Ultimate Music Guide, April 2022: Difference between revisions
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{{tags}}[[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Armed Forces]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[Punch The Clock]] {{-}} [[The Invisible Man]] {{-}} [[Charm School]] {{-}} [[The Costello Show]] {{-}} [[King Of America]] {{-}} [[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[Spectacular Spinning Songbook|Spinning Songbook]] {{-}} [[Napoleon Dynamite]] {{-}} [[Brutal Youth]] {{-}} [[When I Was Cruel]] {{-}} [[Momofuku]] {{-}} [[The Boy Named If]] {{-}} [[David Lee Roth]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[Declan MacManus]] {{-}} [[Ross MacManus]] {{-}} [[Flip City]] {{-}} [[Elizabeth Arden]] {{-}} [[Acton]] {{-}} [[Hounslow]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Stiff Records]] {{-}} [[Brinsley Schwarz]] {{-}} [[Dave Edmunds]] {{-}} [[Rockpile]] {{-}} [[Wreckless Eric]] {{-}} [[Jake Riviera]] {{-}} [[Clover]] {{-}} [[Huey Lewis]] {{-}} [[Revenge and guilt]] {{-}} [[Welcome To The Working Week]] {{-}} [[Miracle Man]] {{-}} [[No Dancing]] {{-}} [[Mystery Dance]] {{-}} [[I'm Not Angry]] {{-}} [[Blame It On Cain]] {{-}} [[Alison]] {{-}} [[John McFee]] {{-}} [[Linda Ronstadt]] {{-}} [[Ghetto Child]] {{-}} [[The Spinners|Detroit Spinners]] {{-}} [[Sneaky Feelings]] {{-}} [[The Byrds]] {{-}} [[(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes]] {{-}} [[Less Than Zero]] {{-}} [[Oswald Mosley]] {{-}} [[Randy Newman]] {{-}} [[Pay It Back]] {{-}} [[Bob Dylan]] {{-}} [[Waiting For The End Of The World]] {{-}} [[The Clash]] {{-}} [[Watching The Detectives]] {{-}} [[Hasselblad]] {{-}} [[No Action]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Vox Continental]] {{-}} [[Pump It Up]] {{-}} [[Lip Service]] {{-}} [[You Belong To Me]] {{-}} [[Lipstick Vogue]] {{-}} [[Barney Bubbles]] {{-}} [[David Bailey]] {{-}} [[Hand In Hand]] {{-}} [[This Year's Girl]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[The Kinks]] {{-}} [[All Day And All Of The Night]] {{-}} [[The Beat]] {{-}} [[Living In Paradise]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Hand In Hand]] {{-}} [[Basher]] {{-}} [[Subterranean Homesick Blues]] {{-}} [[Night Rally]] {{-}} [[National Front]] | {{tags}}[[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Armed Forces]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[Punch The Clock]] {{-}} [[The Invisible Man]] {{-}} [[Charm School]] {{-}} [[The Costello Show]] {{-}} [[King Of America]] {{-}} [[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[Spectacular Spinning Songbook|Spinning Songbook]] {{-}} [[Napoleon Dynamite]] {{-}} [[Brutal Youth]] {{-}} [[When I Was Cruel]] {{-}} [[Momofuku]] {{-}} [[The Boy Named If]] {{-}} [[David Lee Roth]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[Declan MacManus]] {{-}} [[Ross MacManus]] {{-}} [[Flip City]] {{-}} [[Elizabeth Arden]] {{-}} [[Acton]] {{-}} [[Hounslow]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Stiff Records]] {{-}} [[Brinsley Schwarz]] {{-}} [[Dave Edmunds]] {{-}} [[Rockpile]] {{-}} [[Wreckless Eric]] {{-}} [[Jake Riviera]] {{-}} [[Clover]] {{-}} [[Huey Lewis]] {{-}} [[Revenge and guilt]] {{-}} [[Welcome To The Working Week]] {{-}} [[Miracle Man]] {{-}} [[No Dancing]] {{-}} [[Mystery Dance]] {{-}} [[I'm Not Angry]] {{-}} [[Blame It On Cain]] {{-}} [[Alison]] {{-}} [[John McFee]] {{-}} [[Linda Ronstadt]] {{-}} [[Ghetto Child]] {{-}} [[The Spinners|Detroit Spinners]] {{-}} [[Sneaky Feelings]] {{-}} [[The Byrds]] {{-}} [[(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes]] {{-}} [[Less Than Zero]] {{-}} [[Oswald Mosley]] {{-}} [[Randy Newman]] {{-}} [[Pay It Back]] {{-}} [[Bob Dylan]] {{-}} [[Waiting For The End Of The World]] {{-}} [[The Clash]] {{-}} [[Watching The Detectives]] {{-}} [[Hasselblad]] {{-}} [[No Action]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Vox Continental]] {{-}} [[Pump It Up]] {{-}} [[Lip Service]] {{-}} [[You Belong To Me]] {{-}} [[Lipstick Vogue]] {{-}} [[Barney Bubbles]] {{-}} [[David Bailey]] {{-}} [[Hand In Hand]] {{-}} [[This Year's Girl]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[The Kinks]] {{-}} [[All Day And All Of The Night]] {{-}} [[The Beat]] {{-}} [[Living In Paradise]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Hand In Hand]] {{-}} [[Basher]] {{-}} [[Subterranean Homesick Blues]] {{-}} [[Night Rally]] {{-}} [[National Front]] | ||
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Beset with death threats and a radio black-out, Costello showed contrition at a New York press conference on March 30, 1979. "Nobody said that to make records you've got to have a certificate that says you're a nice and wonderful person," he said, struggling to maintain some dignity. He has been apologising ever since. This in 1982: "I said the most outrageous thing I could possibly say to [the Stills party] — that I knew, in my drunken logic, would anger them more than anything else." Then a lifetime later in 2010: "I thought [''I''] was being ironic," and again, "Despite everything else that I've stood for, that's still mentioned." | Beset with death threats and a radio black-out, Costello showed contrition at a New York press conference on March 30, 1979. "Nobody said that to make records you've got to have a certificate that says you're a nice and wonderful person," he said, struggling to maintain some dignity. He has been apologising ever since. This in 1982: "I said the most outrageous thing I could possibly say to [the Stills party] — that I knew, in my drunken logic, would anger them more than anything else." Then a lifetime later in 2010: "I thought [''I''] was being ironic," and again, "Despite everything else that I've stood for, that's still mentioned." | ||
Many read the affection for soul music expressed on ''Get Happy!!'' as a musical act of penitence, but the lessons in humility are seemingly more to do with his well-publicised dalliance with November 1974 Playmate Of The Month Bebe Buell, and the uneasy reconciliation with first wife Mary Burgoyne. A 25- | Many read the affection for soul music expressed on ''Get Happy!!'' as a musical act of penitence, but the lessons in humility are seemingly more to do with his well-publicised dalliance with November 1974 Playmate Of The Month Bebe Buell, and the uneasy reconciliation with first wife Mary Burgoyne. A 25-year-old father and husband, Costello's discovery — expressed on unflattering third-person pen pic "The Imposter" — that he is ''"not the man you think that he could be"'' is everywhere. A sense of inadequacy underpins ''Get Happy!!'', along with the feeling that he has simultaneously underpaid for and been short-changed by love. | ||
Opening pun fiesta "Love For Tender" sullies human emotion with the language of high finance, and finds Costello very much in arrears: ''"You can total up the balance sheet, and never know if I'm a counterfeit,"'' he sings over a chirpy, finger-clicking backdrop. His fakery is further exposed on the uptempo "The Imposter," the protagonist ''"Dying to be too bad, trying to talk too tough, trying to jack the lad."'' Trying, and notably failing. | Opening pun fiesta "Love For Tender" sullies human emotion with the language of high finance, and finds Costello very much in arrears: ''"You can total up the balance sheet, and never know if I'm a counterfeit,"'' he sings over a chirpy, finger-clicking backdrop. His fakery is further exposed on the uptempo "The Imposter," the protagonist ''"Dying to be too bad, trying to talk too tough, trying to jack the lad."'' Trying, and notably failing. | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> Almost Blue </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Rob Hughes </center> | ||
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''' | '''"WARNING: This album contains country & western music and may cause offence to narrow-minded listeners." | ||
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If Elvis Costello had been toying with the idea of retiring from music prior to ''Trust'', its disappointing sales numbers hardly lightened the mood. His marriage was failing, he was drinking too much, and the collective tension within The Attractions showed little sign of easing up. | |||
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As a consequence, he chose to take a break from songwriting altogether — though crucially, not from the studio itself. Costello had come to the conclusion that he could better articulate his current state through other people's songs. And what better medium to express his sorry disillusionment than country music? | |||
This was no arbitrary solution to a dilemma. Costello had been a country disciple for most of his life. Hank Williams was part of the repertoire during his folk club days as Declan MacManus, and during the Live Stiffs jaunt of '77, it was suggested that he remove ''The Best Of George Jones'' from the tour bus for fear of "confusing" guests from the music press. The same rationale, you suspect, was behind the label's decision to nix the Jones-apeing "Stranger In The House" from ''My Aim Is True''. Costello had eventually realised an ambition, though, when he and Gorgeous George cut a duet of the song for the latter's My Very Special Guests in 1979. | |||
Seduced by the self-destructive tropes of classic country, Costello opted to go the full mile on his next album. He and The Attractions flew to Nashville and hired Billy Sherrill, famous for his work with Jones, Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich, as producer. Also in tow was a camera crew from ''The South Bank Show'', their interest piqued by the sight of one of Britain's edgier talents making a detour into the distinctly unhip realm of country. | |||
The band were joined by fiddler Tommy Millar and lead guitarist/pedal steel player John McFee at CBS' Studio A, where Costello had shortlisted a bunch of songs previously recorded by the likes of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, George Jones and Gram Parsons. The latter was a key signpost on what became ''Almost Blue''. Costello's initial interest in country had been sparked by the discovery of two Parsons-heavy albums as a teenager: The Byrds' ''Sweetheart Of The Rodeo'' and The Flying Burrito Brothers' ''The Gilded Palace Of Sin''. Both records ached with a peculiar sense of longing, made all the more potent by a soulful voice that seemed to foretell some hopelessly broken future. | |||
Given that Parsons died young, at just 26, the sentiment of these songs now drew Costello in deeper. Two Gram covers made it onto ''Almost Blue''. The first, "I'm Your Toy" (aka "Hot Burrito #1"), found Elvis in potent form, crying hurt while his onetime lover sinks into the arms of another. It's a midtempo ballad that more or less sticks to the arrangement of the original, as does the second Parsons co-write, "How Much I Lied," marked by Steve Nieve's rolling piano riff. | |||
Such faithful adherence to source material was a constant puzzle to Sherrill. This clearly wasn't what he was expecting. And while Elvis fans no doubt had similar concerns about the choice of producer (as a pioneer of Nashville's countrypolitan sound, Sherrill was noted for sugaring his work with liberal use of strings), Costello knew what he was aiming for. If the choice of song was right, he argued, there could be a genuine tension between the emotion of the singer and Sherrill's smooth backdrops. | |||
Yet Sherrill couldn't understand why an English ex-punk would want to cut an album of "worn-out" country covers. His barely disguised indifference to the whole thing caused a degree of tension in its own right. Only when Costello and the band ripped through an utterly irreverent version of Hank Williams' "Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?" did the producer get animated at all, double tracking the song for added oomph. Most of the time, though, as Costello recalled later, "it was less of a collaboration and more of a contest in cultural differences." He added: "Anybody who has seen ''The South Bank Show'' will know Mr Sherrill as an impatient man with an overwhelming interest in speedboats." | |||
Still, over the course of 12 days in Nashville, the band recorded over 25 covers, of which a dozen made it onto the album. It was only fitting that, given Costello's predilection for booze, a pair of drinking songs made the final cut. One of them is an uptempo take on Merle Haggard's "Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down," imbuing the song with a fine dash of R'n'B swing. The other is Charlie Rich's gin-soaked "Sittin' And Thinkin'," which proved a capable vehicle for both Sherrill's backing choir, Nashville Edition, and the weepy drift of McFee's pedal steel. | |||
As if to pre-empt a tough reception, at a time when populist country in the UK meant little more than Kenny Rogers and Crystal Gayle, ''Almost Blue'''s cover came with a sardonic sticker: "WARNING: This album contains country & western music and may cause offence to narrow-minded listeners." It fared better than Costello may have expected, however, outselling ''Trust'' and landing him a first Top 10 hit for 18 months with "A Good Year For The Roses." Written by Jerry Chesnut and originally cut by George Jones, it's a classic break-up ballad that Costello tackles admirably. | |||
''Almost Blue'' certainly isn't perfect, but neither is it the ill-judged genre exercise that some critics, especially in the US, tried to make out. Some reviews were scathing. The ''Washington Post'' declared it "a mean-spirited mess," while ''Creem'' dismissed Costello as little more than a "hack lounge singer." Elvis countered by suggesting that Americans resented him for daring to play their music. | |||
At the surface, ''Almost Blue'' is simply a case of one man tipping the wink to the songs and artists who moved him. But the album also served to resolve something of a crisis of faith in his own songwriting ability, allowing Costello to clear the ground for his next endeavour, the wholly different ''Imperial Bedroom''. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Hank Williams]] {{-}} [[:Category:Stiff's Greatest Stiffs Live|Live Stiffs tour]] {{-}} [[Stranger In The House]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[George Jones]] {{-}} [[George Jones: My Very Special Guests|My Very Special Guests]] {{-}} [[Billy Sherrill]] {{-}} [[Tammy Wynette]] {{-}} [[Charlie Rich]] {{-}} [[The South Bank Show]] {{-}} [[Tommy Millar]] {{-}} [[John McFee]] {{-}} [[Patsy Cline]] {{-}} [[Gram Parsons]] {{-}} [[The Byrds]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#The Byrds|Sweetheart Of The Rodeo]] {{-}} [[The Flying Burrito Brothers]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#The Flying Burrito Brothers|The Gilded Palace Of Sin]] {{-}} [[I'm Your Toy]] {{-}} [[How Much I Lied]] {{-}} [[Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?]] {{-}} [[Merle Haggard]] {{-}} [[Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down]] {{-}} [[Sittin' And Thinkin']] {{-}} [[Nashville Edition]] {{-}} [[Good Year For The Roses]] {{-}} [[Jerry Chesnut]] {{-}} [[Creem, March 1982|Creem]] {{-}} [[Washington Post, November 6, 1981|Washington Post]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue sticker]] | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> Punch The Clock </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Peter Watts </center> | ||
