Time Out, February 8, 1989

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Time Out

UK & Ireland magazines

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Love hurts


Nick Coleman

Rock's cruellest Cupid, Elvis Costello, is back with more strings to his bow than ever: a new album, Spike, on a major label, a string of dates, and a neat line in character assassination.

With great deliberation, so as not to be mistaken for a pseud (pseuds are always casual in these matters), Elvis Costello waves a copy of the memoirs of Shostakovich in my face. "Once you read this book you'll realise there aren't any major record companies of the magnitude of evil of Stalin. And the sheer magnitude of Shostakovich's endeavour, however far removed it is from what we like to celebrate as "the primitive" ... well, it puts your own trivial tribulations into some kind of perspective."

Rain smashes down on the roof of the dacha and old Anfisa bumps into the furniture as she shuffles meaninglessly around the room. Cait, Elvis's wife, hunches over her newspaper, in mourning for her life.

"Elvis, look at modern jazz!" I say excitedly, catching the mood. "It is an exact model of that suffering. In the act of grappling with the demands of his instrument, the jazz musician grapples with the demands of society. To him, the act of playing the saxophone and the act of living are the same thing!"

"Yes, and we mustn't forget that jazz also carries its own tradition along with it." Elvis's eyes blaze across the samovar. "And pop music does the same thing, but instead of doing it in a "content" way, it does it in a "style" way. What's so tedious about pop music today is that a marketing man will sit around and draw a photo-fit pop star and then go out and find a guy who looks like that picture, make him a star for five minutes, and ruin his life. This young guy won't learn anything, he won't be any happier afterwards. But our jazzer will be living a life. He'll have carried a bit of Jelly Roll Morton, a bit of Art Tatum along with him, added something entirely his own to it, and whether it becomes too high-flown or removed from what we like to call the primitive doesn't really matter. It's a life.

"Anyway, what's so fucking great about the primitive?" he asks himself aggressively. "Okay, I know it's 'great,' but it's not everything. Nothing is everything." And twiddling our long moustaches, we laugh with the joy of great insight. "Nothing is everything! I've said something now! I've been waiting to say this for 15 years. My whole career has been leading up to this moment! NOTHING IS EVERYTHING."

Outside the dacha the rain has stopped and in the silence the Pines are steaming. Elvis's gaze clouds over. He is dreaming.

It's been 12 years since "Alison" and Stiff's "Help Us Hype Elvis" publicity campaign first thrust this myopic, knock kneed shrike into the bosom of the nation. Over that decade-and-a-bit, 11 albums and a handful of hit singles have confirmed the impression that here is an English songwriter for our times: a man who loves to hate, a poet unencumbered with a poetic vision, a writer to whom the twists and turns of language are a map of life's treachery. "You lack lust, you're so lacklustre," would be a groaningly awful pun if it weren't so irredeemably bleak, in both sentiment and construction. Just thinking of it now makes me go numb in the head. Yet somehow, in all its depressing intimations of inadequacy, sour humour and imaginative contortion, it is an ensign of Elvis Costello's passion: the conviction that even the bleak, the banal, the despised, the shitty little men in ugly spectacles who say "cunt" too much, that they all have life too.

Not surprisingly, there haven't been many hits, despite all the critical approbation. The trouble with Costello's themes, even his tenderest ones, is that they always drag us out of our dreams.


CHILD KILLER

He's extremely polite when we meet, but remote too. He seldom allows me to finish burbling my questions and will only talk about what he wants to talk about. All my subtle attempts to lure him into reflection on his emotional life are fielded quickly and flung back, sharp end first.

"Whatever changes happen to you are reflected and expressed in the songs you write. Beyond that, it's nobody else's business. I think that's a decent, honourable line to draw and if anybody crosses that line, I kick their head in. I'm a pacifist until you come into my house, and then I kill your children."

He smiles at me. I smile back. Cait slurps on her cappuccino and continues to examine her Guardian.

Elvis, you have a reputation for being intemperate. At going on 35 you must feel that you've changed from the man you were, say, eight, ten years ago? (This is code. As Costello well knows, it's a tacit, albeit undemanding reference to the dodgiest episode in his whole career, the time when he got involved in a brawl with Stephen Stills over an allegedly racist remark Costello had made in a bar in Columbus, Ohio.)

