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. 





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London Guardian

UK & Ireland newspapers

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A belly laugh with Spike


Mark Cooper

A new album, his umpteenth US tour — Elvis Costello is back in the fray. Mark Cooper profiles rock's "beloved entertainer."

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 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.




Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...

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The Guardian, July 7, 1994


Mark Cooper profiles Elvis Costello.


Robin Denselow reviews Spike.

Images

1989-02-10 London Guardian page 26 clipping 01.jpg
Clipping.


Costello's classy comeback

Elvis Costello / Spike

Robin Denselow

This Monday, an assortment of record company executives, stars, DJs, journalists and other such music biz hangers-on, will be assembled at the Albert Hall for the presentation of the BPI's BRIT awards. You don't need to watch it on television to guess at the nominations: the five short-listed for Best British Male Artist include Phil Collins and George Michael and those for Best British Group include Pet Shop Boys and Wet Wet Wet.

And why not? British pop music certainly deserves its own awards, even if such events are bound to suffer from self-congratulatory predictability. Every nomination makes me think of a dozen other artists who always get ignored, often because they're too difficult, too inventive, too original, or simply too good. Just like Elvis Costello.

It is 12 years since he released his first LP and since then he has surely matched all contenders, in the quality of his songwriting, the invention of his musical settings and his enthusiasm for new bands and sounds. That said, Costello has been mysteriously quiet of late, ever since his spate of work in 1986, when he released both King Of America and that instant romp with the Attractions, Blood & Chocolate.

Now, at last, comes his twelfth studio set and it is well worth the wait. Not that it's an album that will be played at parties. It is a mellow, sometimes even dirge-like collection of songs that also happens to be his most musically adventurous work to date, a collection of 14 tracks that explore styles as disparate as New Orleans blues, Irish roots, discordant funk and English balladry.

Cased in a bizarre album sleeve of Costello's head, half painted like a black and white minstrel, mounted on a wall above a slogan "the beloved entertainer," Spike is clearly going to be a bitter set, and the first track, "This Town," sets the mood. It's an angry little ballad with lines like "you're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard," and rides on a powerful bass line by Paul McCartney, with added guitars from Roger McGuinn and co-producer T-Bone Burnett.

That's just the first in a whole batch of surprises. Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty fame) provides the keyboards for the next furious track, "Let Him Dangle," an anti-hanging song dealing with that earlier controversy at Wandsworth Prison, the Bentley execution. Now Costello sets out on his global excursions, travelling to New Orleans to meet the great Allen Toussaint and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for the thoughtful, introspective and gospel-tinged "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror." Elsewhere, the brass is used for the discordant funk of "Chewing Gum," and a bold, experimental instrumental piece, "Stalin Malone," that echoes David Byrne's experiments in The Knee Plays.

His other excursion is to Ireland, which is very much home territory (particularly since his association with the Pogues). Here he joins former members of that grand political folk-rock band Moving Hearts, including piper Davy Spillane, bouzouki-player Donal Lunny and even Christy Moore (banging a bodhrán). "Tramp The Dirt Down," which is not so much a political song as an extraordinary explosion of rage, includes the lines "when England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam" and "I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down."

What else? Well, there are relaxed and poignant laments like Baby Plays Around, which shows off the quality of his singing and his acoustic guitar work; there's a wacky and funny finger-clicking piece, "God's Comic" (in which the Almighty listens to Andrew Lloyd-Webber), and there's the more upbeat current single, "Veronica," an Attractions-style guitar rocker co-written with McCartney. All of which adds up to a notable comeback.



Photo by Allan Titmuss.
1989-02-10 London Guardian photo 01 at.jpg


Page scan.
1989-02-10 London Guardian page 26.jpg

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