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''' | '''A technical knockout of '80s pop. And, behind the horn section, lurk two political classics. | ||
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You can probably get a handle on Elvis Costello's feelings for ''Punch The Clock'' by the fact that, when asked to write sleevenotes for a 2003 re-release, he claimed to be "unable to recall a single further entertaining incident that occurred during these sessions," so simply reprinted the essay that prefaced the 1995 reissue, complete with typing errors. ''Punch The Clock'' is an awkward entry in Costello's catalogue. Boasting an atmosphere of superficial jollity, but also two of his finest, most deeply felt, political songs, it's an album that has to be considered a success on its own terms. It's the nature of those terms that left the strange taste in his mouth. | |||
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In 1983, Costello needed a hit, to get "reacquainted with the wonderful world of pop music." As he admitted, "If you allow contact with the mainstream audience to be severed for too long, you lose the freedom to do what you want to do." America hadn't shown much interest in ''Almost Blue'' or ''Imperial Bedroom'', and the UK Top 30 hadn't been troubled since "Good Year For The Roses," so ''Punch The Clock'' has purpose and begins with gusto. "Let Them All Talk" and "Everyday I Write The Book" are frantic, full and ridiculously charming: the former is packed with crusading, peppy horns, the latter led off by a modern approximation of Motown backing harmonies. Slick, synthetic but by no means unpalatable, this was Costello embracing what he called the "passionless fads of that charmless time: the early '80s." | |||
To his credit, it was a challenge Costello took seriously. First, he recruited the best pop producers in the land, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who had married commercial success with artistic credibility on a succession of great singles with Madness, Teardrop Explodes and Dexys Midnight Runners and who brought with them the TKO Horns section. Costello wrote songs with the horns in mind, and when Langer asked him to stop his bedroom moping and write something with zest, Costello obliged, picking up the guitar for a sequence of songs about love and marriage. The first of these was "Let Them All Talk," which begins the album with a bounce that requires Costello produce a superb vocal performance to keep up, delivering a wry lyric that comments on ''"the sad songs that the radio plays."'' | |||
" | It's followed by "Everyday I Write The Book," conceived by Costello as a Merseybeat spoof but successfully redrafted in the studio with a Motown feel. Backing vocals came from Claudia Fontaine and Caron Wheeler, known as Afrodiziak (Wheeler later sang Soul II Soul's "Back To Life"). The song exemplified the Langer/Winstanley process, patiently rebuilding a song track by track, using little of the original and demanding numerous retakes. It was a laborious process that didn't sit naturally with the spontaneity of The Attractions, but when it worked, the results were splendid. The excellent "Everyday I Write The Book" was, confessed Costello, "one of our very few entirely cheerful recordings." It reached No 33 in America, his first US hit. | ||
Costello | Two songs in, and while Costello had made his point, he'd also set a pace impossible to maintain. The throwaway "The Greatest Thing," written to Langer's orders, is a "proud and wishful song on love and marriage" in which Costello rarely sounds as if he means what he's singing. It's followed by the woozy whimsy of "The Element Within Her" and "Love Went Mad," the latter an insubstantial hotchpotch that conceals a couple of arch lines (''"a self made mug is hard to break"'') amid careering inanity. | ||
Just when a trend seems to be established — undercooked songs meets overbaked production — ''Punch The Clock'' hits you with not just the best song on the album, but one of the best songs Costello has written. "Shipbuilding" started with a piano melody written by Clive Langer. Asked to supply lyrics, Costello went on tour in Australia, where he followed the Falklands war between Argentina and Britain through the tabloids, and produced a stunning, sad but above all wise meditation about war, industry, economy and class. Released as a single with Robert Wyatt supplying elegiac vocals, "Shipbuilding" had been a minor hit in April 1983, but Costello always planned to do his own version and, to distinguish it from Wyatt's version, called in Chet Baker to contribute mournful trumpet. Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis were also considered, but Baker's solo is magnificent, even if he was "pretty spaced out" according to Langer, who pieced it together from three takes. | |||
Side two kicks leads off with the horn-happy "TKO (Boxing Day)," with Costello ungallantly noting that ''"Now you don't look so glamorous, whenever I feel so amorous"'' and offering a bewildering litany of puns: ''"They put the numb into number, put the cut into cutie/ They put the slum into slumber and the boot into beauty."'' The tempo is sustained on the light funk "Charm School," with Afrodiziak contributing some of their best backing vocals, before "The Invisible Man," pulled together from discarded lyrics, struts into view like a Kinks outtake. The sequence of "Mouth Almighty" and "King Of Thieves" offer a low point, the former a half-hearted pop ballad, the second sprawling and shapeless. Given that the equally modest Squeeze-lite "The World And His Wife" is yet to come, the only thing saving the second half of the record from complete mediocrity is a song that, like "Shipbuilding," Costello didn't even write for the album. "Pills And Soap" was based on Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," with Costello delivering a tremendously cynical lyric, ostensibly about the iniquity of the tabloid press but also about political deceit and establishment hypocrisy, over a drum machine and Steve Nieve's dramatic piano. Stark and demanding, it came out before the general election of May 1983, with Costello styling himself The Imposter. He planned to bring it out on red vinyl in the event of Labour victory but, denied that satisfaction, instead covered The Beat's anti-Thatcher "Stand Down Margaret" on the BBC. Shortly after, ''Punch The Clock'' was released to a receptive public. Costello's calculated gamble had paid off, but it was a tightrope act he'd struggle to repeat. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Punch The Clock]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[Good Year For The Roses]] {{-}} [[Let Them All Talk]] {{-}} [[Everyday I Write The Book]] {{-}} [[Motown]] {{-}} [[Clive Langer]] {{-}} [[Alan Winstanley]] {{-}} [[Madness]] {{-}} [[Dexys Midnight Runners]] {{-}} [[The TKO Horns]] {{-}} [[Merseybeat]] {{-}} [[Claudia Fontaine]] {{-}} [[Caron Wheeler]] {{-}} [[Afrodiziak]] {{-}} [[The Greatest Thing]] {{-}} [[The Element Within Her]] {{-}} [[Love Went Mad]] {{-}} [[Shipbuilding]] {{-}} [[Robert Wyatt]] {{-}} [[Chet Baker]] {{-}} [[Wynton Marsalis]] {{-}} [[Miles Davis]] {{-}} [[TKO (Boxing Day)]] {{-}} [[Charm School]] {{-}} [[The Invisible Man]] {{-}} [[The Kinks]] {{-}} [[Mouth Almighty]] {{-}} [[King Of Thieves]] {{-}} [[Squeeze]] {{-}} [[The World And His Wife]] {{-}} [[Pills And Soap]] {{-}} [[Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five|Grandmaster Flash]] {{-}} [[The Message]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[The Imposter]] {{-}} [[The Beat (band)|The Beat]] {{-}} [[Margaret Thatcher]] {{-}} [[Stand Down Margaret]] | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> King Of America </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Andrew Mueller </center> | ||
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''' | '''Introducing The Costello Show, The Little Hands Of Concrete, and an illustrious new supporting cast... Declan MacManus' crowning glory? | ||
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We've become accustomed, 37 years into his career, to Elvis Costello's unpredictable waxes and wanes. However, around the time of the release of his 10th album, ''King Of America'', there was considerable muttering to the effect that Costello was no sure long-term proposition. He had gone up like a rocket, this argument went, releasing five nigh-flawless albums in as many years straight off the launchpad, and had since been wafting slowly back down through less rarefied stratospheres, via a country covers project, a somewhat overheated orchestral pop opus, a Philly soul digression and, most latterly, the muddled, portentously titled ''Goodbye Cruel World''. When he broke what was, by his standards, an epochal silence of two years with a hoarse, desperate swipe at The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," many assumed that Elvis had, to all intents and purposes, left the building. | |||
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The outward appearance of ''King Of America'' offered little reassurance. The LP was formally credited, somewhat bafflingly, to The Costello Show (one of few places his familiar pseudonym appeared at all, with songs credited to Costello's real name, Declan MacManus, and guitars to The Little Hands Of Concrete, owing to a predilection for in-studio string-breaking). The cover was a sepia headshot of Costello sporting a beard, brocaded jacket, crown, and expression of bored insouciance, of the sort that might well preface inquiring, of some simpering serf, "And what is it that you do?" The sleevenotes prompted further bewilderment. It was surprising enough that The Attractions appeared on only one track, rather more so that for much of the album Costello was backed by men who had, until a decade previously, been playing for another Elvis: the TCB Band themselves, James Burton, Jerry Scheff and Ron Tutt. Also aboard were supreme jazz bassist (and once Mr Ella Fitzgerald) Ray Brown, former Little Richard (and almost everybody else) drummer Earl Palmer, and such top-drawer sessioneers as T-Bone Wolk, Mitchell Froom and Jim Keltner. If Costello had submitted to hubris, he hadn't done it by halves. | |||
In his disarmingly candid essay accompanying the 1995 Demon reissue, Costello explained himself. "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" had been Columbia's choice of single, rather than his. The sidelining of The Attractions had been semi-accidental. An original plan to have them play on half the album had been overtaken by the fact that by the time they arrived in LA, sessions had gone so swimmingly that more than half was already done — leaving, as Costello recalled, "my sullen and estranged band hanging around our hotel harbouring a grudge or honing an embittered anecdote" (a good few of the latter, barely fictionalised, would surface a few years later in Bruce Thomas' score-settling memoir, ''The Big Wheel''). It was hopefully some consolation that the one song The Attractions did play on, "Suit Of Lights," was very arguably the best thing on what was clearly, once you got around to playing the damn thing, one of Costello's very finest records. | |||
Costello, steeped in a learned love of Americana, was always going to make a country record — his own country record, that is (''Almost Blue'', the respectful covers album recorded in Nashville with Billy Sherrill a few years earlier, felt in retrospect like EC's establishment of his credentials in this department). But throughout ''King Of America'', Costello is both too smart and too confident to adapt himself to country tropes — that way, he knows, lies fatuous imposture, empty pastiche and the rarely edifying spectacle of Englishmen wearing cowboy boots. Instead, he adapts country to Elvis Costello — and country responds enthusiastically, as a genre always sympathetic to unusual voices and cunning lyricism would. Any doubts that he'd struck the right note were vanquished within the year when a reading of the rueful hangover romp "The Big Light" appeared as the opening track on Johnny Cash's ''Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town'' (other ''King Of America'' tracks to have been adopted by American country singers include Laura Cantrell's "Indoor Fireworks" and Rhett Miller's "Brilliant Mistake," and while it remains an outrage that George Jones never recorded "Our Little Angel," Rosanne Cash did). | |||
Crucially, for all that he is recording in some of America's best-known studios with some of America's best-regarded musicians, Costello never loses sight of the fact that he's a stranger here — the opening lines of opening track "Brilliant Mistake" sound, in context, like a caution against succumbing to these kind of assumptions (''"He thought he was the king of America / Where they pour Coca-Cola just like vintage wine"''). On the heavily Cash-influenced "Glitter Gulch," he's the aghast, seduced hotel-room-flickerer between gaudy game shows on US television, underpinned by a James Burton masterclass on guitar and dobro. On the gentle waltz "American Without Tears" — a true story, by Costello's account — he sees something of himself in two elderly English GI brides drinking in a hotel bar, who don't quite belong here but can never really go home (a sequel, "American Without Tears No.{{nb}}2," can be found on the ''Out Of Our Idiot'' compilation). | |||
For all its explicit rooting in foreign soil, ''King Of America'' peaks at the points at which Costello is at his most personal — and therefore his most universal. "I'll Wear It Proudly" and its companion piece "Jack Of All Parades" are two of his most poised love songs, the former a beautiful devotional leavened with grateful humility (''"In shameless moments / You made more of me than just a mess"''), the latter an acknowledgement of the terror of losing something you never expected to have (''"When we first met I didn't know what to do / My old love lines were all worn out on you"''). The presumable subject of this pair, former Pogues bass player and soon-to-be Mrs Costello Cait O'Riordan, is also credited with co-writing the winning rockabilly shuffle "Lovable." | |||