"The worst possible thing to do is to keep talking about it. I don't wanna sound like Kurt Waldheim, but the record shows I took the blows. . . In fact, I found out the other day that the Columbus incident with Stills is now a question in a rock trivia game. This is a most disappointing thing to find out." His brows arch like stukas over our eye-contact.

So I ask him about music, if he's found that getting older has changed the way he works. After all Elvis, you're now a part of history. The stukas return to base.

If there's a difference, it's in the way professional endeavour is seen these days: that you can end up in a rock trivia quiz, you can wind up in a little sound-byte on somebody else's record or in Smash Hits. If they were to write about me I'd be in their wonderful language as an eccentric old wrinkly who once got involved in a "punch-up" with some older old "wrinklies". And then some 16-year-old who's joined AAA will want to come and kill me."


KICK IN THE TEETH

"I suppose it must be a consequence of my advanced years, but whenever I hear some arrogant young pup in the first flush of success protesting that he's going to live for ever, I don't get angry, my blood pressure doesn't go up, I just laugh. I think soon, son, you're going to get old and some kind of dilapidation is going to befall you, and I hope it isn't in your pretty face. I hope your brain comes to first." He laughs, apparently without bitterness.

"You see, what people want and what they're set up to expect are different. When you see these cocooned young people on these opinion programmes on telly — the ones with the nice who think the government's great, which leads them everything's going to be wonderful — well, when they go out and find what the world's really like, they must be horribly disillusioned; much more than the person on YTS who's only expecting a kick in the teeth anyway…

"There's a kind of pop music equivalent of that. It's a career for these people now. Nobody's having any fun, it's not even in 'em to get drunk and get off with the PR girl after the show at the BBC ‘cause they're worried that they might get spots the next day. There isn't even that meagre level of outrageousness in them.

"Now it probably sounds like bad grace to be criticising these guys like this, but their ambition is all on the surface, so transparent, just another generation of Pat Boones and Fabians, instead of Elvises (Presley, we may presume). The pretend outrage of Heavy Metal or Sigue Sigue Sputnik, it's all done to a set of rules. It's like playing Monopoly."


ROCKIN' McCARTNEY

With characteristic attention to the effect of words, Costello has entitled his new album Spike. And for the first time in Britain a new Elvis album will be directly released by a major company, Warners, which may well explain the album's relatively high production costs. Thankfully, however, the money has been spent according to artistic principles and not on the manufacture of a highly glossed product to seduce the nostalgia market (face it folks, nostalgia is the growth sector in the popular music industry).

Spike is as astringent in sound as all but the most "primitive" of his earlier works. No, the money has been spent on getting the players right Michael Blair and Marc Ribot from Tom Wait's band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Allen Toussaint from New Orleans; jazz bassist Buell Neidlinger; Davey Spillane and his uileann pipes; long-time spar T Bone Burnett; Paul McCartney. The McCartney/MacManus (Costello's real name) songwriting credit appears twice, but there is a lot more material in the can.

"McCartney's one of those people who everyone's got too much attitude about. If you see how many lives pop music has destroyed from a fleeting moment's fame, it's kinda remarkable that he's still so fluent. People forget what a good musician the guy is, what a great rock 'n' roll singer. They seem to have an allergy to him. If pop music can be so greedy and transparent in its motives and can be accepted for that and not ridiculed out of hand, then there's no reason whatsoever for people to be vitriolic about Paul McCartney."

But all this comfy sentimentality, Elvis — I just can't help my feeling that the man who wrote "Mull Of Kintyre" deserves to die.

"It's not as bad as 'Fernando.' What people don't like is that it doesn't have any redeeming kitsch factor. People stick up for 'Fernando' ‘cause it's Swedes singing about a guy in Spain. But McCartney's honest-to-goodness sentimentality... I mean he grew up in the ‘50s. If you listen to what was in the charts then, sentimental music was everything. It's a wonder he grew up as rockin' as he did."

