Alan Bleasdale on Elvis Presley, 1985

“I've never seen a man that erotic.”

Still one of my favourite albums.

Everyone’s talking about Elvis again. Which is how it should be.

Mainly because this month marked what would have been his 90th birthday. (And also because he has another number one album.)

For UK fans, this attention is particularly good because it means that the BBC has been showing the Elvis ’68 Comeback Special, and it’s now available on iPlayer. Bits of it (unsurprisingly) seem dated, and some of it is a bit kitsch, but the man himself is magnetic.

That show made a big impression on Liverpool playwright Alan Bleasdale, as I found out when I interviewed him about his play Are You Lonesome Tonight in 1985. He had a lot of insightful things to say about Elvis, from a true fan’s perspective.

BEHIND THE WALLS OF HEARTACHE

MELODY MAKER, August 3, 1985

Are You Lonesome Tonight' is ALAN BLEASDALE's play about the life and death of Elvis Presley - and about the myths behind the man. The play has already been seen around the country, and it reaches London's West End in August. Penny Kiley caught up with Bleasdale in his native Liverpool to find out how the play came to be written.

IT'S a strange fact of life in this entertainment business that we inhabit that theatre and rock'n'roll, closely related as they are, so rarely meet happily. Yet rock'n'roll has rarely been served well by the theatre, and when the play's about a famous dead person the worst usually happens.

So when the news came out that Alan Bleasdale was working on a musical about the life of Elvis Presley there was cause for scepticism, yet if anyone could pull it off he was probably the person.

It was seeing an Alan Bleasdale stage play that made me realise theatre could be more than polite outings with your mother on the one hand, and more than intellectual exercises with books on the other. And it was seeing an Alan Bleasdale TV series that made me realise television drama could be something more than the superficially curious involvement in others' lives of a soap or the intellectually curious detachment of a Play For Today. "Boys from The Blackstuff" took the best of both, then took with that television's potential for massively shared experience and lit it with the intensity of theatre's physical involvement. Thousands lived that experience for six weeks.

If there were gaps to be bridged, forms to be linked, here was the man for the job. Though when the media train began to roll it became obvious that "Are You Lonesome Tonight" (premiered at Liverpool Playhouse, with its West End opening at the Phoenix Theatre in August 13) was, for Bleasdale, more than just a job.

"For the first time in my life", he told me, "I wrote something not for artistic credibility, financial reward, or critical acclaim — I didn't really care. It was something I had to write, like climbing mountains. I was so angry!"

The anger's on behalf of a dead man unable to defend his memory and so, essentially, is the play. The anger's been well publicised by now, the credential well established, but it's still very much in evidence when we meet, halfway through its Liverpool run.

"I always get emotional about it," he admits. "I finished it in September so I should be well removed because I don't keep things with me, I carry on, but the Presley thing is still there."

Having seen it, how did he assess the end result? He's honest enough to admit that, as a play, it wasn't perfect, but in the bigger task he's set himself he hadn't failed. "I'm not sure that I got the play right, but I got the response right." And as for the delicate sensibilities of the people who really counted — "the Elfans, as they call themselves" — he's had a deluge of mail that vindicates the risk he took on behalf of their hero.

Although there are objective criticisms to be made about the play (a weakness of narrative that brings it too close at times to being just another "show" for example), ultimately what remains after the event (the true test) is enough to overshadow any reservations.

The things that linger after "Are You Lonesome Tonight" are, first of all, that song, resonant with pathos, and secondly a series of images, each with a song to match — the startling perfection of the young Elvis bursting into the public gaze for the first time; the breathtakingly outrageous foolishness of the first TV appearance; and the joyful comic eroticism of the TV show that marked the '68 comeback. You laugh without knowing quite why you laugh, and that's rule 1 of rock'n'roll and something Bleasdale discovered in his Elvis Presley.

"I think one thing that Presley did that nobody has ever actually pinpointed before is he made people aware that carnal knowledge was a situation comedy as well and that sex is great fun! I've never seen a man that erotic. It's not like Tom Jones' eroticism which is like sex by numbers, and Mick Jagger's sexual appeal always struck me as coming off a toilet wall — but those early videos of the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows when he comes flying on stage and he moves . . .