''King Of America'' isn't perfect. At 15 tracks, it may be too much of a good thing — it could have lived without the rehearsal-room workout of J.B. Lenoir's "Eisenhower Blues" and the oversold ballad "Poisoned Rose." But it's a great record in its own right, and an important one, for better and for worse, in confirming to Costello that there might be life beyond The Attractions — after, that is, he'd put the old gang back together for one more job... | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[King Of America]] {{-}} [[The Costello Show]] {{-}} [[Declan MacManus]] {{-}} [[The Little Hands Of Concrete|Little Hands Of Concrete]] {{-}} [[The Animals]] {{-}} [[Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Elvis Presley]] {{-}} [[The TCB Band]] {{-}} [[James Burton]] {{-}} [[Jerry Scheff]] {{-}} [[Ron Tutt]] {{-}} [[Ella Fitzgerald]] {{-}} [[Ray Brown]] {{-}} [[Earl Palmer]] {{-}} [[Little Richard]] {{-}} [[T-Bone Wolk]] {{-}} [[Jim Keltner]] {{-}} [[Mitchell Froom]] {{-}} [[King Of America (1995) liner notes]] {{-}} [[King Of America#King Of America (1995 Rykodisc/Demon edition)|King Of America 1995 reissue]] {{-}} [[Bruce Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Big Wheel]] {{-}} [[Suit Of Lights]] {{-}} [[Billy Sherrill]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Johnny Cash]] {{-}} [[The Big Light]] {{-}} [[Johnny Cash: Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town/Boom Chicka Boom|Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town]] {{-}} [[Laura Cantrell: Live At Schubas|Laura Cantrell]] {{-}} [[Indoor Fireworks]] {{-}} [[Rhett Miller: The Interpreter: Live at Largo|Rhett Miller]] {{-}} [[Brilliant Mistake]] {{-}} [[Rosanne Cash: Retrospective|Rosanne Cash]] {{-}} [[Our Little Angel]] {{-}} [[George Jones]] {{-}} [[Glitter Gulch]] {{-}} [[American Without Tears]] {{-}} [[Out Of Our Idiot]] {{-}} [[American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)|American Without Tears No. 2]] {{-}} [[I'll Wear It Proudly]] {{-}} [[Jack Of All Parades]] {{-}} [[The Pogues]] {{-}} [[Cait O'Riordan]] {{-}} [[Lovable]] {{-}} [[J.B. Lenoir]] {{-}} [[Eisenhower Blues]] {{-}} [[Poisoned Rose]] | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> Spike </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Neil Spencer </center> | ||
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''' | '''Irish folk? New Orleans funk? Americana? A Costello/ McCartney dream team? The Beloved Entertainer stretches out... | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
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As the 1980s dwindled, Elvis Costello found himself in the unusual position of not knowing what to do next. Amid a host of plans and projects, which was the one to pursue? By the end of 1987, his protracted break-up with The Attractions was (more or less) completed, while he had slotted in international dates with The Confederates. His marriage to Cait O'Riordan was still in its honeymoon and Costello was much in the orbit of The Pogues, with whom O'Riordan played bass. Further, he had been working with Paul McCartney, who had proposed the pair write an album together. By the start of 1988, he was also penning the soundtrack for ''The Courier'', an Irish film that featured O'Riordan in its cast. | |||
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Costello was | Costello was in truth all over the place, his restlessness and dissatisfaction with his career arc reflected in the welter of soubriquets he had adopted over the previous couple of years, and in his ceaseless changes of musical approach. Was this desperation in the guise of a questing spirit, or simply a loss of direction? | ||
Both, actually. As he considered his first album for a new label, Warners, Costello's head swam with ideas. Apparently convinced that any genre was his for the taking, he envisaged a series of four, even five albums. There would be another Americana record with Coward Brother T{{nb}}Bone Burnett, a venture into New Orleans territory with some of the Crescent City's finest, yet another using the Irish folk flavours he enjoyed with The Pogues, and then a more mainstream pop album, possibly the McCartney project... | |||
What emerged from these grand visions was ''Spike'', a diffuse sprawl across genres, a fascinating and sometimes inspired collection that refused to become more than the sum of its parts. Its uncertainty is there in a cover shot of Costello in clown greasepaint — or is it music hall demon? — with "The Beloved Entertainer" inscribed below, yet another toyed-with alias, as if any but the most ardent Ellophile cared what nom de plume was currently in favour. It was all Costello, after all. | |||
Not quite. ''Spike'' was the first Costello album with co-composer credits — a brace with McCartney, another with O'Riordan. It also boasts a giddy array of guests clustered around each of its several recording locations. The aristocracy of Irish folk graced the Dublin sessions — Dónal Lunny, Davy Spillane, Christy Moore. The LA studios drew Roger McGuinn, Mitchell Froom, Marc Ribot, Jim Keltner, with co-producer T Bone Burnett also lending a hand. New Orleans provided The Dirty Dozen Brass Band under the supervision of soul maestro Allen <!-- Touusaint --> Toussaint. Back home there was a near-duet to be sung with Chrissie Hynde, and of course, somewhere, Nick Lowe was on bass. The sessions were a logistical jigsaw, with parts recorded in one city and augmented elsewhere. But if scattered, ''Spike'' was also fearless, Costello putting himself among the top brass of his profession. | |||
Could he rise to the various occasions? Mostly. Opener "This Town" unrolls grandly with a chiming chorus of ''"You're nobody in this town until you're a bastard,"'' with intriguing vignettes of modern-day bastardry in its verses. "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," a potentially awkward mid-tempo piece of finger-pointing, is lent gravitas by Toussaint's rippling piano and the growls of the Dirty Dozen Brass. There's a wry joy to the cabaret of "Miss Macbeth," with its Beatlesesque Wurlitzer, while the actual Beatle presence delivers a highlight — and much-needed hit single — in "Veronica." Costello provided the song, about an old lady drifting into absent-mindedness, more or less intact, but Macca's added chorus swirls the song upwards into exuberance. The pair's other co-write, "Pads, Paws And Claws," is a less fortunate affair, a nondescript neo-rockabilly that never gets past its title. | |||
The | Best of all comes "Tramp The Dirt Down," an elegant excursion into Irish balladry, simply and sweetly played by the doyens of the craft, cradling one of Costello's most vitriolic tirades, aimed not at a lover but at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Costello's revulsion at the sight of the baby-kissing Iron Lady triggered the song, which contrasts her smiles with the miseries inflicted by her policies: ''"I never thought that human life could be so cheap."'' Reflecting a widespread loathing for her regime, its sentiments are delivered drily, or at least as dry as hoping to stamp on someone's grave can get. Only towards the end does Costello's voice crack with bile. Heaven knows what the world made of it, but in Eire and Albion the cheers rang. True to his word, Costello continued to sing the number after Thatcher's death in 2013. | ||
"Any King's Shilling" allows the Celtic contingent more space to stretch out musically, and they produce a majestic arrangement for one of Costello's most impassioned vocals, cautioning a young man against ''"putting your silly head in that British soldier's hat"''; it could as easily belong to the "troubles" of the 1920s as the 1980s. | |||
Yet for every triumph on ''Spike'' there is a so-so counterweight. "Chewing Gum" is a stab at funk that's too strong for Costello's reedy vocals. "Satellite," with Chrissie Hynde backing, struggles to establish a clear identity. "Last Boat Leaving," written for ''The Courier'', is a pleasant plod. "Let Him Dangle," about the last man to be hanged in Britain, is a well-meant polemic against the death penalty but one that, chorus aside, comes melody-free. "God's Comic," cut from the same cloth as Randy Newman's "God's Song," has some droll lines — EC imagines The Almighty listening to Lloyd Webber's ''Requiem'' and remarking ''"I preferred the one about my Son"'' — but its conceit and mock jaunty arrangement soon outwear their novelty. | |||
' | Then there's "Stalin Malone," a beautifully played instrumental from The Dirty Dozen Brass, intricate yet catchy. Costello seems to have realised that fitting in an equally elaborate set of lyrics — sample: ''"the jazz band drowns out the hysterical bird"'' — would be inviting trouble, so the track stays gamely but oddly a stand-alone. One might say the same | ||
of ''Spike'' as a whole; among Costello's huge output it's a one-off in its diversity, and if its contents don't quite coalesce, its stand-outs and bravery still shine. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Spike]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[The Confederates]] {{-}} [[Cait O'Riordan]] {{-}} [[The Pogues]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[The Courier]] {{-}} [[Warner Bros.]] {{-}} [[The Coward Brothers|Coward Brothers]] {{-}} [[T{{nb}}Bone Burnett]] {{-}} [[The Beloved Entertainer]] {{-}} [[Dónal Lunny]] {{-}} [[Davy Spillane]] {{-}} [[Christy Moore]] {{-}} [[Roger McGuinn]] {{-}} [[Mitchell Froom]] {{-}} [[Marc Ribot]] {{-}} [[Jim Keltner]] {{-}} [[Dirty Dozen Brass Band]] {{-}} [[Allen Toussaint]] {{-}} [[Chrissie Hynde]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[...This Town...|This Town]] {{-}} [[Deep Dark Truthful Mirror]] {{-}} [[Miss Macbeth]] {{-}} [[The Beatles]] {{-}} [[Veronica]] {{-}} [[Pads, Paws And Claws]] {{-}} [[Tramp The Dirt Down]] {{-}} [[Margaret Thatcher]] {{-}} [[Any King's Shilling]] {{-}} [[Chewing Gum]] {{-}} [[Satellite]] {{-}} [[Last Boat Leaving]] {{-}} [[Let Him Dangle]] {{-}} [[God's Comic]] {{-}} [[Randy Newman]] {{-}} [[Andrew Lloyd Webber]] {{-}} [[Stalin Malone]] | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> The Juliet Letters </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Andrew Mueller </center> | ||
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'''The | '''Rock 'n' roll, where art thou? A confounding, undervalued hook-up with The Brodsky Quartet. | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
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"This is no more my stab at classical music than it is the Brodsky Quartet's first rock and roll album," declared Elvis Costello in the (extensive) sleevenotes of the original release of ''The Juliet Letters''. A measure of defensiveness was understandable. As Costello had learned the hard way, over 13 previous albums of restless reinvention and innovation, and the often bewildered and/or outraged response to same, rock fans — for all their rebel posturing — are often extremely conservative and possessive people. | |||
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There was indeed reason to fear that those who would have preferred he never outgrew the sweaty, splenetic, knock-kneed, misanthropic punk rocker on the cover of ''My Aim Is True'' and ''This Year's Model'' might be other than welcoming of what was — and there was really no getting around this — an emotionally complex concept album made in cahoots with serious string players. Or, as a senior figure at one music weekly remarked when the first violin trills of the brief instrumental fanfare "Deliver Us" were broadcast across the office, "Has the King of Albania died or something?" | |||
The suspicions engendered by ''The Juliet Letters'' were mostly to the effect that Costello was being deliberately and obtusely whimsical and/or insane and vainglorious and/or was making a clumsy and faintly pitiable attempt to be taken seriously. The last of these was convincingly debunked by Costello himself in the (even more extensive) sleevenotes of the 2006 reissue of ''The Juliet Letters'' ("Clearly, anyone who made such a statement had little or no knowledge of critical hyperbole that can rain down on even the slightest talent before the bloom goes off the romance in pop music. I had found myself being taken too seriously and over-analysed from the very outset of my recording career.") The other accusations were rather more a reflection on those making them than the object of them: imagination and ambition seem strange insults to level at any artist, or indeed anyone. | |||
The more prosaic truth of the gestation of ''The Juliet Letters'' was that Costello had chanced across a newspaper article about a Veronese professor who had taken to replying to the correspondence the city apparently received addressed to Juliet Capulet. Costello, not unreasonably, was intrigued by the idea of what people might be writing to a fictional or at any rate long-dead character, and what one could possibly say in reply. At around the same time, he was entranced by The Brodsky Quartet's performances of Shostakovich's string quartets at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and over the next few years became a regular at their concerts — unaware, as he tells it, that the Brodskys had also been to see him play more than once. They began discussing working together in 1991, and ''The Juliet Letters'' was premiered in London and <!-- Darlington --> Dartington in the summer of 1992, after which the album was recorded, live in the studio. | |||
''The Juliet Letters'' is a punctiliously equal collaboration: Costello contributes to the music, the Brodskys to the words. For all that, ''The Juliet Letters'', like few other Costello albums before or since — ''North'' is perhaps the only comparison — is dominated by Costello's singing voice. This is understandable — he'd cut that unmistakable serrated whine to be heard against vastly more clamorous backing. And it's mostly no problem at all, at least for listeners who have acquired what remains a divisive taste. His impersonation of a vindictive grandmother plotting disinheritance on "I Almost Had A Weakness" owes much to such previous sanctimoniously enraged outbursts as "Blue Chair" and "How To Be Dumb"; "This Sad Burlesque" is a descendant of such beard-era baroque triumphs as "All Grown Up" and "God's Comic," and his ominous muttering of "For Other Eyes" recalls "Pills And Soap" (a Brodskyfied version of which would form part of the encore at live performances of ''The Juliet Letters''). | |||
But the worst and best moments of ''The Juliet Letters'' are those at which Costello tries to find new voices for this new context. On "Swine," he affects a nasal, declamatory bark to suit a screed of deranged ranting (''"You're a swine and I'm saying that's an insult to the pig"''), but sounds perhaps too convincingly like a ragged-trousered itinerant barking at traffic outside an off-licence. Similarly, the hoarse barrow-boy yelp of "This Offer Is Unrepeatable" suits the chain-letter huckster narrating the lyric, but entices the repeat listener as little as spam of this sort (''"Ignore at your peril this splendid advice"'') entices sane recipients. On a few other tracks, especially "Romeo's Seance" and "The First To Leave," Costello could perhaps have afforded to rein in his sometimes hyperactively tremulous vibrato just a little. | |||
