New York Newsday, March 13, 1994

From The Elvis Costello Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
... Bibliography ...
727677787980818283
848586878889909192
939495969798990001
020304050607080910
111213141516171819
202122232425 26 27 28


New York Newsday

New York publications

Newspapers

University publications

Magazines and alt. weeklies


US publications by state
  • ALAKARAZCA
  • COCTDCDEFL
  • GAHI   IA      ID      IL
  • IN   KSKYLA   MA
  • MDME   MIMNMO
  • MSMTNC  ND  NE
  • NHNJNMNVNY
  • OHOKORPARI
  • SCSDTNTXUT
  • VAVTWAWIWY

-

The irony and the ecstasy


Ira Robbins

Elvis Costello reclaims his youth with a mature new album.

Like an old flame breezing back through the door with no more than an indolent shrug and a sly wink, Elvis Costello has returned from last year's string quartet fling to reclaim the stripped-down, jacked-up sound of his younger days. The newly released Brutal Youth — a fervid album as taut, spare and focused as any Costello has made since 1981's Trust — brings the bitter, aggressive adolescent of that era around to meet a confident musical intellectual approaching 40. For longtime fans alarmed by the cerebral theatricality of The Juliet Letters, the new record is a rapturous return to form.

Rather than attempt his singular rapprochement alone, Costello had help reversing into the future. Through a series of coincidences and barely considered efforts, Brutal Youth (Warner Bros.) reunites Costello and the four people with whom he made This Year's Model, Armed Forces and other classics of the early canon: bassist Nick Lowe (producer of Costello's first five albums) and the Attractions, the idiosyncratically peerless trio of keyboardist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas.

The Costello-Attractions affair ended with Blood & Chocolate, a 1986 album on which, Costello says, "We very consciously took the musical blueprint of This Year's Model and played it like grouchy 35-year-olds.

"What I thought to be the final Attractions record is very much the record of the way we were then — not quite holding together as a band. There are flaws in the playing, which actually turn into virtues on the finished record. But there were flaws in the instrumental relationship to one another." Costello and Pete Thomas continued to work together, but Nieve drifted away and Bruce Thomas dashed off The Big Wheel, a distastefully peevish 1990 tour-and-tell memoir. ("The Singer had begun taking cameo acting roles as a move toward becoming an all-round entertainer. If he kept scoffing sushi at the rate he was, he wouldn't have much longer to wait.")

Costello replied in song, with the heatedly vindictive "How to Be Dumb," on 1991's Mighty Like a Rose, and that was all he wrote. "Now you've got yourself a brand new occupation / Every fleeting thought is a pearl," ran the lyrics. "You could've walked out anytime you wanted but face it you didn't have the courage / I guess that makes you a full-time hypocrite or some kind of twisted dilettante."

"Obviously," Costello says now, "neither [the book nor the song] would exist if there hadn't been some ill feeling, but that's in the past. Maybe that's why you write a song, to get it out of your system."

The reunion "came together in a much more casual way than most people would expect. They probably imagine someone came and said, 'Well, we can't get the Clash to reform, how about you guys?'"

In reality, he says, about two months after finishing The Juliet Letters, "I went in the studio with Pete Thomas, and we cut a few things, with just electric guitar and drums." Costello would then add on the other instruments himself but came up against one song in which the self-designed piano part was beyond his abilities.

As luck would have it, Costello ran into Nieve and asked him to take a crack at that tune, as well as several others. Costello then "took the tapes and just thought about it for a month. Then I asked Mitchell Froom to produce. I rang Nick Lowe to play bass, and he was fine apart from a few [songs]. He has a real aversion to anything more than five chords in it. He sort of says, 'Oh, I can't play that.' To be honest, it's kind of an act."

With the scheduled sessions about to begin, Costello needed a backup bassist. Froom suggested Bruce Thomas as the obvious choice. Costello concurred. "I just gave him a call. Everything was just fine. It was weird. You might have expected us to have to have a big heart-to-heart, but we didn't." Thomas wound up playing bass on five songs and will be present when Costello and the Attractions begin an American tour in May. (They should reach this area sometime in June.)

On Brutal Youth, simple arrangements built on Nieve's unmistakable piano and organ flourishes and Pete Thomas' ferociously inventive snare work provide a familiar setting for some of Costello's most direct and distinctive songs. The resemblance to his early albums provides a convenient entry point, but it's the cohesive playing and the vivid force of the material — especially the lyrics — that give artistic weight to Brutal Youth.

"I've no desire to repeat myself musically, but inevitably you've got the same four musicians in a studio — however older you may have gotten, however much more sophisticated, or [how much] you may have lost some quality that used to be second nature." Belying the dated aspects of the sound, Costello's words reflect his active interest in the modern world. "This album has some musical things in it which people [may] feel familiar with, but there's no way I could have written the words of these songs [back then]."

Discussing the numerous ironies and reference points that seem crucial to his creative process, Costello says he believes people have grown "more sophisticated in the way they listen to music. If you make a musical reference on a record now, they don't necessarily take it just at face value. Some will; therefore, the song has to work at face value."

For instance, in "Pony Street," the mother-daughter song that leads off Brutal Youth, Costello points out "a bit of very early Who in the structure, in the way the drums float free and [the song] doesn't really release until the very end. [The Who's 'My Generation'] is a very obvious association to draw from when you're writing a song about generations."

Beyond the personal politics of "Pony Street," "Sulky Girl" and "Just About Glad," and the tender romance of "Still Too Soon to Know," the album's strongest songs take a witheringly critical look at the decaying state of Britain.

