Thanks to mcramahamasham for posting this , along with all the other 'notes , in another thread here - I'm posting them individually for easier access.
BRUTAL YOUTH
From where I was standing, jammed up against the off-white acoustic tiles behind a smeared glass screen, Pete Thomas was just visible in the opposite booth. I counted off the tune and hit a few guitar chords over the beat distorting in my headphones. I was back in Pathway Studios, where my recording career had begun 15 years earlier. In the movie version of our lives, we would have been cutting a hit record. Unfortunately the song was a mess.
In the previous year I had learned to read and write musical notation, written and recorded The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky Quartet, and toured the world with them in under 25 days. At the end of it all, my wife and I had written ten trashy pop songs in one weekend for a girl named Wendy. I'd enjoyed making demos of those songs so much that I got the notion that I should just keep on recording. The only thing I forgot to do was write any more songs.
The record I set out to make was to be called Idiophone. The Collins Dictionary defines this as an instrument "made of naturally sonorous material". It is a term used to describe a percussion instrument, but I couldn't see why it should not also refer to a singer. It was also comforting close to the word idiot. I'd written an instrumental piece that took this title, although it was little more than a series of squalls and clusters on the guitar and piano over a programmed bass line. I'd also written some music to perform at the W.B. Yeats Festival in Dublin that year, a rowdy setting of his poem "A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety". It was a song close to my heart.
The only other complete tunes that I thought suitable were an attempted collision between musical styles of The Rolling Stones and that of a minor Russian composer and a grim tale of men hiding in armed forces to evade responsibility to the teenage mothers that they had abandoned. In other words, absolutely pure pop music. The bare bones of these two tracks were laid down in a couple of takes, but the session came to an ugly halt with the attempt to record a half-finished piece called "Poisoned Letter". This barely focused rant about intolerance contained a pretty decent bass figure and number of good lines, but I could feel I was forcing the pace.
I had enlisted the help of Kevin Killen, who had engineered Spike and recorded and co-produced both Mighty Like A Rose and The Juliet Letters. The technical limitations of Pathway held no attraction for him, and once the session faltered we relocated to another North London venue: Church Studios, where we could attempt some more sophisticated recordings.
I continued to work under the Idiophone banner, laying down the instrumental parts of the title piece. My son, Matt, came in to play bass over a drum loop provided by Pete Thomas for another work-in-progress, entitled "Abandon Words". Although that song was actually about some of the more fashionable and idiotic aspects of self-censorship, the title accurately reflected my more drastic moods and intentions.
Although Pete Thomas and I had continued to work together since the apparent demise of The Attractions, my relationship with Steve Nieve and Bruce Thomas was pretty non- existent. In the intervening years, Steve had enjoyed a career as a television chat-show bandleader and contributed to a great number of recordings. Bruce Thomas had also worked occasionally as a session player and made a not entirely successful venture into the world of pulp fiction. After my attempt to reassemble the band for the recording of Mighty Like a Rose had ended in an unseemly legal squabble, I assumed that we had cut our last record together.
Having added the bass part to the guitar and drums performance of "Kinder Murder" before we left Pathway, I now started to overdub on the other backing track from that session: "20% Amnesia". This was a reference to the amount of the proposed tax bribe that had apparently swung the most recent U.K. election to keep the Tories in power. I used the large Church recording room as a bass echo chamber and also laid down a simple marimba line in the chorus. However, when we came to the piano part, I found it was quite beyond my capabilities. It was time to call in Steve Nieve.
I had composed a number of slow tempo songs that year but had put them to one side since most of my contributions to The Juliet Letters were ballads. I wanted to do something different. Now it was becoming obvious that I needed to reconsider this decision.
The mood at our first session together for a number of years was a little formal, but Steve played brilliantly. We cut good exploratory versions of "London's Brilliant Parade", "This is Hell", "Favourite Hour", and an early draft of "You tripped at every step". Most of the time the instrumentation consisted of just piano and drums, while I concentrated on singing. The takes featured on the second CD of this edition illustrate how quickly the arrangements started to develop.
Despite taking this more musical approach, I was still pushing for a much harsher sound, and Kevin Killen and I agreed that this was unsuited to his production style. My mood swings were also affecting the progress of the sessions, one minute I believed we were really making a record and the next I was in despair. I took the decision to live with all the material cut so far, while intending to write the balance of material needed for a full album.
I did not imagine that it would all happen quite so quickly when I purchased a second- hand sunburst Gibson 160E. Although this model would always be associated with John Lennon in my mind, people were now appearing on MTV balanced on the edge of a canyon or perched on some windswept mountain range while strumming the same model of guitar. I thought it was pretty safe to be seen playing one, as it was unlikely that I would be confused for anyone who might be photographed from a helicopter.
I began writing again using the Gibson, and in a single day I composed the outlines of "Rocking Horse Road", "Pony St.", "Clown Strike", "Still too soon to know", "13 Steps Lead Down", and "Just about glad". This was an unprecedented and slightly frightening burst of inspiration. To these I soon added "Sulky Girl" and "All the Rage", which adapted some of the lyrics from "Poisoned Letter". The discarded bass figure from that song became the foundation for another new tune, "My Science Fiction Twin". It was a satire about a man who does five things at once.
I called Nick Lowe and asked for his help. Not as a producer this time but as a bass player. We met in Pete Thomas' basement home studio, The Napoleon Rooms, and ran through all of the songs that I had written recently. Nick was great at threading a figure through a song like "Clown Strike", and we had "Pony St." and "Just about Glad" worked out in a couple of hours with the tapes rolling all the time (these takes can be heard on CD 2). However, when we looked at the ballads, Nick, who has always remained understated about his instrumental abilities, claimed that they simply contained "too many Norwegians" for his style of playing. In other words: too many damn chords.
I called in Mitchell Froom to co-produce the next sessions. He had played keyboards on both King of America and Spike and had joined Kevin Killen and me in producing Mighty Like A Rose. Now he arrived with his usual production partner, Tchad Blake. They favoured a quirkier sound created with arcane devices, lengths of metal pipe and a bizarre portable P.A. system that Tchad had dragged back from a trip to India, which he used to rebroadcast voices and instrumental sounds. They had also employed another bass player on their recent sessions for other artists. At their suggestion, I made the call to Bruce Thomas.
We had all the tracks with Nick Lowe on bass "in the can" before The Attractions assembled at Olympic Studios to attempt their first recording session in eight years. There was no doubting that Bruce's arrival gave us the right combination of musicians to rerecord some of the more complex songs. Though the atmosphere was cautious and respectful on the surface, the humour of these sessions was best captured by Bill Flanagan's Thurber-esque cartoon in which I was jokingly menaced by The Attractions wielding axes, swords, and a pair of large garden shears. Bill was the editor of Musician magazine at the time, and the tableaux was later re-created for a photo shoot, although I think the pen and ink version was actually closer to real life.
Putting aside any simmering grudges, The Attractions lineup made an excellent job of cutting "This is Hell", "London's Brilliant Parade", and "You tripped at every step" in a mere handful of takes. Two tracks that were later released as singles, "Sulky Girl" and "13 Steps Lead Down", were reminders that this could also be a pretty great rock and roll band.
When Brutal Youth was finally released, the record company made much of the return of The Attractions, and the album was tagged with that lame old cliché: "back to basics". These simplifications may have made for good ad copy and lazy journalism, but they were pretty inaccurate. Nick Lowe played bass on the majority of the tracks that were required to groove, and the two rawest cuts on the record, "Kinder Murder" and "20% Amnesia", dated from the first Pathway session when there had only been Pete Thomas and myself in the studio.
In time I came to regard the Idiophone/Brutal Youth sessions as a failure, simply because the little that was said about the album tended to focus on superficial appearances and the soap-opera mechanics of the recording, while totally ignoring the content.
So, what of the songs? Although so many of them had arrived in a rush--that is not to say that they were dashed off without any thought. I had filled many notebooks with snatches of lyrics that only took shape as the music revealed itself to me.
I had carried around fragments of the melody that opens "Pony St." for almost a year after it came to me during a stay in Italy. I had not even picked up a guitar or sat at the piano to work out any harmony. I was unsure whether it wouldn't be better suited to more experimental compositions that had made up my contributions to The Juliet Letters, but it ended up in a rock and roll song in which the daughter is the parent to the mother.
The Brutal Youth album contains at least four songs that could not have been written before the experience of working with the Brodsky Quartet. In fact, "Favourite Hour" was written in a deserted rehearsal room at Dartington Summer School where the Quartet and myself gave the second performance of The Juliet Letters just prior to taking the piece into the studio.
"London's Brilliant Parade" was another song that shared the musical ambition of The Juliet Letters. Lyrically, it was a more affectionate look at the city in which I was born than I could ever have managed when I was actually living there. I've never thought to use the term hometown, but there is a very personal route map in the final verse. Handing the song over for Steve Nieve to play meant that it could be realised beyond my extreme limitations at the piano. Adding the rhythm section brought it closer to the darker domestic ballads, "You tripped at every step" and "Still too soon to know".
"This is Hell" was an attempt to continue the fantasy afterlife theme of "God's Comic" from Spike and "Damnation's Cellar" from The Juliet Letters. Of the two versions contained in this edition I think I now favour the more spontaneous take from the Church Studios session. I hope the song justifies its existence with the notion that "in hell" you can hear Richard Rodgers' "My Favourite Things", but it is always performed by Julie Andrews and never by John Coltrane.
