Goldmine, December 1983

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications Goldmine   1978 February 1979 April 1982 February 1982 April 1983 January 1983 November 1983 December 1984 October 12 1986 November 7 1987 December 18 1989 April 7 1991 September 6 1993 March 5 1995 September 1 1996 March 29 1996 August 16 1998 May 8 1999 February 12 2001 July 13 2001 October 5 2002 May 31 2004 January 9 2005 February 4 2006 February 17 2007 December 7 2013 March 2013 April 2  2014 March 2015 November 24  2016 June 2018 September 21 2021 October 27  Magazines  Concerto Details Entertainment Weekly Esquire Forbes Il giornale della musica GQ Interview magazine Life Music Maker The Nation New Yorker Newsweek Nöjesguiden Opera News People Spy Time Total Guitar Uncut Vanity Fair Village Voice Vox The Word — Elvis Costello: I'm Not Angry Anymore Jeff Tamarkin Elvin Costello's head is buried in a booklet. He's not being rude; he simply must check this out immediately. The booklet is about Elvis Costello. "Extraordinary!" says the singer, oblivious to the reporter whose tape recorder is still running a few feet away. "How did they get all of this? They even have the medleys that I did. And look at this! How did they find out that I DJ'd in a club six months ago. They must follow me everywhere." Elvis Costello looks up for a brief moment. "You know, they even called my dad once for some information. Can you believe it?" His head returns to the booklet, a skinny mimeographed sheet from Holland by a group of fans calling itself the Elvis Costello Information Service. He'd heard about them but had never seen one of their published reports before. "Would you like their address?" the interviewer asks. "Absolutely! Oh, now look at this. They've got this wrong. I never played 'Ready Teddy' or 'Rip It Up' And I certainly never played 'Dance To The Music.' And not 'Imagine' either, although I think Steve might've played that. But how in the world do they know that we once recorded 'First I Look At The Purse?' This is too much." Costello shaking his head, puts aside the fanzine's list of every song he's ever covered by another artist. He still can't believe that someone would take the time to document his every breath. But his promise to get in touch with the club and straighten things out proves at least one thing other than Costello's perplexity over the whole thing. It proves that Elvis Costello, who wouldn't talk to press for nearly five years, has come out of his shell. The new Elvis has something to say. But is he really a new Elvis or has the man just outlived the myth that grew up around him? In many ways Elvis Costello is a changed man. But in other ways it is obvious that time has simply eroded some of the confusion and fury that made this bespectacled, rather soft-spoken, dedicated musician into the pigeon-toed "Angry Young Man of the New Wave" in the late '70s. The Costello one meets in 1983 is cordial and down-to-earth, hardly a threat in anyway. And one gets the impression that had things not ballooned the way they had over four years ago when he became one of the first successful new wave artists, Costello would've been just a regular nice guy then too. So why dad this Costello avoid the press throughout the entire period that he was attracting the most attention? Simple. "When you're first starting out and you do interviews, you only end up talking about what you did when you were 12," says Costello in his diamond-shaped hotel suite overlooking New York's Central Park. It's the morning after his New York concert date and the former Declan Patrick MacManus, hair still rumpled, blue horn-rims in place, and shirt buttoned to the neck, is sipping from a pot of Twinings tea. His room is littered with clothes, magazines and records (everything from 12" funk reonds to a Motown boxed set to new ones by Style Council and Aztec Camera, the latter who supported his tour). An Aretha tape plays on a portable stereo as the interviewer enters. There's an Elvis Costello tour booklet lying on the floor. The TV set, sound off, is tuned to a show about gorillas, later giving way to Sesame Street. But Costello is wide awake and lucid at this early hour, every bit as intelligent and well-spoken as his songs would lead one to believe he'd be. "I have some things now that can bear explanation," be says. "1 guess I just have more to say than I did five years ago." Costello is acutely aware of his own history and everything that has surrounded his career. He knows about the myth that defined him to his fans during those silent years and he has an answer for it. And his answer is that it wag no big deal. "The reason was very basic. People wanted to turn it into a myth, but all it was was that we didn't have anything to say. It got blown into this thing that I must be very aggressive. But we didn't have time far some of the niceties that some of the bigger record companies did. When we first started out at Stiff Records, it was all of us doing whatever had to be done, even taking the records and putting than into sleeves. We were very proud of what we were doing and we saw no reason that we should conform to some of the niceties that we regarded as bullshit, receptions and that kind of crap. "I had a very disillusioned attitude towards the record companies, because they were so unimaginative. I disliked most