Elvis Costello – “My Aim Is True” (1977)
Chas de Whalley review of EC’s debut album, from Sounds magazine circa 1977…
Elvis Costello is a cagey sort of fellow. You can talk to him for hours and still not discover quite what makes him tick.
The same thing is true about his songs. There are eleven of them here on My Aim Is True and although I’ve listened to them at least seven times now, I still don’t feel I’ve worked out what’s going on. I normally expect to get to grips with even difficult albums after about three spins, but every time I put My Aim Is True onto the turntable I hear something else that wasn’t there before. Like a flower Elvis’ debut album is opening up into something of metallic beauty.
With Nick Lowe at the mixing desk, Elvis sings a set of semi-autobiographical riddles and rhymes that refuse to be tied down. Behind his harsh whining voice, there crashes a bright beat group guitar and a hissing cymbal. His tunes and arrangements plunder the jukeboxes of Pirate radio youth. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that he bears some resemblance to the likes of Graham Parker and Bruce Springsteen.
He’s not without pretensions though. Just look at the front cover of My Aim Is True and that Duane Eddie pose of a ’50s guitar here!
But look at the back and you’ll find another image completely … our boy as a mutant midget with a guitar bigger than his body looking pensive and distraught. So which is the real Elvis Costello, the super-hero or the man crippled inside?
As a lyric writer Costello is frequently a little on the verbose side. Imaginative, almost literary at times, he sings of intensely personal problems and views them in fine focus under a hard white light. Mostly he sings about women, but throughout the album Elvis strives to find an emotional identity as an individual and not a mere social stereotype.
In ‘Miracle Man’, for instance, he compares himself with the lover who ‘can do it better than I can’ and pleads humanity in his own defence. The Merseybeat ‘No Dancing’ sits right in at the break-up of a fierce love affair, with Elvis viewing himself in a neurotic third person as if on a movie screen. The idea of life as a cinema crops up again, explicitly this time, in the eerie ‘I’m Not Angry’ with it’s edgy Blue Oyster Cult riff and a strangely sumptuous production. Like the slow, sad ballad ‘Alison’ (Elvis’ current single and surely destined for the charts) ‘I’m Not Angry’ is the tale of a man cruelly confronted with his lover’s infidelity.
But while every separate song scenario is highly charged with emotion Elvis Costello is not above a laugh occasionally. A self-deprecatory sarcasm colours ‘Welcome to the Working Week’ while the doomy and Dylany ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ is a strip cartoon peopled with wierd, surrealist characters and scripted with a fatalistic black humour.
If you want to hear Elvis Costello at his wittiest though, you should seek out ‘Mystery Dance’ on side two. A spoof ’50s rocker, with Elvis camping up his namesake, ‘Mystery Dance’ examines the tender and traumatic problem of a teenager’s first screw. The sheer ludicrousness of the situation is brilliantly exaggerated but the pathos is never sacrificed for the obvious cheap laugh.
Elvis Costello is a songwriter of rare sensitivity and talent. He is backed by a fine band too. The individual musicians go uncredited unfortunately. Guitar freaks should check ‘em out too for whoever plays the stylish Amos Garrett-influenced fills on ‘Alison’ and the Steely Dan lead lines on ‘Blame It on Cain’ and ‘Sneaky Feelings’ is obviously star quality.
But he’s only the icing on the cake. Elvis Costello is the King. Or at least that’s what you’ll find scratched onto the middle of My Aim Is True. I think it’s true.
Chas de Whalley
Elvis Costello – “When I Was Cruel” (2002)
This review comes from Fran Fried, April 26, 2002, from the New Haven Register. Good album, but I can’t say that it’s better than Imperial Bedroom, which to me is EC’s masterpiece…
No Cruelty to Costello’s Brilliant Return to Form
Through the dark ages of ’90s rock, it was as if Costello took a working vacation — digging into expanding his horizons and seeing what happened. And when he did come up for air, in various personae (the Jerry Garcia Elvis, the Brodsky Quartet Elvis, the Burt Bacharach/Austin Powers Elvis), he was trying things out in public — seeing what worked, what didn’t. It might have been frustrating to his fans, to bounce with him through his many forays — but it was necessary, really, in his growth process.