"Favourite Hour" was about the terrible anticipation of a dread event. Although Steve played it very grandly, with drum accompaniment, on the version heard on CD 2, I was determined to rerecord it with a live vocal and piano performance of my own in order to concentrate the attention totally on the melody. I believe it is among the very best songs that I have been fortunate enough to write. Whether it should have received a more expansive treatment is something that I will leave to the listener or for another performer to resolve.
The details in the other songs were collected during periods of travel. "13 Steps Lead Down" refers to that number being used to instill dread in those entering the Tomb of the Spanish Kings at El Escorial. Not that the song continues much with that theme--it was more for those who could not subscribe to the new fashion of sobriety.
I found the real "Rocking Horse Road" in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was one of those lovely suburban neighbourhoods that was, at once, utterly benign and filled with reminders of a claustrophobic life from which a career in music and emotional cowardice once offered an escape. "You tripped at every step" was a candid reminiscence of what occurs when that exit is not taken. "My Science Fiction Twin" was about a fantasy life that I was lucky to avoid.
As the album was mixed and assembled at Sound Factory Studios in Hollywood, it seemed that there was some sort of thread running through these songs. However, I could not pretend that I had planned this in advance. The preceding story of these sessions would make nonsense of that conceit.
The title, Brutal Youth, was suggested by a friend after he heard "Favourite Hour", musically, the gentlest song on the record. The phrase was extracted from the line: "Now, there's a tragic waste of brutal youth". The cover art, with its childhood snapshots, confirms that this title was intended humorously rather than with any sense of intimidation. The only song contained in this edition that is about youths that are brutal is "Life Shrinks". This was originally recorded for the soundtrack to the movie War of the Buttons but was removed from the final cut after a contractual dispute. It was later issued as a B-side.
The other songs contained on CD 2 are either the studio demos and experiments from the Napoleon Rooms, Pathway, and Church Studios or fuzzy 4-track home demos that were cut just after the songs were completed.
The record IS backward looking, but I do not mean that in a musical sense. I had spent the previous nine years exploring other ways to play songs, and in the 12 months prior to recording this album, I had learned how to write songs of a completely different shape and feeling. Now came the question of whether there was still a loud song worth singing.
So, if this record does look back, it is with affection and amusement to disastrous and bungled affairs of "Just about glad", "Clown Strike", and "My Science Fiction Twin" or with the regret and remorse of "You tripped at every step" and "Rocking Horse Road".
There are also outward looking songs longing for a vanished place and time in "London's Brilliant Parade" and "Favourite Hour" and those looking on with dread and loathing for the way things appear in "Kinder Murder" and "20% Amnesia".
I started out to make something violent and undone in the wake of the most disciplined work of my career. After several false starts, I managed to get from the incoherent insults of "Poisoned Letter" to "All the Rage", full of bravado and a sense of fallibility--
"So don't try to touch my heart
It's darker than you think
And don't try to read my mind
Because it's full of disappearing ink"
If this record ended up just a little closer to the truth than these things sometimes get, it was almost by accident. What do you want? This isn't confession. This is pop music. I found myself playing in a rock and roll band again. If this did not require forgiveness, then it did assume some small understanding of anger and when to let it go.
-Elvis Costello
A Tribute To Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth,' Released 21 Years Ago Today
A Tribute To Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth,' Released 21 Years Ago Today
Last edited by johnfoyle on Mon Mar 09, 2015 5:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: 1993/94 , Brutal Youth sleevenote
This excellent account of Elvis circa. 1994 doesn't seem to be online so I've scanned it from my print copy -
Musician, March 1994
Elvis Costello and his invisible twin
by Bill Flanagan
Q: How many cranky rock legends does it take to reunite the Attractions, cut several simultaneous albums, write a play, compose and perform with a classical quartet, and learn Italian, musical notation, and how to drive a car at the same time? A: Two.
Elvis Costello is in the music room of his home in the hills overlooking Dublin, Ireland, talking about his new song “Pony Street,” a pointed dialog between a mom who grew up in the ‘60s and her embarrassed, conservative daughter. It would make a great duet for Michelle and Chynna Phillips. “Instead of ‘Eat up your greens,’ the scenario is basically, ‘Come on, take your barbiturates,” Costello says. “You’ve got to get into those spandex trousers and go down to the Rainbow and act like a slut and don’t you comeback here trying to marry that accountant!’ I think it probably does happen quite a bit—the rock ‘n’ roll mom who’s a little bit past the look now. Everything has become an off-the-peg fashion. You get a little bit of punk with a little bit of the ‘60s mixed up with a bit of bondage, but it’s all had its original context surgically removed so it’s no longer dangerous. If a kid wants to wear a £500 jacket with safety pins in it, it’s no longer a statement of destroying that—it’s just a fashion accessory. I’m not saying, Oh,for the old days of rebellion ‘cause I never did any of that shit myself, but it’s ironic.
“One of the things I got the story off was a review I read of Guns N’ Roses in one of the English papers. The journalist asked this seven-year-old girl which one of Guns N’ Roses she liked most and she said, ‘I like Axl ‘cause my mummy says he puts a cucumber down his trousers.’ And I thought, well, there it is—there’s rock ‘n’ roll neutered forever. And maybe thankfully, as well. Maybe that side of it is dead and buried—although there’s some serious practitioners still around, heaven knows.”
And as long as they are around, Costello will be there making fun of them. He will be 40 next summer, and he has reached the point in his prolific career where his early albums are being reissued in boxed sets, but Costello can still get as worked up as any teenager. On his new album, Brutal Youth, he returned to recording with his estranged band, the Attractions, with whom he will tour later this year. He has more projects underway, and more albums in the can.
“You’d think, ‘Well I’ve written everything I’ve got to say now,’” he continues. “But as you get older you look farther, and you look at yourself and you change. It means there’s still stuff to sing about. There’s no rule that says you have to get better and better and better until you explode. Or more refined in any sense of the word. The writing doesn’t have to get leaner—you could be more effusive one time and the next time it could be really sparse.
“And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s not just words! What’s a song about? It’s about music as well. For instance, ‘All the Rage,’ which is a much more accusative song, was originally set to the figure at the front of ‘Science Fiction Twin.’ It was going to be a much faster song. It didn’t work at all. It was a more angry song but it didn’t sound convincing. Sometimes when you have something right in your heart you don’t even pause to think about it; it just comes out. It’s a horrible moment when you realize it hasn’t achieved the effect that you wanted, even though it’s satisfied your desire to revenge yourself about whatever it is that’s getting under your skin. Even if it’s supposed to be aggressive or enraged, if it just sounds like hot air then that’s wrong. That’s why ‘Beyond Belief’ on Imperial Bedroom sounds like it does rather than a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s a rather odd combination of a low, very intimate vocal and an out track. Because I redubbed the vocal on it an octave lower and completely changed the melody, which gave it this unsettling thing of the band going full tilt and a voice very close up—something you couldn’t possibly achieve live. Because I wasn’t happy with the way the song came over being yelled over the top of the backing; it just sounded like something I’d done before.”
Avoiding doing things he’s done before keeps Costello on the front edge of his talent. Even his decision to reunite with the Attractions after seven years (and some hard feelings) was not, as might be supposed, because Rykodisc was re-releasing all their early albums and it was time to cash in. Nothing with Costello is ever as simple as that. Costello spent much of 1992 working on The Juliet Letters, a collaboration with the classical chamber group the Brodsky Quartet. During that time—and for a lark—he wrote and recorded 10 rock ‘n’ roll songs for British pop singer Wendy James, knocking them off with Attractions drummer Pete Thomas in the studio where Costello had recorded his first album in 1976. The fun and ease of that side-project made him imagine that he could write and record his own next rock album with the same abandon. So he hatched the unlikely plan of cutting it in December of ‘92, so that the spring of ‘93 could see the
release of the sophisticated Juliet Letters, the ironic Wendy James project and a new album of rocking Costello tunes which would be called Idiophone. Sometime around Christmas of ‘92 Costello closed his eyes long enough to admit to himself that some of the Idiophone material wasn’t up to his standard. So he postponed work on his rock album until the summer of ‘93, alter he was done touring with the Brodsky Quartet.
While he was doing those projects, Costello was also writing the book and songs for a stage musical to debut at England’s Nottingham Playhouse next year, as well as composing for other singers, learning to read and write music, and even taking a one-month trip to Florence for a crash course in Italian. Costello mocks his own eclecticism in a song on Brutal Youth called “My Science Fiction Twin,” about an Elvis Costello clone who “filled up his purse dictating verse while painting masterpieces. His almost universal excellence is starting to disturb me. They asked how in the world he does all these things. He answered, ‘Superbly.’”
By the summer of 1993, when Costello, Pete Thomas and producer Mitchell Froom resumed work on the postponed rock album, they knew that they wanted a stripped-down record of a small band playing live together in the studio. Attractions pianist Steve Nieve had played on some of the Idiophone sessions. It had gone well and he was asked back. Costello again played bass on a couple of tracks, but his ideas were ahead of his technique so he asked Nick Lowe, who produced Costello's first five albums, to take over. Half of the album was cut that way, before Lowe’s attention began to wander and they had to find another bassist. Mitchell Froom finally suggested a bass player he’d used on a Suzanne Vega album—former Attraction Bruce Thomas.
At first Costello resisted. Although there had been lots of bruised feelings and petty feuds between all four musicians by the time Elvis Costello and the Attractions closed up shop in 1986, the biggest gulf was between Elvis and Bruce. It had gotten worse when Bruce published his novel The Big Wheel, a mocking roman a clef about life with E.C. Still, the others told Elvis that Bruce had grown up a lot, and he agreed to call him and at least talk.
