1. Blue Suede Shoes
2. I’m Counting on You
3. I Got a Woman
4. One-Sided Love Affair
5. I Love You Because
6. Just Because
7. Tutti Frutti
8. Trying To Get To You
9. I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)
10. I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)
11. Blue Moon
12. Money Honey
I’m the assistant editor at the Spectator, and write mostly about politics. When comment editors ask me to write about ‘something else’, they immediately regret it and never make such an offer ever again as the rest of my life is supremely middle-aged. I keep chickens, collect rare berry bushes, and like going for hearty walks or runs through the beautiful Chilterns.
Here are three albums that I’ve thought of that I own in their entirety and will listen to in their entirety. I’m not sure if they are my favourites, but I’ve taken about five days to come up with an answer.
Ceremonials – Florence + The Machine
Listen – David Guetta
Days Are Gone – Haim
Do you want to know the maddest thing about Elvis Presley?
It’s his real name.
Sounds made up doesn’t it? Like an alter ego bestowed upon the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But it wasn’t. He was always Elvis Presley.
As a ten-year-old who entered a singing competition, a loner kid who played hillbilly music at school and a teenager who sang blues songs in his neighbourhood – the whole time he was walking around called Elvis Presley.
Seems like an odd name for a nobody.
Aged eighteen he walks into Sun Studios, declaring that he’d like to record a song for his mother. It’s a disingenuous statement, there are places all over town where he could record himself, at a cheaper price too. But it’s here at Sun that he wants to be heard, that he wants to be noticed.
The receptionist, Marion Keisker, sees a shy, woebegone kid in front of her cradling a battered child’s guitar. She asks him what kind of singer he is and he replies, ‘I sing all kinds.’ She asks him who he sounds like, and he replies, ‘I don’t sound like nobody.’
He may as well have walked in and said ‘Hi, I’ve been sent from the future.’
Elvis records his first song, ‘My Happiness’, and Keisker listens, agreeing with the kid’s assessment of himself. Yes, she could detect the influences, she knew what he’d been listening to, but he was right – he didn’t sound like anyone else.
Sam Phillips, the producer and head of Sun Studios, feels the same. On hearing Elvis sing for the first time he simply nods and says he’s an ‘interesting singer’. He then tells Elvis to give him a call sometime and instructs Marion Keisker to make a note of his details, which she did – ‘Elvis Presley. Good Ballad Singer.’
Really, that should have been that.
Elvis Presley had walked into a recording studio for the first time in his life and sung his heart out. And we’ll get to this later, but he looked like Elvis too, by which I mean he looked bloody fantastic. It’s hard to know what else they could have been looking for in a potential artist and, in all honesty, everyone at Sun Studios should have stopped what they were doing, recognised the good fortune that had come their way and directed all their efforts into the eighteen-year-old.
But they didn’t. They did nothing. No call came from Sun Studios and Elvis becomes nothing but a cheap flirt – walking past the windows of Sun Studios on a regular basis, deliberately parking his car outside – hoping that he’ll jog their memory and they’ll give him a chance. But nothing. He goes unrecognised and unnoticed.
It’s crazy when you think about it.
In January 1954, he decides to record another song at Sun, but this time he delivers a weak performance, affected by nerves, and nothing comes from it. Desperate, he gives up on the studio as a route to stardom and starts to audition for local bands. First up he tries out for the terribly named Songfellows and they tell him he can’t sing. Next up, he auditions for a band led by a fella called Eddie Bond who tells Elvis to stick to truck driving because ‘you’re never going to make it as a singer’. Not one person, but multiple people, hear Elvis sing and basically say ‘nah, he’s rubbish’. It’s at this point in the story I’ve often thought about inventing a time machine, going back to Memphis in 1954, and shouting ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL YOU PEOPLE! HE’S ELVIS PRESLEY!’
But fortunately, common sense prevailed and everyone eventually stopped being so stupid.
On a trip to Nashville, Sam Phillips heard a song called ‘Without You’, a plaintive ballad that he thought, with the right voice, he could turn into a hit. He thought about the kid that had been stopping by for the last ten months and considered him a perfect fit for the purity and simplicity of the song. Phillips asked Marion Keisker to remind him of his name (how could he have forgotten?) and to invite him down to the studio.
