Before Elvis Costello became the dullest Renaissance Man of the Western World, gadflying about with the likes of Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, some Swedish mezzo-soprano whose name escapes me at the moment, the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest, jazz pianist Marian McPartland, T-Bone Barnett, the London Symphony Orchestra and others, including for all I know the Men’s Choir of Barracks 22 of the Toksong Political Prison Camp in North Korea, he was a punk fellow-traveler and one of the angriest young men in England this side of Johnny Lydon.
Everybody grows up, but do you have to grow up to be a sophisticated dabbler and bore? In Costello’s case it was the Paul Weller Komplex times ten, and when it came to wanton genre-hopping, Elvis made Neil Young look like a piker. Even the early Costello was a hybrid of sorts—a singer-songwriter in spirit, a punk in attitude. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau summed this up by comparing him to Jackson Browne in his review of Costello’s 1977 debut My Aim Is True, then turning around and complimenting him on his snarl come the following year’s This Year’s Model.
Costello famously recorded My Aim Is True with, yes it’s true, a California-based country rock act (Clover, whose members would later go on to play, variously, with Huey Lewis and the News, the Doobie Brothers, and Lucinda Williams) as his backing band. A very singer-songwriter thing to do, that, but by the time he got around to recording This Year’s Model (again with Nick Lowe as producer) he recruited a band of his own that could produce music to mirror his adamantine misanthropy (and some would say misogyny).
Costello would never be a true-blue punk—too much clever wordplay and a musical vocabulary that pre-dated the Sex Pistols—but he was a punk in spirit, much like the 1966 Dylan. Indeed, “Like a Rolling Stone” is a template of sorts for Costello, with its catchy wordsmithing, laser focus on the personal and themes of (to use words Costello would himself employ and would stick to him like glue throughout his career) “revenge and guilt.” Unlike the post-protest Dylan, Costello was not apolitical—his disgust extended to goings-on in Great Britain, but rarely went in for punk sloganeering. No anarchy in the UK for the former computer operator from Bootle.
So, This Year’s Model. The band Costello cobbled together—drummer Pete Thomas, bassist Bruce Thomas, and especially keyboardist Steve Neive—had pub rock, power pop chops, endowing his music with the edge to match his misanthropic snarl, making This Year’s Model a far more belligerent slice of bile than My Aim Is True. There was more garage in the sound, and Costello’s snot and sneer didn’t have to carry all the weight. If anything, the sound made amplified his adamantine disgust.
I keep saying punk, but when push came to shove Costello was a New Wave artist, nebulous as that term is. What else would you call the irresistibly slinky “The Beat,” which made him a fellow traveler of Joe Jackson? Or the mid-tempo, anti-fashion “This Year’s Model,” his answer song to The Rolling Stones’ “Stupid Girl”? And most of the other songs on the album, for that matter. You get interesting hybrids—the organ on “You Belong to Me” is pure garage, and the lyrics make me think of ’65-’66 Dylan. It’s not a punk song, but it’s not New Wave either; I hear something older, but perfectly updated.
Costello wasn’t, as your punks were, seeking to break with the past—he was incorporating it into his sound. He wasn’t starting from ground zero—unlike some, he had an immense musical vocabulary at hand when he finally broke through. The brilliant and frantic “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” is ska here (guitar straight from The Pioneers) and The Who there with an overlay of Costello’s vocal dis-ease–he sounds like a petulant kid whose parents want to drag him off to some wretched place (the dentist, perhaps) he doesn’t want to go, and it works. The ballad “Little Triggers” somehow manages to be pretty and angry at the same time, and once again Dylan (and the Stones) come to mind.
The hard-charging “Lipstick Vogue” is all drum slam with a great stealth melody—when Costello isn’t delivering his lyrics at a staccato pace, and Thomas isn’t (no kidding) soloing on the drums, that melody is giving you shivers, that is until the band kicks things into overdrive and you’ve got a real rocker on your hands. Instrumentally, “Living in Paradise” reminds me of the Talking Heads, but lyrically it ain’t much to write home about and frankly the song has always bored me. “Hand in Hand” opens, believe it or not, on a psychedelic note, and has always struck me as a polished work of songcraft rather than a good song.