“I said to Mitchell, ‘I just don’t think we’ll get along, I don’t think it will be any fun,’” Costello says. “But we talked and, really, we saw the very best side of Bruce, he was really funny, he played really well, he had lots of good ideas. We’d both had our respective say about stuff. It’s disappointingly unlike People magazine. This isn’t a reunion record where we sort of went, ‘I love you, guy! I forgive you for every mean thing you ever said about me!’ We’re not like that. I just think life’s really a bit too short to bother about things. Everybody’s had a good scream and shout and it really doesn’t matter anymore. While I don’t think it would be a very good idea for us to be trapped together in a crowded lift for several years—which is similar to our first eight years together—we can play together an awful lot better than a lot of other people.”
The first time in seven years that Costello and the Attractions recorded together was on August 2, 1993, at Olympic Studios in London. Steve Nieve was wearing shoulder-length hair (which he would shave off before the album was over) and everybody looked a bit droopier than they had in the grand old days of punk rock. Pete Thomas had been the center of communications between the band members during their long vacation, playing with Costello on various projects and even touring with Steve as temporary members of Squeeze. While Froom was getting set to roll tape Pete was trying to get Steve to recall road stories (“You must remember that girl on Nantucket? With the garden and the Depeche Mode tape?”) but the keyboard player was denying all memory.
Unlike their rowdy past, the four musicians treated each other with Alphonse & Gaston courtesy. Clearly each was determined not to be the one who started the fight that broke up the group again. They went into the studio, picked up their instruments and began playing a song called “Distorted Angel.” The first run-through felt tentative. Elvis expressed doubts about Steve’s rather baroque piano part, so for the second take Steve moved to organ. They counted off and quickly landed on something close to their beloved Armed Forces style. Elvis busted a string a few bars in but they kept going.
Listening to a playback, Steve sat off in the corner silently, Bruce and Pete were very enthusiastic, and Elvis had doubts. He said he wondered if in going for a great sound they’d lost the song. Bruce dug a cassette demo of the tune out of his bag and they all expressed amazement at how much slower it was than what they’d been playing. The lyric (about the shame of a little boy who gets caught playing doctor with a little girl) had gone from a poignant lament to a mad jumble.
The producer conceded that the sense of the song had been lost, but that sound was so great... Elvis wondered if there wasn't a way to have both. Looking for that compromise they tried cutting a version with Elvis playing the first verse accompanied only by his acoustic guitar—to establish the story—and the Attractions crashing in on the second. They next tried that same approach with Pete drumming a sort of Egyptian pattern behind the acoustic verse. That went nowhere. Elvis asked Bruce to calm his hyper bass part; Bruce did but on each subsequent take it regained a bit of frenzy. The Attractions kept trying to bust out and Elvis kept trying to hold them down. Finally Pete said loudly, “I thought we were making a rock record!”
Elvis said, “It can rock without losing the meaning of the song.”
Then the courtesies kicked in again — Elvis asked Steve if he was sick of playing the tune, Steve said not at all. Another take and then Elvis asked Pete if he wanted to go on to another number. Pete said no, no,it’s fine. Finally they finished a take that everyone pretended to like and pronounced the day’s work done. The pressure off, they started playing a tricky song called “You Tripped at Every Step,” nailing it perfectly on the first take. From there on, the recording sailed along. “Distorted Angel” was sacrificed for the sake of getting the band past its opening jitters and into their rock ‘n’ roll shoes.
Looking at that first day of recording now, Costello says, “We played like idiots ‘cause everyone was so anxious to get it right. We were trying really hard and everybody was really, really positive and trying to keep on a really up note, but the truth is we were playing really badly because we were playing too hard. When we do that the sound just closes down. We’re aware of it; the harder you hit the drum the smaller it actually sounds, and the bass gets very pointy and you hit the guitar so hard it becomes just distorted white noise—you can’t hear any tone. It was just that everybody was excited.”
Pete Thomas says that the fact that the band nailed “You Tripped at Every Step” on the first take was crucial to morale. “Mitchell just came on the talkback and said, ‘That’s it,” Pete recalls. “When we all stood there listening to it, it couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a real lift for everyone. I think everyone’s little problems fell away and there were four very thrilled chaps looking at each other. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Having toured with Costello after the break-up of the Attractions, Pete says that now “I’m the only bloke at the rehearsals who’s gonna know all the songs! Poor old Steve rang me the other day and said, ‘I’ve come across this very odd few years of things I’m not fully conversant with. There seem to be some records here that don’t appear to have me on them!’” Pete lets out a cackle. “Steve and Bruce have got to knuckle down and learn ‘Brilliant Mistake’ and all this other stuff.”
Once those parts are learned, Pete says, formality will go out the window: “This is just like, Buy a box of fireworks, put it in the middle of the stage, throw a Molotov cocktail into it and run! I think that’s what people want to see and I think at its best that’s what it’s going to be. It’s not like, ‘Okay, we’ll really hold the rhythm down,’ or ‘Let’s get the groove.’ With this band we’re all mad—we get by in the real world, but when we get together it’s a fireworks display.”
Costello stresses that beyond this year the group has no definite plans. “I have no sense of how valuable this is in a mercenary way,” Costello says. “I think it’s more in the minds of writers or record company people who somehow imagine it’s going to put right everything that they think went wrong with me in between. It’s not like the difference between what’s-his-name, Monty from Pink Floyd.. .Roger Waters. It’s not like the difference between going out as Roger Waters or going out as Pink Floyd. It’s not a commodity, like the Who reforming. I’m not trying to demean it because this was a good group that perhaps didn’t get as much credit as it might have done. And of course I get asked all the time if we’re going to play together again. But equally, I get asked, ‘Are you ever going to sing with John Hiatt again?’ or ‘Are you ever going to record those Wendy James songs?”
THOSE WENDY James songs’ are not the little sideshow Costello tries to make them. Their story starts two years ago. Costello never had a driver’s license till he moved to Ireland but, unlike the chickens who assume they cannot learn anything new after age 18, Costello figured he could figure it out, So he signed up for driving lessons as soon as he got to Dublin, bought a car and got his license. Admiration for his initiative was only slightly compromised by the fact that when he pulled up at a Dublin hotel in January of 1992, he was driving a loaner to replace the car he had wrecked in a recent crash.
As he whizzed past the lampposts, walls and sheep that demark the border between Dublin city and its rural surroundings, Costello stuck in a cassette he had just recorded. He had been approached by a representative of Wendy James to write a song for her new solo album, and in atypical burst of perverse enthusiasm, he had knocked off 10. Costello said he would send the finished tape to James with instructions to cut all of them or none. The music came blasting out of the car speakers with the venom of the Clash and quickly turned that reference into a joke about trendies ‘still digging up the bones of Strummer and Jones.” Further tracks found him at his most caustic, describing some unlucky singer this way: ‘She danced like an ambulance, talked like a cartoon mouse/She took off her clothes and it brought down the house.”
Song after song sang on the car stereo as Costello played slalom with sheep and goats and the question finally had to be asked: ‘Elvis, are you sure you want to give this away? It’s like This Year’s Model Part 2!” Costello laughed and said, ‘That’s exactly why! I’ve done all that before, I can do it in my sleep.”
So he gave the album to Wendy James and she re-recorded it all with studio musicians replaying the parts and pretty much strangled the thing in its cradle. Elvis never made any comment about James’ version of his tunes, even when she cooked up a promo campaign suggesting that he had written them out of response to a soul-baring letter she had sent him about her life, art and ambitions. He just went back to work on The Juliet Letters and let the Wendy songs sink into the atmosphere. But hopefully the world will someday get to hear Costello’s versions of London’s Brilliant,” “Do You Know What I’m Saying” and “Basement Kiss,” because they are great work, even if the artist who cranked them out doesn’t think so.
Costello tries to brush off serious discussion of those songs, but he can’t pretend there was no commitment behind the Solzhenitsyn-like (well, at least Woody Allen—like) cultural indictment of these lyrics: Boys will be boys, blood must be spilt, and nothing like show business ever was built for letting your critical function wilt under the weight of your liberal guilt.
“I suppose that has to do with rap,” Costello says. “A lot of white writers are really deeply afraid, particularly in these days when you can’t say anything that’s not p.c., to say, ‘It’s wrong to say that about women because somebody will go and do that because you’re on TV saying it,dummy!" To paraphrase Network. If I said half the things said
by either the dumb ravers or some of the more obnoxious rappers they would be down on me like a witchhunt. And it’s nothing to do with freedom of speech. I’m just saying it’s stupid! It’s stupid to say you want to shoot people or rape people. You don’t need a PMRC, you don’t need a sticker on a record, because I can just not listen and I have the right to say, ‘This is dumb and ugly.’
“There’s a lot of dumb and ugly things in the world. It could just as well apply to the lingering cucumbers-down-the-trousers boys, but they’re now kind of quaint. It’s funny to think they used to be thought of as a threat because now it’s sort of coy. I saw country music television last night and there was some guy I never heard of doing some song with a girl in silhouette wrapping her legs around him. It looked like a Whitesnake video from the ‘80s. There’s progress for you! They can do that in Nashville now!”
