London Guardian, February 10, 1989: Difference between revisions
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In a couple of months' time, Elvis Costello will dust down his guitars and set off for what must be his umpteenth tour of America. Costello has done his fair share of US tours since he first played the clubs in the punky days of 1977 and is always finding new ways to keep cliche at bay. Already he is plotting various finales designed to curtail his American audiences' ingenuous but habitual insistence on multiple encores. The two current favourites are a medley of "The Red Flag" and "Faith Of Our Fathers" (both anthems mention dungeons) or the sudden production of a pair of giant shears followed by a smile, a bow and a severing of guitar strings. | In a couple of months' time, Elvis Costello will dust down his guitars and set off for what must be his umpteenth tour of America. Costello has done his fair share of US tours since he first played the clubs in the punky days of 1977 and is always finding new ways to keep cliche at bay. Already he is plotting various finales designed to curtail his American audiences' ingenuous but habitual insistence on multiple encores. The two current favourites are a medley of "The Red Flag" and "Faith Of Our Fathers" (both anthems mention dungeons) or the sudden production of a pair of giant shears followed by a smile, a bow and a severing of guitar strings. | ||
Costello’s gift for black comedy is exercised with almost manic vigour on ''Spike The Beloved Entertainer'', his twelfth studio album and the first in more than two-and-a-half years. The cover boasts a tacky tartan backdrop, a pink pincushion frame and a leering insincere Elvis smiling out of the cushion with his face painted in two like some ghastly nightclub comic. | |||
The cover is a suitable send off for the dark vaudeville of Costello’s latest songs whose biting sarcasm and arcane plots evoke the mixture of hilarity and grief that fuelled ''Cabaret''’s portrait of pre-war Berlin. Costello distrusts such comparisons because they suggest the kind of nostalgic borrowings that reduce so much of our contemporary culture to a series of glib shorthand references. Yet while these portraits of loveless manipulation and political despair are undoubtedly Costello’s most detached pieces of storytelling to date, he emerges from ''Spike'' with all the cracked dignity of ''King Lear''’s Fool. | |||
''Spike The Beloved Entertainer'' is full of belly laughs that stick in the gut with pride of place going to [[God's Comic|God’s Comic]] and [[Tramp The Dirt Down]]. In the first, a drunken priest with a lipstick-stained dogcollar dies and goes to heaven, only to encounter God lying on a waterbed “soaking up all our mediocrity, just horrified” . This God is discovered drinking Coke, reading Jeffery Archer and listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s ''Requiem'', even through he prefers “the one about my son”. | |||
Neither the priest nor God are anything less than ''Beetlejuice''-like nightmare and Costello’s deranged Vaudevillian arrangement chuckles away like a kettle boiling dry. Tramp The Dirt Down is sadder still. Halfway between a curse and a lament, this plea for Thatcher’s demise is saddened by its own brutality and sets Costello exhausted vocals against a variety of traditional Irish musicians deployed like a chamber orchestra. | |||
Despite the talk of severed guitar strings, Costello clearly relishes his return to the fray. | |||
Revision as of 19:03, 20 April 2019
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