But when he properly hits it, he's magnificent. The creeping, obsessive "Taking My Life In Your Hands," the glorious show-stopper that heralded the intermission in live performances of ''The Juliet Letters'', builds slowly and sumptuously to a crescendo that Costello surely has no hope of reaching, until he does, at which he suddenly resembles some seething, vindictive cousin of Bobby Hatfield (a compliment, in these circumstances). | |||
The Brodsky Quartet are predictably extraordinary throughout, as capable of the stately and restrained ("The Letter Home," "This Sad Burlesque") as they are of the playful and poppy. "Jacksons, Monk And Rowe," for all that it was mostly written by the Brodskys' Michael and Jacqueline Thomas, would have fitted seamlessly onto one of Costello's more arranged albums — ''Imperial Bedroom'', say, or ''Spike''. It says much about the seamlessness of Costello's association with The Brodsky Quartet that it barely seemed remarkable when they did pop up on a couple of his subsequent albums, playing on a track each of ''All This Useless Beauty'' and ''North'', or when Costello appeared on their <!-- Mood Swings --> ''Moodswings''. | |||
No Elvis Costello album has been so witheringly pre-judged as ''The Juliet Letters''. It may be for that reason that it rarely features among lists of his best works. Indeed, it must be that, because there's not a lot wrong with the songs. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[The Juliet Letters]] {{-}} [[The Brodsky Quartet]] {{-}} [[The Juliet Letters (1993) liner notes|Juliet Letters (1993) liner notes]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Deliver Us]] {{-}} [[The Juliet Letters (2006) liner notes]] {{-}} [[The Juliet Letters#The Juliet Letters (2006 Rhino/Edsel edition)|The Juliet Letters 2006 Rhino/ Edsel reissue]] {{-}} [[Juliet Capulet]] {{-}} [[Queen Elizabeth Hall]] {{-}} [[Dmitri Shostakovich|Shostakovich]] {{-}} [[Concert 1992-07-01 London|London 1992]] {{-}} [[Concert 1992-08-13 Dartington|Dartington 1992]] {{-}} [[North]] {{-}} [[I Almost Had A Weakness]] {{-}} [[Blue Chair]] {{-}} [[How To Be Dumb]] {{-}} [[This Sad Burlesque]] {{-}} [[All Grown Up]] {{-}} [[God's Comic]] {{-}} [[For Other Eyes]] {{-}} [[Pills And Soap]] {{-}} [[This Offer Is Unrepeatable]] {{-}} [[Swine]] {{-}} [[The First To Leave]] {{-}} [[Romeo's Seance]] {{-}} [[Taking My Life In Your Hands]] {{-}} [[The Letter Home]] {{-}} [[This Sad Burlesque]] {{-}} [[Jacksons, Monk And Rowe]] {{-}} [[Michael Thomas]] {{-}} [[Jacqueline Thomas]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[All This Useless Beauty]] {{-}} [[Spike]] {{-}} [[North]] {{-}} [[The Brodsky Quartet: Moodswings]] | ||
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A for a celebrated songwriter, Elvis Costello has recorded and performed an awful lot of covers. ''Kojak Variety'' might stand as only his second, and thus far final, album of cover versions, but by 1995 Costello had released over 40 interpretations of other songwriters' material, and the 2004 remastered edition of ''Kojak Variety'' came complete with a bonus CD comprising a further 20 previously unreleased covers recorded by Costello in the 1990s. These included such obvious classics as Lennon/McCartney's "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," Chips Moman and Dan Penn's soul standard "The Dark End Of The Street" and Bruce Springsteen's "Brilliant Disguise," the latter two as part of a private demo for Costello's country hero, George Jones. | A for a celebrated songwriter, Elvis Costello has recorded and performed an awful lot of covers. ''Kojak Variety'' might stand as only his second, and thus far final, album of cover versions, but by 1995 Costello had released over 40 interpretations of other songwriters' material, and the 2004 remastered edition of ''Kojak Variety'' came complete with a bonus CD comprising a further 20 previously unreleased covers recorded by Costello in the 1990s. These included such obvious classics as Lennon/McCartney's "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," Chips Moman and Dan Penn's soul standard "The Dark End Of The Street" and Bruce Springsteen's "Brilliant Disguise," the latter two as part of a private demo for Costello's country hero, George Jones. | ||
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But, for the original ''Kojak Variety'', Costello was in full crate-rummaging record collector mode; selecting 15 tunes dominated by obscure album tracks and B-sides from the 1950s and '60s, dominated by soul, rhythm 'n' blues and country, in which only two songs — British dance bandleader Ray Noble's "The Very Thought Of You" and Ray Davies' much-loved "Days" — were not written by Americans. | But, for the original ''Kojak Variety'', Costello was in full crate-rummaging record collector mode; selecting 15 tunes dominated by obscure album tracks and B-sides from the 1950s and '60s, dominated by soul, rhythm 'n' blues and country, in which only two songs — British dance bandleader Ray Noble's "The Very Thought Of You" and Ray Davies' much-loved "Days" — were not written by Americans. | ||
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The film didn't do great, but Costello and his new buddy did. The pair's co-written "God Give Me Strength," played out over the closing credits with a full orchestra, was perhaps the best thing about it. An epic ballad with an impassioned vocal and Bacharach's sure handiwork — discreet piano, soft horns and rousing string choir — it was an ideal excuse for Costello to suggest a full-length collaboration. | The film didn't do great, but Costello and his new buddy did. The pair's co-written "God Give Me Strength," played out over the closing credits with a full orchestra, was perhaps the best thing about it. An epic ballad with an impassioned vocal and Bacharach's sure handiwork — discreet piano, soft horns and rousing string choir — it was an ideal excuse for Costello to suggest a full-length collaboration. | ||
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Costello had long been a fan. Growing up in the '60s, he'd watched his bandleader father Ross cover Bacharach songs in his setlist. He and The Attractions were playing "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" at the height of punk in '77 (a version cropped up on ''Live Stiffs'' the following year). And by the mid-'80s Costello was slipping bits of "I Say A Little Prayer" and "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" into live medleys. | Costello had long been a fan. Growing up in the '60s, he'd watched his bandleader father Ross cover Bacharach songs in his setlist. He and The Attractions were playing "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" at the height of punk in '77 (a version cropped up on ''Live Stiffs'' the following year). And by the mid-'80s Costello was slipping bits of "I Say A Little Prayer" and "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" into live medleys. | ||
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''North'' is Costello's least typical set of songs. It finds the Mouth Almighty tongue-tied, and the launcher of a hundred acid-tipped romantic barbs humbled by love. Laying his strengths to one side, he left himself uncharacteristically defenceless with a muted, soft-hearted, vulnerable album of unmistakably autobiographical songs, tracing the collapse of his marriage to Cait O'Riordan and infatuation with his future wife, Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall. Costello predictably bristled at the wounding reviews that resulted. These weren't unfair, inasmuch as a musician who only made records like ''North'' would be a minor one. But in the context of Costello's career, it has the feeling of opening the windows on a cool, bright day and gratefully breathing in, before returning to work in the emotional and verbal hothouse of the MacManus song factory. It's a disarmingly honest pause for thought. | ''North'' is Costello's least typical set of songs. It finds the Mouth Almighty tongue-tied, and the launcher of a hundred acid-tipped romantic barbs humbled by love. Laying his strengths to one side, he left himself uncharacteristically defenceless with a muted, soft-hearted, vulnerable album of unmistakably autobiographical songs, tracing the collapse of his marriage to Cait O'Riordan and infatuation with his future wife, Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall. Costello predictably bristled at the wounding reviews that resulted. These weren't unfair, inasmuch as a musician who only made records like ''North'' would be a minor one. But in the context of Costello's career, it has the feeling of opening the windows on a cool, bright day and gratefully breathing in, before returning to work in the emotional and verbal hothouse of the MacManus song factory. It's a disarmingly honest pause for thought. | ||
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The periodically volatile relationship with O'Riordan (Costello's "spiritual," not legal, wife, his biographer Graeme Thomson revealed) had flared into public rows during the extensive ''When I Was Cruel'' world tour. They had separated in September 2002, announcing an "amicable" end to their "marriage" in November. He had met Krall when they co-presented a Grammy award that February, and they had quickly fallen hard for each other. In April 2003, he recorded the songs that this inspired with equal speed, playing what were basically piano ballads with an acoustic quartet including Steve Nieve. A sparingly used 48-piece orchestra was conducted by Costello from his own score, and The Brodsky Quartet and the great jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz also guested. | The periodically volatile relationship with O'Riordan (Costello's "spiritual," not legal, wife, his biographer Graeme Thomson revealed) had flared into public rows during the extensive ''When I Was Cruel'' world tour. They had separated in September 2002, announcing an "amicable" end to their "marriage" in November. He had met Krall when they co-presented a Grammy award that February, and they had quickly fallen hard for each other. In April 2003, he recorded the songs that this inspired with equal speed, playing what were basically piano ballads with an acoustic quartet including Steve Nieve. A sparingly used 48-piece orchestra was conducted by Costello from his own score, and The Brodsky Quartet and the great jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz also guested. | ||
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When Hurricane Katrina destroyed huge parts of New Orleans at the end of August 2005, one of Elvis Costello's first concerns was for the well-being of his friends in the city — in particular Allen Toussaint, who went missing for several days after the deluge. His house, near the Fair Grounds Race Course, had been badly damaged, while his fabled Sea-Saint studio had been utterly destroyed. | When Hurricane Katrina destroyed huge parts of New Orleans at the end of August 2005, one of Elvis Costello's first concerns was for the well-being of his friends in the city — in particular Allen Toussaint, who went missing for several days after the deluge. His house, near the Fair Grounds Race Course, had been badly damaged, while his fabled Sea-Saint studio had been utterly destroyed. | ||
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Costello, still unaware of his friend's whereabouts, played the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle on September 5 and closed his set with two Toussaint songs — "Freedom For The Stallion" and "All These Things" — played solo for voice and guitar: "That was just my way of sending out a little message, the way you do with music, not really knowing where it goes." | Costello, still unaware of his friend's whereabouts, played the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle on September 5 and closed his set with two Toussaint songs — "Freedom For The Stallion" and "All These Things" — played solo for voice and guitar: "That was just my way of sending out a little message, the way you do with music, not really knowing where it goes." | ||
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<center><h3> | <center><h3> Trust </h3></center> | ||
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<center> | <center> Bud Scoppa </center> | ||
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''' | '''Close to collapse, Costello leads The Attractions on an erratic, diverse adventure. Watch your step! | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
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One man's hodge-podge is another man's ''White Album''. A close examination of ''Trust'', a third of a century after its release, indicates that it is neither the awkward misstep some perceived it to be at the time, nor an overlooked masterpiece, as revisionists have pronounced it to be in retrospect. Among the 14 tracks are a handful of subpar songs by Costello's standards, still valuable thanks to the tautness and invention of The Attractions, at the peak of their powers. But ''Trust'' also contains some of the finest songs Costello has ever written, brought to life by flights of vocal brilliance and jaw-dropping instrumental interaction. | |||
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In the fall of 1980, Costello, Nieve, the Thomases and producer Nick Lowe began work on their fourth collaboration, no doubt hoping to add to their streak of instant classics. Once again, the prolific Costello had prepared a bounty of new material, drawing inspiration from the macro (the new, repressive political climate of the Thatcher regime) and the micro (his unravelling marriage), while also cherry-picking bits from a sheaf of notes and partly written pieces the 26-year-old artist had been accumulating since his late adolescence. | |||
Given the pressure they were clearly under to deliver the goods yet again, it seems odd that the principals chose to abandon London's Eden Studios, where they'd made all of their previous magic together, in favour of Dick James' DJM Studios, whose tracking room had a strikingly different sonic character to Eden. It was "drier," "tighter" and "less live," in the parlance of recording engineers, as they soon discovered, and as several tracks contained on the bonus disc of the 2003 Rhino reissue illustrate. The band and Lowe's inability to get the sounds they were going for ramped up their frustration to unprecedented levels and led them back to Eden to cut the bulk of the album. | |||
