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Extract
Ever since rock ‘n’ roll was born on American soil, British musicians have been masters at robbing the cradle. Pop music in the 1960s underwent a massive commercial boom only after British artists took the squalling sounds of American blues and early rock and garnished them for mass appeal. And when rock lost its edge during the 1970s, British bands revitalised the music, stripping it back to its basics and injecting the vitality of punk and new wave into the mainstream. Emerging from Britain’s new-wave scene, Elvis Costello has become one of rock’s most talented songwriters, drawing comparisons for his prolific output to such celebrated American composers as Cole Porter and George Gershwin. And Fine Young Cannibals a popular 1980’s British band has won acclaim by grafting the vocal style of Americana and added the dance culture rhythms. The new albums of both Costello and the Cannibals demonstrate that, even at a time when technology has transformed rock into a kind of borderless global pop. British musicians still play a leading role by borrowing American traditions and making them their own.
Costello’s Spike his 12th album and his first for Warner Bros. is transatlantic in its production as well as its content. Recorded in London, Dublin, New Orleans and Hollywood, it represents the artist’s most ambitious – and accomplished - work to date. Using the talents of such diverse musicians as Paul McCartney and T Bone Burnett, Costello’s pallet covers the musical spectrum from jazz and folk to rockabilly and pop. And with it he paints a cynical world full of characters who are either victims or practitioners of deception and betrayal.
While Costello is the past has proved himself to be both inventive and eclectic. Spike takes his creativity to even greater heights. And in an apparent homage, Costello has named the album after one of his heroes, British comedian Spike Milligan and depicted himself on the cover as a harlequin, with half his face in black paint.
Much of Spike is clearly influenced by Americana music, having musical rhythms of the Old South to gritty urban styles of the 1990s. The New Orleans sounds of Allen Toussaint’s elegant piano and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s on Deep Dark Truthful Mirror, a ballad of spurned love. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band then shift gears to provide cartoon-like accompaniment – including much squawking out and screeching – on the freaky Chewing Gum, an odd tale about a mail-order bride and their manipulative “kinky beast” husband.
Two songs came out of Costello’s recent collaboration with McCartney, who invited him to co-write material for his now next album, due later this year. Veronica, a portrait of an eccentric old woman, is a giddy song blessed with a main melody that is classic McCartney. But Costello’s mark is clear “She closed her eyes upon the world and picked upon the bones of last week's news”. And Pads, Paws and Claws, a scorching rockabilly number, deals with a drunk whose spouse is “a feline tormentor not any vaudeville wife”.
But Spike’s angriest tracks spring from Costello’s own cultural roots. Although known for his Presley-inspired first name and Buddy Holly glasses, Costello was born Declan MacManus to Irish parents, he recently moved back to Dublin with his Irish wife, Cait O’Riordan. And the songs that draw on Celtic music each tell a deeply moving tale. Costello has said that Any King’s Shilling, a story about a man caught in the Irish Independence conflict, set to traditional harp music, is about the experience of his grandfather. Tramp The Dirt Down depicting an England marked by the Northern Ireland civil war and unemployment, clearly stems from Costello’s own observations. Featuring traditional Celtic instruments, it amounts to a bitter farewell to the insanity in it, he blames the government of Margaret Thatcher for those social ills ; “England was the whore of the world/Margaret was her madam.”
While Costello’s new album is a mother lode of musical and lyrical nuggets, the latest from the Fine Young Cannibals has riches of another kind, highly polished dance music. “
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