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If the great grey they put the numb into number and the boot into beauty, then who, pray, puts the El into the element within?
It must be a question on all our lips at the time of year when Elvis Costello comes back to raise us from our daily death, the video'n'roll stupor of the Top Teen Hit Pops.
Something under his skin perhaps. I'm ashamed now that I ever doubted him, that I couldn't accept how soul, whatever that is, could be made by someone who knew what he was doing. There was a time I'd sneer if you blue white stax in my ear. And still I went home to "Can't Stand Up," "New Amsterdam," "Motel Matches" …
As a simpleton I had problems with the bejewelled jungle of Imperial Bedroom (nothing that wasn't remedied by a little concentration), but the Clive Langer/Alan Winstanley-produced Punch The Clock gave no quarter. Either I plunged in there or it was pension time.
Now, having accepted that total physical co-operation is demanded from its first to last brass bar, the record causes me to hurtle dangerously about my abode and even to testify to various rather dilapidated household gods none of whom respond to my anxious requests to be sanctified, but who may possibly share a polite chuckle at this ungainly spectacle.
But we have little time, and even less space.
What I've tried to get on tape and paper here is not Elvis the Last White Hope, the elder statesman of Real Pop, but Costello the fan and fanatic. My view was, why ask questions about Neil Kinnock if this guy knows about Aaron Neville? I hope that makes sense.
Today Elvis starts a British tour with the full ten-piece troupe of Attractions and Afrodiziaks and TKO horns which should establish him as the most formidable entertainer in contemporary music.
Let's make that precious.
Elvis, why are we here? Don't you sometimes wonder if Smash Hits and No. 1 aren't being more realistic about pop music?
Well, there's even some idiots in the record business today who think that I should conform to that — they're people who want to see everybody in those terms, because they run scared whenever this happens in pop music. And it does happen periodically, that you get a load of people pretending to be homosexuals in shorts. There's nothing worse than that fake effete pop. Some of these groups write good songs, but when the record company people start trying to get me to do that …
At the same time, you may be treated as an artist, yet not want to speak "as an artist" …
I was asked some pretty serious questions in America, so I was hoping for some light relief here!
The consensus seems to be that Punch The Clock is a return, or at least a part-return, to the soul base of Get Happy.
Listening to it the other day, it struck me as being simply a pop record. It had some mannerisms which you could call soul, but it didn't have the edginess of Get Happy, which was in any case made by a different group, in a different frame of mind.
I wouldn't want to return to anything, regardless of how good it was at the time. I might want to remember some good qualities that you put a premium on, because you don't want a standard to drop, but I don't think of that as returning.
People seem to be quibbling that the record isn't as ambitious as Imperial Bedroom, but you yourself have expressed doubts about the way some songs on Bedroom were "overdeveloped".
On Punch The Clock, we had the discipline of a production team, who do actually take ideas and put them in a bit more logical order than I did when I was ordering the music of Imperial Bedroom. I mean, what Geoff Emerick did on that record was nothing short of a miracle, to make sense of some of the stuff that I wanted to do.
In that way, the songs were overdeveloped, because nobody was stopping me and saying, no, take that bit … and the same thing goes for Steve, particularly, because Clive was really ruthless about getting him to play the same thing twice, since Steve comes up with lots of brilliant ideas, any one of which might make a good piano figure on a track. I have the same problem with singing, sometime I get bored with singing something the same way. But I don't think Punch The Clock was any less ambitious, it may be less diverse but then were were actually attempting to make something brighter and more forceful than Imperial Bedroom.
Was it reasonable of one reviewer to suggest that Imperial Bedroom was a kind of cleansing, a purging of obsessions?
It never occurred to me at the time, I thought it was quite a cheerful record. Because of all the sounds on it, it seemed quite bright to me. After Almost Blue, which was the most depressing record both to make and to listen to, Bedroom sounded like a positive holiday. When you're still close to a record, it's difficult to hear what other people hear.
But there's already songs on Punch The Clock which I think have a misplaced arrangement, that don't get to the heart of a song, which I can correct later in, for example, live versions. "King Of Thieves" is a song that has more heart than the record suggests.
It wasn't so much that Bedroom was depressing, it's just that the production was so clear it was like every word, every phrase, was being picked apart …
The voice is incredibly loud on that record, it's almost like this voice alone in the room with you. There was a conscious effect to turn all the instruments down and put the voice up. It's like if you listen to old Walker Brothers or Dusty Springfield records, the backing is compressed and only surges up when the voice stops, and we were attempting to do the same thing in a modern recording studio.
In fact Geoff did use old, I think they're called Fairchild, compressors, which are his secret weapon and which give that dynamic effect that modern solid state just can't achieve. I don't understand an awful lot of the technical side, but I understand enough to know that the loss in humanity on records coincides with the revolution of the solid state valve.
Dreamboats into footnotes
Besides "Pills" and "Shipbuilding," though, the new record is pretty upbeat. I liked your description of "The Greatest Thing" as a 1983" version of "I Saw Her Standing There."