Well, it’s only been two years since his album with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, but it seems an eternity (actually five years-plus) since the last “Costello” album (All This Useless Beauty). And now, he’s come around full circle and given us his best album in over 20 years. Actually, 24 years. This will probably land on the medal platform with This Year’s Model, his second album, and My Aim Is True his second and first discs, respectively.
I know; that’s a serious statement, and some fans will point to Imperial Bedroom (1982) and King of America (‘86). But three things set this album apart. It’s a synthesis of just about everything he’s absorbed musically over the years. It’s clear that Costello finally took Bacharach’s advice about trying to cram too many words into a bar of music, rediscovering the balance between lyric and melody, letting the lyrics breathe. And he rocks like he hasn’t in a long time.
He’s had his rock moments over the decade or so — “Veronica,” “The Other Side of Summer,” “13 Steps” — but not many. Here, backed by a core unit that includes old Attractions mates Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas, he lets loose years’ worth. The nostalgic “45″ explodes into a bloom of melody and sound, then retreats, the waits to do it again. “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s a Doll Revolution)” is, at turns, ’60s trippy and poppy, edgy and relentless. The noisy “Dissolve” is his John Lennon venting moment, early-’70s vintage. And “Daddy Can I Turn This?” a rage against a golden cage, is as hard as he’s sounded since the Angry Young Man days, a searing guitar screaming over a dense beat and ominous melody line.
But, master of subtlety and variety that he’s become, he’s just as effective slowed down. The acid test is when one can make a long song seem too short. “When I Was Cruel No. 2,” a 7-minute tale, treads old territory (money can’t buy happiness), but paints it with a craftsman’s verbal dexterity, roasting it slowly over a musical bed of dread, sadness and emptiness. It will probably stand as one of his best songs. And “Alibi,” nearly as long, uses dub reggae to set up a song that morphs into Bacharach/Dionne Warwick soul with a fuzzy guitar over it (think “Don’t Make Me Over” at one point).
It’s corny and untrue to say “Elvis is back” or even hint this is a comeback. The sly dog didn’t go away, and besides, he knew what he was doing all along.
Fran Fried
Dave Schulps – “Elvis Costello: I Fought the Law!” (1977)
Taken from the December 1977 issue of Trouser Press, comes this early article on the former Declan MacManus…
Rarely has mystery surrounded the arrival of a new rock performer the way it has Elvis Costello. Totally unknown a year ago, courtesy of Stiff Records Costello burst forth onto the British music scene. His debut album, My Aim Is True, quickly became the largest selling import of 1977 and led in short order to a contract with Columbia Records in America.
If Elvis’s name alone wasn’t enough to make you do a double-take, the album cover, featuring this unusually plain-looking bespectacled chap striking a knock-kneed Presleyesque pose, was certainly enough to garner a raised eyebrow and second glance from any dedicated rock ‘n” roller. But it was the music inside that provided the most complicated mystery of all: 12 songs of revenge, guilt, jealousy, humiliation and rage written and sung by Elvis, who also supplied his own lead guitar work in tandem with an unnamed backing band, spartan arrangements, and minimum-frills production by Stiff stablemate Nick Lowe.
In fact, prior to the release of the album, Elvis was keeping such a low profile that many were sure that Lowe himself, recording under this strange pseudonym, had made the record and that our boy Elvis was just a figment of Lowe’s and the inscrutable Jake Riviera’s collective imagination. Gradually it came to be known that there was indeed a real live Elvis lurking about London and that he and band would soon be unleashed on an unsuspecting public, gigging around London in the near future.
By the time the reviews were in on My Aim Is True, Elvis was already hot property on his way to stardom. Not only was his single, ‘Less Than Zero’, climbing up the British charts, but American FM stations were hooking onto the album almost as if it were an American release. The race to unscramble the Elvis mystery was on, but nobody was saying a whole lot, least of all Elvis, whose interviews were as oblique as most of the lyrics on the album.
It wasn’t until Nick Kent of New Musical Express managed to get Elvis drunk and talkative (for him) that a picture began to emerge from the blankness. It turned out Elvis was really one Declan (D.P.) Costello hailing from Whitton, Middlesex, and was, as his lyrics strongly indicated, not just a little bit hung up on the idea of revenge and guilt, even going so far as to carry a little black book around with him containing a list of people to be dealt with when the propitious time arose (presumably after he had achieved some degree of notoriety in the pop music world). Admission to the list seemed to be tied to rejection of Elvis in one way or another, and quite obviously, Elvis had known some rejection in his time.