Later on, Costello returns to the subject, bringing his debating skills to hear on several sides of the argument: “Somehow retrospectively people like Barry White are being endowed with hipness, which they didn’t have. Whereas the cucumber-down-the-trousers merchants have been drummed out of town. Or you just accept them for what they are: It’s like going to the circus. Even Rod Stewart has managed somehow to sing some of his old songs. Okay, he’s fessed up now—’Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ is a bit naff, but I think there’s a lot of tenderness in ‘You Wear It Well.’ That shouldn’t be overlooked just because he did ‘Hot Legs.’ But then again, ‘Hot Legs’ is a true song, too. Nobody said we all had to be redeemed at the end of it! It’s not church. For all the screaming and shouting about sex—that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be about isn’t it? This is the water-drinking ‘90s rearing its ugly head:We’re not allowed to enjoy any illicit lust for drugs or bad sex. It’s not on anymore. Particularly if you’re older! Heaven forfend that you’d still own up!”
Costello sticks his nose back into that particular rock ‘n’ roll tradition on “Thirteen Steps Lead Down,” the first single from Brutal Youth. “I suppose some people will think I’m being deliberately provocative because a lot of people get a lot of help from those 12-step plans,” Costello says, “but the truth is that the way down has to be one more step. Whether or not you believe 12 steps will help you back up, 13 steps are definitely the way down.
“I wrote ‘Thirteen Steps Lead Down’ in Spain. I went to see where Franco is buried. It’s a big tunnel under a mountain. It’s such a sick mausoleum because 100,000 people are buried in this tunnel from either side of the civil war, and he’s buried at the center with a sort of altar. It’s a retrospective gesture of reconciliation, avoiding the fact that if not for him they wouldn’t all have been dead. It was guarded by these futuristic, literally distorted angels, these fascistic gods.
“Nearby is the palace where all the Spanish kings are buried. Whereas the awful imagery of Franco’s tomb is so unsubtle and so typical of fascists, at least the despots of the past really knew how to do it. You go down these green marble stairs and there they are, all in beautiful gilded coffins with death masks. And it’s 13 steps. Of course it would be, to be ominous. I was looking for a phrase for obsessive and repetitive behavior; the girl is in some cheap bondage scene in the first verse and in the last she’s in the bondage of luxury and nothing really much in between except unreliable lovers.”
Bimbos and the men who love them often come up for disparagement in his songs. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether Costello (who declined the promotionally precious Playboy interview in 1991 because Playboy is sexist) is at heart a modern feminist or an old-fashioned moralist. “I’m going to get stick again on this record that I hate women and stuff,’ he shrugs. “But I don’t—I hate men!”
NOTHING COSTELLO has done in recent years divided his partisans as much as The Juliet Letters, his collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet. To some it was confirmation of Costello’s genius, to others it was proof he’d lost his mind. Paul Cassidy of the Brodskys recalls his group’s initial feelings as their friendship with Costello led to informal sessions playing together at his home: “Obviously we thought to ourselves, ‘This guy’s a bloody legend.’ We never said that to each other, but the thought goes through your head. What all five of us discussed at great length was that the crossovers between rock and classical that had gone on in the past, in our opinions, were almost entirely disasters. We were very, very wary of that. We never said, ‘Hey, let’s make an album,’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be great doing a tour.’ We just let the material come out. We soon realized that in fact we didn’t need drums, pianos, guitars or anything. What presented itself was the possibility of actually writing a song cycle. We did not try to be a rock group and Elvis did not try to be a diva. It’s not Bobby McFerrin pretending to be an opera singer or Michael Tilson Thomas pretending he’s in a rock band.”
Asked what surprised him most about the whole project, Cassidy says, “Elvis. He’s a very special guy. He knows more about classical music than I do. He’s obviously gone into it in great depth over the last six or seven years. When we started working together he wasn’t able to read or write music, so the initial workings were quite slow because he would put his ideas on tape or play them to us, and we would be busily writing these things down, which is difficult and time-consuming. His ideas were coming thick and fast, but he’s not the greatest piano player in the world. Sometimes we’d just look at each other and say, ‘This guy’s off his rocker,’ ‘cause we couldn’t hear what he was hearing. It was well-formed in his brain, but it wasn’t coming through his fingers. So he just decided to learn how to read music—which he did in about six weeks! Elvis started turning up with his ideas written out in four Staves. Absolutely
amazing.”
On first listening, The Juliet Letters sounded so unusual that some people never made it back for a second listening. They missed something good. Once you got used to hearing a rock singer swooping and crooning over a string quartet, the songs themselves started to emerge, and the songs on Juliet Letters were extraordinary. They came to further life during the concert tour Costello and the Brodskys undertook in the spring of ‘93. On stage no one could miss the humor in some of the tunes (On “I Almost Had a Weakness” Costello rolled his eyes and gestured like Groucho) and the poignancy of others. The audiences went wild, demanding encore after encore.
Following a triumphant sell-out at New York’s Town Hall, Costello greeted well wishers at a post-show party. While he was chatting with two people and shaking hands with a third, a woman approached him and said quietly that she was Constance, a female soldier who had sent him a frightened letter from the Gulf War that he set to music in “I Thought I’d Write to Juliet.” Costello has met every sort of lunatic fan and hustler, but a few words from this timid stranger convinced him she really was the woman whose letter had inspired his song. But another V.I.P. appeared in his face and by the time he’d excused himself and gone looking, Constance was gone.
“I’ve had a greater variety of interesting letters, good and bad, about The Juliet Letters than any other piece of work I’ve ever been involved in,” Costello says. “You know, a quarter of a million people bought the record, which is a fantastic amount for a chamber music recording; there’s nothing comparable. Of course, you could say, ‘You’re just being clever by calling it that; it’s a pop record dressed up as chamber music.’ But it’s a fact, it is some sort of chamber music without any obvious ancestors. Even if people’s invitation into it was created by my name on the credits, that’s still fine. They would have taken it back to the shop if they didn’t like it. Some undoubtedly did. But in the main when people gave it a little bit of time it came through to them and in fact revealed itself to be a much more open record emotionally than some other stuff I’ve been involved with. But then, it wasn’t wholly my work. It was a
collaborative effort.
‘Of course, there were those people in the classical world talking very loudly about ‘naive harmonies’ or ‘wrong harmonies.’ Well, wrong harmonies compared to who? Compared to Bach? Compared to Stravinsky? Compared to Ornette Coleman? I have every confidence that once the style war that goes on about any sort of new or different piece is fought and lost in the minds of fevered criticism, people will keep returning to those songs.”
COSTELLO HAS an almost touching faith in his audience to understand what he’s on about in his music. With Brutal Youth, he figures his listeners will pick upon the fact that ‘London’s Brilliant Parade” is a tribute to and send-up of the Kinks, on which he plays dobro as Ray Davies did on “Lola.” He thinks pop fans with good ears will find it as funny as he does that the bass on the Faces-like ‘Just About Glad” plays the melody line of the song, because that’s what Ron Wood often does. (He thinks it’s a further hoot that the Faces always sang randy songs about getting laid and in his version the singer is relieved that he did not get laid.)
Costello assumes his listeners get inside musical jokes because he himself always catches such things. Costello’s father was a well—known British big band singer and trumpet player, and young Declan grew up surrounded by music. The breadth of his musical vocabulary is sometimes spooky. Six years ago Costello agreed to be a judge in Musician’s Best Unsigned Band contest. Sitting in T-Bone Burnett’s California apartment, Costello impressed his fellow judges not because after hearing one song he could point out each entrant’s influences and references (any number of otherwise useless critics could do that), but because he kept correctly deducing all their personal situations.
“This girl sounds like she plays in little cafes by the ocean,” he’d say. She did, on Cape Cod.
“This is a band of well-off college students whose parents bought them their gear when they were at school in.. not New York... Boston!”
All true; it was like playing ‘Name That Tune” with Kreskin.
Not to claim Costello has psychic powers, but how would you feel if you took a copy of Brutal Youth to New Zealand, put it on in a car touring the countryside, and when it got to the song “Rocking Horse Road” told another passenger, “Oh, this song is about a street Elvis got lost on somewhere in this country,” only to have the driver turn around and announce, “Rocking Horse Road? Why that’s it, right over there!”
Bring that absurd coincidence up to Costello and he just says, “So now you know what I mean.”
Well, maybe it could use a little explanation. Rocking Horse Road is a long street down the middle of a peninsula near Christ-church. Costello was drawn there because the area has the same name as the Liverpool resort where he spent summers in his youth— New Brighton. After hours wandering the beach in the hot sun, Costello stumbled, disoriented, through the suburban neighborhood nearby and found himself gripped by an unreasonable panic.
“It just became like the twilight zone,” he says. “I started to think later on, when I reflected on it, that that’s many people’s ideal. That could have been the life I aspired to when I was a schoolboy; to have a nice house on a nice street. I didn’t want to write ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’: It’s more personal than that. This is one way it could have gone for me and then it didn’t.”
And that is the real theme of Brutal Youth. The soulful ‘Rocking Horse Road,” the goofy ‘My Science Fiction Twin,” the biting ‘All the Rage” and the elegiac ‘Favorite Hour” all deal, in one way or another, with the notion of another self who lives the life Costello might have lived. Brutal Youth is full of doppelgangers, secret sharers and bizarro worlds.
‘Some people have imaginary friends,” Costello says. ‘Well, I have my imaginary friend when I’m feeling dark; it’s ‘My Science Fiction Twin.’ The first verse of that song is the flip side of the last verse of ‘Rocking Horse Road.’ Even if I’d done this job I still could have ended up living in Weybridge with a creation of the plastic surgeon.