"Two things: he's laughing all the way, and in between the screams the girls are laughing too. All that early stuff must have been an enormous release to kids of his age — I was too young to know or understand, but when you look back on it . . . nobody else got near."

Those moments in the course of the play that indicate that essence in Presley come as near as theatre can to defining rock'n'roll. Like "Boys From The Blackstuff", an unprecedented mix of soap, drama, comedy and documentary, "Are You Lonesome Tonight" (finally proving that rock'n'roll and theatre can mix) cuts across both genre and medium to the service of its subject. The play comes across like a film on stage but with the emotional intensity (particularly in Martin Shaw's stunning portrayal of the older Presley) that can only be engendered by physical presence in front of an audience.

Yet it's images, not words, that convey most of the message, and that's the second rule of rock'n'roll that Bleasdale's used. And the third is one that every rock'n'roller (and rock'n'roll writer) knows, and that no amount of stage lookalikes and impersonators ever will: that realism is something that's often furthest from the truth. Bleasdale calls his play "a myth about a myth". As he discusses certain scenes, he'll tell you "I was going for the truth - not the facts" – a very rock'n'roll conceit!

The myth making that surrounded "the most famous man of our time" is explicit in the play. The dying Presley, viewing the ghosts of his past, sees some that never existed except in his own or others' minds. The young Presley as Brando or Dean he dismisses — "That was never me" — but for many people, it was. A myth is public property, and private property to as many people as claim it.

Behind the myths Bleasdale has found a man, and a man who, despite the strengths of his talent, lacked the personal strength to cope with it. Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager, was instrumental in exploiting the contradiction. "They were both waiting for each other," says Bleasdale, "but Parker came well armed.

"It's very clear who I'm attaching some of the blame to, but some must be attached to Presley himself — for not being able to survive enough, for not having the conceit and arrogance to push people away that say Sinatra or McCartney or Dylan or John Lennon, before his untimely death, did, or even Springsteen, patently nice and generous and articulate man that he is, must have a hard inner core of strength . . . Parker was a hustler and a con man and anyone who's as susceptible and as easy a victim as Presley or George Best is always going to be surrounded by people like that."

The football analogies come easily to Bleasdale, ex-PE teacher and lifelong Liverpool supporter (though, since Brussels, "I doubt if I'll ever go to a football match again").

"My basic philosophy in life," he says, "is a philosophy from the football pitch. I would never kick anyone until they deliberately kick me and then I'd try to put them in intensive care! I'm all for an easy life but I don't like being messed around." That, he admits, is a very Liverpool attitude ("That's why Toxteth went"), and Bleasdale's image is still very much based on that identification.

"I know I do the public side pretty well — I was a teacher for nine years and you're performing all the time. I'm good at public performances because I gave public performances five days a week, 40 weeks a year, for nine years — when I see an audience I respond. But I'm not interested in being a public figure — for a writer that's bad news."

What Bleasdale celebrates is something he can celebrate without the taint of nostalgia. At 38, he's close enough to understand, but not too close. ("I was only 10 when 'Heartbreak Hotel' came out.") He discovered Presley in retrospect, after the stunning experience of seeing the '68 comeback. "Suddenly, there he was — everything he had been before but better — astonishing!"

These days, he admits "I'm just an ageing rocker" ("my musical education finished with Bruce Springsteen"), but still enthusiast enough to pride himself with adolescent glee on the effects of his noise levels on the neighbours. Typical of his generation, he doesn't follow the contemporary scene too closely — "Punk made me laugh and synthesizers made me throw up” — but he does admire "the political bands — Paul Weller" (who he's shared a stage with on more than one occasion), "UB40, and especially Costello, who's a friend of mine now." His heroes, though, are of an earlier era: "Dylan, Lennon, and Presley."

There's the obvious question ... "I couldn't actually write about Lennon, I've been asked to several times but I couldn't do it — I couldn't do it." Even now, the subject gives him visible pain. And after the emotional energy he poured into Presley, he vows, "I don't think I'll every write again about another human being. I'd much rather invent the buggers."

Watch Elvis

Here he is in the ’68 Comeback Special singing Jailhouse Rock. Wonderful.