of what was going on. It seemed convenient to them that they could just pigeonhole us as new wave and then they could just absorb it all up. So I was very wary of that as well. Perhaps that's why I'm still going and a lot of the bands that thought they were so outrageous are all split up and beck on the dole. You've got to have the sense to see them try to absorb you. The record business took a step backwards when '77 happened. Then they just absorbed it all and sucked people in. You have to be a bit cunning to sidestep them, or you become ridiculous." Costello has sidestepped the rules at every turn. When be saw himself becoming, in his own words, a "parody" of himself, becoming a typical new wave act, be recorded Get Happy!, a tribute album to Stax-styled soul music. That was the beginning of Elvis Costello's liberation from his own myth. A couple years later came Almost Blue, an album of country standards. At that time he also appeared on a George Jones TY special and a Jones LP. That was followed by Imperial Bedroom, including lushly arranged ballads, completely ignoring the big beat that brought him recognition in the first place. It was a gamble perhaps. but one which paid off; the album was Costello's most critically lauded, proving to any doubters that he is a master musician who refused to lock himself into any trends or expectations. (He's even taped a spot on a TV special dueting with Tony Bennett!) But by that point, Costello had learned enough about the workings of the biz to be able to shoo away the eulogizers; he wasn't buying any new images to replace the old, "Imperial Bedroom made people give me a whole new set of labels," he flatly states. "The new George Gershwin and all that kind of stuff. I found it ridiculous. It's very flattering, but if you took it seriously you'd be a fool. There are a lot worse things 1 could have been called though, like the new Loverboy." Costello knew when he recorded Imperial Bedroom that he would alienate some of his rock audience and wipe out, perhaps permanently, the image that had followed him since he emerged with his first album, My Aim Is True, in 1977. That's what he wanted to. "That record (Bedroom) was consciously made in willful disregard of the mainstream. It proved that you have to be in an already commanding commercial position to do something as different as that, and not be overlooked by the larger part of the public. If the Police had made Imperial Bedroom it would have been a million-selling record. It's not that radical a record, but it's radically different than a lot of other things. "On Imperial Bedroom, I wanted nothing more to do with rock 'n' roll," he continues. "As a style, I just thought it had served its purpose for me. I'm not dismissing the possibility of somebody coming up with another three cord trick wholly and totally original. But I think we're more likely to end up with things like the Stray Cats, which, although they're excellently done, lack the excitement of originality. A lot of people would say the same about me, because a lot of the earlier songs were very conscious quotes. On Imperial Bedroom I dispensed with it altogether and just used all the other forms. There is so much other music, although a lot of it is too unfamiliar to people to be effective. In some cases I think we were being too subtle on that record; you almost have to make a more conscious effort of parody if you want to use an old-fashioned style." On Punch The Clock, Costello's eighth LP discounting compilation, he steers clear of extremes and presents the listener with a neat cross-section of the familiar and the unexpected. There are some brilliant new songs and some standard fare. A four-piece horn section and a pair of female backup singers lend a stirring soul edge to the majority of the record, while some of the more introspective ballads seem to be carry-overs from Imperial Bedroom. Costello agrees, with reservations, with the interviewer's contention that Punch The Clock seems in some ways a cross between Bedroom and the earlier soul experiment Get Happy!, minus the extreme feeling generated by either. "You could say that, yeah," he says, "but I don't think you could compare it to Get Happy! in mood. That one had a very extreme mood and this one doesn't; it's a much saner album that Get Happy!. And as much as I didn't want to pursue the complexity of Imperial Bedroom any further because I didn't think it would serve as well, there are obviously elements of it that have to be continued on. "The most abrupt change was between Trust and Imperial Bedroom because there was two years between them in which I didn't record any songs. So it appeared as though I'd changed my style completely and I'd had a lot of time to develop a new style of writing. But naturally there had to be some similarities in the style of writing; I couldn't have changed that much." What has changed, perhaps, is the public's willingness to accept new ideas. As he stated, Elvis Costello could not have gotten away with an album like Imperial Bedroom earlier in his career. His fans wouldn't have been ready for it. But he says that he was capable of writing that kind of material even in his early days. "I'd written more complicated songs before I made My Aim Is True, like 'New Lace Sleeves,' which didn't turn up until Trust, which was the fifth album. So it