Other interesting tidbits included Elvis’s prior employment as a computer operator in an Elizabeth Arden plant (“Working all day in a vanity factory” is a line in ‘I’m Not Angry’); his annoyance at being compared to Graham Parker; the fact that he had recorded a demo for Dave Robinson (now director of Stiff) two years ago under a different name (rejected!) at the same time that Parker (accepted) and Willy DeVille (recording under his real name, William Borsay – also rejected) were doing the same; that he had once been a member of a bluegrass band called Flip City who had opened at the Marquee for awhile; and that he was married and had a child.
Aside from that and whatever could be gleaned from the seemingly autobiographical nature of his lyrics, the Elvis Costello story is strictly a game of fill in the blanks. And Elvis doesn’t seem too keen on helping. The story was going around that a journalist from Sounds had been stuck into a corner of Dingwalls (a club in London where Elvis was appearing) by Jake Riviera, Elvis’s manager, and told to wait there for Elvis to join him for an interview. Sometime over an hour later the writer was reportedly told that Elvis had left the building long ago.
Fortunately, Jake likes Trouser Press, so when we asked him for a crack at Elvis, albeit over the phone from 3,000 miles away – hardly the proper circumstances for dragging anything out of a tough interviewee – we weren’t left holding the phone. No, Elvis called at the appointed time (thanks!), but as expected proved a tough nut to crack. Not that he was hostile, or even particularly evasive, but he made it clear that he felt his past was for the most part irrelevant, that he wasn’t too crazy about people analysing his songs and certainly wasn’t going out of his way to help them. That didn’t mean there was nothing to talk about, but it did limit things. Still, so much had happened to Elvis in the year since he had joined the Stiff stable of artistes that we were at least able to put Elvis’s recent doings in some kind of perspective.
How long had he been writing songs and trying to find a label before coming to Stiff?
“I suppose I’ve been writing for seven or eight years now, since I learned to play lead guitar. I started writing soon after that, but it doesn’t mean the songs were any good. You just start writing for a bit of fun and then you find it means something. I started taking my songs around about three or four years ago after I moved back to London from Liverpool, where I’d been living for two years. From then on I tried to get various things going without much success. About a year before I signed with Stiff I was actually taking tapes around to all the other labels and not getting very far with anybody. In fact, I wasn’t getting anywhere. That’s about it, really.”
Why did he think they had passed him up then? Was it just too different from what was around at that time?
“I’d say it was down to lack of imagination on the part of the people at most of the other labels. They can’t hear something unless it’s put on a plate for them. I didn’t think it was all that different; maybe they did. I think it was their ears that were at fault, not mine, and fortunately that’s the way I kept thinking about it. I did sometimes wonder whether I wasn’t mad and that maybe it wasn’t any good, but I kept on thinking it was they who were wrong and not me. It turned out to be the best way to think about it.”
For sure. But then Dave Robinson, who eventually was to sign Elvis at Stiff (at this time Elvis is no longer with Stiff, having been caught in the internal break-up there and choosing to stick with Riviera, who has left the company for undetermined points), was one of those who’d rejected Costello back then.
“Funny about that. He was quite surprised when I turned out to be the same person. When I submitted the tapes to Stiff, he didn’t realize that it was the same person who’d done the earlier tape because I used another name then. It turned out he already had over an hour of me on tape and didn’t know it. None of it’s of great interest now except historically. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Whether it’ll ever get used is another matter.”
An inquiry into the name Elvis used to record those earlier demos, however, brought out Elvis’s defenses. That was digging too deep.
“I’m not going to go into all that,” he stated flatly, “because I don’t like to dwell on the past. I don’t see that as important now, that’s gone. It’s just a matter of irony, really, that they happen to have those tapes, but I don’t want to talk about them that much.”
Anyway, Elvis’s reunion with Robinson took place because he answered an ad by a new record company who were looking for artists to submit tapes. “I believe it was one of the first they received,” he recalled, “They just reacted to one of the songs and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll make a single,’ which was the policy of Stiff in the early days. It just developed from doing a single to doing an album as we cut more and more tracks.”
