Uncut
Ultimate Music Guide
|
—
|
Elvis Costello — Album by album
Elvis Costello
The acerbic new wave wit turned storied elder statesman revisits career highlights
|
"With stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas," Elvis Costello tells Uncut, discussing his 1981 LP Trust. The new-wave upstart turned renaissance man could almost be describing any of his albums, though; from the audacious mix of fury and classicism on 1977 debut My Aim Is True, and the extravagant, Beatles-esque Imperial Bedroom (1982), to the sombre torch songs of 2003's North and his eclectic, impressive latest, Look Now, Costello has aimed high and invariably succeeded.
When Uncut invited the songwriter to discuss nine of his finest albums, Costello suggested that he instead write his own reflections on some of his personal favourites with the Attractions, the Imposters, The Roots and solo — plus a fond look back at the demos he recorded with Paul McCartney, only released in 2017. Here, then, is Costello's own personal history. On completing his "classic," he says he left the NYC studio at l am "thinking this was a movie that will probably never get made again." — Tom Pinnock
|
Elvis Costello
My Aim Is True Stiff, 1977
Costello's first recordings were so striking, Stiff signed their songwriter as an artist in his own right
|
Rehearsed in a rat-infested country house and recorded in a cardboard box in Islington [Pathway Studios] in a total of 24 hours' studio time, on sick days and holidays from my office job as a computer operator. Having only heard my voice, mumbling under a bare bulb, club stage or on a borrowed reel-to-reel in my bedroom, I never imagined I would be in that studio with a band as good as Clover, a Marin County outfit whose Fantasy albums I'd had to hunt down in secondhand shops. They spoke in code about the songs — "Red Shoes" was "the one that sounds like The Byrds." I didn't mention that "Waiting For The End Of The World" was supposed to sound like "I'm Waiting For The Man." I don't think they had ever heard The Velvet Underground, and perhaps that was for the best. You can listen to a new take on "Mr. Moon" from Clover's recent Homestead Redemption (on which they revisit their '70s songs and I deputise for vocalist Alex Call on an alternate take) and hear John McFee quote his own guitar part from "Alison." Time is going backwards. I liked the sound of Pathway so much that I went back there with just me and Pete Thomas to cut "Kinder Murder" for Brutal Youth, and The Gwendolyn Letters, demos of the 12 songs that I wrote for Wendy James over one weekend in the '90s.
|
Elvis Costello
This Year's Model Radar, 1978
His second album, featuring "Pump It Up" and "Night Rally," remains one of Costello's best
|
Before we left Pathway, Nick Lowe had showed me that we could paint pictures with sound on "Watching The Detectives." Steve Nieve had arrived by then to play the keyboards. I told him I wanted the piano to sound like "Hitchcock," when I think I meant "Bernard Herrmann." However, I needed all of the Attractions to work at speed of life for "Lipstick Vogue." "Pump It Up" was scrawled on a hotel fire-escape in Newcastle, in the last days of the Stiff Tour, and cut at Eden Studios in Acton just before I left for our first American misadventure. You could say "we never looked back," but having crossed the United States for the first time and been thrown off SNL and had a mince pie, when we returned home, we finished the album in the rest of the 11 days that we could afford. And then we went back to America, again and again… Look Now co-producer Sebastian Krys pushed up the faders on "This Year's Girl" recently, adding the voice of Natalie Bergman (from Wild Belle) for a remix for the opening titles of the second season of The Deuce. These are very big shoes to fill after Curtis Mayfield's "If There's A Hell Below" had opened Season One, but Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas and Steve Nieve's playing sounded as mighty as ever and we even uncovered an unused background vocal idea, lifted from our inspiration — The Rolling Stones' Aftermath.
|
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Trust F-Beat / Columbia, 1981
Recorded at a troubled time, Costello's fifth took aim at his pop contemporaries
|
Every one of the 45rpm records that we issued between late 1977 and mid-1980 made some kind of showing on the UK hit parade. My face was suddenly on the cover of teen magazines, as unlikely as that may sound now. It's a sad and predictable story that too much attention can turn a young man's head. I thought myself above all temptations but wrote a lot of songs about the debris that surrounds them and anything else that flew by my window. That's what filled Armed Forces and Get Happy!! After some hits, some inexplicable catastrophes and producing The Specials under a laundromat in the Fulham Palace Road, I felt like driving the car into a ditch or at least to Sunderland, so, with stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas. "Clubland" was supposed to be "Message In A Bottle" with a middle eight, "You'll Never Be A Man" was "Brass In Pocket" with more chords and some ideas hijacked from The "Detroit" Spinners, while "White Knuckles" was like hearing several XTC songs through a haze of scrumpy, gin and sherbet dabs. I doubt any of them were better songs than their models, but it was a lark. I wish I could say it kept us out of trouble. Somewhere along the way the Attractions managed to cut what I think of as their most original ensemble performance, "New Lace Sleeves." Around this time, my publisher told me the song I'd just written on a newly purchased piano reminded him of something by Erik Satie, so I went to a music shop to find out what he was talking about and discovered that I could actually play the opening bars of a few of his deceptively simple piano pieces. However, I absolutely needed Steve Nieve's fingers to make sense and music out of my sketch for "Shot With His Own Gun" and then I straightened up long enough to co-produce Squeeze's East Side Story.
|
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Imperial Bedroom F-Beat / Columbia, 1982
Eager to embrace a variety of styles, Costello enlisted Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick
|
It was very sad to read of the recent passing of that incredibly talented, gentle man, Geoff Emerick. He patiently watched us burn off the "nervous energy" that had fuelled all our previous records until we found our way to this album. He'd seen better bands than us come into the studio with crazed notions and fuzzy fragments of song and put them into sonic order. We had set up at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Regent Street, in AIR Studios. If we thought we were being like The Beatles by hiring a harpsichord, then an actual Beatle was down the hallway making Tug Of War with George Martin, just past a mixing suite that hosted both The Jam and Alice Cooper, although, sadly, not at the same time. We gave ourselves an extravagant amount of weeks to make our best mistakes. Geoff Emerick's recording experience and mixing made absolute sense of the band's unpredictable but brilliant playing — Pete Thomas's insane drumming on "Beyond Belief," to Nieve's demented piano on "Man Out Of Time" and "The Loved Ones" and Bruce Thomas's mighty bass coda for "Shabby Doll." Geoff sat through my endless vocal-group overdubs that were the first thing to get lost when we took the songs on the road as not one of the band could do much more than shout "Hey" on the chorus, so it took until last summer's Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers Tour for Davey Faragher, Kitten Kuroi and Briana Lee to make some sense of my, sometimes, nonsensical notions. The record is occasionally called "baroque" — another of those overused French words, like "genre," that make "critical thinking" seem like thinking — but this could really only be applied to Steve Nieve's insanely funny and extravagant orchestration for "...And In Every Home" or that damn harpsichord on "You Little Fool." I don't think it has anything to do with "Almost Blue," a song later heartbreakingly performed by Chet Baker, who had inspired me to write it, two years before he brought his beautiful trumpet playing to our rendition of "Shipbuilding."
|
Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
|
Photo by Richard Young.
Photo by Keith Morris.
Photo by Danny Clinch.
Cover and contents page.
|
