Follow Me Gentlemen, June 1989: Difference between revisions
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Tied up with this was a distaste for his high standing among the musically unadventurous, those who positively adored his prosaic old pub-rock backing musos such as Steve Nieve and Nick “Basher” Lowe: musical jobsworths, authenticity bores, the “if it wears a cowboy hat, worship it” brigade. Until ''Blood and Chocolate'' that is. But more of that later. | Tied up with this was a distaste for his high standing among the musically unadventurous, those who positively adored his prosaic old pub-rock backing musos such as Steve Nieve and Nick “Basher” Lowe: musical jobsworths, authenticity bores, the “if it wears a cowboy hat, worship it” brigade. Until ''Blood and Chocolate'' that is. But more of that later. | ||
For many of those secretly threatened and alienated in 1977 by the gob-shite authoritarianism of punk (whole swathes of people’s record collections became officially redundant overnight), the allied “new-wave” that came flying out of Britain on Elvis Costello’s shirt-tails provided a respectable alternative: anger with craftsmanship, iconoclasm tempered by a respect for tradition. ''My Aim Is True'', his first album, was the ''Tubular Bells'' of its day: you could meet someone, go round their house and know they had a copy before you’d even bothered leafing through their records. Singles like ‘Watching The Detectives’, ‘Pump It Up’ and ‘(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea’ were hard for anyone to dislike – signatures indelibly inscribed on the times. | |||
So closely are they identified with the era that now their only resonance is that of curios. The odd song still stands – memorable ballad ‘Alison’, for example – but most have dated badly: too redolent of skinny ties, bug-eyed stares and the mass adoption of street cred. Listening to ''This Year’s Model'' in 1989 is like finding an old photo of yourself in flares. | |||
Costello never regained the popularity he achieved in his early days; as the new wave died out, the vacuous New Romantic movement moved into its place; the adoption of the correct pose. Costello grew in stature among those who admired him, but in truth his sound was becoming old-fashioned – abrasive in an age where the lush ‘new pop’ glamour of the Human League and ABC was in the ascendant. Costello was becoming a British Randy Newman – loved by the critics and soundly ignored by the public. | |||
He has maintained his role – a kind of elder statesman of British music (born Declan MacManus, he is actually half-Irish, half-English) to this day. When he speaks, thousands listen, even if they don’t all rush out and buy his records. His sales, however, are said to be respectable; his records sell steadily, rather than making sudden dents in the charts before disappearing. | |||
He has tried his hand at producing – Two-Tone ska band The Specials, Anglo-Irish punk-folk rebels The Pogues, and UK-based Zimbabwe band The Bhundu Boys (the latter session never released) – but he remains, principally, a song-writer. | |||
Often I’ve suspected that Costello’s song-writing is revered for the wrong reasons: not for his frequently inspired cadences and melodic invention, not even for his words, but for the way his words look when written down. For every memorable line like “''He thought he was the King of America, where they pour Coca-Cola just like vintage wine''”, he seems to have a bagful of smart-ass puns and tricks – many of them not ever readily translatable from the records alone. | |||
I can’t hear ‘Clubland’ on 1981’s ''Trust'' without wincing at the memory of the British music paper editor who kept playing the first verse over and over on the office stereo in an attempt at deciphering one of Costello’s more opaquely enunciated stanzas. | |||
Rock critics love word-smithery because it gives them something to analyse. But perhaps the question that should be asked more often is not, “What does this mean?” but “how does this communicate through the experience of the music?” A lyric takes its meaning from the way it is sung. Do we judge Costello by his lyric sheets or by the words as delivered? | |||
The relationship between words and music is something Costello has been looking at more closely on ''Spike'', his first album for Warner Bros. “I’ve paid more attention to the music on this album,” he says. “In the past I’ve paid so much attention to the words that sometimes I get disappointed when the meaning or feeling doesn’t reach people. And it’s simply because I’ve given more credibility to the music, when really I needed to pay more attention to the music as a medium to get the point of the song over.” | |||
The way he has handled it on ''Spike'' is through a daringly unprecedented diversity of arrangements, an almost bewilderingly colourful spray of styles. Starting with ‘This Town’ a song that from the startling opening sounds like the Byrds letting loose over the thumping electro-drums of Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ (perhaps no surprise when you read the credit and find ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn on a 12-string guitar), it proceeds through arrangements utilising New Orleans jazz players, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Irish folk players, Paul McCartney, Michael Blair and Marc Ribot from Tom Wait’s band, Chrissie Hynde and Allen Toussaint. Not to mention others. | |||
There are a few jarring moments – it’s hard to leap from Ireland to New Orleans without a clash of sensibilities – but generally it works, giving his music a new scope, an added depth. Costello has always shown signs of eclecticism, but always one album at a time – ''Get Happy'' (Stax soul-inspired), ''Almost Blue'' (his country opus recorded with Billy Sherrill). But never has he shown so much colour and dash, taken so many chances, on a single album. | |||