‘Can you be here by three?’ she asked Elvis over the phone.
Whenever he recounted the story in the future, Elvis would say, ‘I was there by the time she hung up.’
They worked on the song all afternoon, but Elvis couldn’t quite get it right. Despite this, Phillips is now convinced the kid has something, a way of communicating with his voice that would make him a star. He asks Elvis to run through all the other songs that he knew, hoping to hit upon something, while watching through the control booth window. Yet something was still missing. The formula wasn’t complete.
Phillips contacts a guitarist called Scotty Moore and tells him about the kid. He suggests that he hooks up with him to see if they can get something going. Scotty agrees and asks what the kid’s name is. When he hears it’s Elvis Presley, he says it sounds like something out of science fiction. He’s right, it does.
Scotty Moore calls Elvis and arranges for an audition round his house with a bass player called Bill Black. Elvis turns up wearing a black shirt, pink trousers and white shoes. Despite this, they let him in and run through a bunch of songs. Neither Moore nor Black, his future band members, are particularly impressed. Black refers to him as a ‘snotty-nosed kid, coming in here with his wild clothes and everything’. As regards his singing, he says, ‘Well it was all right, nothing out of the ordinary. I mean, the cat can sing...’
Moore agrees – it was all right, nothing special, and he phones Phillips to give him the less-than-enthusiastic verdict. Phillips decides to give Elvis one more chance and suggests that all three of them come into the studio the next day.
And it’s the same story. There’s still something missing.
Until there isn’t. Until they take a break from recording and Elvis picks up his guitar and starts messing around, singing a song from 1946 called ‘That’s All Right Mama’. Moore and Black start filling in, messing around too, completely uninhibited now the pressure is off.
Phillips hears them and sticks his head around the door.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks.
Their reply, which is absolutely brilliant, is, ‘We don’t know.’
It’s the pivotal moment in the development of rock ‘n’ roll and no one knows what they’re doing, it’s happened by accident. Phillips gets them to start at the beginning and hits ‘Record’.
And now there’s nothing missing. It’s full steam ahead.
Sam Phillips calls local DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation) and invites him to his house to hear the song. Both men stay up till 2 a.m. listening to it, over and over again. They’re the only two men in the world who have access to Elvis’s first single, they’ve discovered treasure, and they’re simultaneously puzzled and excited by it. The song wasn’t black, it wasn’t white, it wasn’t pop, it wasn’t country. What could they do with it? Where would they go from here?
Dewey Phillips decides to play it on his radio show the next night and the response was instantaneous. Calls flood into the station and the switchboard lights up with a bunch of kids trying to find out more about Elvis Presley. The genie was out of the bottle. Elvis himself was in a cinema at the time – too nervous to hear his debut single being played on the radio and scared that people might laugh at him. Such was the response, though, that his mum and dad were dispatched to find him. Legend has it that his mum walked up one aisle in the cinema and his dad walked up another, until they finally found him in the dark and whisked him away to the radio station for an impromptu interview. What a scene that must have been:
‘Come on son, don’t worry about this rubbish film, you’re about to become king of this thing called rock ‘n’ roll.’
‘Oh.’
That night Dewey Phillips played ‘That’s All Right Mama’ a total of eleven times on his radio show.
Overnight, Memphis had gone Elvis mad. And the strange thing, possibly the strangest of all, is that they don’t even know what he looks like. All this adulation, all this hysteria, a song played eleven times on one radio show, and they don’t even know what he looks like. Because he could have looked like anyone, but he didn’t, he looked like Elvis fucking Presley. He looked like the most beautiful man ever, a man with skin so smooth he looked like he’d never shaved. For his whole life, in every era, he looked like he’d never shaved.
So imagine those people who were already sold by what they’d heard. Imagine when they saw him for the first time. He could have looked like anyone but he looked exactly like the young Elvis Presley.
The response was entirely predictable – a level of hysteria among teenagers that had never been seen before. I would recommend everyone watch his first national television appearance, on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, to see why. He enters the stage as if he’s been shot from a cannon and then proceeds to launch into ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ before improvising into ‘Flip, Flop and Fly’. Is he nervous? Is he supposed to be nervous? He doesn’t look it. He’s only twenty, surrounded by people so much older, yet he’s simultaneously dominant and assured – chewing gum between singing and breaking off to do those weird leg movements that caused so many young girls to go mad.
