and die young."
"Yet."
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