wasn't like I started off real simple and got more complicated. I was just as capable of writing complicated songs when I was 18 as I am now. It's more that I've refined the way I write. You're more conscious after you've written a bunch of songs of not writing them again. So I don't see there as being that much of a change, in terms of technique. It's more a change of attitude, change of the person." Costello says that he had no specific idea in mind when recording Punch The Clock, but that a recording does seem to take on its own personality after it's in progress, and often that dictated how the record turns out. "I never really have a concept in mind," he explains, "but if a song is disrupting what I think is the general feeling of the record, it will get left off. There's a song on the B-side of the next English single called 'The Flirting Kind', which was left off of Punch The Clock because I felt it was more like something on Imperial Bedroom. It was too soft for this record; it didn't have enough presence." There are no purposeful intentions of establishing a defined lyrical direction on Costello's albums either, he says, but still there are certain themes that reoccur. There's a reason for that: "Having written all the songs (for a given album) over a certain period of time, I suppose there must be certain things and thoughts on my mind. But I don't think like, 'Well, I've written about that, now I think I'll carry it over in chapter three.' I don't write like a novelist. If there are certain parallel things or continuing things, it's only because I wrote the songs over a certain period of time and I can only think of so much. There's only so much life. I'm not going to be willfully weird, looking for odd things and writing about witches and goblins and so forth. But I think you can look at the same elements of life from a different perspective as you change yourself, and get something new out of it." One thing Costello says he has learned is not to give away too much of his lyrical intent by printing the words to songs on the inner sleeves of his records. He only started doing that with Imperial Bedroom and now the new record, but he won't do it again. He'd rather let people figure out for themselves what he's singing, although many critics argued in the early days that his words were often difficult to hear. "I don't agree with critics who've said that the lyrics are too clever, that the word play is too clever," he comments. "I made a conscious effort this time to tone down being clever for clever's sake. I think the only reason critics have had that reservation is that we've printed the words clearly for the first time; they were printed rather obliquely last time. Therefore some things that they wouldn't have gotten until the 20th listening they're getting the first time because it's easily readable. I won't put lyrics on any other record. I've learned that that's a mistake. I might consider printing a book of lyrics some time in the future for those who are really interested. "It's not my fault that people aren't bright enough to have thought of these things in the first place. That way of looking at it might sound arrogant, but I can't help what goes on in my head. I'm not going to write like an idiot just because some guy can't respect the use of language. I think this is particularly true of critics who have become hardened and brutalized by awful work and have become cynical. But the public, the person who buys the record and doesn't get it for free, had a different attitude because he's looking for the good in something, not the negative. He's not saying 'Oh, he's being clever again.' Rolling Stone picked up a verse in 'T.K.O.', the lines "They put the numb into number they put the cut into cutie / They put the slum into slumber and the boot into beauty." I think that's perfectly acceptable; it's not just being clever for clever's sake. It makes a point. All of those things are true, they are things that are happening. I can't see what's so difficult to understand about that." "One of the most critically praised songs on the new album is "Shipbuilding", a rare collaborative effort by Costello. The music was written by Clive Langer, who, along with Alan Winstanley, produced Punch The Clock, and was also recorded by Robert Wyatt, vocalist/drummer formerly with the British progressive outfit Soft Machine. Wyatt had a hit single with it in England. Costello cites Wyatt as one of his favorite vocalists, and described how the song came about. "Clive dragged me out to his car one night during a party and told me he wrote this tune and he wanted it to be sung by Robert Wyatt. He asked me if I'd have a go at writing lyrics, and he gave me the tape. I took it to Australia with me as sort of a traveling project. When I got there the idea became fully formed in my head. The Falklands War was current at the time and we were hearing all about it. Rather than having some reaction to the actual horror of the war, being away from home I tended to see some of the more ironic aspects, one of which being the loss of ships. If the war had gone on and Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come... Goldmine, No. 91, December 1983 Jeff Tamarkin interviews Elvis Costello. Images Cover. Page scans. Clippings. Clippings.

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