On Monday August 15 [1977, the day before Elvis died] I went into a shop to get a T-shirt printed with Elvis’ photo on it. The shop also printed wording on T-shirts, so I asked for ELVIS to be printed above the photo. The man in the shop teased me by asking how to spell the name, and asked who this Elvis was. I did not realise at the time that he was joking, and I replied in all seriousness.
TONY CLAPTON
Walking the length of the beach to buy Gauloises and a glass of diabolo menthe – crème de menthe and lemonade, fizzy and green and halfway grown-up – still child-invincible so walking the length of the beach alone in the dark, walking alone from the campsite to the straggle of restaurants and outdoor discotheques where they played medleys: Et les Cailloux chantaient … I can’t get no … It’s been a hard … Everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now, and the slow numbers, Il est trop tard, those two boys, hippyish but cute, Il est trop tard pour faire l’amour, who wanted to dance with my friend and her sister, whom we thought we’d see tomorrow but saw only once more days later by when we’d become part of a gang who hung around a different disco, we’d met them walking the beach, noticing, deciding, daring each other to walk up with a cigarette, Vous avez du feu? Among them the golden couple who used me to argue with one another, and the night she wasn’t there he got me to walk into the dark and pretended not to understand when I wouldn’t lie down, and yes he had a girlfriend but what was the problem, she wasn’t there and nothing was serious, not even the letter that came later, Ma petite Anglaise adorée, from him or him? Because this was a medley, all of us fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, making it up out of bits of what we knew, and we were free because there were only tents and the beach and the track between the two, and we spent all day soaking up heat and salt and planning the night, these French boys wanting me to translate the words to David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ – He pulls in just behind the fridge? All night, barely noticing the adults we were with, my friend’s parents and her uncle and aunt, who had brought us here and who took us for meals and corrected our French but let us roam. The last night, how we lay in a medley, no one being themselves, everyone sleeping on someone else and the night darker and colder than I thought and we woke in a confusion of temperatures to find grown-ups and children wandering past in their swimsuits and us left behind, as if we’d slipped down a crack between them. Too clear, and we woke and walked to the end of the beach to buy Gauloises and diabolo menthes for breakfast, the news-stands: Elvis est mort. Late Elvis, ‘In the Ghetto’, ‘Suspicious Minds’, his mansion of a voice, but lumbering, sclerotic now, that was who had died not the inky nimble ‘King Creole’, the shivery boy of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. It didn’t hurt, he was a story by then, a double album of greatest hits someone gave me for Christmas. We left him behind with the boys and the heat and the medleys, not knowing what it meant to see someone like that for the first time, to hear a voice shaped like that, a body move like that for the first time, we knew nothing yet of such disturbance and drove north, three girls in a crush on the back seat trying to sleep and when we couldn’t sleep we would be dreaming, for now, of Michel or Joël, Yannick or Olivier, Je t’aime et tu danses bien … mais ce soir … il est trop tard … and it would take days to get home, the long drive and the ferry, the sea we’d cross as the sun pulled away and we wrapped up and sank back into village life and school life and family life, and the first of the last years of it all.