You can draw a line from the raucous, no-holds-barred “No Action” through The Stooges’ “No Fun” all the way back to The Rolling Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” but unlike the others Costello has a former lover in mind and he isn’t in a resigned mood, what with lines like “Every time I phone you/I just wanna put you down.” Love the lines, “And the things in my head/Start hurtin’ my mind,” just as I do any lyric that is simultaneously smart and dumb.
“Night Rally,” Costello’s not-quite-head-on assault on Britain’s far-right National Front, doesn’t exactly knock you over as a protest song—it’s far too oblique (Billy Bragg he ain’t.) But the lines “You think they’re so dumb, you think they’re so funny/Wait until they’ve got you running/To the night rally, night rally, night rally” are menacing enough, even if they may not exactly be crystal clear to the politically uninformed on the other side of the pond. Costello’s delivery is surprisingly understated—you’d think he’d be spitting bile, but then the song is understated as well. Seems he’d prefer to save his acid and ammunition for women and the radio.
He sounds twice as worked up in the hard-hitting and organ-driven “Big Tears,” which could be about an assassination or any manner of other things—all I know is the lines “Big tears mean nothing/When you’re lying in your coffin/Tell me who’s been taken in” stick to the ribs. And I’ll buy a pint for anybody who can come up with a line as grammatically complex but still effective as “You wouldn’t even like me if you’d never had a drink.” “Lip Service” has Big No. 1 written all over it with that slick forward momentum and Nuevo Wavo feel and the great lines “When did you become so choosy?/Don’t act like you’re above me/Just look at your shoes,” which makes me wonder exactly what the subject of the song has on her feet. Birkenstock clogs? And since when did Elvis become a shoe critic?
“Pump It Up” is pneumatic rock par excellece with this great drum thump and guitar riff and has this far-off echo of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to it—you can practically see Elvis holding up and tossing off flashcards with the lyrics on them. That said, the lyrics are a bit hard to make sense of, and for all of the praise folks heap upon Costello’s way with words, that’s not unusual. Frankly I’ve never thought his lyrics were his greatest strength—it’s his delivery that matter, his tone that sets the mood.
Except when he comes across clear as a bell, as he does on the great “Radio, Radio,” the most acerbic assault on the rock airwaves ever recorded. This baby wasn’t even on the British release of the album, which makes me pity ‘em—on no other track does Costello sound so rancorous. When he isn’t milking the sarcasm (“wonderful radio, marvelous radio”) he’s seething—he practically chews through the lines “I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/I wanna bite that hand so badly/I wanna make them wish they’d never seen me,” and he spits out the words, “And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools/Tryin’ to anaesthetise the way that you feel” with enough bile to melt vinyl.
And musically “Radio, Radio” has bite galore, what with that mad organ and the strange spray bottle effect that adds emphasis to the line “Radio is cleaning up the nation.” “Radio, Radio” could well be Costello’s finest moment—he would go on to write some mighty fine songs, but this is his most scathing, the ultimate pirate radio broadcast from a man who made hatred his calling card.
Costello would go on to make a lot of great music. He would also go on to become a musical gadfly (“I haven’t made a éntekhno album with Psarantonis yet! Be a doll, Diana, and get him on the horn!”) and general menace. Me, I stopped caring in the mid-eighties, not long after the release of 1986’s Blood and Chocolate. A strong album, Blood and Chocolate, but I was tired of his puns and his meticulous songcraft—I’d heard enough.
And just as importantly, I’d stopped hearing something I considered key. Call it bile, spite, vitriol, disgust—call it whatever you want—it was gone the way of Costello’s angry youth and I missed it. Turns out I didn’t have much use for Elvis Costello’s much-vaunted musical artistry—it was the hatred, the fuck you to everyone and everything, I got off on. Growing up is a terrible thing to do.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