A stylistic potpourri, ''Trust'' refuses to stay in one place for long, looking backward one moment and forward the next. "Lovers Walk" and "Strict Time" continue ''Get Happy!!'''s R'n'B-derived propulsiveness, and "Different Finger" anticipates the following country set ''Almost Blue'', while the ballads "You'll Never Be A Man," "Shot With His Own Gun" and "Big Sister's Clothes" exhibit the baroque intricacy of ''Imperial Bedroom''. Less obvious moves, according to their author, involved the nipping of bits from such contemporaries as The Police ("Clubland"), The Pretenders ("Clubland" again) and XTC ("White Knuckles"). Costello, though, may well have been putting us on —apart from the also acknowledged, more readily apparent rub-off from his mates in Squeeze, as evidenced in the Glenn Tilbrook co-starring "From A Whisper To A Scream" and the Chris Difford-like lyrical detail in "Fish 'N' Chip Paper." (In 1982, Costello would return the favour, guesting on Squeeze's "Black Coffee In Bed"). | |||
While the most illuminating evaluations of Costello's records are Costello's own 2002 notes, which enriched the Rhino reissues, the reader must bear in mind that he frequently sells himself short in the interests of self-mockery and the desire to amuse. Nonetheless, considering the excesses that characterised that wild and woolly era, there's no reason to doubt his oft-quoted description of ''Trust'' as "easily the most drug-influenced record of my career," or that "It was completed close to a self-induced nervous collapse on a diet of rough 'scrumpy' cider, gin and tonic, various powders, only one of which was 'Andrews Liver Salts,' and, in the final hours, Seconal and Johnnie Walker Black Label." In light of this confession, the impish grin on Costello's face on the cover portrait comes off as comically ironic. | |||
''Trust'', though, has its share of undeniably brilliant passages, none better than the tandem of "Watch Your Step" and "New Lace Sleeves." Properly placed alongside each other precisely in the middle of the sequence, the two songs are fraternal twins in several respects. Costello had started them six years earlier when he was 20, prior to ''My Aim Is True'', making them the oldest on the LP. The echo-free, close-mic'd vocal sound matches the bone-dry recording, and Nieve's overdubbed, Jamaican-dub-inspired melodica flourishes further integrate their elegant feel. In addition, the two lyrics are embedded with drop-dead-gorgeous turns of phrase, like the delectable near-rhyme ''"And you're drinking down the Eau de Cologne/ And you're spitting out the Kodachrome''," from "Watch Your Step" and the memorable set-up of "New Lace Sleeves," which Costello croons in blubber-lipped fashion, like a new wave Bing Crosby: ''"Bad lovers face to face in the morning/ Shy apologies and polite regrets/ Slow dances that left no warning of/ Outraged glances and indiscreet yawning/ Good manners and bad breath get you nowhere."'' That's as good as it gets — a movie in five lines. | |||
What's more, as a showcase for The Attractions, ''Trust'' has few equals. Among the numerous high points are Pete Thomas' systematic pulverising of his drumkit in the brutally visceral yet perfectly controlled "Lovers Walk"; Bruce Thomas' hyper-melodic, McCartney-esque lead bass on "Clubland," "Strict Time" and throughout; Nieve's eloquent song-serving piano work on "You'll Never Be A Man" and "Shot With His Own Gun." It's the ensemble's raging groove on "From A Whisper To A Scream" that delivers the album's most hair-raising contrast when it erupts on the stately heels of "New Lace Sleeves," with the slashing guitar riffs of The Rumour's Martin Belmont matching Tilbrook and Costello's conjoined vocal urgency. | |||
At the other extreme, The Attractions rescue the throwaways "Luxembourg" and "Fish 'N' Chip Paper," seamlessly fusing Sun Records rockabilly and hardcore punk on the former and animating the latter's flatness with their jaunty interplay. By the same token, they give odd-song-out "Different Finger" a reason for inclusion, by expertly impersonating a combo of stone-country Nashville cats. | |||
''Trust'' might not have been relatively undervalued in the canon had it yielded a hit (strangely, "New Lace Sleeves," clearly its standout track, was never released as a single), and it might've been more highly regarded had it been edited down to a compact 11-song set. As released, the album is a mixed bag, but its pleasures are many, its baseline is sturdy and its peaks are towering indeed. | |||
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{{tags}}[[Trust]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Bruce Thomas]] {{-}} [[Pete Thomas]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Eden Studios]] {{-}} [[Trust#Trust (2003 Rhino/Edsel edition)|2003 Rhino reissue]] {{-}} [[Lovers Walk]] {{-}} [[Strict Time]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Different Finger]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[You'll Never Be A Man]] {{-}} [[Shot With His Own Gun]] {{-}} [[Big Sister's Clothes]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[The Police]] {{-}} [[Clubland]] {{-}} [[The Pretenders]] {{-}} [[White Knuckles]] {{-}} [[Squeeze]] {{-}} [[Glenn Tilbrook]] {{-}} [[From A Whisper To A Scream]] {{-}} [[Chris Difford]] {{-}} [[Fish 'N' Chip Paper]] {{-}} [[Squeeze]] {{-}} [[Squeeze: Black Coffee In Bed|Black Coffee In Bed]] {{-}} [[Trust (2003) liner notes]] {{-}} [[Watch Your Step]] {{-}} [[New Lace Sleeves]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[Bing Crosby]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[The Rumour]] {{-}} [[Martin Belmont]] {{-}} [[Luxembourg]] {{-}} [[Sun Records]] | |||
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<center><h3> Imperial Bedroom </h3></center> | |||
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'''The boy with a problem reaches a kind of maturity. Baroque, Beatlesy, but still uncompromisingly visceral. | |||
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Talk about great expectations. For their promotional campaign for Elvis Costello & The Attractions' 1982 album ''Imperial Bedroom'', Columbia Records advertised the record with a simple tagline: "Masterpiece?" That question mark is the (doubtless unintentionally) telling moment. Critical reception of ''Imperial Bedroom'' was mixed but mainly positive; its two singles didn't do particularly well, but the public took to the album, sending it Top to in the UK. And yet Costello himself would come out, later, criticising the songs, telling ''Rolling Stone'' in the late '80s, "Some of the songs are just not written well enough," that they often were too "vague" and "theoretical." | |||
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It was the first time Costello's own songs had been produced by someone other than Nick Lowe, another step outside the familiar, outside the psychological confines of the Stiff Records clique (Lowe wouldn't return to the Costello producer's chair until 1986's ''Blood & Chocolate''). Instead, Costello called in Geoff Emerick, perhaps best known for his engineering work on The Beatles' ''Revolver'', ''Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' and "Strawberry Fields Forever." Emerick would also follow through some of Paul McCartney's solo career, including co-production and engineering of ''Band On The Run'' and ''Tug Of War'', which he was engineering concurrently with the ''Imperial Bedroom'' sessions. In short, Emerick had good form. | |||
''Imperial Bedroom'' was also the first set of original songs that Costello had brought to the studio without road testing them first, which might account for the stylistic leaps that he takes within the album: even, with the dislocations of "Man Out Of Time," within the songs themselves. That song carves its material out of several temporalities, with the beginning and ending dropped in from an earlier, rockier version, recorded on eight-track during demo sessions for the album. Tearing up the song with idiot energy, the feverish drive of the demo "Man Out Of Time," all clanging guitar and raucous screams, was spliced out of the original and cut into the top and tail of the studio recording, Costello says in his liner notes, "to break with the mood of the surrounding tracks." | |||
It's a fair observation — if ''Imperial Bedroom'' suffers from anything, and it's a minor complaint, it's an occasional longueur, a settling into mood that, rather than helping narrate a coherent story for the album in toto, can have it feeling slightly ponderous. If anything, such an approach could have been better served breaking up other parts of the album. As it is, the escalating fervour of the studio "Man Out Of Time" sits beautifully next to the piercingly gentle "Almost Blue," its jazz-ish modality cut from the same cloth as "Shipbuilding," the song Costello had recently co-written with Clive Langer for Robert Wyatt, but with that song's political edge replaced with interpersonal autopsy. And is that an echo of one of Costello's earlier, best-known songs, in the line, ''"there is part of me that's always true, always"''? | |||
Reeling back to the start of the album, "Beyond Belief" shares similar psychological space with "Almost Blue," though Costello's grappling with mortality (''"you'll never be alone in the bone orchard"'') and cruelty has a much more tart edge. Here he's also playing with his voice, treating it as yet another piece of sonic material to be cut and pulled, moving into strangely windy, reedy falsetto, leaping into a distortion chamber for emphasis, or towards the end of the song, corralling multiple Costellos as the group recede out of view. "Tears Before Bedtime" follows suit, with Costello leaping between octaves like no-one's business; it's a strange, disconnected song, not really telling of the strengths of ''Imperial Bedroom''. | |||
From there, though, the album is on the ascendant, moving through the chilling dissections of "Shabby Doll," the thrilling, previously mentioned "Man Out Of Time" (a great example of The Attractions' simpatico approach, able to build emotional architectures from their ensemble playing that buttress and bolster Costello's voice and lyrics). By the time of "...And In Every Home," where Costello and Nieve bring in a 40-piece orchestra, it's clear that, with ''Imperial Bedroom'', Costello's taking his greatest strides, in terms of arrangement, risking some of the material in the process, but often with great, surprising outcomes. | |||
"...And In Every Home" is a puzzling, but lovely song. While the arrangements contain references to George Martin's work for The Beatles, if anything, Nieve's charts have the same voluptuous, voluminous splendour as Van Dyke Parks' arrangements for his own ''Song Cycle'' and ''Discover America'' albums. Like those, there's an almost rococo approach to the orchestration, using the nuance of the orchestra to its greatest, going for playful touches that can suddenly turn, on a dime, to moments of great pathos, like the drone bed that swells as Costello's voice disappears into the silence at the end, repeating the song title. | |||
'' | From there, ''Imperial Bedroom'' quickly slides through a series of two-minute songs that play out further as an index of possibilities, enjoyable but not quite fully realised — "The Loved Ones," "Human Hands," "Kid About It" — before the album rallies with the heartbreaking "Boy With A Problem," where Costello passes the lyrical baton to Squeeze's Chris Difford. The album's lead single, "You Little Fool," starts to wind the set down, Costello again twisting his vocal performances around the song's rattling spine, some seriously baroque harpsichord touches and ill-advised flanging — well, it was the '80s — serving as dislocating forces, complications, before "Town Cryer" closes the album. | ||
While Costello's said that many of the lyrics for ''Imperial Bedroom'' played characters, you can't help but hear the lyricist's own psychology in "Town Cryer"'s loser pathology, Costello squeezing ''"I'm the town cryer... I'm a little down/ With a lifetime to go"'' out of his body, before, towards the very end, sighing about being ''"Just a little boy lost in a big man's shirt."'' Rallying after a couple of years of performative excess, mutual antagonisms, sideways moves and confusing 180-degree spins, with ''Imperial Bedroom'', Costello took stock to figure out where he was headed. It's maturity, in other words, but the real deal, with all of the confusions and agonies of real life bleeding from the songs. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Beyond Belief]] {{-}} [[Tears Before Bedtime]] {{-}} [[Shabby Doll]] {{-}} [[...And In Every Home|And In Every Home]] {{-}} [[The Loved Ones]] {{-}} [[Human Hands]] {{-}} [[Kid About It]] {{-}} [[Boy With A Problem]] {{-}} [[Chris Difford]] {{-}} [[Squeeze]] {{-}} [[You Little Fool]] {{-}} [[Town Cryer]] {{-}} [[Almost Blue (song)|Almost Blue]] {{-}} [[Man Out Of Time]] {{-}} [[:image:1982-07-10 Billboard page 02 advertisement.jpg|Masterpiece?]] {{-}} [[Geoff Emerick]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Stiff Records]] {{-}} [[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[The Beatles]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#The Beatles|Revolver]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#The Beatles|Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#Wings|Band On The Run]] {{-}} [[Shipbuilding]] {{-}} [[Robert Wyatt]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[George Martin]] {{-}} [[Van Dyke Parks]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#Van Dyke Parks|Discover America]] {{-}} [[Rolling Stone, November 16, 1989|Rolling Stone]] | ||
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<center><h3> Goodbye Cruel World </h3></center> | |||
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<center> | <center> Luke Torn </center> | ||
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''' | '''In which EC's negotiations with modem pop go somewhat awry: "That was really a fucked-up record!" | ||
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Chances are, despite Elvis Costello's enormous capacity for irony and vitriol, even he didn't mean for the title of his ninth album to be such a personal prophecy. Nonetheless, the wicked series of events swirling around him as summer 1984 beckoned — the final disintegration of his 10-year marriage, financial strife verging on bankruptcy — resulted in the release of ''Goodbye Cruel World'', essentially the bitter end of Elvis' first golden era. By the time he regained his artistic footing, shedding longtime co-conspirators The Attractions, writing and touring with both T{{nb}}Bone Burnett and The Pogues, he was taking on a passel of noms de plume (take a bow, Howard Coward). He had all but buried "Elvis Costello." | |||