It has always been on the cards that Elvis would go a bit Chekhovian. He's always been intelligent, pessimistic, rigorous, contrary, superior and prone to bouts of unfathomable sentimentality — just think of all that Country & Western. He is entirely preoccupied with the way things are, an unusual preoccupation in pop.

So it should not be a surprise that Costello has come to question the parameters of pop's language of the primitive. That's what people do when they get wrinkly, dilapidated and weary of life's processional aspect. They start to do things you don't expect.

"I've been listening to more instrumental music recently. When you're travelling it's nice to just drift off... Kirk Joseph, the sousaphone player in the Dirty Dozen, he has this really nice expression: when we were working on a tune in the studio he used to take a tape of the song home at the end of the day so that he could "dream on it". I've found myself dreaming on stuff recently, Henry Threadgill, Mingus, Rollins, lots of horn things."


THE HIT FACTORY

I tell Costello that I think it's inconceivable that he could have a hit record in the current climate.

"The only thing stopping me from having a hit record is the preconceived notion that I'm not fashionable enough to be played on the radio," he says with surprising ingenuousness. "I'm not competing with other people. In fact, I'm trying to make records that specifically don't sound like other people's; that's my strength, so if a record as bizarre as that Enya one can be a hit, there's no reason why mine shouldn't.

"It's not that I don't know how to make records like they make today; I just have no interest in making them. Most dance records for a start are rhythmically incredibly dull. For instance, I heard 'Hey Music Lover' by S-Express the other day and I thought what a dreary version of a great tune. The whole machine thing on that record limits the song from flying like it did in the Sly Stone original. At Christmas, on the 900th edition of Top Of The Pops or whatever it was, they had The Swinging Blue Jeans, and they were rockin'. They were speeding up ‘cause they were so excited by being back on the telly. And they wiped the floor with everybody else. They were the only band playing with any excitement. All that excitement is lost in the controlled structure of this dance stuff.

"We all know pop records are a contrivance — there are perhaps half a dozen true rock 'n' roll records that are inspired spontaneous performances and everything else is contrived. Even most of Elvis's records. 'Hound Dog' is really contrived. Brilliantly so. And 'Veronica' (Costello's new single, co-written with "Macca," which could easily have been entitled "When I'm Eighty Four") is a contrived pop record. But although it has the structural reference points of pop music, it also has a heart, life, it says something that I care about: that there's a point where the mind goes beyond the dilapidations of the body. Y'know, I could have written it like 'Oh, the old people and their funny minds,' the sensitive version, and given it to Tanita Tikaram and she'd have had a big hit with it. But instead I did it my way. Yes, 'I do it my-y-y way'." The dangers of making like Frank Sinatra are not lost on Elvis. He smiles.

"Look, I like a lot of real commercial music, on its own terms. I love Bon Jovi, Aerosmith. I think their records are a lot of fun, they're let loose in their own confines really well. But pop records from this side of the Atlantic don't have that feeling. Both lots are contrived but one is contrived in an interesting way, the other in a deadly way.

"What's the perfect pop record? 'When Will I Be Famous?' is. Of course it is. But it's the least interesting pop record I could ever imagine. I don't wanna hear somebody say 'When Will I Be Famous?,' I wanna hear somebody say 'Your Love Is Like Bad Medicine.'"

Spike is Costello's most overtly political record to date. It is angry and specific and littered with atrocious puns; it has story songs, vignettes and vigorous lamentations. It's a real Elvis Costello record. What you have to decide before you buy it, or go to his solo concerts later in the year, is whether you want all of this stuff from an intelligent, pessimistic, rigorous, contrary, superior and occasionally unfathomably sentimental pop record by a 35-year-old man, or whether you want nostalgia.

"It's very rare that somebody knows better than you yourself where to go next; critics, record companies, anyone. If you go back to where they think you belong, you always find that that place isn't there anymore." Which is as good a justification of dreams as I've heard.

Spike has just been released by Warners. Elvis Costello plays the London Palladium on May 7, 14, 21, 28.

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Time Out, No. 964, February 8-15, 1989


Nick Coleman interviews Elvis Costello.

Images

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Cover.


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Photo by Frances Newman.
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Back page advertisement.
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