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It's shaping up as the year of the return of the rock dinosaur, with everyone from Pink Floyd to the Eagles hitting the concert trail one more time to tap into the rich arteries of the classic-rock sweepstakes.
Elvis Costello has also reunited with his old band, the Attractions, for an album, Brutal Youth, and a concert tour, which brings Costello to the Theatre du Forum tomorrow for his first local appearance in more than 14 years.
The reunion of Elvis and the Attractions, and the recent CD reissue by Rykodisc of the first five Costello albums, have sparked a revival of interest in that early period of his career. Those records — especially the first three, My Aim Is True, This Year's Model and Armed Forces — remain Costello's best-known work, and clearly at least some of the fans at the Forum tomorrow will be there expressly to hear the bespectacled Liverpudlian rocker race through old punky chestnuts like "Watching the Detectives" and "Radio, Radio."
But Costello — who was born Declan MacManus — has little interest in wallowing in fond old musical memories and the 39-year-old singer-songwriter bristles at the suggestion that the Attractions reunion has anything to do with pandering to the nostalgic, rear-view mirror set.
"I think people are going to get a big shock when they hear what this group sounds like," Costello said in a phone interview from London during rehearsals before the start of the tour last month.
"It doesn't sound like an oldies band. I couldn't believe it when they cranked it up behind me. It was the most ungodly thing. It was very exciting. It was like being strapped on the front of a runaway train. So if they get us on a good night, I think people are going to be very surprised."
The return of the Attractions to the Costello camp came as a surprise to most longtime fans, many of whom were still trying to come to grips with his decision to make an album with a classical string quartet two years ago. The Juliet Letters, an ambitious collection of Costello's typically caustic fare paired with music played by the Brodsky Quartet, was light-years — and several musical universes — removed from the fiery rock 'n' roll clatter produced by Costello and the Attractions back in the late '70s.
With the manic trio of keyboard whiz Steve Nieve, bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas back on board, there's certainly no shortage of reminders on Brutal Youth of the ferocious yet stylish pop that was the Attractions' stock in trade until Costello disbanded the unit eight years ago.
But it isn't simply This Year's Model circa 1994: for better or worse, Costello has developed into a much more intricate, musically sophisticated tunesmith 16 years down the road. Brutally direct rockers like "Kinder Murder" and "20% Amnesia" rub shoulders with crafty Kinks-like pop tapestries such as "London's Brilliant Parade."
"A song like 'London's Brilliant Parade' ... couldn't have been written at any other time in my career than after the experience of working in such a different world as I did with The Juliet Letters," Costello said.
Brutal Youth does have a tougher, more stripped-down sonic approach than anything Costello has done in years, however, and he says it was the harder edge to the songs that pushed him to look up his old band-mates.
"It was a process by which the songs chose the players, which is very similar to the way we got together originally," Costello said.
The split in the mid-'80s had been fairly acrimonious and relations were particularly strained between Costello and bassist Bruce Thomas, who penned a bitter roman a clef about a certain obnoxious character called E.C. But apparently everyone's getting along just fine these days, according to Costello.
"I think it's a lot better group than it was eight years ago. There were a lot of personal reasons why the group didn't sound at its best when we stopped. The reason I stopped us playing together was because I didn't think we were improving. We did two tours in a row where I didn't feel we were getting anywhere."
After experimenting with country (Almost Blue), classical (The Juliet Letters), Motown/Stax (Get Happy!!), and lush, over-produced pop (Mighty Like a Rose, which he jokingly refers to as this "enormous rococo beast"), Costello has returned to his rough-edged, power-pop roots at a time when tough, punk-flavored music has added a new ingredient to the Top 40. But this wildly eclectic artist is not buying the argument that he's finally in sync with the rest of the music world. For one thing, he scoffs at the notion that the Nirvana-led revolt actually changed anything.
"Did it? I didn't notice, I can't say. The groups that people say are punk just sound like heavy-metal bands to me. They could as easily be influenced by Black Sabbath as they could by the Sex Pistols. These are just the songs I wrote now and if they coincide with something that's happening and if that makes more people listen to it, then it's good."
Rykodisc released the first three Costello albums in a box set titled 2½ Years last year, and the specialty label continued the dig through the vaults with the reissue of Get Happy!! and Trust last month.
These reissues underline Costello's opinion that his music has never fit neatly with any of the trendy pop movements of the day and the records serve as a useful reminder of his prolific songwriting talent. Though big-time commercial success has always eluded Costello, he is widely regarded as one of the most gifted pop scribes around, thanks to his uncanny knack for whipping off songs that display brutal satirical wit — something of a rare commodity in contemporary music — and one of the best senses of melody this side of Paul McCartney.
The former angry young man of British pop turns 40 this year and he doesn't see any reason he should have to throw in the rock 'n' roll towel any time soon.
"I think it's a great thing," Costello said. "Nobody ever told Duke Ellington to stop writing. Nobody ever told Vladimir Horowitz to stop playing the piano. Why not? What I don't particularly want to hear is some 45-year-old guy singing 'Can I take you to the high-school hop?' That I find kind of demeaning. But there are very few songs I feel ill at ease with approaching out of my entire catalogue. I never bought all that 'rock 'n' roll saves your soul' bullshit. It's just music to me and rock 'n' roll is just one kind of music."
It's been close to 15 years since Costello & Co. last visited Montreal. Costello and the Attractions played two incendiary concerts at Theatre St. Denis in the space of 18 months in the late '70s, and, though he's toured regularly since, he never made it back here. Costello isn't quite sure why that's the case.
"I don't really know, actually. I don't think our last trip there was a particularly big success. It may just have been an off-night. Often the relationship with the local promoter can be blighted by something like that. You come to town and you don't do good business or the gig doesn't go well for some reason that nobody can remember any more, and, for some reason, the offer to come back never comes."
In fact, the last Costello gig in Montreal featured angry feminists picketing the theatre to protest against the appearance of opening act the Battered Wives, a long-forgotten Ontario punk band, and the Attractions ended the evening on a sour note by racing through a tense, furious 50-minute set.
"Was that the last time we were here?" Costello asked. "With that awful group? Well, that probably didn't help, did it? Plus, in those days, the tensions between French and English-speaking culture were probably greater than they are today, which didn't help, either. I remember that tour as being pretty fraught. My guess is it wasn't the greatest show we ever played. Let's hope this one does the job."
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