Fresh, March 1989: Difference between revisions
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Elvis's new album ''[[Spike]]'' will do nothing to quell the accusations. It's packed with words. So is Elvis. After years of steering clear of the press he's happier than ever to talk, explain and offer opinions on just about anything. In the same hotel where he wrote much of ''Spike'' — Dublin's Gresham — we go through 1989's most critically praised album so far, track-by-track. | Elvis's new album ''[[Spike]]'' will do nothing to quell the accusations. It's packed with words. So is Elvis. After years of steering clear of the press he's happier than ever to talk, explain and offer opinions on just about anything. In the same hotel where he wrote much of ''Spike'' — Dublin's Gresham — we go through 1989's most critically praised album so far, track-by-track. | ||
That opening salvo was a description of a song | That opening salvo was a description of a song that doesn't even appear on the album. There's no room on the inner sleeve for the lyrics. They're printed on the back cover. On the album, 'Stalin Malone' is an instrumental. We'd be here 'till page 94 if I continued to relate the dissections and discussions on each track but in order that you may be able "to amaze and baffle your friends" (a phrase that has stuck with me since the age of ten, written on the back of a set of trick playing cards!), let's delve, not too deeply, into one or two more numbers. | ||
"There's not necessarily a lot of laughs on the new album. There's two songs that I think have, but maybe I've just got a warped sense of humour. The opening track, "[[...This Town...]]" and "[[God's Comic]]." I think "[[Chewing Gum]]" is very funny but it's very sleezy. Neither character could be referred to as a nice person. He gets a mail-order bride from Bangkok and takes her home but the joke is on him 'cos she puts the chewing gum in her ears so she doesn't have to listen to him. It's a very dark joke. Neither of them are any picnic. She's a bit of an opportunist 'cos she went with him in the first place. It's not 'Pygmalion'. It leans towards that. It's more to do with the idea that he just gives her the very words he wants her to hear and she doesn't hear him at all. It's kind of a joke, a nasty little song." | |||
The closing track on side one is called "[[Tramp The Dirt Down]]," one of the tracks heavily populated with famous Irish traditional musicians described by journalist Mark Cooper as "the curse that never preaches. Instead of repeating the usual dismayed shake of the head rejection of Thatcherism, Costello plunges in and winds up vowing to trample on her grave." What about it, Elvis? | |||
"I wrote most of the song in one go, in about ten minutes. And then a friend of mine suggested that he thought it needed more of a catalogue of these people who felt put on, not just by her (Thatcher) but by everything and the way the world was generally. And it wasn't going to be like a catalogue that built up and got worse and worse and worse. One person's idea of what the worst thing could be — it's not like an equation where, for instance, in the long verse, "Try telling that to the father..." — he's saying that obviously a child murderer is not the equivalent in his desperation to the schoolboy, say, who can't get a job, but to them it's the most important thing in their world. So all that, which forms a litany, is not intended to be connected. They're all unequal, unreasonable, unreasoning ... each verse should be taken as a whole rather than any one line be more important than the other, in the same way as those things can't be prepared. It just builds up to the frustration of it all." | |||
At the age of 34 it's quite clear that Elvis has put a lot of his well-documented frustrations behind him. There was a time when the artistic venom of Costello, the musician, "started to take over" his life with the result that he was "rapidly becoming not a nice person", as he confessed. In his 69-day, 53-concert tour of the U.S. ten years ago he alienated audiences and American rock musicians as well as the press with his contrariness, culminating in the infamous Columbus, Ohio [[:Category:Columbus incident|incident]], where in a drunken argument with [[Bonnie Bramlett]] and other members of the [[Stephen Stills|Stephen Stills band]], he decided to say whatever he thought would outrage people the most. His racist slur on American black musicians created a major scandal. | |||
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{{Bibliography notes header}} | {{Bibliography notes header}} | ||
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[[Category:Magazine articles|Fresh 1989-03-00]] | [[Category:Magazine articles|Fresh 1989-03-00]] | ||
[[Category:Interviews|Fresh 1989-03-00]] | [[Category:Interviews|Fresh 1989-03-00]] | ||
[[:Category:Columbus incident|Fresh 1989-03-00]] |
Revision as of 19:38, 18 March 2013
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