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Few would disagree that Elvis Costello is the finest songwriter our culture has ever produced. Those who have simply not listened widely enough. From the twangingly witty "Watching The Detectives," replete with Bogartesque dialogue, to the poignant anger of the anti-Falklands war song, "Shipbuilding."
Costello's work has come to represent the conscience of a culture ashamed of itself — a culture founded on unfairness, inequality and bombastic stupidity. Talleyrand once remarked that only those born after the French Revolution "knew the sweetness of life"; he did not, of course, know what Thatcherism was to be.
Unfortunately, Costello's brand of acerbic genius was not able to reach its fullest expression last Friday night at London's Royal Albert Hall, due largely to the muddy mix the men on the sound decks treated the audience to. The set opened with four of Costello's most punchy numbers, presumably in an attempt to shake the audience's Guardian-reading majority out of its filo-faxed frigidity. But the RAH's notorious acoustics badly let the band down and people sat close to me continued to exchange recipes for variants on Prawn Cocktail dressing. When Costello refers to the "Transparent people who live on the other side / Living a life that is almost like suicide," you realise with a vengeance what he means.
One of the show's highspots was the cover of the ABBA classic "Knowing Me, Knowing You." I saw him perform it in Liverpool just before Christmas, but there it was a tame, limp version totally unlike what I'd imagined Costello would do with it. This time, however, he got it right — spitting out every line with almost diligent spitefulness and proving that the song is a Costello "natural." All that was missing was the "A-ha" that follows the song's title line in the original — with that he could have really rewritten the song in his own image.
On the whole though, Elvis Costello is a far happier man than he was two or three years ago; laughing and joking with his audience, playing at being Leslie Crowther as he demonstrates his "fabulous spinning songbook" ("Just look at all these hits"), Costello these days resembles a line from one of his earliest songs: "Sometimes I almost feel / Just like a human being." Undoubtedly this elevation of spirits is due in part to his marriage to Caitlin O'Riordan, ex of The Pogues. One only hopes that this newfound happiness does not castrate Costello of his most powerful insight — the hatred that can all too easily bubble under the surface of love.
The theme finds expression in one of his most recent songs, "I Want You" from the Blood & Chocolate album of last year, reviewed in these pages by Mr. Mike With. At the end of the song, they turn all the stage lights down and the Attractions stop their music; there's just Costello, alone at the microphone, his voice pullulating with the energy of repressed anguish. Its' a dazzlingly felt piece of singing and it's one that nobody, today, can come close to matching.
Not, then, the finest performance I've ever seen the great man give (even the precisely textured keyboarding of Steve Nieve seemed at times overblown, at times less than inspired) but in a country where we have so much to be ashamed of, Elvis Costello stands out as a restorative radical.
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