Elvis is back in the building

When Elvis died the last thing any self-respecting rocker would do was praise Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas years. It wasn’t cool. On the contrary, it was hip only to heap praise on his Sun Recordings, at most. Happily, most of the rock powers-that-be who perpetuated such nonsense have long since been put out to pasture and we now have a brand new generation who came of age to the music of the King in the ’70s. One such kid was Kevin Doyle who plays the man himself in The Elvis Presley Story which starts at Dublin’s Gaiety theatre on April 14.

Doyle’s earliest memory of Presley’s music involves just one cassette, the 1972 release, Live At Madison Square Garden.

“I was born the year that came out but I’ll always remember when I was about five my parents had this cassette in the car and they’d be playing it driving me to school, all the time in fact,” he recalls. “Then one day years later, my brother came home with this on CD and said, ‘remember we used to listen to this in the car?’. And I discovered Elvis all over again.”

Now that Kevin is the kind of fan who has “a shrine to the King” at home. In fact, when he started out performing “around the same time as The Commitments movie” it was as a drummer in a nine-piece soul band called Soulfinger, doing “Stax stuff”, and Elvis didn’t figure at all. But as more and more promoters began asking for tribute bands, Kevin moved from drums to singing, and slowly he began to “sneak in things like Elvis’s ‘Polk Salad Annie’ and ‘Proud Mary’ – from that Madison Square Garden album, of course. At that point they formed an Elvis tribute band, one so good that recently they got to play a gig in Dublin with three members of Presley’s ’70s band, Ronnie Tutt, Jerry Scheff and Glen D. Hardin.

“Glen D. Hardin saw us last year and got them to play with us,” says Kevin, beaming. “It was magical. When I started this – as a drummer – Ronnie Tutt was the man and, believe me, he’s as good now as he ever was. Even though he had a stroke some time ago. And I was so chuffed after the show when he said, ‘when you were out in front of me, in that jumpsuit, I couldn’t see your face and it sure brought back memories of working with Elvis’. I couldn’t believe it!”

No better candidate then for the guy who plays Elvis in The Elvis Presley Story. But if this is a form of ‘Lucan Mafia’ as opposed to Presley’s ‘Memphis Mafia’, the musical doesn’t focus on the shadier aspects of Presley’s story. In other words, it’s not about sex and drugs – just rock ’n’ roll. But does this mean this show was controlled by Graceland and the Presley Estate?

“‘No, there’s no control or contact made with Graceland, as yet,” Kevin responds. “But what we focus on, mostly, are the musical highlights of the man’s career, making it as much of a non-stop-music gig as possible. 95% of it is us knocking out the tunes – though there is also a certain amount of narration and use of multi media – film clips and stills, for example.”

No doubt lots of time is given to tracks from that Madison Square Garden album. But has Kevin thought of recording a live album of his own show to close the circle nearly thirty years later?

“I always reckoned why would people want to buy me singing Elvis songs when they can go into HMV and buy the real thing,” he says, wisely. “But maybe people would like a memento of our show, on the night, so maybe we’ll do that.”