Elvis Aaron Presley, the King of rock’n’roll, never performed in the UK. Instead, Elvis at the O2 is TCB – that’s Taking Care of Business, the Presley motto.
It’s the closest most British fans will ever get to Memphis, Tennessee, where he lived until his death in 1977. At his home in Graceland, there are tens of thousands of artefacts – from which a small selection has been shipped over to the UK. A 1957 gold lame suit is just one piece from the extended showbiz wardrobe of jumpsuits, leather outfits and increasingly bizarre costumes worn by Elvis in later years in Las Vegas; his mother’s pink Cadillac Fleetwood is a retro delight from the twenty ostentatious gas guzzlers on show in the Elvis Presley Automobile Museum – one of several buildings on the Graceland compound.
The London exhibition will run for nine months from Friday 12 December, and will be updated every few weeks. Elvis’s own personal house keys will be shown alongside his gold telephone, his wallet, and some of the 89 gold and platinum discs amassed from an estimated 600m album sales. In Graceland, those discs line the walls of a very long corridor, floor to ceiling.
The London exhibition is but a drop in the ocean. Graceland, nine miles outside of Memphis, covers fourteen acres, and employs scores of tour guides driving a fleet of minibuses around the various buildings on the estate. Inside the mansion itself (actually a rather modest house) each of the 500,000 pilgrims who visit annually is given an interactive iPad tour tablet to explain the detail and decor: the white leather sofas, the canary yellow den, the kitsch and dark wood interiors throughout the ground floor and basement. The bedrooms and bathroom upstairs where Elvis died are off limits. Not even visiting presidents are allowed up there. It’s an American Historic Landmark, which means it comes with its fair share of burger outlets and souvenir shops, as well as exhibits: two customised private jets and the backyard family graves for example.
No item in Graceland is too small for reverence. In the stadium-seated archive theatre, a woman wearing white gloves gingerly shows off Mr P’s 1947 tax return, now encased in plastic. She has an illuminated powerpoint display of filing cabinets, apparently containing several thousand photographs and papers which belonged to the great man. “Kinda cool, huh?” she says. That doesn’t include a further three thousand items of clothing – the garish shirts and hipswinging slacks from early movies like Blue Hawaii as well as those later, larger, appliqued and embroidered white romper suits. Out on the gun range, the spent bullet casings fired by Elvis himself are unlikely to make it across for the London show.
Elvis’s first record, That’s All Right – regarded by many as the first ever rock’n’roll single – was released in July 1954 when Elvis was just 19 years old, a Mississipi white boy who loved Hank Snow’s country music but oozed raw sex on stage as he channelled the black music of church gospel and southern blues which he heard on Beale Street, Memphis’s short downtown music strip. Beale Street’s bars and supper joints are now kept alive by tourists after they’ve done the Museum of Rock’n’Soul, a permanent exhibition by The Smithsonian which succinctly explains the city’s musical heritage.
From there a free shuttlebus will take you to Graceland, twenty minutes outside the city. On a good day, whizzing down the freeway with bequiffed devotees, electrifying numbers like Suspicious Minds and Blue Suede Shoes will blast out from the onboard video console, prompting head and thigh shakes, feet and finger taps, until the actual Heartbreak Hotel hoves into view.
The Platinum tour costs $37 (£23.50) (the VIP queue jumping ticket is $77 (£49)) and kicks off with a photo opp as you stand in line for the minibus. This is taken in front of a grainy old picture of Graceland, and costs an extra $25 (£16)if you want a print. At the end of the tour, access to both those private jets, fenced off in their own compound, is another $5.
It takes two hours, or longer if you’ve lingered over the rollers and cadillacs in the Automobile Museum, or had Elvis’s favourite peanut butter and banana sandwich at the Rockabilly Burger Shop. Afterwards the shuttlebus goes back to downtown Memphis, to Sun Studios, where Elvis recorded his earliest, ballsy rock numbers and gospel inspired ballads which had the world rushing to record stores as they fell in love with him.
The London organisers say Elvis at The O2 will take visitors two hours to go round too, if you include a 30-minute video presentation. Tickets are timed and cost up to £20 for adults. A special return ticket allows up to six return visits for £40. They’re also promising the “largest Elvis-themed retail outlet ever assembled” to sell merchandising, collector memorabilia and special issue CDs and recordings. In that sense it really is just like the real thing out at Graceland.
• Elvis at the O2, North Greenwich, London, 12 December to 31 August, 2015. Open every day. See website for ticket times and visiting details: elvisattheo2.com
• Graceland, 3717 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee. Open 360 days a year. See website for visiting details: graceland.com
• For further information on travel to Memphis go to memphistravel.com
Not coming to London – must sees in Memphis
Sun Studios
An ‘X’ on the floor marks the exact spot where Elvis first worked his magic. The studio where blues and country music were mixed by pioneer Sam Phillips to create the raw sound that gave birth to rock’n’roll.
• One hour guided tours $12; 706 Union Avenue, Memphis sunstudio.com
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
Soulboy heaven in a museum recreated from the original disused cinema where Otis Redding, The Staples Singers, Isaac Hayes and many more came to record America’s soul hits. Video clips, the clothes, and an actual church. Now the Soulsville Foundation includes a music school too.
• $12 admission; 926 East McLemore Avenue, Memphis staxmuseum.com
National Civil Rights Museum
Housed in the former Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on 4 April, 1968. Immensely powerful display of exhibits detailing racial segregation (Rosa Parks’s bus) and the progress of civil rights to where the US is today.
• 450 Mulberry Street, civilrightsmuseum.org
Peabody Hotel
Opulently restored 1869 Grand Hotel, a city landmark, bizarrely famous for the ‘Duckwalk’ where a raft of ducks is marched each evening from the lobby fountain via their own elevator to rooftop sleeping quarters. The four star french restaurant, Chez Philippe, does not have le canard on le menu.
• 149 Union Avenue, www.peabodymemphis.com, the Peabody ducks march at 11am and 5pm daily