Exposure, April 1989

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Exposure

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From a whisper to a scream


Clinton Walker

The continuing attraction of rock's angry young man

Elvis Costello is the biggest little star there is. He doesn't need the canonization accorded him by Jay McInerney (who in his latest novel, Story of My Life, has its central character constantly quoting the man) to know where he stands. Though he may be an unwilling "spokesperson for a generation." Costello, in America at least, still stands on the outside. But then he doesn't seem to want to come to the party anyway. Not if it means he's going to end up in a compromising position.

In his native Britain, Elvis is an elder statesman of the post-punk pop scene, who has amazingly survived for this most fickle of audiences, not only because his credibility has never been in question, but also because he has consistently produced invigorating music. Costello is getting everything he the wants to do exactly the way that he wants to do it. Why should he want to upset that balance?

Few performers in fact have managed to actually sell so few records and make so much noise about doing so. In sync with the superstar process to this extent at least, Costello has cultivated his own myth, fronted by the image of the bug-eyed insect with a poison sting in his tail. An image as iconographic as a Madonna or Billy Idol. Those hornrims as much a symbol as Michael Jackson’s glove. You can almost see Elvis taking his place in that silly rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame, sneaking in the back door, peering out from between Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp.

Elvis Costello has always had a reputation for being "difficult." He refuses, as he would undoubtedly claim himself, to be but a pliant pop star akimbo with his two-dimensional image. But is a real person whose music is about real life.

Elvis Costello isn’t one to take an easy option — the easiest of which is to simply repeat yourself, ad infinitum – or to shirk the issues. Since the release of his first album My Aim Is True in 1976, Costello has released virtually an album per year, sometimes more, which has kept his fans glued to the edge of their seats. The release, then, of the first new Costello album for some eighteen months, his first for his new label, Warner Bros., would have to be something of an event. Fans might immediately want to know, why has Spike, as the album is called, taken so long?

“Well, if you think most people release records every eighteen months, and I maybe release one every nine months, it’s not really a long time,” says the man. “It took a little while to set this up, getting my recent contract aligned, boring practical things like that.”

Costello adds that he’s hardly been idle anyway. After touring the US and Europe in ’87, last year, as well as getting Spike together, which involved sessions in London, Dublin, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, he married for the second time, to Cait O’Riordan (formerly of the Pogues), wrote a filmscore and songs with Ruben Blades, Aimee Mann and Paul McCartney (two of which are included on Spike, one – “Veronica” – the first single); and has moved from England (“a very tatty, Third World country”) to live in Ireland.

“You see, also, you reach a point,” he continues, “where you get offered things to do that seem interesting, that you might learn something from, that you might enjoy. And because I’m not in competition with anyone but myself, you don’t have to do everything motivated by ‘Is it going to get me on the charts? Is it going to get me on the cover of Exposure magazine?” It’s not the most important thing in my life, you know. Enjoying my life, and doing things the way I want to, and having the freedom to do that, is, you know, a much better way to be than on some schedule.”

Costello was in Australia to shoot the “Veronica” video in Melbourne (with Evan English and Johnny Hillcoat, the production team that made the film Ghosts of the Civil Dead with Nick Cave) and he took the opportunity to do a couple of rare interviews in Sydney. The record company had advised me Elvis only wanted to “talk about the new album.”

About forty-five minutes into my allotted forty-five minutes with him, I had to say “Elvis,” (who was dressed head to toe in crisply-pressed black perched on a lounge in his hotel suite sipping Perrier), “I was told you only wanted to talk about the new album, and so far the only thing we haven’t talked about is the new album.” Elvis has never been one to suffer journalists too gladly, and this journalist has ruffled his feathers. In a review of last year’s music I took a facetious shot at him. As far as Elvis was concerned, it was a case of “some very cynical person deciding to write me off in a couple of lines because I’m past my Use-By date.” Whether or not it was meant as that or not (and it wasn’t) Costello was off and running. He decided to fill me in on his view of the current scene. And he wasn’t going to stop until he was finished.

“The scene itself … I get to the point where I know things I like, and they’re private to me. And I don’t tell anybody.” He did, however, tell me that he liked DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, the Sugarcubes and Yaz.