1994-03-13 New York Newsday, FanFare page 11.jpg

Reflecting on "20% Amnesia," an ambitious collection of glancing vignettes on corruption and decline in British politics and society, he observes, "When you cram a lot of stuff into a song, the song does the job for you. The aggression of the music or the collision of music and words gets a point over, which, if you then try to really unravel and explain, takes five times longer and sounds really grand. Which is why I write songs and not write books on political history."

Ironically, cramming words into that song has done an unintended job that may require a lot of unraveling and explaining. As sung, the line "strip-jack-naked with a Stanley knife" appears to contain the same racist epithet that got Costello decked in a 1979 bar brawl with Bonnie Bramlett. According to the author and the lyric sheet, he sings no such thing but admits that other listeners have heard it. "It wouldn't have been part of the song, it wouldn't have made sense. But once it was pointed out, I can sort of hear it. I was completely astounded. When you do something very quick like that, it's a trick of the light."

Such problems of perception are nothing new to Costello. "I had somebody tell me they brought Elvis [Presley] to see me when I first played in America." The King had died three months earlier.

Although this is only the third new Costello album to see light in the '90s, he's been as prodigious as ever. Prefiguring Guns N' Roses and the Ramones, he recorded an album of cover versions, which he has so far opted not to release, after completing Mighty Like a Rose three years ago. He's been working with Rykodisc on the long-term catalog reissue program that has already yielded the boxed-set 2½ Years and will continue in chronological order with twofer album sets.

Early this year, Costello filmed a performance with the Brodsky Quartet of "Lost in the Stars" for a movie tribute to Kurt Weill music; he's just recorded "Sally Sue Brown" for an upcoming Arthur Alexander album. He remains active in the management of Demon Records, which he co-owns. He appeared at a Yeats festival in Dublin, where he now lives, and set one of the writer's poems to music.

British singer Tasmin Archer has just released "Shipbuilding," a mini-album containing four Costello covers. "I think she sings very well, and it shows some interesting things about the songs," says the composer, adding, "She has nearly as difficult a job of getting away from my version of 'New Amsterdam' as Linda Ronstadt had of getting away from my versions of the songs she covered. Which maybe mitigates my criticism of her at the time, because I realize now that those early songs are much more tied to my vocal phrasing than I thought."

And then there's British pop star Wendy James, who last year issued "Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears," an album of tunes Costello and his missus, Cait O'Riordan, wrote on demand for her over a weekend. "It wasn't demand," he laughs, "it was abject groveling. No, it wasn't," he quickly demurs.

"I don't know her, I've only ever met her once," Costello says of the former Transvision Vamp vocalist whose singing career had previously relied on her sex appeal. Through Pete Thomas, she asked Costello to write her a song, a request he was inclined to ignore. "I mean, I like a stupid pop song as best as the next guy, but...

1994-03-13 New York Newsday, FanFare page 24 clipping 01.jpg

"She seemed sincere about wanting to carry on and do something different. So without much further consultation, Cait and I wrote the ten songs between a Friday and a Sunday."

Regarding the challenge of sustaining a songwriting career for nearly two decades, Costello admits, "Sometimes, I feel maybe I've written all the songs I'm ever going to write." But looking back over a catalog he estimates at around 300 tunes, he has no regrets. "There are some I like more than others, and there are some I realize we didn't get the recording right on, but there are no songs I'm embarrassed about or ashamed of."

The creator of albums divergently oriented toward rock, country, R & B and Tin Pan Alley says, "I've got a lot of different interests in music." As an artist, the choice "is whether I want to follow ones which I know are going to perplex people but then win a new audience, or get to the point where people just completely lose patience because you never do the thing they expect of you. But you can't really worry about that stuff if you're going to do what I do, which is follow my instinct."

On the occasion of an album that he knows will draw accusations of regression and pandering, Costello, after nearly two decades of defying expectations, is philosophical about the consistency dilemma but recognizes the diversity of his audience. "I got more considered mail about The Juliet Letters than anything else I've ever done, soulful letters from people that really listened. It was obvious that a lot of these people had never heard any of my records before.

"People used to write and say 'I saw you on Saturday Night Live, I was 12 and I thought it was fantastic.' It's great to get a letter like that, it's like when people saw the Beatles on TV and it made them go nuts. Or Elvis. But then I've had letters that said 'I saw you on the Letterman show in 1984 when I was 14.' And I go, yeah, but the song I was doing then wasn't that great. But if it was great for you, then fine. I can't argue with where you came into the picture."


Tags: Brutal YouthThe AttractionsSteve NievePete ThomasBruce ThomasNick LoweTrustThe Juliet LettersArmed ForcesThis Year's ModelBlood & ChocolateThe Big WheelHow To Be DumbMighty Like A Rose1994 US TourPony St.Sulky GirlJust About GladStill Too Soon To Know20% AmnesiaElvis PresleyRykodisc2½ YearsLost In The StarsKurt WeillArthur AlexanderSally Sue BrownTasmin ArcherShipbuildingNew AmsterdamLinda RonstadtWendy JamesNow Ain't The Time For Your TearsCait O'RiordanSaturday Night LiveLate Night With David LettermanThe Tonight ShowTin Pan AlleyWarner Bros.Demon RecordsThe WhoThe BeatlesW.B. Yeats

-
<< >>

Newsday, March 13, 1994


Ira Robbins interviews Elvis Costello upon the release of Brutal Youth.

Images

1994-03-13 New York Newsday, FanFare page 10.jpg
Page scans.


1994-03-13 New York Newsday, FanFare page 11.jpg


Clipping.
1994-03-13 New York Newsday, FanFare page 24 clipping 01.jpg










Photos by Bruce Gilbert.
1994-03-13 New York Newsday photo 02 bg.jpg


1994-03-13 New York Newsday photo 01 bg.jpg
Photos by Bruce Gilbert.

-



Back to top

External links