‘There are all these people who live these apparently hollow lives of celebrity in Hello magazine and stagger from one of those appraisals to another. I wonder what the life in between is like? Perhaps it’s not unlike this, perhaps I shouldn’t judge them. I’m not really judging them—I’m saying I could have been that.
‘Also, it’s about how if you have a tabloid life and then you write about it in your songs as well, that’s fair enough for as long as people are fascinated. But I’ve always resisted that. Certainly people know a little more about me than I’m really happy about, but I can hardly complain if I put intimate details in songs. But I use them as the material out of which to make songs which are about something else entirely. I mean, I don’t think I’ve written too many weepy here are my wounds songs. Because I think in the long run they’re useless beyond being cathartic for the writer.
“All the Rage’ is the other side of the coin from ‘Science Fiction Twin.’ You realize that the things you’re saying, you’re saying to yourself as well. Which is the best kind of accusative song.”
On ‘All the Rage” Costello sings,’ Don’t try to touch my heart, it’s darker than you think/And don’t try to read my mind because it’s full of disappearing ink.” Coming late on the album, those lines have the effect of summoning the ghost of that young Elvis Costello Ryko is currently reissuing to tell the world,Just because we’ve been on this 15-year journey together, don’t think you know me any better now than you did then.
‘Yeah,” Costello nods, ‘but I’m also saying it to myself. Maybe that’s the distance, maybe that’s the award that’s been given to you for the journey. I don’t want any long-service medals, I don’t want any sympathy or special
consideration because of it. But I do honestly mean what I say on the bridge. If anybody’s on my back then I would say that the bridge of that song is about as close to it as I’ve been able to put in a song. I will just go along the way I want to and there isn’t really anything that anybody can much do about it.”
The bridge Costello’s referring to goes:
I’ll probably play along left to my own devices
Spare me the drone of your advice
The sins of garter and gin confession may delay
You know the measuring pole, the merry boots of clay?
I’ve heard it all before. You’ll say it anyway.
Costello was going to close the album with ‘All the Rage,” but thought that might seem like he was trying to be 22 again. So he added a coda, a song he wrote when he was at Dartington, a British college/music retreat, where he and the Brodsky Quartet put the finishing touches on The Juliet Letters in the summer of 1992. “Favorite Hour” is a gently melancholy song that implies something really sinister—perhaps a condemned man waiting for his hanging—before coming back to campus for the final verse, which contains the phrase, “Now there’s a tragic waste of brutal youth.”
‘We were leaving Dartington when I wrote the last verse,” Costello says. ‘It was a bit like a more reflective version of ‘Science Fiction Twin’ or ‘Rocking Horse Road.’ It is about the options that have come up and gone away. One of them was college life. Sometimes you see colleges and they look so welcoming, and I never did that. When I was down there I saw a chapel which was now a music hail, beautiful trees and gardens with Henry Moore sculptures we stumbled on in the woods. I thought, ‘This could have been the life I had.’ On the last verse I deliberately made all the imagery like when you read translations of German poetry and Schubert; it’s all about babbling brooks and stuff. It is probably beautiful in German, but when you read the English translation it’s sort of trite. Maybe it’s trite in German, I don’t know—but it doesn’t really matter because the music carries it. So I said the waving branches are waving
goodbye, and the murmuring brook had better speak up.
‘Really, what it comes down to is, I don’t count my blessings! So you’ve got ‘All the Rage,’ all that rage that you can’t ever get free of. And then in ‘Favorite Hour’ it’s ‘blessings I don’t count/Small mercies and such.’ It’s as simple as that. When somebody gets sick you realize you say not, ‘It isn’t me, thank goodness’ but ‘It isn’t me, what a surprise!’”
Costello has been talking about this stuff for hours now, and he’s getting restless. He is wary of getting into what he calls, “The ramblings of the tortured I AM, the pampered artist. This is the dilemma in writing songs. You can write about a totally unique experience, so unique to yourself that it is almost meaningless to other people. But you still have some distant admiration for the song, because it conjures up a mood which you have not necessarily experienced. I’ve written songs like that and in retrospect realized that they don’t communicate a universal experience. They don’t even pretend to. Kid About It’ off Imperial Bedroom is about as obscure and abstracts lyric as you could imagine, yet it definitely means something.”
So how rarified is too rarified?
“Joni Mitchell’s talking about fairly rarified things on Court and Spark and particularly Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Costello says. “I still think they’re her two best records, not the earlier ones that people love so much or the ones where it just becomes either too selfconscious or, probably, just too rarified. That can happen. It happens to most.”
Costello looks past his window. The lights arc coming on in Ireland and it’s time to think about dinner. “I’ve been lucky to not be so famous,” he says. “I can still move around. I discussed this once with Dylan: the difficulty of maintaining some perspective. That was the thing I was most curious about. You can have the most fantastic imagination but you’ve still got to have some substance to draw from. You can draw from other people’s experiences and piece it together with other things, but it won’t always ring true. I also don’t think you can live an experimental life just so you can have subject matter. I know — I’ve done it.
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Musical Youth
Inn a previous Musician interview Elvis Costello pleaded for the return of his stolen Telecaster. He got it hack, but now prefers the Tele with which he’d replaced it. A Fender loyalist, he also has two Jazzmasters. The “magic” guitar on Brutal Youth, he says, is a Gibson E160 sunburst that inspired him to write sis songs Imost of which made the albumi on the day he got it Elvis is still playing through two Vos AC3O amps. His acoustic guitars include a Ferrington, a Martin 12-string and a Martin 0-28. “My main Martin is 00018, a prewar I’m getting fixed up.” He uses D’Addario strings on his acoustics, and Ernie Balls on his electrics, “heavier than most people’s — I like the sound of the strain.”
Costello says it’s small hands, not friendship with McCartney, that made him choose his old Hofner Beatle bass and Hofner President . Still he burrowed Pete Thomas’s Precision on “Kinder Murder.” Nick Lowe also played a Precision on the album. Elvis’s wife Cait keeps a Precision in their living room that Elvis often plays. Bruce Thomas, however approached this album with a Jerry Jones recreation of a Danelectro Longhorn. Pete Thomas played a Gretsch drumkit with what Elvis calls “the very bright characteristic Attractions snare. It goes konk” and Zildjian cymbals.
Steve Nieve played an assortment of cheap upright pianos purchased for the sessions so that he could stick tacks into the hammers and other mutilations not acceptable with studio rentals. He also arranged a little house of keyboards so that if the track called for a switch from, say, piano to organ on the chorus, he made the change live in the studio, rather than have to go back and overdub. Around him were a Hammond Organ, a Vox Continental, Wurlitzer and Roland electric pianos. Although a Chamberlain pops up once or twice on Brutal Youth, the “Mitchell Froom subculture” did not appear much this time out. They used Sennheiser 441 mlkes for vocals, Shure SMS7s on most of the instruments, and Neumann KM-IOOs with binaural heads on the drums.
In the middle of E.C.’s music room sits a Roland RD-bOO, MIDI’d up for his film scoring, and a Bechstein grand piano. Over in the corner are a couple of old Yamaha synths and an antique harmonium Mitchell Froom dragged into the Brutal Youth sessions and Costello liberated.
Musician, March 1994
Elvis Costello and his invisible twin
by Bill Flanagan
Q: How many cranky rock legends does it take to reunite the Attractions, cut several simultaneous albums, write a play, compose and perform with a classical quartet, and learn Italian, musical notation, and how to drive a car at the same time? A: Two.
Elvis Costello is in the music room of his home in the hills overlooking Dublin, Ireland, talking about his new song “Pony Street,” a pointed dialog between a mom who grew up in the ‘60s and her embarrassed, conservative daughter. It would make a great duet for Michelle and Chynna Phillips. “Instead of ‘Eat up your greens,’ the scenario is basically, ‘Come on, take your barbiturates,” Costello says. “You’ve got to get into those spandex trousers and go down to the Rainbow and act like a slut and don’t you comeback here trying to marry that accountant!’ I think it probably does happen quite a bit—the rock ‘n’ roll mom who’s a little bit past the look now. Everything has become an off-the-peg fashion. You get a little bit of punk with a little bit of the ‘60s mixed up with a bit of bondage, but it’s all had its original context surgically removed so it’s no longer dangerous. If a kid wants to wear a £500 jacket with safety pins in it, it’s no longer a statement of destroying that—it’s just a fashion accessory. I’m not saying, Oh,for the old days of rebellion ‘cause I never did any of that shit myself, but it’s ironic.
“One of the things I got the story off was a review I read of Guns N’ Roses in one of the English papers. The journalist asked this seven-year-old girl which one of Guns N’ Roses she liked most and she said, ‘I like Axl ‘cause my mummy says he puts a cucumber down his trousers.’ And I thought, well, there it is—there’s rock ‘n’ roll neutered forever. And maybe thankfully, as well. Maybe that side of it is dead and buried—although there’s some serious practitioners still around, heaven knows.”
And as long as they are around, Costello will be there making fun of them. He will be 40 next summer, and he has reached the point in his prolific career where his early albums are being reissued in boxed sets, but Costello can still get as worked up as any teenager. On his new album, Brutal Youth, he returned to recording with his estranged band, the Attractions, with whom he will tour later this year. He has more projects underway, and more albums in the can.
“You’d think, ‘Well I’ve written everything I’ve got to say now,’” he continues. “But as you get older you look farther, and you look at yourself and you change. It means there’s still stuff to sing about. There’s no rule that says you have to get better and better and better until you explode. Or more refined in any sense of the word. The writing doesn’t have to get leaner—you could be more effusive one time and the next time it could be really sparse.