“I only trust people with corporate sponsorship” (Who’s being facetious now?) “I like to know they’re really solid upright citizens. Like Jon Bon Jovi. I think if they’re good enough for Coca-Cola, they’re good enough for me. I mean, I think you’re safe that way. It’s like making sure you’ve got a good locking system on your car, you pretty much can’t go off the road with Whitney, Michael, Jon…”

“But I really do like “Bad Medicine,” I’m not kidding you. I’m not being facetious. I really think it’s a great pop record. I think that Jon Bon Jovi’s a lot less despicable than a lot of other very arch people around, who’ve got one eye on the charts and the other on, like, being in The Face. I mean he’s literally got it down. You know, he sings about partying and not being put down by parents and authority, and you’ve got lots of long-legged girls with big breasts in the video, and I think he really believes it. That’s one definition – there are people that live that life, and that’s all they want. They don’t want to know about the government, they don’t want to hear about politics. Which is fair enough. It’s just what’s important to them.”

So you’re saying that Jon Bon Jovi isn’t offensive because he’s not cynical about what he’s doing?

“Yeah, because Jon Bon Jovi has as much faith in what he does as I do in what I do. He just believes different things are important.”

“I think he really believes it, he really believes in all the myths of rock n’ roll, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

“It’s like Elvis … you know the thing James Burton said to me – name-dropping again (Burton played guitar for the first Elvis, and more recently with this Elvis) – he said, ‘You know the thing I liked about Elvis… he really believed he was the King of rock n’ roll. That’s the cool thing about him. He really believed it all. I think he fucking died for it, you know.’”

“But I don’t, you know, I don’t believe it.”

But even if it isn’t cynically calculated, Bon Jovi’s still bubblegum. Elvis Costello is considered an artist of substance. But in the image-paddling of modern pop, is it not all illusory?

“I would say that I break through to people more often than a lot of these other people do. They never get any closer. They give the illusion of proximity.”

“I don’t think it makes it any less real to just write the songs and play them and release records the way you want to, than it is to stand on stage and look out and see 15,000 facsimiles of yourself, the way that in so many rock n’ roll songs the only definition of them is that everyone wants to be them [the performer] or fuck them. I don’t think that that’s necessarily the only way a singer’s defined. It can be just one little thing that person might say that will make all the effort you put into it worthwhile. It’s just a different perspective on fame.”

“To some people it [fame] is everything, like it’s the best thing they could be. Did you see the movie The Decline of Western Civilization [The Metal Years]? All these interviews, they’re with all these people with these huge haircuts, saying, “Well, when I’m famous,” you know. And their definition of famous is, like, big cars, girls, and all the drugs they can take. They just see it as a conveyor belt.”

Fame as an end in itself (famous for being famous) is obviously ultimately hollow.

“Yeah, these people don’t want to think about why they’re there, what it means, what they can do there, they just want to be there.”

Given Costello’s consistently outspoken politics commitments – his involvement in the early days of Rock Against Racism, his having produced the Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” in 1984 (perhaps the first ‘choral protest’ record and the only one of any artistic merit) and having written such songs as “Shipbuilding” and “Pills And Soap” – I would have liked to have asked his opinion of all the current Aid For Everything. I would have liked to have asked him lots of things. I would have liked to have asked him what he thought of Tracy Chapman. But I could barely get a word in edgewise. “George Michael,” he flies off again, “Personally, I think George Michael’s incredibly overrated. I don’t think he’s a very good songwriter. The coincidence of his pop celebrity, with his very small grasp of songwriting technique, even though he’s capable. I think what’s out of whack is that the minute he makes a commercial mistake he'll discover how much he has to learn about songwriting.”

“You know, I mean he’s blessed with the look, and he looks exactly like he does in his pictures. I met him recently and he’s one of the few people who does look exactly like his pictures, except a little shorter. But he just isn’t very interesting, he’s not a very interesting person. His whole image is very contrived, and it doesn’t have any humility to it. Really, what does he sing about? It’s like Michael Jackson. He’s got the ears of the world, and what does he sing about? He does Pepsi commercials! Anybody would like just a little bit of his sort of success, in terms of financial reward, but if it doesn’t free you … If I can be as free as I am doing what I do with the little success I’ve had surely he could do anything… he could go to the moon!”

“Most people are not ten years into their career trying to do what I’ve done with this record. Whether anybody likes it or not is kind of irrelevant. Most people don’t put much effort into making a record. I mean … this is a fucking good record. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be, and perhaps if I had more expectations upon me as a commercial, big, successful artist, maybe I would be in the kind of dilemma that, say, Michael Jackson is. Does he make a record which is going to maintain his phenomenal status, or does he just make a musical record he’s capable of making. Because Bad is complete crap, compared to Thriller. It’s just a question of how limited a lot of music is. The very self-consciousness of pop music has almost taken away all of what’s left of its possibilities.”