The album. It hit me right in the gut the first time I heard it. The compact, straightforward delivery, the pure simplicity of great rock ‘n’ roll songs, and the words. Songs for losers, for anyone who’s ever felt like they were being hurt or humiliated. Maybe not each and every song, but the feeling pervades the LP. Try these on for size: “I said, ‘I’m so happy I could die’/She said, ‘Drop dead,’ and left with another guy”; “And I’m doing everything just to try and please her, even crawl around on all fours/Well, I thought by now it was gonna be easy, but she still seems to want for more”; “I know that she has made a fool of him/Like girls have done so many nights before, time and time again.” Or, “You’re upstairs with a boyfriend while I’m left here to listen/I hear you calling his name, I hear the stutter of ignition/I could hear you whisperin’ as I crept by your door/So you found some other joker who could please you more… I’m not angry.”
Not angry? Sounds positively furious to me. Why, Elvis? Why so bitter?
“Because I’m an extraordinarily bitter person. I don’t like to sound as if I’m too obsessed and can’t feel any other way, but it just happens that those songs evince that kind of feeling and, therefore, the album is like that. The next one could be very, very different, although I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be any kinder. In fact, if anything, the way I feel at the moment, it’s going to be a lot crueler.
“People have noticed that a lot of the album is about being rejected, but I don’t like the idea of getting too analytical about it. It’s just what the songs are about, I don’t think about them too hard. I think people will see the next album as being a little different. I hope they do, anyway, because I don’t want it thought that I’m totally obsessed with one theme because I’m not. Just like everyone else I have good days and bad days. The things that mean the most to you or affect you most you write songs about.”
But Elvis, isn’t that a reason to get analytical? Precisely because the songs affect or move the listener, they’d want to know more.
“I think that’s maybe journalist’s job, if they choose, depending on the nature of the paper or magazine. Sometimes it’s on a very superficial level – asking me what I eat for breakfast or something – other times they want to know what books of philosophy I’ve read so they can determine something about my soul. It all depends on the complexity of the analysis.”
I protested that it wasn’t as a journalist, but as a listener who was moved by what the songs said or implied, that I wanted to understand his motivations better. Personally, I didn’t feel it had anything to do with my job. I was touched by the songs, identified with some of the feelings he was expressing.
“I suppose you try to make people think a little bit,” proffered Elvis. “You intend to have people identify with what you’re writing. Not to be crass about it and say, ‘How will I write a song which will go to the heart of every kid in the land?’ or, on the other hand, be like Cat Stevens and write these terribly introspective songs that only have meaning to yourself. That’s it, really. I don’t really plan these things. I just write them and they come out as they are.”
Did he have any particularly favorite songwriters, or people that he felt were influential on him?
“Yeah, but they change so rapidly that I tend not to itemize them and say, ‘My favorites are…. because they change from day to day. Somebody asked me last week and looked at me kind of surprised when I said Dusty Springfield was my favorite singer. Right at that moment, she was. Right now, George Jones is my favorite singer because I happen to be listening to his album a lot. The same thing happens with songwriters, they just float in and out of my head. I’m not particularly obsessed with anyone who would bear down on me in any way.”
Elvis has put together a backing band since he started doing concerts. They’re called the Attractions and consist of ex-Chilli Willi drummer Pete Thomas, ex-Quiver/Moonrider bassist Bruce Thomas, and Steve Young on keyboards. Elvis says the band is meant to be permanent, “or until it goes wrong,” but adds that he’s not thinking about anything going wrong. “We’re thinking about it going right,” he adds for emphasis.
Questions about the band members’ past history, however, meet with the same response as questions about his own.
“They’re not particularly interested in talking about the past, either. We don’t like to dwell on the past in general. They’re the Attractions now and I’m Elvis Costello and we’re not bothered whether people talk about the past or not. We just generally encourage them not to, because I don’t feel it’s very interesting and they feel the same way.
We think it’s polite of people if they don’t talk about it, and we usually think a little less of them if they dwell on it too heavily.”
I wondered if that was a subtle warning. Anyway, when did he start calling himself Elvis?
“A while ago.”
Why?
