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On 26 June 1977, Elvis Presley performed in Indianapolis. He wasn’t the only attraction: brass bands, soul singers and comedian Jack Kahanee filled the bill before his 80-minute show. Over the PA, a voice reminded the 18,000 fans to “be sure and stop in at the Elvis Presley super souvenir stands”. There’s a pretty alarming picture taken from in front of the stage of Elvis half-grinning, the familiar features sort of marooned on a pasty, puffy head. He’s in there somewhere.
The local press wasn’t that impressed. “It’s time ardent Presley fans quit protecting their idol and start demanding more,” wrote Zach Dunkin of the Indianapolis News. “They know ‘the King’ can do better.” Presley died twenty days later.
That final performance was a particularly sad note for the Elvis story to end on, but soon it won’t be the very last Elvis gig. This November will see Elvis Evolution, “a major new show celebrating the world’s biggest star of stage and screen,” at a London theatre.
It is, apparently, “all thanks to Layered Reality’s unique blend of technology, augmented reality, theatre, projection and multi-sensory effects”. What that actually means is a little vague, but there is one hard promise in there: the evening “peaks with a concert experience that will recreate the seismic impact of seeing Elvis live for a whole new generation of fans, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy,” and the sight of Elvis performing “for the very first time on a UK stage”. Layered Reality's founder and CEO Andrew McGuinness has said it would be “a next-generation tribute to the musical legend”.
Having seen what ABBA Voyage has done – and at more than $2 million in ticket sales a week, according to some reports – the Presley estate and several other organisations have won the race to leap into this brand new way to celebrate the greats of pop/sweat the asset. If you’re feeling cynical, you might figure that the Presley estate and the tech boffins saw that bit in Blade Runner 2049 where Harrison Ford hunts Ryan Gosling through a dead Las Vegas and thought, ‘Hey, that necrotic civilisation looks like fun’. If you’re not, it’s a good night out.
And for some reason London is going to get the first look at it. There’s no publicly confirmed Elvis-London connection, though the late Bill Kenwright once said that first-gen British rock ‘n’ roller Tommy Steele met Elvis in London in 1958. Steele apparently took him on a sightseeing tour of the capital including a look at the Houses of Parliament and presumably, across the river at County Hall, the future site of Shrek’s Adventure. The closest the real Elvis ever got to a UK gig was a 1960 stopover at Prestwick airport in Ayrshire en route home from West Germany, where he’d spent two years in the army. He milled about on the tarmac in full military uniform, asking fans: “Where am I?”
Still, it’s going to be a big thing. After all the bumph on the Elvis Evolution website, though, is a banner headline: “EXPERIENCE NEVER SEEN MOMENTS”.
That should raise some eyebrows. This life size digital Elvis will apparently be the big crescendo of Elvis Evolution, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster pieced together from data pulled from home movies and private photos. Reading between the lines it sounds like there will be reconstructions of big moments: thrusting his way through ‘Hound Dog’ on the Milton Berle Show, the comeback special, the early Vegas shows before things got too pharmaceutical.
McGuinness does know what audiences are after. “People around the world no longer want to sit there and passively receive entertainment,” he said. “They want to be a part of it.”
And, you know, he’s not wrong. At the minute in London there’s an immersive experience which David Hockney made a load of work for, and at other venues there are posthumous reimaginings of works by Kandinsky, Monet, Rembrandt and Von Gogh, among others.
But between Hockney and ABBA’s shows and the kind of beyond-the-grave reanimations which Elvis appears to be, there’s a gap the size of those massive peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches Presley loved. Hockney and ABBA saw the creative crackle in those experiences and got fully involved, moulding and expanding on their own work because they were excited about the medium as well as it being a nice earner. You can’t really say the same about Kandinsky, and not just because he’s been dead for 80 years.
It depends, really, what you think Elvis actually is. Is he a musician who made a lot of great music for a few years, lost his thread in the Sixties, found it again with the comeback special, then slowly slid into Vegas schlock before dying, constipated and frightened, on the floor of his bathroom? Is he a one-man industry built on the early stuff and the jumpsuit years, with the near-decade he spent lost in Hollywood while the world went kaleidoscopic snipped out? Or is he an NPC you can force to sing and dance to things he never did?
Without seeing what Layered Reality has cooked up, it’s hard to tell. In a way, though, it’s sort of apt. Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona doc was built on the idea that he was split into the man, Diego, and the myth, Maradona. In the same way, Presley died a shadow of his former self, and over the last half-century an enormous amount of effort has gone into buffing the legacy of Elvis. If Elvis Evolution is doing what it sounds like it’s doing, it’ll be the definitive severing of the link between ‘Elvis’ and ‘Presley’. It’ll also be probably the most spectacular thing happening in London this year.
That at least feels very Elvis. Back in Indianapolis, Presley took his final bow. God bless and adios, he said: “We’ll meet you again.”