“The conditioning of the marketplace has just made everybody so boring. These trends that go through the mill, it’s boring, the music’s boring. It’s imitation wild. You know, acid house – it’s like drug music for people who are afraid to take drugs. I’m not trying to encourage anyone to take drugs. There’s no unpredictability about it. The artificial nature of so much of it means that the potential of the really inspired moment is diminished, just by the law of averages.”

“My son, he’s 14, and when Bowie and Jagger had that version of “Dancing In The Streets” out, I played him the original by Martha and The Vandellas, and I said, “Isn’t that better?” And he said, ‘Yes,’ but he couldn’t hear it as well. It didn’t reach his ears, because he’s conditioned to hearing records in a certain way. He detected it was more passionate, he was smart enough to do that, but he still wanted to listen to the other thing, because it was brighter. That’s the thing. Everything’s brighter, all the colors are brighter, but there’s no real excitement. I mean, how much more of a good time can you fucking have? That’s the fallacy of acid house – the day is still 24-hours long. I don’t see it coming around. You know, I don’t need Sonic Youth. They don’t serve any purpose to me. I’m afraid the reason that I still do love a lot of music I love is because it is human, it does sweat. It’s like not trusting people that don’t drink. Like, if you’ve got a good reason not to drink, fine, but if you’re just afraid of losing some of your inhibitions, if it’s only because you don’t want to crease your suit, I think that’s a dumb reason. I’m not advocating it as an everyday practice, but, you know, you might enjoy falling on the floor once in a while.”

If anyone thought signing – directly – to the corporate giant Warners might have diluted Costello’s muse, they’ll be thinking again. Spike – named, or not, after old English musical comedian Spike Jones – isn’t going to be an easy record for Warners to sell.

“No, no, but I don’t think I’ve ever made a record that’s easy to sell,” Costello counters, “that sounds like everything on the charts. Surely that’s why they signed me, because I don’t sound like everybody else.”

Spike marks another wry, if not willfully perverse twist in Elvis Costello’s oeuvre.

Costello’s is a body of work marked by inconsistency as much as a defiant vision, petulance and arrogance as much as compassion and humor, spontaneity and inspiration as much as stolid workmanship – which is of course, in an all but totally homogenized environment, a great part of its beauty. Where Costello came in, with his first few albums with his band the Attractions, would best be described as simply English R&B – flavored pub rock elevated by the superior material of a driven post-Dylan singer/songwriter. Along the way, he indulged some of his influences – toyed with genres – but it was in honing and polishing his own style that he was most convincing. After Goodbye Cruel World, which Costello himself apparently described as a “pretty terrible record,” in 1987 he released King of America. Produced by Costello in collaboration with T Bone Burnett, and using mostly American musicians like James Burton, Jerry Scheff and Ron Tutt (the latter two who’d also worked with Elvis), Jim Keltner, Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, Mitchell Froom and Michael Blair (of Tom Waits’ band) – a floating aggregation known as the Confederates – King Of America was to this listener Elvis Costello’s most listenable album ever.

Then he turned around and later that year released another album, Blood And Chocolate which was about as far away from King Of America as you could get. Returning to The Attractions and producer Nick Lowe, where King Of America was fairly well-refined, Blood And Chocolate was rather raw and savage.

It’s too easy to dismiss Elvis Costello as merely the voice of undergraduate angst, or even now mid-life crisis. He speaks to people who distrust appearances, and he refuses to submit to the blind control of radio programmers and other out-of-touch tastemakers. For all his “difficulty” though, it’s Costello’s gift for turning out the most easily singalongable – classic, Sixties’ pop-influenced – melodies, and lyrics that roll effortlessly off them, that makes him appealing to a lot of people. He’s a clever wordsmith who asks his audience to get involved with the songs, and whatever sort of arrangements he puts them to, it’s the words and the tune that remain his hook. You just have to go to a Costello concert to see that – so many in the audience will know all the words to every song, and mouth them along with him. Clearly, Costello’s saying something to these people, but not unexpectedly he’s unprepared to take the weight of a generation upon his shoulders.

“It’s not like I’ve ever said I was some kind of guru figure,” he said, “with lots of to-be-unlocked-multi-layered-meaning songs. I mean, some of the songs I wrote earlier on, technically speaking, were less than transparent. But more recently, since I’ve been writing clearer, I decided that that’s the way I want to write now. The songs, I think, are very easy to understand so I get less of those neurotic reactions these days.” But as much as Costello still inspires a passionate devotion among his fans, there’s an even larger number of people whom he leaves completely cold. A clue as to why that is could be contained in something Costello told an interviewer last year. “While the Attractions,” he said, “are brilliant at creating a claustrophobic sound, the Confederates, being American are good at creating space.”