“Why not?”
So much for motivation. But didn’t he think that people just hearing about him now might get the wrong idea and think he was jumping on the Elvis bandwagon? Did he feel Elvis’s death hurt him?
“We did lose a bit of press, but it’s not any big deal, it’s just a name. It wasn’t meant as an insult to Elvis Presley and it’s unfortunate if anybody thinks we’re having a go at him in any way. I don’t really comment on it at all, usually – it’s really irrelevant. It’s just because it’s such an unusual name that anyone would even bother asking me about it. If John Lennon died tomorrow, people wouldn’t ask John Miles about it.”
Come on, Elvis, that’s ridiculous. If Elvis was your given name, I could understand, but you did take it on.
“Yeah. It’s rather like wearing a crown, because people expect something of you. I don’t mind that, I’m prepared to give them all I can. I don’t think any feelings on it are relevant, though. I’m not prepared to be quoted about it.”
One very amusing incident made headlines in the British music papers recently. It involves Elvis’s getting arrested for playing music in the street without a permit, an incident which took place in front of London’s Hilton hotel in ritzy Park Lane where, inside, CBS Records was holding its annual international convention. Jake and Elvis thought it would be a laugh if Elvis went outside and played for the company staffers when they went outside on their lunch break.
“We were playing a gig at Dingwall’s that night and we went down to let them know that the gig was on,” Elvis explained. “We had guys walking around with placards advertising the gig and I was playing through a battery-powered amplifier. They came out on the pavement and quite a big crowd gathered very quickly, including quite a few of the big guys at CBS. All these guys were actually standing there and applauding, but the Hilton didn’t see the humor in the situation and called the police. The police didn’t see the humor in the situation and arrested me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a crazy stunt.” Elvis is now signed to CBS in America.
Getting back to My Aim Is True, there were two songs I felt Elvis might be willing to shed some light on (not analytically, of course), because their subject matter stood out from the other songs. One is ‘Waiting for the End of the World’, the album closer which seemed to be some kind of fantasy story, with Dylanesque images (“The legendary hitchhiker says that he knows where it’s at/Now he’d like to go to Spain or somewhere like that/With his tombstone bible and his funny cigarettes/His suntan lotion and his castanets…”); the other is ‘Less than Zero’, which also appeared on Bunch of Stiffs, and refers to British Nazi spokesman Oswald Mosley in its lyrics.
” ‘Waiting’ was just the result of a particular feeling I had. At the time I wrote it I was working a day job. It was written on a train where several incidents had occurred to spark off this frame of mind. It’s rather the way I feel, more resigned than angry. The whole album is pretty much that way because I feel that, particularly in England, people don’t go shooting each other in the streets – if they get fed up with their neighbor they don’t go and kill him. It’s probably just that we can’t buy guns so easily as you can in America. We read a lot about people getting shot over trivial things there just because there’s a gun handy when somebody gets angry, but it’s different here. It’s not that we’re any better because we don’t actually kill people – the feelings are still there – it’s just under the surface, very close to the surface, and it breaks out quite easily. It’s just that we don’t have these tools at hand.
“Some of the songs are about those kind of feelings, but I don’t like to put it in grand terms. I just like to put it in the way I feel about it myself, maybe from one person to another. That’s why some of the songs have got violence in them or elements of violence. Those things are very close.”
It seems a repressed violence, though, quite masochistic.
“I’m not sure I’d like to get so analytical about it. I tend to shy away from words like that come out, because I’m not sure of the implications of using those kind of words, but you could look at it that way, I agree.
“Briefly, ‘Less than Zero’ is about Mosley’s being allowed on TV during the evenings. I really don’t feel like itemizing these things though, because there’s no point writing songs if I have to explain them.
“Uh, listen, I gotta go, my wife’s on the other line.”
A face for ‘78? Definitely. The album should’ve already been released here by the time you read this, and Elvis says there are plans for some US dates before the end of the year. Whether or not he plays here, get the record; listen to Elvis. The guy has something to say, and his record has touched me like no other album this year. Make Elvis king once again.
