Always on Our Mind

Aug 12, 09:00 AM

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He's sold a billion records and has more than 625 active fan clubs celebrating his lip-curling, hip-gyrating greatness. Thirty years after his death, famous names tell us why Elvis lives for them

ROB DEERING, COMEDIAN

WHEN I FIRST DID comedy about Elvis it was all about comparing him to Jesus, and I think that's valid.

His profligacy is quite amusing; he had a 24-hour chef to make his favourite fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Once he used his private plane to fly to another state to get ingredients for the sandwich. Then there were the cars - he once bought 32 Cadillacs in one day. He wouldn't keep them all, he'd give them to family and friends, saying "I couldn't eat another one."

Going back through my Edinburgh shows, all of them have had an Elvis joke in them. Last time I was just doing Hound Dog in the most ridiculous way, the stuff that was shockingly sexy to people at the time. Because I'm a bit of a clown I'd do the leg wobbling and the lip twitching to the point where I looked like an idiot, then say "still just as erotic now" while everyone was thinking otherwise.

Elvis didn't take himself seriously, he obviously had a good sense of humour and had a laugh. On the one hand he's ridiculous, with those outfits, but he got away with it because of how good he was. Any of those great Vegas-y stars are just so much larger than life, early Tom Jones, Sammy Davis Junior. You can't parody them because they were so full-on.

In the last couple of years before Elvis died, he wasn't really famous any more, he certainly wasn't in the zeitgeist by then, he was just churning out records. But as is so often the case, the silver lining with people dying young is that it seals their fame for ever.

* Rob Deering will be performing Charmageddon at the Underbelly's Baby Belly until 26 August. For tickets tel: 0870 745 3083 or visit www.edfringe.com/shows

JOHN BURNSIDE, NOVELIST AND POET

It's cool to talk about early Sun Records Elvis, but the first exposure I had to Elvis, like a lot of people in Scotland of my generation, was the films. We used to go to the fleapit in Cowdenbeath and see Elvis films. And obviously, you saw him on TV as well - if you think about people like me sitting watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium, we'd watch these singers just standing there. Occasionally Max Bygraves would move one hand, but Elvis danced and that was what was radical about him. It was a kind of animal grace and the sheer sense that he wasn't self-conscious, he was just doing something spontaneous. It was like the whole world had been standing still until Elvis came along.

He was a very beautiful man, the kind of guy I grew up wanting to look like. I remember later watching Viva Las Vegas and thinking it must have been really hard for leading ladies because there was no leading lady who was as beautiful as Elvis, even Ann-Margret came second best.

My short story collection, Burning Elvis, was based on a true story: I lived in Brighton and a friend and I used to make effigies of Elvis and set them on fire and take pictures of them. I'm not artistic but my friend did this drawing which was kind of corny, but it was a picture of the beautiful Elvis in a leather jacket with the young face, and underneath the jacket you got a little glimpse of a skeleton.

That's the other thing about Elvis - the way he died was pretty sad. The slow decay into the person he became which is a horrible, fascinating, scary story, like Pete Doherty at the moment, I suppose.

With Elvis it happened over years in front of everybody's eyes. Hendrix dying at 29 is sad and tragic, but that's a different thing, it's not that decay, that "rust never sleeps" sort of moment.

EDDI READER, SINGER-SONGWRITER

Elvis was as much a part of our family as my Dad or my uncles. He was a big deal to my Mum and Dad, they were massive fans and played his records all the time, so he was ubiquitous in our house. My Dad was a contract builder and he worked away from home a lot, so all we had was my Mum and an Elvis poster above the mantelpiece. That was in the 1970s, so it was the bare-chested, white rhinestone shirt, sweaty Elvis who was in the living-room.

When I was growing up I remember playing The Wonder of You really loudly with all the windows open on a Sunday afternoon. All the street must have heard it, but I don't think they minded. The earlier rock'n'roll songs were before my time but they stayed around because my Dad would sing them at parties - (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear and my Mum and Dad used to sing Are You Lonesome Tonight? together at New Year. Elvis's music was pretty much the soundtrack to our lives.

During the 1970s a whole bunch of us weans wanted to do a petition and send it to Graceland to get him to do his rock'n'roll songs again because he was stretching into massive, big, epic territory.

When he died the whole house went into mourning. It was my sister's sixth birthday so it put a real damper on the whole day for her, we were all affected by it. Since then my Dad's passed on but I always feel that he's around me when I hear Elvis come on the radio. It feels a bit like he's talking to me somehow. When I play music onstage now, sometimes I do Love Me ... and I always used to do Elvis's version of Blue Moon of Kentucky. He's part of my marrow, is Elvis Presley.

