Phonograph Record Magazine, May 1978

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Phonograph Record

US rock magazines

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Rock's angry man

(he never smiles)

Bobby Abrams

ITEM — You're humpin' some broad – have been for a while. Suddenly she starts making demands on you, trivial things but constant. Hitting her is one solution, but then America has always been a violent country.

ITEM — There's this chick where you work that you've been wanting to ask out for months. Finally, you screw up enough courage to speak to her — She turns you down flat. You point your finger, squeeze the trigger and boom! — she's blown away.

ITEM — In the subway, sitting opposite, is the most beautiful fox you've ever seen. She sits primly, with her legs tight together. She might well be filing her nails for all she knows you exist. So why not. Grab her and lay her out on the floor – there's some action. It feels much better this way.

ITEM — You carry this book around with you, see, and everytime someone does you dirt, gives you grief, their name is entered. When you seize the power, you will have your own private gestapo to enforce punishment for those heinous crimes.

ITEM — You walk into your bedroom and there's your old lady makin' it with your best friend. You'd really like to tear them in pieces , rip the skin off their bones, slice them up in a bloody mess, stomp on them, kick the crap out of them, but you're far too civilised for such enraged behaviour. Instead, you decide to be adult about it.

This is the world of Elvis Costello. His vision is populated with these images, thoughts, experiences, emotions. Violence, repression, vengeance, retaliation, guilt, impotence. Getting laid, not getting laid. Anger over position in the world (at the bottom of the heap). Classic rock and roll sentiments, expressed in a really new manner. Costello in this short time has already established himself as one of the alltime great rock wordsmiths.

It seems obvious now, in retrospect, that 1977 witnessed the emergence of that most eagerly awaited event: The Next Big Thing. Hoped for by messianic musicphiles as much as the Second Coming by Pentecostal Christians, it has seemed just as illusory, as reactionary and radical argued dialectics through-out the entirety of the seventies – trying to explain or justify false contenders to a road begun with the rock and roll revolution epitomised by the King – through its revitalization by the British Invasion, symbolised by the Fabulous Four. Rock and roll is always the currency of these ideological debates, but the common denominator is how successfully the music defeats the ambient complacency of improved technical aesthetics.

Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio" would seem to best describe the existing status quo; "They're trying to anaesthetise the way you feel / Radio is such a sad salvation". So then in the grandest tradition, as the Mitch Millers of the fifties gave way to Elvis and Chuck Berry, as the insipid sounds of artificially created Philadelphia Rock and the Twist gave way to the pounding groin-oriented sounds of the Beatles and Stones, so too now is the sigma sound of recycled banality now giving way to thoroughbreds like the Sex Pistols and, especially, Elvis Costello.

August 1977 saw the release of two very remarkable albums, related more in space and time than in thematic unity or musical approach, yet both promised to turn the world around. The Sex Pistols threatened to submerge all else in the wake of the group's massive media overkill, but due to a series of mismanagement mistakes, it is quite possible that Johnny Rotten and company may wind up mere footnotes in the eventual recounting of all this as history.

So, it seemed, by after-the-fact deduction, that punk rock was about political revolution and its major theme was despicable social conditions, and these were the themes of the leading groups, like the Pistols, the Jam, the Clash. Even this may have been surmounted perhaps if the Pistols had made a few concessions to the facts of American commercial life. But no, they had to do a minimal tour, ignoring the cities where they could have sold five thousand tickets like New York and Los Angeles, turning down a Saturday Night Live appearance, not releasing a single that could get airplay. After all, even the conservative old farts, wanted to jump on the bandwagon; all they wanted was a little cooperation.

Almost by default then, attention was focussed on this other young English upstart, Elvis Costello, whose album on Stiff was almost as hot a seller as the imported Virgin copy of the Pistols' Bollocks. So typically, Elvis did all those things that the Pistols wouldn't; he appeared on Saturday Night Live as their replacement, singing an unscripted and particularly caustic rendition of "Radio, Radio"; he toured 36 markets in 42 days; but most of all he made music that American audiences could relate to with no reservations.

"Well I used to be disgusted / Now I try to be amused"

"The reason I don't talk about the past is that I feel it's boring". No chance, when Elvis' lyrics are so deeply mired in past hurts, past rejections and vulnerabilities. He's put it more succinctly on other occasions. "You weren't there when it was happening, why are you interested now? Piss-off! Americans like that sort of thing, it helps to define heroic actions in trivial terms.

One reason for this reluctance to talk about the past is that he seems to be a David Berkowitz, a Richard Speck… Elvis Costello is in fact really one Declan Patrick McManus – born in 1955, the only child of a jazz trumpeter who one day hit the road for good. His family started off in the London area, then moved on to Liverpool for Dec's formative years where he was raised a Catholic – "Had to be either Catholic or Jewish didn't I" – and married when he was young. He supported himself as a computer operator in Whitton, near Twickenham, working for Elizabeth Arden ("working all day in a vanity factory"). He has one child, age unknown, privacy extremely guarded.

"I suppose I've been writing for seven or eight years now, since I learned to play lead guitar – but that doesn't mean my songs were any good. You just start writing for a bit of fun and then you realise it means something. I started taking my songs around about three or four years ago, after I moved back to London from Liverpool. From then on I tried to do various things without any success.

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Phonograph Record Magazine, May/June 1978


Bobby Abrams profiles Elvis Costello.


Mitch Cohen profiles Nick Lowe.

Images

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Cover.

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Page scans.

1978-05-00 Phonograph Record Magazine page 26.jpg 1978-05-00 Phonograph Record Magazine illustration.jpg
Sculpture by Grace Kizu and illustration by Dave McMacken.

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Contents page.

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