According to arguably one of the biggest Elvis Presley superfans and experts, Todd Slaughter, there won’t be another star that comes close to rivalling the power of the late King – not even Freddie Mercury can measure up.
Elvis died aged 42 in 1977 and according to Todd, who has been the owner of the Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain for fifty years and was the last man to be filmed with The King before his death, Elvis’s prowess was more powerful than that of Queen’s Freddie Mercury.
Speaking ahead of the re-release of documentary and concert film Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, Todd recalls witnessing the Suspicious Minds singer live in all his glory and how he doesn’t think we’ll come to see another performer quite like it.
‘There will never be a star like Elvis Presley again and never a movie made again like that movie,’ he tells Metro.co.uk of That’s The Way It Is, which was first released 50 years ago. ‘I guess if you’ve seen Bohemian Rhapsody, which is possibly one of the best dramas about a pop star, about Freddie Mercury, that was incredibly good.’
Going further to compare Elvis to Freddie, who died in 1991, Todd went on: ‘Queen were incredible. Now if you see the control that Freddie Mercury had with his audience, then you look at the control that Elvis had, the outreach he had over his audience, it was two or three times greater than Freddie Mercury.
‘The big difference being there were no Live Aid kind of shows in those days. So Elvis was appearing before casino audiences of two and a half thousand people and nobody was really that far from the stage, so it didn’t matter, even if you were sitting at the back you still saw Elvis Presley’s face.’
Todd is known as appearing alongside the singer and actor in the last known filmed footage six weeks before his death, and had a good relationship with Elvis’ long-term manager Colonel Parker.
And, sure, while many may want to imagine what Elvis’s career might have looked like now, had he continued to perform for decades more, Todd is reluctant to even assume.
The superfan had met Elvis a couple of times before their final 1977 reunion, and he admits Elvis – who was intensely touring – had already changed from their first meeting just seven years earlier.
He explains: ‘He’d become a different kind of entertainer. He’d gone on tour, he was doing 150 concerts a year when Elton John was only doing four. [He was doing] schedules that would have killed most people, and to some extent probably finished Elvis off. It was a tremendous amount of effort and energy…people don’t do it these days.
‘It is so different. When Elvis went on tour he went along with half a dozen of his mates and musicians, when Adele goes on tour she’s got 15 people making up her nails. It’s a different thing, totally different.’
The King – who was married to Priscilla Presley, the pair sharing daughter Lisa Marie – released 24 studio albums over his career, and appeared in 31 feature films, rising temperatures around the world, but finding a staggeringly loyal fanbase in the US.
To this day, he is considered one of the highest-selling solo artists based on sales claims (which range from 600million to 1billion) – recently being pipped by Garth Brooks to the top spot.
However, according to Todd, the star was still seen as a ‘curio’ to those in the UK.
He says: ‘In the eyes of the public, Elvis was always a curio because nobody saw him over here, he didn’t really appear on TV over here. His early material he made for Ed Sullivan in the states in the 50s was not shown because Elvis was appearing behind am advert for [cigarette brand] Lucky Strike, and we only had one TV network the BBC, and there was no way the BBC would carry those kinds of programmes that were peppered with ads.’
To Todd, even when Elvis was at the height of his fame, all rhinestone outfits and unhinged, gyrating hips, he ‘didn’t get the accolades his success deserved’, attributing the apparent overnight to ‘a snobbery attached to music and films’.
Which is why he’s so impressed with The Way It Is, insisting the film – which uses footage from Todd’s club’s 1970 international convention in Luxembourg – captures Elvis at his ‘best’.
‘The costumes he’s wearing, it was the first time he was wearing these jumpsuits, but they’ve not time travelled that well,’ Todd says of Elvis’s famous on-stage threads. ‘So [in the film] it looks perfect, but as he got older, that’s the image people remember of Elvis. It’s encapsulated him at the height of his career you couldn’t get a better Elvis.’
Elvis: That’s The Way It Is will be in UK cinemas for one night only on August 13 with tickets available here.