“And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s not just words! What’s a song about? It’s about music as well. For instance, ‘All the Rage,’ which is a much more accusative song, was originally set to the figure at the front of ‘Science Fiction Twin.’ It was going to be a much faster song. It didn’t work at all. It was a more angry song but it didn’t sound convincing. Sometimes when you have something right in your heart you don’t even pause to think about it; it just comes out. It’s a horrible moment when you realize it hasn’t achieved the effect that you wanted, even though it’s satisfied your desire to revenge yourself about whatever it is that’s getting under your skin. Even if it’s supposed to be aggressive or enraged, if it just sounds like hot air then that’s wrong. That’s why ‘Beyond Belief’ on Imperial Bedroom sounds like it does rather than a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s a rather odd combination of a low, very intimate vocal and an out track. Because I redubbed the vocal on it an octave lower and completely changed the melody, which gave it this unsettling thing of the band going full tilt and a voice very close up—something you couldn’t possibly achieve live. Because I wasn’t happy with the way the song came over being yelled over the top of the backing; it just sounded like something I’d done before.”
Avoiding doing things he’s done before keeps Costello on the front edge of his talent. Even his decision to reunite with the Attractions after seven years (and some hard feelings) was not, as might be supposed, because Rykodisc was re-releasing all their early albums and it was time to cash in. Nothing with Costello is ever as simple as that. Costello spent much of 1992 working on The Juliet Letters, a collaboration with the classical chamber group the Brodsky Quartet. During that time—and for a lark—he wrote and recorded 10 rock ‘n’ roll songs for British pop singer Wendy James, knocking them off with Attractions drummer Pete Thomas in the studio where Costello had recorded his first album in 1976. The fun and ease of that side-project made him imagine that he could write and record his own next rock album with the same abandon. So he hatched the unlikely plan of cutting it in December of ‘92, so that the spring of ‘93 could see the
release of the sophisticated Juliet Letters, the ironic Wendy James project and a new album of rocking Costello tunes which would be called Idiophone. Sometime around Christmas of ‘92 Costello closed his eyes long enough to admit to himself that some of the Idiophone material wasn’t up to his standard. So he postponed work on his rock album until the summer of ‘93, alter he was done touring with the Brodsky Quartet.
While he was doing those projects, Costello was also writing the book and songs for a stage musical to debut at England’s Nottingham Playhouse next year, as well as composing for other singers, learning to read and write music, and even taking a one-month trip to Florence for a crash course in Italian. Costello mocks his own eclecticism in a song on Brutal Youth called “My Science Fiction Twin,” about an Elvis Costello clone who “filled up his purse dictating verse while painting masterpieces. His almost universal excellence is starting to disturb me. They asked how in the world he does all these things. He answered, ‘Superbly.’”
By the summer of 1993, when Costello, Pete Thomas and producer Mitchell Froom resumed work on the postponed rock album, they knew that they wanted a stripped-down record of a small band playing live together in the studio. Attractions pianist Steve Nieve had played on some of the Idiophone sessions. It had gone well and he was asked back. Costello again played bass on a couple of tracks, but his ideas were ahead of his technique so he asked Nick Lowe, who produced Costello's first five albums, to take over. Half of the album was cut that way, before Lowe’s attention began to wander and they had to find another bassist. Mitchell Froom finally suggested a bass player he’d used on a Suzanne Vega album—former Attraction Bruce Thomas.
At first Costello resisted. Although there had been lots of bruised feelings and petty feuds between all four musicians by the time Elvis Costello and the Attractions closed up shop in 1986, the biggest gulf was between Elvis and Bruce. It had gotten worse when Bruce published his novel The Big Wheel, a mocking roman a clef about life with E.C. Still, the others told Elvis that Bruce had grown up a lot, and he agreed to call him and at least talk.
“I said to Mitchell, ‘I just don’t think we’ll get along, I don’t think it will be any fun,’” Costello says. “But we talked and, really, we saw the very best side of Bruce, he was really funny, he played really well, he had lots of good ideas. We’d both had our respective say about stuff. It’s disappointingly unlike People magazine. This isn’t a reunion record where we sort of went, ‘I love you, guy! I forgive you for every mean thing you ever said about me!’ We’re not like that. I just think life’s really a bit too short to bother about things. Everybody’s had a good scream and shout and it really doesn’t matter anymore. While I don’t think it would be a very good idea for us to be trapped together in a crowded lift for several years—which is similar to our first eight years together—we can play together an awful lot better than a lot of other people.”
The first time in seven years that Costello and the Attractions recorded together was on August 2, 1993, at Olympic Studios in London. Steve Nieve was wearing shoulder-length hair (which he would shave off before the album was over) and everybody looked a bit droopier than they had in the grand old days of punk rock. Pete Thomas had been the center of communications between the band members during their long vacation, playing with Costello on various projects and even touring with Steve as temporary members of Squeeze. While Froom was getting set to roll tape Pete was trying to get Steve to recall road stories (“You must remember that girl on Nantucket? With the garden and the Depeche Mode tape?”) but the keyboard player was denying all memory.
Unlike their rowdy past, the four musicians treated each other with Alphonse & Gaston courtesy. Clearly each was determined not to be the one who started the fight that broke up the group again. They went into the studio, picked up their instruments and began playing a song called “Distorted Angel.” The first run-through felt tentative. Elvis expressed doubts about Steve’s rather baroque piano part, so for the second take Steve moved to organ. They counted off and quickly landed on something close to their beloved Armed Forces style. Elvis busted a string a few bars in but they kept going.
Listening to a playback, Steve sat off in the corner silently, Bruce and Pete were very enthusiastic, and Elvis had doubts. He said he wondered if in going for a great sound they’d lost the song. Bruce dug a cassette demo of the tune out of his bag and they all expressed amazement at how much slower it was than what they’d been playing. The lyric (about the shame of a little boy who gets caught playing doctor with a little girl) had gone from a poignant lament to a mad jumble.
The producer conceded that the sense of the song had been lost, but that sound was so great... Elvis wondered if there wasn't a way to have both. Looking for that compromise they tried cutting a version with Elvis playing the first verse accompanied only by his acoustic guitar—to establish the story—and the Attractions crashing in on the second. They next tried that same approach with Pete drumming a sort of Egyptian pattern behind the acoustic verse. That went nowhere. Elvis asked Bruce to calm his hyper bass part; Bruce did but on each subsequent take it regained a bit of frenzy. The Attractions kept trying to bust out and Elvis kept trying to hold them down. Finally Pete said loudly, “I thought we were making a rock record!”
Elvis said, “It can rock without losing the meaning of the song.”
Then the courtesies kicked in again — Elvis asked Steve if he was sick of playing the tune, Steve said not at all. Another take and then Elvis asked Pete if he wanted to go on to another number. Pete said no, no,it’s fine. Finally they finished a take that everyone pretended to like and pronounced the day’s work done. The pressure off, they started playing a tricky song called “You Tripped at Every Step,” nailing it perfectly on the first take. From there on, the recording sailed along. “Distorted Angel” was sacrificed for the sake of getting the band past its opening jitters and into their rock ‘n’ roll shoes.
Looking at that first day of recording now, Costello says, “We played like idiots ‘cause everyone was so anxious to get it right. We were trying really hard and everybody was really, really positive and trying to keep on a really up note, but the truth is we were playing really badly because we were playing too hard. When we do that the sound just closes down. We’re aware of it; the harder you hit the drum the smaller it actually sounds, and the bass gets very pointy and you hit the guitar so hard it becomes just distorted white noise—you can’t hear any tone. It was just that everybody was excited.”
Pete Thomas says that the fact that the band nailed “You Tripped at Every Step” on the first take was crucial to morale. “Mitchell just came on the talkback and said, ‘That’s it,” Pete recalls. “When we all stood there listening to it, it couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a real lift for everyone. I think everyone’s little problems fell away and there were four very thrilled chaps looking at each other. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Having toured with Costello after the break-up of the Attractions, Pete says that now “I’m the only bloke at the rehearsals who’s gonna know all the songs! Poor old Steve rang me the other day and said, ‘I’ve come across this very odd few years of things I’m not fully conversant with. There seem to be some records here that don’t appear to have me on them!’” Pete lets out a cackle. “Steve and Bruce have got to knuckle down and learn ‘Brilliant Mistake’ and all this other stuff.”
Once those parts are learned, Pete says, formality will go out the window: “This is just like, Buy a box of fireworks, put it in the middle of the stage, throw a Molotov cocktail into it and run! I think that’s what people want to see and I think at its best that’s what it’s going to be. It’s not like, ‘Okay, we’ll really hold the rhythm down,’ or ‘Let’s get the groove.’ With this band we’re all mad—we get by in the real world, but when we get together it’s a fireworks display.”
Costello stresses that beyond this year the group has no definite plans. “I have no sense of how valuable this is in a mercenary way,” Costello says. “I think it’s more in the minds of writers or record company people who somehow imagine it’s going to put right everything that they think went wrong with me in between. It’s not like the difference between what’s-his-name, Monty from Pink Floyd.. .Roger Waters. It’s not like the difference between going out as Roger Waters or going out as Pink Floyd. It’s not a commodity, like the Who reforming. I’m not trying to demean it because this was a good group that perhaps didn’t get as much credit as it might have done. And of course I get asked all the time if we’re going to play together again. But equally, I get asked, ‘Are you ever going to sing with John Hiatt again?’ or ‘Are you ever going to record those Wendy James songs?”