It wasn’t that he was filling a gap in the market; he was offering a whole new market of his own.
Meanwhile, in the studio, he follows ‘That’s All Right Mama’ with a string of other singles before reaching his turning point – ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. If his previous singles were a consequence of ‘messing around’, this is anything but – it is a peculiarly moody song that his new record company, RCA, are reluctant to release, worried that it might not be a hit. But Elvis champions it and he is insistent. It becomes his first number one, his first of eighteen, and he never looks back.
Elvis Presley, his first album, is released in 1956. It’s a collection of songs recorded between July 1954 and January 1956 that are mostly brilliant, save for a couple of appalling ballads and a truly dreadful version of ‘Blue Moon’. It’s in and out though, coming in at just twenty-eight minutes long.
But the cover. Look at him on that cover. Who’s walking past that in a record shop in 1956 and not buying it?
In one image it says everything about what he has, what people had been missing, and what he would become. Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing, Dylan said that hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. He had smashed down the door for everyone to follow, playing a guitar instead of a piano, being a star as well as a singer.
And whatever happened next, through his Lost in Hollywood years to his Stuck in Vegas years, there was always a healthy reverence, a sense that he was the one that started everything.
But more than that it was he, and only he, who could ever get away with simply being called The King.
Because I have a slight aversion to listening to things that people who know about music tell me I should listen to.
I tend to assume that the words ‘critically acclaimed’ mean I won’t like something, and the same goes for films. At university I had a housemate who was obsessed with ‘critically acclaimed’ films and I hated every one of the ones I agreed to watch for being so poncey and boring. Being John Malkovich was a particular low point. I tend to like music and films that are rubbish and popular, whether it be chick flicks or Britney Spears. I watch films when I’m too tired to read, and listen to music when I’m doing something practical or walking to work. Both are crowded into other bits of my life, rather than being important in their own right.
Growing up, I was a weird but quite happy combination of bluestocking and tomboy (both terms that suggest girls should like lipstick not mud or books, but at least they give you a picture of the rather singular outdoorsy child I was). I was either curled up with a book or riding horses, climbing trees and making camps with my brothers in our garden – in a wonderfully isolated hamlet with a bus on Thursdays (it left at 7 a.m. and didn’t come back). Music and films were a bit too buzzy for me. I’ve been to two concerts in my life: Justin Timberlake in homemade glittery T-shirts with a giggly group of girlfriends from sixth form and an Elton John concert with a family member who had free tickets. And I went to the Proms for the first time this year, even though I’ve worked in London since 2009.
I took a holiday job in HMV in my second year at university. They were desperate for more staff during the Christmas period and employed me even though I failed their music knowledge test spectacularly. I walked the shop floor and gave customers terribly bad advice on what albums to buy for their relatives for Christmas, based on things I’d seen while tidying the stock. I imagine a lot of people remember 2006 as the worst haul of musical Christmas presents they ever received as a result.
I do quite like music from the Olden Days, though: I loved the A Hard Day’s Night film as a kid and the Motown classics were almost always on the hi-fi in our home.
I listen to Leonard Cohen when I’m cooking a big family meal as that’s what my mother does and it doesn’t feel right to be fussing over a large joint of meat without ‘So Long, Marianne’ playing in the background. My favourite song in the whole wide world is ‘You Got the Love’ by Candi Staton, which I fell in love with long before Florence got to it because it was at the end of Sex and the City and because it has terrific lyrics. I left my wedding to my best friend singing that song.
But most of the time I listen either to house music (I had to google my favourite artists to find out that the genre was called house, though, and I’m not sure I look or sound like someone who says they’re into house. In fact, I only know David Guetta exists because a middle-aged Tory MP told me about him while doing a little dance to illustrate what sort of music it is) or pop-ish stuff. I could (and often do) listen to Listen by David Guetta all day, and similarly I love Chicane and Calvin Harris. I often play Thousand Mile Stare by Chicane while writing a column as it gets me in an intentional and focused mood. And then I do tend to download a lot of albums by female singers like Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Ellie Goulding and Haim. Or else I’ll sing loudly and tunelessly along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat which was my first ever CD and which I know off by heart from start to finish until my husband either leaves the room in great distress or pleads with me to stop.