* Eddi Reader plays the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh on 23 and 24 August, tel: 0131-668 2019.

RICHARD HAWLEY, SINGER-SONGWRITER

Elvis was the first artist that I got into as a kid. My Dad had loads of old Sun 78s and original albums and I just used to love his music. During the summer holidays I remember when I was about six or seven, they showed all his films on TV. It seemed like he was my big brother or something. Now if you look back at the films they're pretty shocking and you know the dark side of them - he was forced to make them and he was off his head. But when he first broke out, he was completely unmanufactured, it was totally and utterly raw.

I do That's All Right Mama whenever we play and we've just done a cover of Poor Boy, which is one of the few songs he wrote. It was originally intended for one of his films but it got left out, and it's a really good song. Elvis gets a lot of credit for inventing rock'n'roll and fusing black and white music together, but there were a lot of other artists before him who'd done that. Chuck Berry did Maybelline, that was country music played by a black R&B guy, and it was very much around the same time. Scotty Moore and Bill Black don't get the credit they deserve as well, because that early sound was definitely three people f***ing around in a room. Obviously, Elvis was the catalyst for that and no-one else would have dared do it. You can't take owt away from Elvis, he was f***ing awesome.

At school I remember I used to wear an Elvis T-shirt with flares. It was the Punk era so I had safety pins in it. One night my Dad got home from the club pissed and he said, "Elvis has died." I remember crying my eyes out.

Elvis, what more can you say? You just have to say the word: Elvis. The end.

* Richard Hawley's new album, Lady's Bridge, is out on 20 August.

MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE, COMEDIAN

I had a big Elvis phase when I was about 20, including having my hair done. It was very much in the GI Blues style - quite neat and military, with a bit of a quiff. I'd always liked the classic songs, the thing that tipped it was I saw The '68 Comeback Special. It's just breathtaking in every sense. It's very funny to watch, it's so ridiculous, but it is a truly mind-blowing performance with some amazing songs, and some crap as well - which is always important with Elvis: embrace the crap.

I've never done stand-up in a jumpsuit, although I'm not ruling it out. I don't know if Elvis has influenced me but he does make me laugh, both in terms of laughing at him and laughing with him. When he did Are You Lonesome Tonight? in one concert he just loses it completely and is self-mocking, he laughs all the way through. Similar things have happened when you realise the absurdity of what you're saying and you're left to mock yourself.

I don't like fat Elvis, but swelling Elvis I like very much. And his attempts at onstage kung-fu, they were just magnificent. The first-ever solo show I did in Edinburgh in 1997, I walked on to Trouble Man. It affected me so much that for about six months afterwards, I couldn't really do a decent gig unless I walked on to that song. There's just something about that snarl "if you're looking for trouble, you've came to the right place". For a stand- up, that's good stuff. If only I'd had a better show that year, but it was my first go at it. Certainly for the first few minutes I was pumped up on Elvis, the spirit of the King was in the room.

* Marcus Brigstocke presents The Early Edition at the Udderbelly until 26 August, 0870 745 3083; and performs Your Time Is Up, 20 and 21 August at the Assembly Rooms, tel: 0131-623 3030.

JOHN BYRNE, PLAYWRIGHT AND ARTIST

I remember coming back from the Edinburgh festival and hearing the news when I got home that Elvis was dead. It was shocking, but in a funny way it wasn't surprising. It was very sad, he was so young. But he was wonderful. I know that people who worked with him said he was the sweetest man they'd ever met. His popularity seems to be almost stronger than ever, it's become an absolute worldwide cult now, he's almost saintly, canonised.

When I heard him doing Heartbreak Hotel on the wireless, it was just the most extraordinary noise or sound or song we'd ever heard in our lives. We'd never heard anything like that before. It was revolutionary. And of course, we didn't know what he looked like until Love Me Tender came out and we started getting pictures of him. I had the EP from the film and I didn't have a gramophone, I had nothing to play it on, but I got it anyway, just to have. That's the impact he had on me.

He's absolutely in there in my work, in The Slab Boys or Your Cheatin' Heart, because there was nobody else around who could touch him - there are lots of references to other people, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and all these people, but Elvis was the first and the greatest.

When you see these Elvis impersonators, it's a travesty, because that was him when he was at his lowest ebb, doing Las Vegas. He gave it his all, but the young Elvis, before the jumpsuits, was the real McCoy.

A few years ago one of the biographies said that his forebears came from Paisley. I'd wandered the streets of Paisley back in 1956, thinking "why's that so familiar?" There was something that just went in your soul. He was loved, he wasn't just admired or hero- worshipped, he was absolutely loved and that comes across very strongly to this day.

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