Dave Schulps
David Fricke – “Elvis Costello: Is This Year’s Elvis Still King?” (1979)
Written for Circus magazine (issue #210), from Feb. 13, 1979. One of Fricke’s early pieces, right before he went to Rolling Stone…
At first glance, the 1979 model Elvis Costello does not look appreciably different from the ‘78 version. He still wears the same black horn-rimmed glasses setting off the defiant glare in his eyes, sports the same awkwardly moddish dress, and sings in the same snarling declamatory tone.
But the Elvis who’s just released his third album, Armed Forces (Columbia), is not quite the same bitter but determined person who sang his songs of lost innocence and pained experience for unsympathetic ears in London pubs for five years. The former computer operator who lived a middle class life with a wife and son during the day and played his songs at night in semi-pro bands is a changed man. The social outcast is now a star.
Dave Robinson, a Costello confidante and head of Stiff Records (Elvis’s first label), claims the main difference is that now the artist is no longer actively creating his music in the environment that “made him and his songs good. He’s on tour now; his little hovel on Downer Street, London W2, is not where he lives anymore. His influences and everything around him have changed. And you hope that now if you put him in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that he’d write about that and it will be just as relevant. That’s the situation with Elvis Costello.”
More to the point: how will Elvis deal with the stardom both in and out of music? So far he’s taken it by the throat and choked it as hard as he can.
For example, Australian wire services were humming over the news of a riot he started at a concert there by refusing to encore for 1200 fans who paid $11 a head. His reason? “They were too mechanical.” More recently, at a London concert, Costello staged what one fan called “an absolute rip-off” when he played another short no-encore set for a full but demonstratively angry audience. A sound engineer at the show surmised that Costello rushed through his set and stalked offstage “probably because the audience wasn’t dancing.”
Now the press reports sighting Elvis in the close company of blonde, scene-making bombshell Bebe Buell (ex-Playmate girlfriend of Todd Rundgren, Peter Frampton, and Rod Stewart). Where Elvis walks, wagging tounges are sure to follow, but those tongues are asking if Costello – hailed as rock’s Angry Young Conscience by the same press he despises – is now succumbing to the pressures and temptations of fame he once called “the arse end of rock.”
Fame has not as yet dulled his lyrical sword. On Armed Forces (originally dubbed Emotional Fascism), he flourishes metaphors, non sequiturs, and verbal barbs with the same meticulously choreographed finesse displayed on My Aim Is True and This Year’s Model. But where Model’s “Lipstick Vogue” and Aim’s “I’m Not Angry” were forcefully staged attacks, Armed Forces’s action imagery in the song titles (“Oliver’s Army,” “Goon Squad,” “Accidents Will Happen”) and the high-tension performance of Elvis’s band, the Attractions, is tempered by Nick Lowe’s sympathetic production and the veiled (as opposed to outright) threats in the lyrics.
The Live at Hollywood High EP included with early pressings of the LP is a touch disappointing only in comparison. The three songs (“Accidents Will Happen,” “Alison,” and “Watching The Detectives”) don’t capture the Attractions – Steve Nieve, keys; Bruce Thomas, bass; Pete Thomas, drums – at their tightest, but the vocal fire Elvis breathes into his performance particularly sends “Detectives” up in a blaze of heated irony.
The former Declan MacManus – English son of a professional big band singer – has been stoking those flames since childhood when he followed his father to concerts and recording sessions when schooling allowed. “Being a musician never seemed like a good job to do,” he once said. But upon quitting school at 16 and eventually landing his computer operator gig in Liverpool, he took to writing songs and, for a period, gigging with a band called Flip City.
The popular story of Elvis’s discovery by Dave Robinson and now-manager Jake Riviera – the fearless original leaders of the fledgling Stiff label – goes that Elvis (who occasionally gigged under the moniker of Declan Costello, the latter a stage name used by his father) answered a Stiff newspaper ad for new and unusual talent. Robinson adds, however, that Elvis first came to him with some songs in 1971 when the former was managing Brinsley Schwarz (with bassist Nick Lowe) and booking bands into London’s Pub-Rock Central, the notorious Hope and Anchor.
“He was really good at the time, too,” Robinson says of Elvis in a clipped Irish accent. “He was writing marvellous songs, sensational stuff (including a prototype of his recent U.K. hit “Radio, Radio”), but there was no market he could do it in and I just wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.”