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But, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. "Everyday I Write The Book," the catchy, snap-step single from ''Cruel World'''s predecessor ''Punch The Clock'', returned Costello to the charts in a big way in 1983, recasting punk's most eloquent angry voice as among the new-fangled crop of MTV pop hopefuls. The escalated game of chart sweepstakes required a suitable follow-up. "The Only Flame In Town," a slinky slice of faux R&B, replete with supper-club horns, cooing vocals and blue-eyed-soul superstar Daryl Hall on harmonies, was Costello's response. Ultimately, the song may have skimmed the realm of the popular, but it was a million miles from the pure chutzpah, revved-up guitars and emotional bloodbath of, say, "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea." | |||
Returning to the ''Punch The Clock'' production team of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, Costello was, albeit amid personal distress, permitting commercial interests to dictate artistic direction. On the surface, though, these seemed to be sensible moves. His new compositions sported pop hooks aplenty — once exposed, just try forgetting the carnivalesque, off-kilter (Madness-like?) melody of "Room With No Number." But in the context of Costello's contrarian artistry, especially the blunt-force trauma and prickly personal politics of his best work, one couldn't help but see ''Goodbye Cruel World'' as a misguided turn toward the trendy or the gauche. Or, as Elvis himself, as his own worst critic, would more succinctly state... | |||
"That was really a fucked-up record. That's the worst one, really," he barked to journalist Nick Kent later, part of a series of self-denigrations on ''Goodbye'''s mere existence, "because I had all the arrangements arse-backwards, picked the wrong producers, then asked them to do an impossible job..." | |||
Costello later revealed that his favourite record at the time — naturally — was Richard and Linda Thompson's break-up spectacular ''Shoot Out The Lights'' and that, briefly, he considered giving Sir Thompson a call to play guitar on ''Goodbye Cruel World''. The prospect raises visions of a dark, intense folk-rock record of broken-heartedness, an amped-up, post-punk ''Blood On The Tracks''. In fact, a wild, rollercoaster-ish ''Blonde On Blonde''-style take of "I Hope You're Happy Now," later revamped for ''Blood & Chocolate'', and a bone-chillingly stark cover of Thompson's "Withered And Died" (among a raft of raw, sometimes acoustic demos and bonus tracks on ''Goodbye'''s subsequent expansions) hint at what a true-to-vision ''Cruel World'' might have sounded like. | |||
All of which is to say, Costello's muse was hardly off in the ditch, as is often presumed. Just that the recorded evidence reveals a mismatch: material at cross-purposes with presentation; fuzzy or overly busy arrangements at cross-purposes with mood, purpose and lyrical intensity. Still, working through regret and guilt, anger and desperation, intermittently grasping at the shards of his broken marriage, Costello came up with a core repertory. "Home Truth" might be the most heart-ripping cut — think a quirky riff on The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" — but "Love Field" is ''Cruel World'''s stunner. With its pulsing balladic arrangement, interweaving keyboards and a suitably present, impassioned Costello vocal, it catalogues a relationship's bit-by-bit erosion, from true love to who cares: ''"You think you're different from the rest/ But you don't know how you've changed,"'' he sings in pure hangdog fashion. | |||
Some of the album's cuts, however, crash with an ugly thud. The simple kiss-off "Sour Milk-Cow Blues" aims for straightforward, off-the-cuff rocker, but sounds stilted, a sign of how far Costello had drifted from his pub-rock roots. A soul obscurity, a cover of '60s Memphis combo the Teacher's Edition's "I Wanna Be Loved," with its smooth synth-cum-sax breaks and full-on '80s sonic puffery, is so artificial and empty it hurts. It would rank as Costello's last chart showing for years. | |||
Others aren't so easy to write off. "The Great Unknown" may sound a tad rushed, even thrown away, but is regal in its depiction of bewilderment in the face of life's mysteries; "The Deportees Club" recoups a measure of classic Costello piss and vinegar, an "I'm So Bored With The USA" revisited. ''"In America the law is apiece of ass,"'' he sneers. And then there's "Peace In Our Time." Hymn-like, majestic, haunting, yet scathing in its indictment of politicians' corruption traced down through the ages, it might emanate from Thatcher/ Reagan-era criminality, but its hard-boiled sentiments remain just as relevant in 2014. With "Shipbuilding" and "Pills And Soap" before it, plus the later "Tramp The Dirt Down" from ''Spike'', it forms the most pointedly elegiac, even transcendental, view of politics offered within the '80s pop milieu. | |||
Beyond the reminiscences, revisionism and lashing reviews, the most precise commentary on ''Goodbye Cruel World'' — what it was, what it could have been — lies in the peculiar double life of "The Comedians." As executed, it's a half-realised, two-and-a-half-minute ditty, an easily forgotten trifle sporting a shopping-mall arrangement, barely-awake vocals, incidental piano tinkling. Asked to contribute to ''Mystery Girl'', Roy Orbison's momentous comeback, Costello rewrote it. Discovering newfound depth, dimension and drama within (something many of ''Goodbye'''s songs would, eventually, receive from the concert stage), he retooled it as a superb, if absurdist, bit of melodrama, a bizarre David Lynch-ian sequel of sorts to Orbison's classic "Running Scared," wherein the protagonist, stranded on a Ferris wheel, watches his love steal away with another. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Goodbye Cruel World]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[T Bone Burnett]] {{-}} [[Howard Coward]] {{-}} [[The Only Flame In Town]] {{-}} [[Daryl Hall]] {{-}} [[Clive Langer]] {{-}} [[Alan Winstanley]] {{-}} [[Punch The Clock]] {{-}} [[Everyday I Write The Book]] {{-}} [[(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea]] {{-}} [[Madness]] {{-}} [[Room With No Number]] {{-}} [[Richard Thompson|Richard and]] [[Linda Thompson]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#Bob Dylan|Blood On The Tracks]] {{-}} [[Vanity Fair, November 2000#Bob Dylan|Blonde On Blonde]] {{-}} [[I Hope You're Happy Now]] {{-}} [[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[Withered And Died]] {{-}} [[Home Truth]] {{-}} [[Love Field]] {{-}} [[Sour Milk-Cow Blues]] {{-}} [[Teacher's Edition]] {{-}} [[I Wanna Be Loved]] {{-}} [[The Great Unknown]] {{-}} [[The Deportees Club]] {{-}} [[The Clash|I'm So Bored With The USA]] {{-}} [[Peace In Our Time]] {{-}} [[Margaret Thatcher]] {{-}} [[Pills And Soap]] {{-}} [[Shipbuilding]] {{-}} [[Tramp The Dirt Down]] {{-}} [[Spike]] {{-}} [[The Comedians]] {{-}} [[Roy Orbison]] {{-}} [[Roy Orbison: Mystery Girl|Mystery Girl]] {{-}} [[The Pogues]] | ||
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<center><h3> Blood & Chocolate </h3></center> | |||
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<center> | <center> Graeme Thomson </center> | ||
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''' | '''Napoleon Dynamite returns to his embittered old cohorts for one more nasty, explosive set. "You basically just wanted to strangle the bastard!" | ||
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Barely six months after the finely etched songcraft of ''King Of America'' had suggested an artist in the throes of elegant reinvention, ''Blood & Chocolate'' arrived to subvert any notions that Elvis Costello might be easing into the armchair of respectability. Shorn of his beard and much of <i>King Of America</i>'s warmth and tenderness, Costello returned in the guise of Napoleon Dynamite with a song so primitive it had been written by banging his palms on a kitchen table and shouting what passed for a melody into a tape recorder. | |||
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"Uncomplicated" is the perfect introduction to ''Blood & Chocolate'', an album of vandal rock 'n' roll, primal mono-rhythms, blunt-force attacks and words that take a masochistic delight in aggravating exposed emotional nerve-endings. Compared to the airy Hollywood professionalism of the ''King Of America'' sessions, ''Blood & Chocolate'' has the mood of a dysfunctional family summit in the back room of a West London bookie's, the atmosphere thick with unpleasant home truths and festering resentments. | |||
On the surface, the return of The Attractions and Nick Lowe, producing for the first time since ''Get Happy!!'', <!-- Trust, actually --> seemed to signal a retreat to first principles. The rich, chiming carnival pop of "I Hope You're Happy Now," "Blue Chair," "Crimes Of Paris" and "Next Time 'Round" is certainly a continuation of a theme begun on ''This Year's Model'' and evolved through the likes of "Accidents Will Happen," "Temptation" and "Man Out Of Time." But, in general, this is a darker take on Costello's bedrock sound. ''Blood & Chocolate'' revisits the template of his classic early albums with almost 10 years' worth of musical experience and interpersonal resentment in the bank, and the results border on the murderous. | |||
Convening between March and May at Olympic Studios, Costello used the tensions between his morale-drained band and their singer to stoke the performances. "He created situations where you basically just wanted to strangle the bastard," bassist Bruce Thomas recalled. "I suppose it was an artistic device." | |||
The four musicians set up as they would at a concert, playing loud and live through a stage PA, with no screens for separation. Microphones were dotted around the huge studio, an anti-technique that often renders The Attractions as blunt and brutal as a club. Each song was done in two or three takes and overdubs were minimal. Costello's girlfriend, Pogues bassist Cait O'Riordan, contributes vocals here and there, Lowe adds a touch of Akoustika Guitaro (all the sleeve credits are, naturally, written in Esperanto), but precious little air is allowed into the room. The textures of the title are apt. This is thick, dark, sticky stuff. | |||
Musically, ''Blood & Chocolate'' possesses all the ugly drama of a final reckoning. Lyrically, it's pained and personal, albeit shot through with pitch-black humour. A remarkable number of songs concern three-way love affairs, some of which end more happily than others. "Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?" is a brief, fractured snapshot of a ménage à trois in which a female interloper is turning his girlfriend's head: ''"She's coming in between us, you know that she is,"'' Costello sings with a raised eyebrow. In the cantering "Next Time 'Round," ''"she's in the bedroom with that boy of hers"'' while Costello is stranded on the landing and seems, frankly, out of his depth. | |||
"I Hope You're Happy Now," on the other hand, is played largely for laughs. Costello takes a swipe at an ex and her hapless new beau, portrayed as the fall guy from some ludicrous '70s sitcom, with ''"his turquoise pyjamas and motorcycle hat."'' "Blue Chair" examines a similarly triangular affair with a little more heart and poetic obfuscation, buttonholing a love rival who might have won the battle but, it seems, is going to lose the war. | |||
Yet when Costello's defences finally crumble, they do so on an epic scale. "Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head" feels so spectacularly sorry for itself from its opening line — ''"Here comes Mr Misery"'' — it could have been written while staring hungover into the mirror. Its gloomy preoccupation with love soured is a mere palate-cleanser, however, for the full-blown horrors of "I Want You," in which Costello's infamous revenge-and-guilt ethos is taken to sado-masochistic, possibly psychopathic extremes. | |||
Over almost seven minutes he's ensnared by blurred visions of the object of his obsession and another man. He is by turns chilling, vulnerable, pleading, pathetic, stalkerish: ''"I'm afraid I won't know where to stop."'' Around these slow-burning obsessions, The Attractions roll out a heavy, concentric groove, descending deeper and deeper into the morass, stopping off only for Costello to deliver a truly deranged two-note guitar solo. For the final 60 seconds the band are leaking through the singer's microphone, a ghostly counterpoint to his whispered confessions. | |||
If "I Want You" documents a troubling personal apocalypse, "Tokyo Storm Warning" is a global one. Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" rebooted for the fresh hell of Thatcherism, it's a six-minute pan-global nightmare vision of a world run to ruin. Over a loose Bo Diddley beat and The Attractions' churning block of noise, Costello sweeps from the ''"monster movie scenery"'' of Japan to an Alabaman Ku Klux Klan convention, the Heysel stadium disaster, the Folies Bergère and the "Costa Del Malvinas." | |||
Like several of these songs, it's essentially a turbo-charged blues, the reliance on repetitive rhythm and minimal chord changes suggesting that Costello wants nothing fancy coming between him and his intimations of disaster. "Poor Napoleon," too, is spare and sulphurous, and its preoccupations darkly familiar. Halfway through this hesitant, bass-heavy tale of sex and murder, Costello asks a question that seems to sum up the mood of the record: ''"Did you ever think there's far too many people in the world?"'' | |||
'' | Ten years into his recording career, ''Blood & Chocolate'' was a rather glorious exercise in creative tunnel vision. It's also a smudgy full stop, marking the end of his deal with Columbia Records, the end of the road with The Attractions and the last hurrah for a certain kind of scorched sensibility and sound. It's a record that does one thing tremendously well. On the next, he would try to do everything all at once. | ||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Blood & Chocolate]] {{-}} [[King Of America]] {{-}} [[Napoleon Dynamite]] {{-}} [[Uncomplicated]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Trust]] {{-}} [[I Hope You're Happy Now]] {{-}} [[Blue Chair]] {{-}} [[Crimes Of Paris]] {{-}} [[Next Time 'Round]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[Accidents Will Happen]] {{-}} [[Temptation]] {{-}} [[Man Out Of Time]] {{-}} [[Olympic Studios]] {{-}} [[Bruce Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Pogues]] {{-}} [[Cait O'Riordan]] {{-}} [[Honey, Are You Straight Or Are You Blind?]] {{-}} [[Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head]] {{-}} [[I Want You]] {{-}} [[Tokyo Storm Warning]] {{-}} [[Bob Dylan]] {{-}} [[Subterranean Homesick Blues]] {{-}} [[Bo Diddley]] {{-}} [[Poor Napoleon]] {{-}} [[Columbia Records]] | ||