THOSE WENDY James songs’ are not the little sideshow Costello tries to make them. Their story starts two years ago. Costello never had a driver’s license till he moved to Ireland but, unlike the chickens who assume they cannot learn anything new after age 18, Costello figured he could figure it out, So he signed up for driving lessons as soon as he got to Dublin, bought a car and got his license. Admiration for his initiative was only slightly compromised by the fact that when he pulled up at a Dublin hotel in January of 1992, he was driving a loaner to replace the car he had wrecked in a recent crash.
As he whizzed past the lampposts, walls and sheep that demark the border between Dublin city and its rural surroundings, Costello stuck in a cassette he had just recorded. He had been approached by a representative of Wendy James to write a song for her new solo album, and in atypical burst of perverse enthusiasm, he had knocked off 10. Costello said he would send the finished tape to James with instructions to cut all of them or none. The music came blasting out of the car speakers with the venom of the Clash and quickly turned that reference into a joke about trendies ‘still digging up the bones of Strummer and Jones.” Further tracks found him at his most caustic, describing some unlucky singer this way: ‘She danced like an ambulance, talked like a cartoon mouse/She took off her clothes and it brought down the house.”
Song after song sang on the car stereo as Costello played slalom with sheep and goats and the question finally had to be asked: ‘Elvis, are you sure you want to give this away? It’s like This Year’s Model Part 2!” Costello laughed and said, ‘That’s exactly why! I’ve done all that before, I can do it in my sleep.”
So he gave the album to Wendy James and she re-recorded it all with studio musicians replaying the parts and pretty much strangled the thing in its cradle. Elvis never made any comment about James’ version of his tunes, even when she cooked up a promo campaign suggesting that he had written them out of response to a soul-baring letter she had sent him about her life, art and ambitions. He just went back to work on The Juliet Letters and let the Wendy songs sink into the atmosphere. But hopefully the world will someday get to hear Costello’s versions of London’s Brilliant,” “Do You Know What I’m Saying” and “Basement Kiss,” because they are great work, even if the artist who cranked them out doesn’t think so.
Costello tries to brush off serious discussion of those songs, but he can’t pretend there was no commitment behind the Solzhenitsyn-like (well, at least Woody Allen—like) cultural indictment of these lyrics: Boys will be boys, blood must be spilt, and nothing like show business ever was built for letting your critical function wilt under the weight of your liberal guilt.
“I suppose that has to do with rap,” Costello says. “A lot of white writers are really deeply afraid, particularly in these days when you can’t say anything that’s not p.c., to say, ‘It’s wrong to say that about women because somebody will go and do that because you’re on TV saying it,dummy!" To paraphrase Network. If I said half the things said
by either the dumb ravers or some of the more obnoxious rappers they would be down on me like a witchhunt. And it’s nothing to do with freedom of speech. I’m just saying it’s stupid! It’s stupid to say you want to shoot people or rape people. You don’t need a PMRC, you don’t need a sticker on a record, because I can just not listen and I have the right to say, ‘This is dumb and ugly.’
“There’s a lot of dumb and ugly things in the world. It could just as well apply to the lingering cucumbers-down-the-trousers boys, but they’re now kind of quaint. It’s funny to think they used to be thought of as a threat because now it’s sort of coy. I saw country music television last night and there was some guy I never heard of doing some song with a girl in silhouette wrapping her legs around him. It looked like a Whitesnake video from the ‘80s. There’s progress for you! They can do that in Nashville now!”
Later on, Costello returns to the subject, bringing his debating skills to hear on several sides of the argument: “Somehow retrospectively people like Barry White are being endowed with hipness, which they didn’t have. Whereas the cucumber-down-the-trousers merchants have been drummed out of town. Or you just accept them for what they are: It’s like going to the circus. Even Rod Stewart has managed somehow to sing some of his old songs. Okay, he’s fessed up now—’Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ is a bit naff, but I think there’s a lot of tenderness in ‘You Wear It Well.’ That shouldn’t be overlooked just because he did ‘Hot Legs.’ But then again, ‘Hot Legs’ is a true song, too. Nobody said we all had to be redeemed at the end of it! It’s not church. For all the screaming and shouting about sex—that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be about isn’t it? This is the water-drinking ‘90s rearing its ugly head:We’re not allowed to enjoy any illicit lust for drugs or bad sex. It’s not on anymore. Particularly if you’re older! Heaven forfend that you’d still own up!”
Costello sticks his nose back into that particular rock ‘n’ roll tradition on “Thirteen Steps Lead Down,” the first single from Brutal Youth. “I suppose some people will think I’m being deliberately provocative because a lot of people get a lot of help from those 12-step plans,” Costello says, “but the truth is that the way down has to be one more step. Whether or not you believe 12 steps will help you back up, 13 steps are definitely the way down.
“I wrote ‘Thirteen Steps Lead Down’ in Spain. I went to see where Franco is buried. It’s a big tunnel under a mountain. It’s such a sick mausoleum because 100,000 people are buried in this tunnel from either side of the civil war, and he’s buried at the center with a sort of altar. It’s a retrospective gesture of reconciliation, avoiding the fact that if not for him they wouldn’t all have been dead. It was guarded by these futuristic, literally distorted angels, these fascistic gods.
“Nearby is the palace where all the Spanish kings are buried. Whereas the awful imagery of Franco’s tomb is so unsubtle and so typical of fascists, at least the despots of the past really knew how to do it. You go down these green marble stairs and there they are, all in beautiful gilded coffins with death masks. And it’s 13 steps. Of course it would be, to be ominous. I was looking for a phrase for obsessive and repetitive behavior; the girl is in some cheap bondage scene in the first verse and in the last she’s in the bondage of luxury and nothing really much in between except unreliable lovers.”
Bimbos and the men who love them often come up for disparagement in his songs. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether Costello (who declined the promotionally precious Playboy interview in 1991 because Playboy is sexist) is at heart a modern feminist or an old-fashioned moralist. “I’m going to get stick again on this record that I hate women and stuff,’ he shrugs. “But I don’t—I hate men!”
NOTHING COSTELLO has done in recent years divided his partisans as much as The Juliet Letters, his collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet. To some it was confirmation of Costello’s genius, to others it was proof he’d lost his mind. Paul Cassidy of the Brodskys recalls his group’s initial feelings as their friendship with Costello led to informal sessions playing together at his home: “Obviously we thought to ourselves, ‘This guy’s a bloody legend.’ We never said that to each other, but the thought goes through your head. What all five of us discussed at great length was that the crossovers between rock and classical that had gone on in the past, in our opinions, were almost entirely disasters. We were very, very wary of that. We never said, ‘Hey, let’s make an album,’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be great doing a tour.’ We just let the material come out. We soon realized that in fact we didn’t need drums, pianos, guitars or anything. What presented itself was the possibility of actually writing a song cycle. We did not try to be a rock group and Elvis did not try to be a diva. It’s not Bobby McFerrin pretending to be an opera singer or Michael Tilson Thomas pretending he’s in a rock band.”
Asked what surprised him most about the whole project, Cassidy says, “Elvis. He’s a very special guy. He knows more about classical music than I do. He’s obviously gone into it in great depth over the last six or seven years. When we started working together he wasn’t able to read or write music, so the initial workings were quite slow because he would put his ideas on tape or play them to us, and we would be busily writing these things down, which is difficult and time-consuming. His ideas were coming thick and fast, but he’s not the greatest piano player in the world. Sometimes we’d just look at each other and say, ‘This guy’s off his rocker,’ ‘cause we couldn’t hear what he was hearing. It was well-formed in his brain, but it wasn’t coming through his fingers. So he just decided to learn how to read music—which he did in about six weeks! Elvis started turning up with his ideas written out in four Staves. Absolutely
amazing.”
On first listening, The Juliet Letters sounded so unusual that some people never made it back for a second listening. They missed something good. Once you got used to hearing a rock singer swooping and crooning over a string quartet, the songs themselves started to emerge, and the songs on Juliet Letters were extraordinary. They came to further life during the concert tour Costello and the Brodskys undertook in the spring of ‘93. On stage no one could miss the humor in some of the tunes (On “I Almost Had a Weakness” Costello rolled his eyes and gestured like Groucho) and the poignancy of others. The audiences went wild, demanding encore after encore.
Following a triumphant sell-out at New York’s Town Hall, Costello greeted well wishers at a post-show party. While he was chatting with two people and shaking hands with a third, a woman approached him and said quietly that she was Constance, a female soldier who had sent him a frightened letter from the Gulf War that he set to music in “I Thought I’d Write to Juliet.” Costello has met every sort of lunatic fan and hustler, but a few words from this timid stranger convinced him she really was the woman whose letter had inspired his song. But another V.I.P. appeared in his face and by the time he’d excused himself and gone looking, Constance was gone.
“I’ve had a greater variety of interesting letters, good and bad, about The Juliet Letters than any other piece of work I’ve ever been involved in,” Costello says. “You know, a quarter of a million people bought the record, which is a fantastic amount for a chamber music recording; there’s nothing comparable. Of course, you could say, ‘You’re just being clever by calling it that; it’s a pop record dressed up as chamber music.’ But it’s a fact, it is some sort of chamber music without any obvious ancestors. Even if people’s invitation into it was created by my name on the credits, that’s still fine. They would have taken it back to the shop if they didn’t like it. Some undoubtedly did. But in the main when people gave it a little bit of time it came through to them and in fact revealed itself to be a much more open record emotionally than some other stuff I’ve been involved with. But then, it wasn’t wholly my work. It was a
collaborative effort.