And the ones who were in the position couldn’t be bothered. Costello personally banged on record company and publishing doors, giving live auditions in the offices, to no avail. That succession of record company rejections and dismissals up until the Stiff deal has coloured Elvis’s current dealings – and the flamboyant managerial style of Riviera – with the music business and its hangers-on. Consider Riviera’s celebrated tossing of an English journalist down a flight of stairs last year because the reporter supposedly hassled Elvis about an interview.
Elvis is certainly not the intimidating prima donna Riviera’s outburst implies, as the members of Canadian rock band, the Battered Wives, will attest. The Wives were the opening act on a late ‘78 Costello tour of the North Country and, much to the chagrin of Elvis’s retinue, garnered most of the headlines. Militant feminists, outraged at the band’s name, staged several protests along the tour route, some of which made the local front pages.
“They could have got really uptight,” explains Wives drummer Toby Swann of Costello and crew. “We were just opening the show but were getting most of the headlines. They could’ve kicked us off the tour, but Elvis seemed to think it actually was rather funny.” That was particularly true in Montreal when the Wives were pelted by protesters with raw edibles during a rousing version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Snickers Swann, “they really got us.”
Maybe it’s Elvis’s love of the incongruous that makes him such an intriguing – even puzzling – figure in pop, not unlike Dylan in top evasive form. There is, however, no doubting Costello’s unbeatable chops as a songwriter who can burn experience on the brain with third-hand clarity as well as first-hand urgency. His own unshakeable belief in himself is all this year’s model needs to bypass rock’s sophomore jinx.
“Years from now,” predicts Dave Robinson, “when people compile their lists of artists who wrote songs now that you can still play in 1985, Elvis will certainly be on it.”
As he once said in a song, Elvis Costello is not angry – or anything else. He’s just Elvis.
David Fricke
Elvis Costello & the Attractions – “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” (TV – 1977)
Taken from “Top of the Pops” from September 1977, right after The Attractions became his permanent backing band.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions – “Armed Forces” (1979)
UK cover
Ira Robbins dissects EC’s 1979 album Armed Forces in the April 1979 issue of the excellent but now-defunct new wave magazine Trouser Press (which still lives on online)…
When Bob Dylan broke up with his wife, Sara, a few years ago, the world was treated to the introspective and bitter Blood on the Tracks. Although Elvis’s personal life is not quite as public (yet) as the Zim’s, Armed Forces emerges from roughly the same emotional territory, although in Costello’s case, since he was the dumper, not the dumpee, his venomous lyrics are a bit harder to comprehend.
Of course, as the Sultan of Spite, Elvis has a reputation to protect, but you have to wonder about the emotional actions of someone who feeds on anger and frustration. Most of us wait for trouble to find us, but not Elvis — he runs right out and creates his own. An interesting endothermic lifestyle.
I don’t care what Elvis does to get his emotional ashes hauled, I’m just a rock critic. I listen to records and write about ‘em, but sometimes you stop and wonder what’s behind a song. I used to really worry about each line of ‘Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, and I suppose I always will. In Elvis’s case, you can sense the specificness of his subject matter, but there aren’t enough clues to jigsaw the puzzle together. The fact that the guy’s got severe emotional and romantic disabilities is clear, but at whom or about what will probably remain a mystery for as long as he refuses to do interviews. I’m not even going to speculate — it’s not a good practice when dealing with a schizy character like El. Figure em out for yourself if it matters.
After This Year’s Model set stellar standards for further Elvis product, speculation about this third album grew and grew until its release started to loom anticlimactically. The double-edged danger of remaining stationary or veering off somewhere awful (like ‘Stranger in the House’) seemed to be a tricky tightrope to negotiate but Elvis, in his infinite inscrutability, has, I’m relieved and pleased to report, done it in spades. Armed Forces exchanges musical violence for sophistication — in melodies, arrangements, performances — variety and subtlety. The lyrics suffer from an excessive penchant towards cheap puns and pseudo-Spoonerisms, which seem to be thrown in mechanically to insure that critics (?) will remark at what a clever dick Elvis is.
