New Musical Express, August 27, 1977: Difference between revisions
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El's already had his share of controversy, y'know. Yessir, even the National Front have apparently been trying to dog his tracks ever since the release of the first-ever Costello vinyl artifact "Less Than Zero" (Stiff 45) which bears a heavy anti-N.F. bias, the song itself being a tacitly fanciful depiction of the landed gentry's rave black sheep boy of the Isherwood era, Oswald Mosley. | El's already had his share of controversy, y'know. Yessir, even the National Front have apparently been trying to dog his tracks ever since the release of the first-ever Costello vinyl artifact "Less Than Zero" (Stiff 45) which bears a heavy anti-N.F. bias, the song itself being a tacitly fanciful depiction of the landed gentry's rave black sheep boy of the Isherwood era, Oswald Mosley. | ||
''"Calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika tatoo"''... croons our El before pointing out in a ream of impressive if often fairly obtuse couplets, the innate British hypocrisy afoot on the double-moral-standard twists that forbid your favourite new wave band, say, from polluting the main media outlets while some gnarled pathetic self-confessed anti-Semite like the senile Mosley can blithely saunter into the BBC studios and run off at the mouth for 45 rivetting minutes over his sordid reminiscences. | |||
The marchings, the beatings, the black shirts, the foul sub-Nietzchen rhetoric — the Nation "tut-tutted" at the time, hut now it's OK 'cos the old fool's past it and virtually everything in this scum-pit that is England gets a benevolent white-washed canonization as time goes by. | |||
Just a few obligatory barbed questions behind and ol' Mose can bleat on about his mistakes, his regrets, his thoughts on the current state of unrest, and everything remains hunky-dory. | |||
It's OK with everyone except for one Mr. Costello, computer operator of Whitton near Twickenham, married with one child, whose brain somehow has been left unaffected by TV-land brain-cell bleach-out, who is offended by having this slimey old fascist drooling away in his living room and who, instead of penning a barbed missive to his local MP, sets down and writes a classic work of sly simmering anger. | |||
''"Let's talk about the future now we've put the past away". | |||
We're in a pub just round the corner from Island Records' St Peters Square building, Elvis and me, talking about the subject matter of "Less Than Zero" when [[Jake Riviera]] suddenly pipes up with the information that all the Yanks who've heard it think it's about Lee Haney Oswald. | |||
"Yeah right," Costello's terse gruff voice breaks in. | |||
"In fact (he's quite animated now) just for the States, I'm going to write a song about ... a guy, yeah, this guy's watching the box when he suddenly sees his girlfriend right behind Lee Haney Oswald just at the moment when Jack Ruby shoots him. And the screen ... the shot freezes, y'know..." | |||
He sits back with a self-satisfied smirk, savouring this perverse little morsel while Jake, whose job it is partly to deal with all the little weirdnesses spurting from the Costello "cerebus" gives his protege a part-"pained", part-"aw come ''on''", and part ... well, impressed squint. | |||
Costello is temporarily fulfilled though. He looks pleased with himself, pleased enough that maybe, just maybe he'll go ahead and conceive just that plot-line for a song tonight when he gets back to Whitton. | |||
After all, his song-vignettes — a lot of them anyway — are pretty damn weird — starting from everyday simple occurences | |||
Revision as of 18:22, 23 August 2013
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