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<center><h3> Mighty Like A Rose </h3></center> | |||
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<center> | <center> Graeme Thomson </center> | ||
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''' | '''The bold beginning of Costello's next phase or a dense and impenetrable wrong move? It's complicated.... | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
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The long hair and the Catweazle beard seemed to instantly alienate critics and fans alike when Elvis Costello returned with his 13th studio album. But the changes that dictated the shape and sound of one of his most dense, complex and relatively unloved albums were far more radical. Between the recording of ''Spike'' and ''Mighty Like A Rose'', Costello had relocated to Dublin with Cait O'Riordan, a move partly predicated on his disgust at the Anglo-American political axis after 10 years of Tory rule and the beginnings of trouble in the Gulf. His rage would seep, none too coherently, into new songs such as "Invasion Hit Parade" and "Hurry Down Doomsday." | |||
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Costello was in | Costello was also enjoying an intense immersion in classical music. He had become an avid follower of pioneering string ensemble The Brodsky Quartet, and could also be heard raving about the varied charms of Schubert's sonatas, Schoenberg's ''Gurrelieder'' and Cecilia Bartoli. This new interest began to shape the way he approached his own music and the ambitions he harboured for it. When he was commissioned in 1990 to score, with Richard Harvey, the soundtrack to Alan Bleasdale's television drama ''GBH'', Costello found himself striving to communicate more sophisticated melodic and harmonic ideas without being able to read or write music. With the help of a computer, he began composing multiple, overlapping melodic lines, a methodology he used not only for <i>GBH</i>'s instrumental pieces, but also for arranging songs for his next album. | ||
If ''Spike'' was marked by a Tom Waitsian sonic adventurousness, ''Mighty Like A Rose'' was an even bolder step. The original plan had been to make an album rooted in live performances with The Attractions, but their participation foundered on financial disagreements (although both Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas appear on the record). Instead, Costello turned to the group of crack US sessions musicians he'd been working with, on and off, live and in the studio, since ''King Of America''. | |||
In the end, the idea of a tight pop record got lost beneath the kitchen-sink production style. Opening track and lead single "The Other Side Of Summer," an enjoyably manic surf-pop gem propelled by Costello at his most quotable (''"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?"'' snarls Paul McCartney's latest writing partner), featured 10 musicians playing live simultaneously. Their parts were then double-tracked, before three separate vocal harmonies were added to the main melody. | |||
This ornate extravagance, typical of the album, was not random. All the vocal lines were carefully planned, the string and horn parts had been written on keyboard beforehand, and even the sequencing had been predetermined before a note had been recorded. ''Mighty Like A Rose'' was intended as a canvas for Costello to display more ambitious ways of writing and arranging, but the problematic result is that the more inviting songs — and there are several excellent ones here — arrive swamped by layers of stuff. | |||
Some of them are as dense and impenetrable as anything Costello has ever recorded. "Invasion Hit Parade," a huffing stop-start affair featuring a trumpet cameo from his father Ross, tackles the Cold War thaw so obliquely that its true purpose remains inaccessible. Co-producer Mitchell Froom later recalled a 25-minute conversation with Costello on the meaning of the song, at the end of which he wasn't any more enlightened. "Hurry Down Doomsday" takes aim at the Gulf War and cultural imperialism — ''"Mickey Mouse, Marlboro and Coca-Cola"'' — but lands closer to incoherent ravings. | |||
The idea of marrying rich, baroque orchestral pop to a bleak worldview was an interesting one on paper, but it often fails in execution. "Georgie And Her Rival" opens with the same chord sequence as "Oliver's Army," but its pop nous is buried in clutter. "All Grown Up" is a lovely song, but one hamstrung by Costello's decision to roar the words like an embittered drunk at a shotgun wedding. | |||
" | Even when all the busy-ness is stripped away, the results fail to convince. The stark "After The Fall" is drab and lifeless. "Broken," a Celtic dirge written by O'Riordan and recorded against a backdrop of ethereal aural wallpaper, remains a blot on Costello's catalogue. One of two McCartney co-writes, "Playboy To A Man" is a careening trifle, though its raw energy perhaps comes closest to the record's intent. | ||
At other times, the plan almost comes together. The elegant chamber setting of "Harpies Bizarre" conveys a mannered restraint utterly in keeping with the song's put-upon female subject. On "So Like Candy," the other McCartney collaboration, the minor-chord murk and Valium haze renders the sad mustiness of a vacated room palpable. "How To Be Dumb" — a coruscating riposte to the publication of Bruce Thomas' memoir ''The Big Wheel'', in which Costello, and indeed life itself, does not emerge with much credit — turns personal enmity into a rousing reprise of "Like A Rolling Stone." Best of all is "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No 4," a dark fireside tale of family secrets, lost faith and lingering regret on which the album's ambition at last pays tangible dividends, the gorgeous melody lifted by an ambitious, carnivalesque arrangement. | |||
''Mighty Like A Rose'' is not a record that often succeeds on its own terms, but it was one Costello clearly needed to make. With the benefit of hindsight it makes more sense, setting him on the path he would follow for much of the 1990s and beyond. His collaborations with the <!-- Brodksy --> Brodsky Quartet, Anne Sofie von Otter and Burt Bacharach, his curation of the 1995 Meltdown festival, his move into scoring opera and ballet, can all be traced back to this point. For good or ill, the roots of Costello as all-round musical renaissance man are planted here. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Mighty Like A Rose]] {{-}} [[Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)|Hurry Down Doomsday]] {{-}} [[Invasion Hit Parade]] {{-}} [[The Brodsky Quartet]] {{-}} [[Franz Schubert]] {{-}} [[Cecilia Bartoli]] {{-}} [[Richard Harvey]] {{-}} [[Alan Bleasdale]] {{-}} [[GBH]] {{-}} [[Paul McCartney]] {{-}} [[Tom Waits]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Pete Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[The Other Side Of Summer]] {{-}} [[Ross MacManus]] {{-}} [[Mitchell Froom]] {{-}} [[Georgie And Her Rival]] {{-}} [[Oliver's Army]] {{-}} [[All Grown Up]] {{-}} [[After The Fall]] {{-}} [[Broken]] {{-}} [[Cait O'Riordan]] {{-}} [[Playboy To A Man]] {{-}} [[Harpies Bizarre]] {{-}} [[So Like Candy]] {{-}} [[How To Be Dumb]] {{-}} [[Bruce Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Big Wheel]] {{-}} [[Like A Rolling Stone]] {{-}} [[Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4]] {{-}} [[Anne Sofie von Otter]] {{-}} [[Burt Bacharach]] {{-}} [[Meltdown|Meltdown festival]] | ||
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<center><h3> Brutal Youth </h3></center> | |||
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<center> | <center> Jon Dale </center> | ||
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''' | '''The Attractions accidentally reform, as EC returns to the rough stuff. "His almost universal excellence is starting to disturb me!" | ||
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After the elaborations of 1991's ''Mighty Like A Rose'' and 1993's collaboration with The Brodsky Quartet, ''The Juliet Letters'', it felt a little like Costello was painting himself into a corner. An ornate one, where the songs were still enduring and compelling — ''The Juliet Letters'' in particular — but a corner nonetheless. One of the great myths of the record-release-tour cycle, though, is that of logical chronology, that x follows y follows z. In Costello's world, things tend to be a little less clear-cut. | |||
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So, in the same year as ''The Juliet Letters'', the dedicated Costello fan would have found themselves shelling out coin for the debut solo album by ex-Transvision Vamp lead singer Wendy James, ''Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears''. Costello had been approached to contribute a song to James' debut solo album, and countered with an offer to write the whole thing — a typically all-or-nothing gesture. Costello sent James 10 songs, some co-written with his wife Cait O'Riordan, on a tape where he'd blasted out rough versions with Pete Thomas on drums. Thomas carried over to the album, but what resulted was a bit of a curate's egg: the finished product, airbrushed and glossed, doesn't necessarily play to the immediate strengths of Costello's songs, but neither is it the debacle many claim — songs like "London's Brilliant" have a sweet snarkiness to them that James carries off with aplomb. | |||
Costello and Thomas had also been working on a project called ''Idiophone'', with roughs recorded back in Pathway Studios. (Costello's musical, which he was working on at the same time, is yet to see the light.) This project then mutated, slowly but surely, into ''Brutal Youth'', an album that brought back together, for the first time since 1986, The Attractions, with Nieve first joining the fold, while bass duties were filled out by Nick Lowe and then Bruce Thomas; producer Mitchell Froom had been working with the ex-Attraction on Suzanne Vega's elliptical folk-rock masterpiece ''99.9F°''. And if you're wondering why Lowe only appears on some of the songs, Costello's liner notes for ''Brutal Youth'' explain: "Nick, who has always remained understated about his instrumental abilities, claimed that [''the ballads''] simply contained 'too many Norwegians' for his style of playing. In other words: too many damn chords." | |||
It may have come about by a series of connections and fortuitous circumstances, but once you hear the songs on ''Brutal Youth'', it's hard to believe Costello wasn't writing with The Attractions in mind. Perhaps that was going on at a subconscious level, a return to the old gang after the different terrain he'd been traversing in recent years. Perhaps, too, there was something in Costello being around the corner from turning 40, and making peace with former selves. He wasn't above mocking his achievements as a genre-leaping, master-of-all-trades songwriter, either — "My Science Fiction Twin" features the quick-witted quips, ''"His almost universal excellence is starting to disturb me / They asked how in the world he does all these things / And he answered, 'Superbly'."'' | |||
' | There's also a palpable sense of rejuvenation in the air throughout ''Brutal Youth'', an occasional moment of collective scores settled, and a simple roughhousing joy in playing the guitar rather fucking loud with an exceptional band in tow. Just don't call it "back to basics" — there's rather more going on here than you think at first blush. Opening with three songs that flood the sensorium with visceral playing, clanging guitars, spittle, invective, observational rage, humour — "Pony St.," "Kinder Murder" and "13 Steps Lead Down" — The Attractions are playing with fire under their feet as Costello reels off a catalogue of brutalities and indiscretions. The ageing hipster mother of "Pony St." is upbraiding her daughter for being a square, while playing the fly-by-night radicalism of the '60s for its shallow core: ''"If you're going out tonight / I won't wait up / Reading Das Kapital / Watching Home Shopping Club."'' | ||
Reflecting on the song while talking to Bill Flanagan, Costello confessed, "One of the things I got the story off was a review I read of Guns N' Roses in one of the English papers. The journalist asked this seven-year-old girl which one of Guns N' Roses she liked most and she said, 'I like Axl Rose 'cos my mummy says he puts a cucumber down his trousers.' And I thought, well, there it is — there's rock 'n' roll neutered forever." Some of ''Brutal Youth'' moves that moment of disappointment into other contexts, like the "fantasy afterlife" nightclub/ Don Juan nightmare of "This Is Hell," where "My Favourite Things" tortures the speakers — ''"It's by Julie Andrews / And not by John Coltrane."'' Or "13 Steps Lead Down," which pulls together a tale of visiting the tombs of Spanish kings, a pun on the 12-step programme, and a sinister bondage diorama. | |||
"13 Steps Lead Down," the album's second single after "Sulky Girl," was furious and thrilling. But then, after the regal "This Is Hell," Costello goes back to his soul roots with "Clown Strike," "You Tripped At Every Step" and then later, "Rocking Horse Road." These aren't quite as successful, feeling like Costello is revisiting some of the terrain of ''Get Happy!!''; but without the cohesive vision of that album, they're left feeling a little anomalous. Elsewhere, though, Costello leaps around with conviction and canniness: certainly, following up the melodramatic, melancholy poise of "Still Too Soon To Know," the arrangement naked and wilting, with the strained, warped rockabilly stroll of "20% Amnesia" is a confident move, proof of a group playing together near the peak of their powers. | |||
If ''Brutal Youth'' suffers from anything, it's a slight dip in quality in its second half — there are still good songs filling the album's back end, but "Just About Glad" and "All The Rage" recast stronger moments from earlier in the record. Closing with the beautiful piano-and-voice shiver and sigh of "Favourite Hour" helps to pull the album together, though, its dark intensity a late-night reflection of the ferocity of those three opening salvos. And there, <i>Brutal Youth</i>'s strangely circular logic reaches its destination, an album that reconnects Costello with his past and fires him off into a future uncertain, but with one of his more potent sets of songs in his back pocket. It's no real surprise that he would turn the corner and give us another set of covers — as if to say that, at least right now, he couldn't top <i>Brutal Youth</i>'s brutal pleasures. | |||