''Spike'' is not simply a case of genre-hopping. Musicians are used in the weirdest combinations, the Dirty Dozen’s Kirk Joseph taking the bass role with his tuba-like sousaphone on several tracks, while some arrangements enter the realm of deliberate parody: ‘Miss Macbeth’, for example, which lurches like a merry-go-round out of control (the credits for this track list uillean pipes, trombone, tenor and baritone saxophone, electric and acoustic bazouki, glockenspiel, mandolin, Wurlitzer and temple bells). | |||
“The last thing I want to read about this album is that it’s eclectic, ‘cos I don’t think it is.” he says, somewhat perversely. “I took the blinders off that I feel some people have got as to what sounds you can use to portray the songs. | |||
“I didn’t feel I was doing a Paul Simon – “I’ll go off and do a musical travelogue now’. I’m not knocking that, he does it his way, he might do it for his own reasons. It doesn’t suit me. | |||
“I don’t think that’s what this record is about, it’s to do with the songs and choosing the instruments. Even where there’s a song like ‘Pads, Paws & Claws’ [co-written with McCartney], which is like a humorous rock’n’roll song, it could have been played in a stock way, but we kind of played it all backwards and made it more fun, I think. It sounds crazier that way, more like the state of mind that the song’s all about.” | |||
Arrangement, Costello feels, is a lost art. “In the old days a producer was like an A&R man. He’d find the artist, find the material, put them in the studio, pick the musicians, so he’d naturally have arrangement skills. Not just Phil Spector, but in the ‘50s; that’s very much the way George Martin was as a producer. And then the cult of the studio took over. | |||
“One of the illuminating things about the CD revolution is how bad ‘60s records sound when they’ve been transferred. The experimentation that might have been interesting when people started getting into effects and everything, they don’t hold up very well. They sacrifice a lot of fidelity. | |||
“Well-transferred recordings of the ‘40s and ‘50s sound a lot richer. The process of production was much more into putting the artist together with the right musicians, the right attitude, the right material, the right atmosphere to do what they did. | |||
“Production now is misnamed, it’s very much a question of people running scared of the next trend in music and in sound. If you read sound engineer magazines, the ones about production, it’s mainly to do with people being afraid not to have the particular output gadget or microphone or studio system. They really mould them [producers and engineers]. | |||
“It’s not just this cliched thing that guitar bands say, ‘It’s all machines now and that’s soulless’, because there’s plenty of great pop music made with the principle. This sounds technical, but it’s more to do with fighting your way out of this cocoon of technology, which actually seems to be holding down the excitement and scope. | |||
“The arrangement side of things is pretty much defined by technology. I have nothing against Fairlights or drum machines, but they all should be tools. It’s like the way you can only buy off-the-peg clothes now, you can’t buy any tailored stuff. “ | |||
Costello is not alone in his complaints. Recently Brian Eno, that protagonist of studio-as-musical-instrument, has made similar comments about the predictable gloss that covers virtually all records these days. “The whole aspiration of recording is so much like Hollywood”, the chrome-dome told America’s ‘''Musician''’ magazine at the end of last year. “Everything’s got to be perfectly lit, nicely balanced, nice colour range, full spectrum – all this sort of stupid assumption that recording has something to do with reality.” | |||
One of the problems is not just the technology, though, but the marketing ‘science’ that lies behind it. Costello points to the immense power that the large retail chains like HMV and Virgin have acquired in the UK, where they are virtually dictating the release dates of records and what does or doesn’t break through. | |||
“I don’t want to get further into this, because you get this thing of, ‘He’s bitter ‘cos he hasn’t sold a lot of records’,” he says, defensively. “That isn’t really it. I see it as a disturbing trend. It doesn’t really affect me, because the record will either sell or it won’t.” | |||
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{{tags}}[[God's Comic]] {{-}} [[Veronica]] {{-}} [[I Wanna Be Loved]] {{-}} [[Stiff]] {{-}} [[F-Beat]] {{-}} [[Warner Bros.]] {{-}} [[Columbia Records]] {{-}} [[Oliver's Army]] {{-}} [[Sting]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] | {{tags}}[[God's Comic]] {{-}} [[Veronica]] {{-}} [[I Wanna Be Loved]] {{-}} [[Stiff]] {{-}} [[F-Beat]] {{-}} [[Warner Bros.]] {{-}} [[Columbia Records]] {{-}} [[Oliver's Army]] {{-}} [[Sting]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[Pump It Up]] {{-}} [[Watching The Detectives]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[Alison]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Randy Newman]] {{-}} [[The Specials]] {{-}} [[The Pogues]] {{-}} [[Clubland]] {{-}} [[Trust]] {{-}} [[Spike]] {{-}} [[...This Town...]] {{-}} [[The Byrds]] {{-}} [[Prince]] {{-}} [[Roger McGuinn]] {{-}} [[New Orleans]] {{-}} [[The Dirty Dozen Brass Band]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Michael Blair]] {{-}} [[Marc Ribot]] {{-}} [[Tom Waits]] {{-}} [[Chrissie Hynde]] {{-}} [[Allen Toussaint]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Billy Sherrill]] {{-}} [[Kirk Joseph]] {{-}} [[Miss Macbeth]] {{-}} [[Paul Simon]] {{-}} [[Pads, Paws And Claws]] {{-}} [[Phil Spector]] {{-}} [[George Martin]] {{-}} [[Brian Eno]] | ||
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Revision as of 20:19, 24 April 2022
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