The sound Costello trademarked as his own on his earlier records with the Attractions was perhaps so claustrophobic, so dense it was to many people impenetrable. King Of America, however, was a record that had light and air, it breathed, and since then Costello’s cultivated this new breakthrough.

Spike is unlike anything he’s done before. Produced again, by Costello and T Bone Burnett, the album’s credits list a remarkable gallery of contributing musicians – among them, Roger McGuinn, Paul McCartney, Cait O’Riordan, various Confederates and the Attractions, Benmont Tench, (from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers), Allan Toussaint, Marc Ribot (from Tom Wait’s band), even Irish picker Christy Moore on one track and New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band on a few others.

At times the album is reminiscent of earlier Costello fare, but at other times – more often – it sounds like nothing so much as recent Tom Waits. And nobody knows as well as Waits how to use space dramatically.

“In some cases, it’s a case of less is more,” says Costello, “ at other times, the arrangements are quite full, but they’re slightly upside down. It was done kind of backwards. It was done instrument by instrument, rather than tracking. Like, a couple of times, where normally you would put the rhythm section down and then do the overdubs, sometimes we’d do what you might call the overdubs first, which would mean it would alter what you’d imagine the rhythm sections should be. The perfect example of that is the song called “Deep, Dark, Truthful Mirror,” the first track on the record. Obviously you put down something as a guide, like a drum machine, but most of that was removed later. Then we put the horns on it, because the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were available first. So that immediately puts a tremendous amount of mood into the thing. And so suddenly maybe you think you don’t need this big bass and drums driving it along. And then we had Allen Toussaint play piano, who plays such a full scope, why impede hearing what he’s doing with his left hand, by putting down bass which is only doubling him? There’s a song called “Chewing Gum,” it’s kind of like all jumpy and cut up, you couldn’t really dance to it but it has some of the effects of a funk tune, it’s got this story about some sleazy guy that gets a mail-order bride. So it’s kind of like funk gone wrong. So there’s that. Taking a recognizable style and damaging it somehow in order to create a dramatic effect which somehow just sits with the song.”

“I just took the blinkers off as to what sounds you can use to portray the songs. Most of the time, what governed it was, ‘Here’s the song, this is what it’s about, now how are you going to bring it to life?’ Instead of it being, like, ‘Well, here we are, we’re a band, and we play rock ‘n’ roll,’ you can sort of say, “Well, I can do any fucking thing I want.’”

Costello speaks highly of Paul McCartney, with whom he’s now written some songs, Spike’s two being earlier fruits of the liaison. People knock him and say his music’s empty. It think they’re making unreasonable demand on what he is and what he represents. People are afraid to like him, almost, because they see him as too homely, or something. He’s a great bass player and a terrific singer.”

Costello is lined up to do a tour of the US in April, performing solo, but he can’t predict if or when he will tour with a band, or what shape it would take. Let alone suggest what his next album will sound like.

“Well, that’s a great thing, isn’t it, because it’s a big adventure. I mean, there are things, when it comes to certain things, the reason we have 7-11’s and Coca-Cola and Bon Jovi, because they’re reliable. You know exactly what you’re going to get. And there’s something comforting about that in the modern world, people seem to need it. But then my role isn’t to do that. I’m the opposite. And I think I’m having a lot more fun.”

“When I see cynicism I react to it badly, because I’m having a ball, you see.” The way Costello keeps trying to convince me how happy he is you must wonder why. But the fact that he doesn’t seem to have lost a Scouse sense of belligerence, that he does still seem to have bees in his bonnet, is maybe what drives him on. He can still get angry, and rock certainly isn’t worse off with at least one angry man still around. “You know,” he says, “I’m getting paid to do exactly what I feel like. As a way of life, that’s a lot more than most people have. And I don’t think I’m being self-indulgent, and a lot of the songs are about real serious subjects. The serious moral dilemmas that you find in the world, everywhere, and I’m not trying to trivialize them. And I’m also not trying to say I’ve got the ultimate answer. But I am free to say what I want, exactly the way I want to, and nobody can fucking stop me.”


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Exposure, April 1989


Clinton Walker interviews Elvis Costello.

(This piece also ran in Rolling Stone Australia, May 1989.)

Images

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Cover photo by Gary Heery.


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Page scans.


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Page scans.



Photo by Gary Heery.
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Photo by Gary Heery.


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Page 91 inset photo by Tom Wright.


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Contents page.

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