Yeah, even down to the fact that we tweaked the vocal up, leant on it so it's slightly higher, younger-sounding. They do that on Michael Jackson records. But yes, a lot of the planning, the imaginary production, of this record relates very much to pop music of the moment.
"Pills And Soap' was "The Message" UK, you know … we've got Wham! UK, now we need Message UK. I was intrigued to know that Jerry Dammers has also got a line about Wham! in one of his songs, coz the second verse of "The Greatest Thing" is about Wham! In fact, that song is sort of an answer record to "Young Guns," because I love answer records, I think that's a tradition that should never have died out.
Some of the things Wham! say really irritate me, because I think they're making people feel small for things they believe in. There are plenty of people who are 19 and married who must resent being told that they are jerks. I resent it, because I was married when I was 20 and my wife was 19.
You've said you were trying to get away from "soul" singing in Imperial Bedroom and there seem to be more non-black influences there, like Dylan on "Man Out Of Time," Lennon on "You Little Fool."
I'm not sure about Lennon, I think I was trying to do an Errol Brown there. On Imperial Bedroom, it was just less of the man-alone-in-the-spotlight, the idea being to disperse the emotional responsibility.
It's funny how a singer's image can interfere with one's impressions of a song. The first time I heard your "Getting Mighty Crowded," I didn't know who it was and assumed it was a version by a '60s soul singer. When people have an image of you, perhaps they don't register the pure soul power of your voice, which beats all those Wellers and Rowlands hands down.
You can do yourself a disservice that way, because over a period of time you build that up, whether consciously or just by being around. I never really think about it, along the lines of "now I'm gonna put these people in their place", I just sing for the way I feel. I do think that this tour is something that you're not gonna see again, unless we do it again. The sort of sounds that we're getting, with the horns and the girls, there aren't very many groups capable of playing like that.
Now that I have that power behind me, the problem is to control myself and not let myself go too far. It's like, you know, when's the cape coming out!
When you turned to Stax and Motown for Get Happy, did you feel you'd exhausted the Abba and Heroes influences you were experimenting with on Armed Forces?
I thought that everybody had. I was obviously wrong, because we've been getting David Bowie rammed down our throats for the last six years! I just felt that the new wave sound that had build up had exhausted itself a bit, it had already become a ready-made cliché, and I thought the very rootlessness of it was what was making it sound insubstantial.
That's why I thought it was necessary to draw on music that I felt had a more natural feeling, a more natural swing to it than rather enforced jerkiness of the rhythm guitar and certain drum patterns in new wave. When that jerkiness was done out of technical limitations, as in punk, it was great, but when you found better musicians playing badly, in this stilted kind of way, it sounded terribly false.
Is Armed Forces still "glib" for you?
I haven't really heard that in a while, though I heard a track on the radio in America, and it sounded a lot rougher than I'd thought, where I'd imagined the production was somehow very smooth. You know, generally speaking, I think I'm almost at peace with my recorded catalogue, apart from the songs that I know are just bad songs. I don't currently have a hatred for any of the albums. I tend to have more of a negative reaction to them when I'm working on a new record.
I agree with you that Armed Forces now sounds quite brash, particularly the drums. When it came out, it did seem almost slick, but now everyone's using drum machines, the Nick Lowe beat sounds rather metallic. That said, I think I prefer the Langer/Winstanley drum sound to the garage sound on Trust or the somewhat muted one of Get Happy.
It's a more natural drum sound, isn't it? Without giving anything away, though, they do use techniques to doctor the drum sound, it's not all natural. That's one of the ironies, that they often use lots of trickery to get a simple, natural sound. "Let Them All Talk" was a real marathon job to make, yet it sounds quite live, it doesn't sound like an ABC record. The sound of Get Happy was probably due more to the studio we were in than anything else, but it was also a very radical approach to that style of music.
Madness' "Our House" proved Langer & Winstanley were probably the best production team around. How do you compare them with Nick Lowe?
Clive and Alan have the patience to construct something the size of "Our House," which Nick Lowe lacked. Nick is like Stax, whereas they're more like Motown or Van McCoy.
Vulgar fractions of a treble clef
When you described Get Happy as "somewhat unfinished", you probably gave away its secret. For me, it's like the bare bones of a sort of new wave MG's sound, as opposed to an attempt to match the Stax sound. It means it's a great record to sing along with … there're gaps to fill in.
We've got live arrangements of Get Happy songs that fill in those gaps, like "Possession" and "King Horse" are now much more realized numbers. "Clubland" is also vastly improved. As I remember, it sounded absolutely devastating to play in the studio, because the torn torn sounds were very deep, but they were almost impossible to get on a disc. If you play Trust extremely loud, it sounds great.
I think you should recognise your failures, as I'm beginning to do with the weak songs on Punch The Clock. I think, for instance, we tried to cram too much into "King Of Thieves". If it had been slower, there might have been more time to build it up, but as it is the heart of it is missing.
I knew there was something wrong with "Little Savage" on Imperial Bedroom, even before we put it out — I knew it was just another of what we call the "F-Beat songs", one of those straight four-beat songs that we do really well, but which don't mean anything. "Love Went Mad" is one on Punch The Clock, and I never wanted it. Clive said we had to
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