I struggle to find out about new artists. I only ever hear music on the radio when Desert Island Discs comes on or the Today programme is doing one of its consciously cool slots. I periodically message my younger and cooler brothers asking for recommendations when I realise I’m still listening to stuff from 2012 and telling myself that it’s very current. Or else I like a song that plays during my spinning class and I try to find out what it is once I’ve caught my breath at the end. Even Spotify passes judgement on me: the other day I tried its ‘Discover’ feature which recommends ‘new’ music based on what you’re already listening to. It suggested a song from FutureSex/LoveSounds by Justin Timberlake. That album was released in 2006.
So the short answer to your question is that I haven’t listened to Elvis because I am totally shambolic when it comes to finding music to listen to.
As an example of how shambolic I am, you can’t get much better than the way I listened to this album. I listened to it three times, dutifully wrote up my thoughts and sent it to Martin. He was very kind, but said I’d listened to the wrong Elvis album. At least I now know a lot more about Elvis as a result.
Anyway, now I’ve listened to the right album and I’ve switched from singing tunelessly along to Joseph to dancing around my kitchen to this. ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘I Got a Woman’, and ‘One-Sided Love Affair’ force you out of your seat. In fact, one of my sessions while listening to this album was at my desk while working, and it didn’t work. I kept trying to put Chicane back on. It was a bit too noisy and jumpy. But it’s perfect for cooking and cleaning. It’s definitely not pretentious in the way that ‘critically acclaimed’ things normally are for me.
There were some songs that sound like the kind of crooning songs lots of people would love, but I could take them or leave them, to be honest. I got a bit bored during ‘I’m Counting on You’, for instance, and it reminded me of a less moving version of ‘Valley of Tears’ by Buddy Holly, which I do love. I also grew bored with ‘Tutti Frutti’. I’m sure clever people would tell me that a) it’s supposed to be repetitive and that b) I really don’t have a leg to stand on given the stuff I normally listen to, but it was repetitive.
I found some keepers. ‘I Love You Because’ was really, really lovely. A gentle, slow, sweet song. I was humming ‘Money Honey’ for the rest of the day after I listened to the album for the first time. And my favourite was ‘Blue Moon’ as it was simple and his voice just sounded terrific and deep and gorgeous. But researching Elvis further, I found my favourite song of his on another album. I loved ‘In the Ghetto’. It was more along the lines of the sort of heartfelt songs that I normally like, though they normally tend to be sung by female artists (not sure why).
Listening along, I realised how many of these songs have appeared in the soundtracks of the non-chick-flick films that I have managed to watch. They feel much more familiar than I was expecting. At the end of the first listen, I felt as though I’d heard just two songs: one was the sort of leaping around dancing song, and the other was a slower more thoughtful tune that I tended to get bored of. Of course, the whole point of Ruth and Martin telling me to listen to the album three times was that I was forced to notice the difference between the songs, and I’m glad I did as I would have discarded it too quickly after one listen and never returned. I’ve realised that I like music that slots snugly into my life rather than that I have to make time and effort to listen to. Elvis Presley was the first album I’ve sat down and listened to without doing anything else at the same time. It felt odd.
I did like this album. Being totally unmusical and having never really immersed myself in music reviews or any of that sort of thing that involves actually thinking about music, I don’t really know what to say about it. I feel a bit like the student in On Beauty who tells her art history lecturer that the reason so few students take his class is that no one’s allowed to just say that they like the artworks. I like it, but there wasn’t one song on there that I loved so much I had to play it again, right away. It was more the sort of album I’d very happily listen to while cooking, dancing merrily away as I moved around the kitchen with cheeks flushed from the heat of the oven and wearing my apron with chickens on that I put on when I’m doing Proper Cooking. And that tends to be old music – or Joseph. And for the rest of the time, I’m afraid I’ll stick to meandering through music that MPs who are even sadder than me tell me I should listen to.
I’ve starred a number of songs from it on Spotify. Probably wouldn’t listen to the whole album again. Unless I’ve got a lot of cooking to do.
7.