The album begins, as did he shows on Elvis’s last tour, with “Accidents Will Happen,” a smooth ballad that benefits greatly from a full arrangement (as opposed to the almost accapella live version): a small bit of paranoia to set the LP’s tone. Next, “Senior Service” syncopates its way along, alternating between a calm tone and an almost hysterical delivery of lyrics like “I want to chop off your head and watch it roll into the basket.” The repetitive organ riff makes an effective backdrop for the vocals. Abba Costello follows, with a “Waterloo” piano nick opening “Oliver’s Army” on a sprightly pop note that masks the recruiting poster tone of the song. “If you’re out of luck or out of work we could send you to Johannesburg.” From sprightly to ‘60s sombre, “Big Boys” starts like a Roy Orbison song and ends on an amazing pop refrain that’s as good as any Yardley commercial. (Can you just imagine Carnaby Costello wearing a paisley shirt, green polka-dot tie, blue granny glasses and a David Hemmings haircut?) The next song, “Green Shirt,” is completely weird — a mechanical organ ticking away under horn synthesizers as Elvis croons softly, “You can please yourself but someone’s gonna get it.”
The side ends with “Party Girl,” a torch tune that follows in the tradition of “Alison” and “Little Triggers.” With grand piano and a steady meter, Elvis delivers all the vocal dynamics he has — starting off softly, with lots of tenderness and ending up at full tilt, holding his own as the band goes into a slow, grandiose finish that sounds like some song from Abbey Road, the name of which I can never remember. There’s a lyric at the end that illustrates the sometimes forced nature of his wit — “I’m in a grip-like vice” — raising horrible memories of the excesses of other lyrical smart alecks (Sparks, 10cc). It’s difficult to be bitter and cute at the same time — sort of like sneezing and coughing simultaneously — and it doesn’t wear all that well on Elvis.
“Goon Squad” is the closest thing here to Last Year’s Model’s venom. The bass loops along in a strange semi-melody while the guitars jerk spasmodically and Elvis delivers his vocal best. There are some amazing organ swirls that add to the melodrama, and the track ends too soon, giving way in a neat fade to “Busy Bodies,” Elvis’s sexual diatribe set to the bass line of “Pretty Woman.” Another great keyboard performance from Steve Naïve. The next nod goes to D. Bowie for ‘Moods for Moderns’, which sounds a bit like everything on Low stuck on to a thoroughly Elvis verse. Mixed into the cheerful delivery are lyrics that seem very serious yet steadfastly hide the meaning.
“You’ve got a chemistry class/I want a piece of your mind” is the chorus of a little exercise in silly lyrics called “Chemistry Class.” Whatever Elvis might be trying to say, little jokes like “Are you ready for the final solution?” would seem more worthy of 10cc than Boss Costello. Could he be getting carried away by his own awesome abilities? The side finishes as strongly as it opens, with a tremendous version of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” an idealistic song from Brinsley Schwarz’s days of joyous hippiedom. The anomaly of subject suits Elvis as well as if he were Linda Ronstadt singing “Alison,” and the rocking energy of the band makes the track roar along in what once might have been called “power pop” fashion. A great finale, and one that apparently isn’t on the English album. (One song has been left off the American version — “Sunday’s Best”) On a final note, if you’re lucky enough to be among the first 200,000 hardy souls to ante up for this record, you should be getting a special three song (“Alison” / “Accidents Will Happen” / “Watching the Detectives”) live single included. However, if you’re not a collector, don’t go looking for it — Elvis live doesn’t translate well without visuals.
Armed Forces may not jump off the turntable with the same supercharged bite of Last Year’s Model, but it certainly holds its own. Where it ultimately stacks up will take some time parked in front of speakers to discern, but that’s a task I don’t mind one bit.
Ira Robbins
US cover
Elvis Costello & the Attractions – “The Only Flame in Town” (Unissued Video – 1984)
This is a video that they didn’t end up using (they replaced it with one that included Daryl Hall and had a storyline - typical of 1980s videos). This rare, unreleased video is very simple and resembles EC’s earliest videos from the late 70s (when they were known as promo clips and weren’t seen by many people).
Notice that EC is not wearing his trademark glasses in this clip.
Elvis Costello – “So Like Candy” (Video – 1991)
EC in his brief “hippie” stage, looking like a dead ringer for John Lennon, circa 1969…
Elvis Costello – “The Scarlet Tide” (Live TV)
Not sure of date on this…probably within the last few years…