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{{tags}}[[ | {{tags}}[[Brutal Youth]] {{-}} [[Mighty Like A Rose]] {{-}} [[The Brodsky Quartet]] {{-}} [[The Juliet Letters]] {{-}} [[Wendy James]] {{-}} [[Wendy James: Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears|Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears]] {{-}} [[Cait O'Riordan]] {{-}} [[Pete Thomas]] {{-}} [[London's Brilliant]] {{-}} [[Idiophone]] {{-}} [[Pathway Studios]] {{-}} [[The Attractions]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Nick Lowe]] {{-}} [[Bruce Thomas]] {{-}} [[Mitchell Froom]] {{-}} [[Suzanne Vega]] {{-}} [[My Science Fiction Twin]] {{-}} [[Pony St.]] {{-}} [[Kinder Murder]] {{-}} [[13 Steps Lead Down]] {{-}} [[Bill Flanagan]] {{-}} [[Musician, March 1994]] {{-}} [[This Is Hell]] {{-}} [[John Coltrane]] {{-}} [[Sulky Girl]] {{-}} [[Clown Strike]] {{-}} [[You Tripped At Every Step]] {{-}} [[Rocking Horse Road]] {{-}} [[Get Happy!!]] {{-}} [[Still Too Soon To Know]] {{-}} [[20% Amnesia]] {{-}} [[Just About Glad]] {{-}} [[All The Rage]] {{-}} [[Favourite Hour]] | ||
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Not as bad as some would make out, the final Elvis Costello & The Attractions album is nonetheless the sound of a band going down without much of a fight. Originally conceived as a double album, the final new recording under Costello's Warner Brothers' contract eventually trundled out as a makeweight assortment, featuring several songs originally written for and recorded by other artists. Gravity is taking its toll on the fortysomething band. Rome is burning and no-one even bothers to fiddle that much. | Not as bad as some would make out, the final Elvis Costello & The Attractions album is nonetheless the sound of a band going down without much of a fight. Originally conceived as a double album, the final new recording under Costello's Warner Brothers' contract eventually trundled out as a makeweight assortment, featuring several songs originally written for and recorded by other artists. Gravity is taking its toll on the fortysomething band. Rome is burning and no-one even bothers to fiddle that much. | ||
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''"I took my better nature out, drowned it in the babbling stream,"'' sings Costello, documenting his midlife crisis sourly on the quietly cosmic "Little Atoms." ''"Took the blossom of my youth and blew it all to smithereens."'' | ''"I took my better nature out, drowned it in the babbling stream,"'' sings Costello, documenting his midlife crisis sourly on the quietly cosmic "Little Atoms." ''"Took the blossom of my youth and blew it all to smithereens."'' | ||
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<center><h3> When I Was Cruel </h3></center> | <center><h3> When I Was Cruel </h3></center> | ||
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Had Costello stuck to his original ambitions, it might have been a very different and far more solitary kind of beast. Instead, his first LP of the 21st century is remarkable for its knockabout vitality and spirit of invention, qualities that are as apparent as the middle-aged rancour that fills such songs as "45," a suitably stroppy opener written in 1999 to mark its author's 45th year. | Had Costello stuck to his original ambitions, it might have been a very different and far more solitary kind of beast. Instead, his first LP of the 21st century is remarkable for its knockabout vitality and spirit of invention, qualities that are as apparent as the middle-aged rancour that fills such songs as "45," a suitably stroppy opener written in 1999 to mark its author's 45th year. | ||
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Evidently overlooking more unexpected elements like the trip-hoppy menace that suffuses "Spooky Girlfriend" and "When I Was Cruel (No. 2)," the snarky marketing team at Island, Costello's new label in the US, promised the man's "first loud album since 19??." But it's hard to trust the suggestion that ''When I Was Cruel'' qualifies as the sort of return-to-rock gesture so beloved of artists who've realised what their deviations from more successful formulas may have cost them. | Evidently overlooking more unexpected elements like the trip-hoppy menace that suffuses "Spooky Girlfriend" and "When I Was Cruel (No. 2)," the snarky marketing team at Island, Costello's new label in the US, promised the man's "first loud album since 19??." But it's hard to trust the suggestion that ''When I Was Cruel'' qualifies as the sort of return-to-rock gesture so beloved of artists who've realised what their deviations from more successful formulas may have cost them. | ||
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With ''North'' out of his system, Elvis took The Imposters south, to a stone-walled studio in Oxford, Mississippi. The original plan had been to follow ''When I Was Cruel'' with hit-and-run raids on small, atmospheric studios, recording new songs as they toured them across the American South. Some of Elvis' favourite records, after all, had been bashed out for local labels beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Delayed by ''North'', The Imposters mostly stayed put in Oxford's <!-- Sweet Pea --> Sweet Tea Studios to record ''The Delivery Man'' during April 2004, briefly detouring to nearby Clarksdale. They played sweat-soaked sets at Proud Larry's bar in Oxford to test songs out, then finished them in the studio with the club's sound system. Headphones were out; the messy sonic spillage of a band playing on the studio floor was in. | With ''North'' out of his system, Elvis took The Imposters south, to a stone-walled studio in Oxford, Mississippi. The original plan had been to follow ''When I Was Cruel'' with hit-and-run raids on small, atmospheric studios, recording new songs as they toured them across the American South. Some of Elvis' favourite records, after all, had been bashed out for local labels beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Delayed by ''North'', The Imposters mostly stayed put in Oxford's <!-- Sweet Pea --> Sweet Tea Studios to record ''The Delivery Man'' during April 2004, briefly detouring to nearby Clarksdale. They played sweat-soaked sets at Proud Larry's bar in Oxford to test songs out, then finished them in the studio with the club's sound system. Headphones were out; the messy sonic spillage of a band playing on the studio floor was in. | ||
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The first album credited to Elvis Costello & The Imposters was a slower, distant cousin to The Attractions' ''Get Happy!!.'' Rather than speed-ripped Motown and Stax, this was Elvis's country-soul record. One of the genre's great songwriters and musicians, Dan Penn, was credited as "Leading Light." ''I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You'', an Aretha Franklin LP Penn partly wrote that Costello's dad had given to him years before, was a key inspiration. | The first album credited to Elvis Costello & The Imposters was a slower, distant cousin to The Attractions' ''Get Happy!!.'' Rather than speed-ripped Motown and Stax, this was Elvis's country-soul record. One of the genre's great songwriters and musicians, Dan Penn, was credited as "Leading Light." ''I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You'', an Aretha Franklin LP Penn partly wrote that Costello's dad had given to him years before, was a key inspiration. | ||
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<center><h3> Momofuku </h3></center> | <center><h3> Momofuku </h3></center> | ||
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<center> Terry Staunton </center> | <center> Terry Staunton </center> | ||
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''' | '''"All we had to do to make this record was add water!" Recorded at speed, released in stealth - try Instant Elvis... | ||
{{Bibliography text | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
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At the tail-end of 2007, a full two years since he last spent any lengthy amount of time in a recording studio, making ''The River In Reverse'', Elvis Costello told the British press that the collaboration with Allen Toussaint may well have been his last album. The rock 'n' roll business model had changed dramatically, he suggested, and live performance was the way forward for any musician who wanted to continue making a living. | |||
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"It's what I really love to do," he said. "In fact, I'm not of a mind to record any more, there's no point. Making a record requires me to take all the money that the label advances me and give it to other people — musicians, producers and studio owners — and then I spend six months doing the record company's job for them, because they won't pay anybody to do the things they used to do, like promote and market. | |||
"Anyway, in terms of recorded music, the pact's been broken, the personal connection between the artist and the listener. MP3 has dismantled the intended shape of an album." | |||
Two weeks into the new year, however, he changed his mind, after a flying visit to Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, where members of The Imposters were backing Jenny Lewis on what would become her second solo album, ''Acid Tongue''. Having laid down a duet vocal on "Carpetbaggers," he enquired about the future availability of the studio and promptly booked eight days in February for himself. | |||
In what was perhaps a wilful "fuck you" to the slow-moving behemoth music industry, ''Momofuku'' was laid down with extraordinary haste, the quickest album he'd made since the cumulative 24 hours it took to record his ''My Aim Is True'' debut more than 30 years earlier. The parallels to his formative years didn't end there; in terms of energy and immediacy, the new record contained echoes of the high-octane ''This Year's Model'', relatively brief tracks punctuated by short sharp stabs of guitar and Steve Nieve's organ. | |||
Though well into his fifties, Costello appears to relish revisiting the angry young man of those early albums, laying in to gung-ho flag-waving patriotism on the garage-like sneer of "American Gangster Time" (''"It's a drag / Saluting that starry rag"'') and chronicling the frustrations of hamstrung lovers on "Stella Hurt." "Turpentine," meanwhile, takes a wry look at the excesses of his twenty-something self. | |||
Yet beyond the all-our-yesterdays new wave touchstones, ''Momofuku'' also takes time to catch its breath and leaf through some less frenetic back pages. The Kinks-like "Mr. Feathers" recalls the vaudevillian shuffle of "God's Comic" from 1989's ''Spike'', while "Pardon Me, Madam, My Name Is Eve," co-written with Nashville icon Loretta Lynn, is a stately country melodrama where a wronged woman confronts her husband's lover. It sounds like it was finished just too late to make the cut for 2004's ''The Delivery Man''. | |||
For the most part, it's a pure Imposters album, Nieve, bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas breaking into regular sweats on fast and furious single takes, although Jenny Lewis and her beau Johnathan Rice add occasional spirited harmonies, and Thomas' daughter Tennessee, drummer with the LA-based all-girl trio The Like, picks up the sticks to bring extra oomph to "Stella Hurt." | |||
The bulk of Costello's output over the previous decade had adhered to themes, either in terms of their lyrical concerns (the romantic autopsies of ''North'', the post-Katrina commentaries of ''The River In Reverse'') or musical palette (the orchestral sweep of the Bacharach two-hander ''Painted From Memory'', the loops and shuffles of ''When I Was Cruel''), but for a record made in such a condensed period of time, ''Momofuku'' is remarkably diverse. | |||
"Harry Worth" indulges his lounge crooner persona, first heard on "The Long Honeymoon" (''Imperial Bedroom''), "Flutter & Wow" takes a detour into smooth '70s soul balladry, but amid the otherwise pleasing genre-hopping there's the mawkish misstep of "My Three Sons," a pedestrian paean to his grown-up first born and the twin boys he'd recently had with jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall; an awkward dollop of syrup next to the rest of the album's venting of spleens. | |||
To say ''Momofuku'' crept out without fanfare is an understatement. Disillusioned by the sluggish music-biz machine, Costello chose not to climb aboard the promotional treadmill and gave no interviews to herald its arrival. His original intention of making it a download- or vinyl-only release stood firm for less than a month, before he was persuaded to sign off on CD availability. But the absence of any marketing push meant it failed to register on any major territory charts — it's peak position, worldwide, was No 34 in Norway. | |||
His only public utterance about the album was a couple of throwaway paragraphs on his official website: "The absence of much advance notice or information might seem a little strange," he conceded, "but the record was made so quickly that I didn't even tell myself about it for a couple of weeks." | |||
He did, however, address the album's title, claiming it was his tribute to the Taiwanese-Japanese businessman Momofuku Ando, the man who developed the "technology" behind Pot Noodles, who'd died the previous year. "Like many things in this world of wonders," Costello wrote, "all we had to do to make this record was add water." | |||
So there it is, then; Elvis Costello's most instant album, which only weeks before he appeared to have no intention of making. But despite its fast-food convenience methodology, ''Momofuku'' nonetheless delivers several rich flavours, unshackled by the rule-following recipes and concepts that had driven many of its immediate predecessors and the records that were to follow it. | |||
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{{tags}}[[Momofuku]] | {{tags}}[[Momofuku]] {{-}} [[The River In Reverse]] {{-}} [[Allen Toussaint]] {{-}} [[Sound City Studios]] {{-}} [[The Imposters]] {{-}} [[Jenny Lewis]] {{-}} [[Carpetbaggers]] {{-}} [[Jenny Lewis: Acid Tongue|Acid Tongue]] {{-}} [[My Aim Is True]] {{-}} [[This Year's Model]] {{-}} [[American Gangster Time]] {{-}} [[Steve Nieve]] {{-}} [[Stella Hurt]] {{-}} [[Turpentine]] {{-}} [[Mr. Feathers]] {{-}} [[The Kinks]] {{-}} [[God's Comic]] {{-}} [[Loretta Lynn]] {{-}} [[Pardon Me, Madam, My Name Is Eve]] {{-}} [[The Delivery Man]] {{-}} [[When I Was Cruel]] {{-}} [[Davey Faragher]] {{-}} [[Pete Thomas]] {{-}} [[Johnathan Rice]] {{-}} [[Tennessee Thomas]] {{-}} [[The Like]] {{-}} [[Burt Bacharach]] {{-}} [[Painted From Memory]] {{-}} [[Harry Worth]] {{-}} [[The Long Honeymoon]] {{-}} [[Imperial Bedroom]] {{-}} [[Flutter & Wow]] {{-}} [[My Three Sons]] | ||
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Revision as of 00:32, 17 March 2024
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External links
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- When I Was Cruel reviews
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- Il Sogno reviews
- The River In Reverse reviews
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- Secret, Profane & Sugarcane reviews