London Guardian, June 30, 2001: Difference between revisions
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The real story was, if anything, harder to believe — that the record was the work of one Declan McManus, a moonlighting 22-year-old married computer operator who grew up in Liverpool and who now, in London, had already declared that all of his songs were motivated solely by "revenge and guilt". But as the songs took over — as you caught the strange, utterly assured merging of rock 'n' roll classicism and punk perversity, heard both the thug hiding in the singer's throat (go ahead, believe him when he says "I'm not angry", it's your funeral) and the cultivated, literary person writing his songs — the story behind the songs ceased to matter. No biography, real or imaginary, was going to explain anything this good, this different, this odd. | The real story was, if anything, harder to believe — that the record was the work of one Declan McManus, a moonlighting 22-year-old married computer operator who grew up in Liverpool and who now, in London, had already declared that all of his songs were motivated solely by "revenge and guilt". But as the songs took over — as you caught the strange, utterly assured merging of rock 'n' roll classicism and punk perversity, heard both the thug hiding in the singer's throat (go ahead, believe him when he says "I'm not angry", it's your funeral) and the cultivated, literary person writing his songs — the story behind the songs ceased to matter. No biography, real or imaginary, was going to explain anything this good, this different, this odd. | ||
Accompanied on ''My Aim Is True'' by Clover, a northern California band trying its luck on the London pub-rock scene, Costello covered so much ground so fast he seemed to burn it up (he wouldn't round up the three-piece Attractions, his long-time backing band, until Watching The Detectives, a single recorded after the UK release of ''My Aim Is True'', but included on the later US version on Columbia). The songs cut so deeply that what first stuck in your memory might have told you something about who you were. Which meant more, the ominous rockabilly rumble under the choruses of Mystery Dance, or the dreadful, hilarious dump job in "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" (the song, like Rather Ripped, in the grand tradition of parenthetical rock 'n' roll titling)? The lovely, necrophiliac image of "fingers lying in the wedding cake" in Alison or the seemingly endless layers of past and future, contempt and self-hatred, in "Less Than Zero"? That's the great thing about an album as good as this one; you keep playing it, you don't have to decide. You let the music change your mind. | Accompanied on ''My Aim Is True'' by Clover, a northern California band trying its luck on the London pub-rock scene, Costello covered so much ground so fast he seemed to burn it up (he wouldn't round up the three-piece Attractions, his long-time backing band, until "Watching The Detectives," a single recorded after the UK release of ''My Aim Is True'', but included on the later US version on Columbia). The songs cut so deeply that what first stuck in your memory might have told you something about who you were. Which meant more, the ominous rockabilly rumble under the choruses of "Mystery Dance," or the dreadful, hilarious dump job in "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" (the song, like Rather Ripped, in the grand tradition of parenthetical rock 'n' roll titling)? The lovely, necrophiliac image of "fingers lying in the wedding cake" in "Alison" or the seemingly endless layers of past and future, contempt and self-hatred, in "Less Than Zero"? That's the great thing about an album as good as this one; you keep playing it, you don't have to decide. You let the music change your mind. | ||
All across ''My Aim Is True'', you could imagine you were listening to Buddy Holly after shock treatment, or an impostor. (Of whom? Costello? Any remotely credible pop star?) Never mind how he looked: Costello sang as if he had a gun at his back, and with "Less Than Zero," he did — most of the 20th century. Costello wrote the song, his first single, after watching a BBC talk show featuring Oswald Mosley, in the 30s the leader of the pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, in 1977 a hero to the racist, neo-fascist National Front, which at the time was savaging Pakistani and Indian Britons in the streets and pushing the UK's Tory party to the right in the rooms where policy was made. "There he was on TV," Costello said five years later, "saying, 'No, I'm not anti-semitic, of course I'm not — doesn't matter even if I was!' His attitude was that time could make it all right! It was a very English way of accepting things that used to really irritate me, really annoy me. The complacency, the moral complacency there — that they would just accept this vicious old man: not string him up on the spot!" | All across ''My Aim Is True'', you could imagine you were listening to Buddy Holly after shock treatment, or an impostor. (Of whom? Costello? Any remotely credible pop star?) Never mind how he looked: Costello sang as if he had a gun at his back, and with "Less Than Zero," he did — most of the 20th century. Costello wrote the song, his first single, after watching a BBC talk show featuring Oswald Mosley, in the 30s the leader of the pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, in 1977 a hero to the racist, neo-fascist National Front, which at the time was savaging Pakistani and Indian Britons in the streets and pushing the UK's Tory party to the right in the rooms where policy was made. "There he was on TV," Costello said five years later, "saying, 'No, I'm not anti-semitic, of course I'm not — doesn't matter even if I was!' His attitude was that time could make it all right! It was a very English way of accepting things that used to really irritate me, really annoy me. The complacency, the moral complacency there — that they would just accept this vicious old man: not string him up on the spot!" |
Revision as of 10:30, 15 November 2014
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