‘Of course, there were those people in the classical world talking very loudly about ‘naive harmonies’ or ‘wrong harmonies.’ Well, wrong harmonies compared to who? Compared to Bach? Compared to Stravinsky? Compared to Ornette Coleman? I have every confidence that once the style war that goes on about any sort of new or different piece is fought and lost in the minds of fevered criticism, people will keep returning to those songs.”
COSTELLO HAS an almost touching faith in his audience to understand what he’s on about in his music. With Brutal Youth, he figures his listeners will pick upon the fact that ‘London’s Brilliant Parade” is a tribute to and send-up of the Kinks, on which he plays dobro as Ray Davies did on “Lola.” He thinks pop fans with good ears will find it as funny as he does that the bass on the Faces-like ‘Just About Glad” plays the melody line of the song, because that’s what Ron Wood often does. (He thinks it’s a further hoot that the Faces always sang randy songs about getting laid and in his version the singer is relieved that he did not get laid.)
Costello assumes his listeners get inside musical jokes because he himself always catches such things. Costello’s father was a well—known British big band singer and trumpet player, and young Declan grew up surrounded by music. The breadth of his musical vocabulary is sometimes spooky. Six years ago Costello agreed to be a judge in Musician’s Best Unsigned Band contest. Sitting in T-Bone Burnett’s California apartment, Costello impressed his fellow judges not because after hearing one song he could point out each entrant’s influences and references (any number of otherwise useless critics could do that), but because he kept correctly deducing all their personal situations.
“This girl sounds like she plays in little cafes by the ocean,” he’d say. She did, on Cape Cod.
“This is a band of well-off college students whose parents bought them their gear when they were at school in.. not New York... Boston!”
All true; it was like playing ‘Name That Tune” with Kreskin.
Not to claim Costello has psychic powers, but how would you feel if you took a copy of Brutal Youth to New Zealand, put it on in a car touring the countryside, and when it got to the song “Rocking Horse Road” told another passenger, “Oh, this song is about a street Elvis got lost on somewhere in this country,” only to have the driver turn around and announce, “Rocking Horse Road? Why that’s it, right over there!”
Bring that absurd coincidence up to Costello and he just says, “So now you know what I mean.”
Well, maybe it could use a little explanation. Rocking Horse Road is a long street down the middle of a peninsula near Christ-church. Costello was drawn there because the area has the same name as the Liverpool resort where he spent summers in his youth— New Brighton. After hours wandering the beach in the hot sun, Costello stumbled, disoriented, through the suburban neighborhood nearby and found himself gripped by an unreasonable panic.
“It just became like the twilight zone,” he says. “I started to think later on, when I reflected on it, that that’s many people’s ideal. That could have been the life I aspired to when I was a schoolboy; to have a nice house on a nice street. I didn’t want to write ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’: It’s more personal than that. This is one way it could have gone for me and then it didn’t.”
And that is the real theme of Brutal Youth. The soulful ‘Rocking Horse Road,” the goofy ‘My Science Fiction Twin,” the biting ‘All the Rage” and the elegiac ‘Favorite Hour” all deal, in one way or another, with the notion of another self who lives the life Costello might have lived. Brutal Youth is full of doppelgangers, secret sharers and bizarro worlds.
‘Some people have imaginary friends,” Costello says. ‘Well, I have my imaginary friend when I’m feeling dark; it’s ‘My Science Fiction Twin.’ The first verse of that song is the flip side of the last verse of ‘Rocking Horse Road.’ Even if I’d done this job I still could have ended up living in Weybridge with a creation of the plastic surgeon.
‘There are all these people who live these apparently hollow lives of celebrity in Hello magazine and stagger from one of those appraisals to another. I wonder what the life in between is like? Perhaps it’s not unlike this, perhaps I shouldn’t judge them. I’m not really judging them—I’m saying I could have been that.
‘Also, it’s about how if you have a tabloid life and then you write about it in your songs as well, that’s fair enough for as long as people are fascinated. But I’ve always resisted that. Certainly people know a little more about me than I’m really happy about, but I can hardly complain if I put intimate details in songs. But I use them as the material out of which to make songs which are about something else entirely. I mean, I don’t think I’ve written too many weepy here are my wounds songs. Because I think in the long run they’re useless beyond being cathartic for the writer.
“All the Rage’ is the other side of the coin from ‘Science Fiction Twin.’ You realize that the things you’re saying, you’re saying to yourself as well. Which is the best kind of accusative song.”
On ‘All the Rage” Costello sings,’ Don’t try to touch my heart, it’s darker than you think/And don’t try to read my mind because it’s full of disappearing ink.” Coming late on the album, those lines have the effect of summoning the ghost of that young Elvis Costello Ryko is currently reissuing to tell the world,Just because we’ve been on this 15-year journey together, don’t think you know me any better now than you did then.
‘Yeah,” Costello nods, ‘but I’m also saying it to myself. Maybe that’s the distance, maybe that’s the award that’s been given to you for the journey. I don’t want any long-service medals, I don’t want any sympathy or special
consideration because of it. But I do honestly mean what I say on the bridge. If anybody’s on my back then I would say that the bridge of that song is about as close to it as I’ve been able to put in a song. I will just go along the way I want to and there isn’t really anything that anybody can much do about it.”
The bridge Costello’s referring to goes:
I’ll probably play along left to my own devices
Spare me the drone of your advice
The sins of garter and gin confession may delay
You know the measuring pole, the merry boots of clay?
I’ve heard it all before. You’ll say it anyway.
Costello was going to close the album with ‘All the Rage,” but thought that might seem like he was trying to be 22 again. So he added a coda, a song he wrote when he was at Dartington, a British college/music retreat, where he and the Brodsky Quartet put the finishing touches on The Juliet Letters in the summer of 1992. “Favorite Hour” is a gently melancholy song that implies something really sinister—perhaps a condemned man waiting for his hanging—before coming back to campus for the final verse, which contains the phrase, “Now there’s a tragic waste of brutal youth.”
‘We were leaving Dartington when I wrote the last verse,” Costello says. ‘It was a bit like a more reflective version of ‘Science Fiction Twin’ or ‘Rocking Horse Road.’ It is about the options that have come up and gone away. One of them was college life. Sometimes you see colleges and they look so welcoming, and I never did that. When I was down there I saw a chapel which was now a music hail, beautiful trees and gardens with Henry Moore sculptures we stumbled on in the woods. I thought, ‘This could have been the life I had.’ On the last verse I deliberately made all the imagery like when you read translations of German poetry and Schubert; it’s all about babbling brooks and stuff. It is probably beautiful in German, but when you read the English translation it’s sort of trite. Maybe it’s trite in German, I don’t know—but it doesn’t really matter because the music carries it. So I said the waving branches are waving
goodbye, and the murmuring brook had better speak up.
‘Really, what it comes down to is, I don’t count my blessings! So you’ve got ‘All the Rage,’ all that rage that you can’t ever get free of. And then in ‘Favorite Hour’ it’s ‘blessings I don’t count/Small mercies and such.’ It’s as simple as that. When somebody gets sick you realize you say not, ‘It isn’t me, thank goodness’ but ‘It isn’t me, what a surprise!’”
Costello has been talking about this stuff for hours now, and he’s getting restless. He is wary of getting into what he calls, “The ramblings of the tortured I AM, the pampered artist. This is the dilemma in writing songs. You can write about a totally unique experience, so unique to yourself that it is almost meaningless to other people. But you still have some distant admiration for the song, because it conjures up a mood which you have not necessarily experienced. I’ve written songs like that and in retrospect realized that they don’t communicate a universal experience. They don’t even pretend to. Kid About It’ off Imperial Bedroom is about as obscure and abstracts lyric as you could imagine, yet it definitely means something.”
So how rarified is too rarified?
“Joni Mitchell’s talking about fairly rarified things on Court and Spark and particularly Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Costello says. “I still think they’re her two best records, not the earlier ones that people love so much or the ones where it just becomes either too selfconscious or, probably, just too rarified. That can happen. It happens to most.”
Costello looks past his window. The lights arc coming on in Ireland and it’s time to think about dinner. “I’ve been lucky to not be so famous,” he says. “I can still move around. I discussed this once with Dylan: the difficulty of maintaining some perspective. That was the thing I was most curious about. You can have the most fantastic imagination but you’ve still got to have some substance to draw from. You can draw from other people’s experiences and piece it together with other things, but it won’t always ring true. I also don’t think you can live an experimental life just so you can have subject matter. I know — I’ve done it.
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Musical Youth
Inn a previous Musician interview Elvis Costello pleaded for the return of his stolen Telecaster. He got it hack, but now prefers the Tele with which he’d replaced it. A Fender loyalist, he also has two Jazzmasters. The “magic” guitar on Brutal Youth, he says, is a Gibson E160 sunburst that inspired him to write sis songs Imost of which made the albumi on the day he got it Elvis is still playing through two Vos AC3O amps. His acoustic guitars include a Ferrington, a Martin 12-string and a Martin 0-28. “My main Martin is 00018, a prewar I’m getting fixed up.” He uses D’Addario strings on his acoustics, and Ernie Balls on his electrics, “heavier than most people’s — I like the sound of the strain.”
Costello says it’s small hands, not friendship with McCartney, that made him choose his old Hofner Beatle bass and Hofner President . Still he burrowed Pete Thomas’s Precision on “Kinder Murder.” Nick Lowe also played a Precision on the album. Elvis’s wife Cait keeps a Precision in their living room that Elvis often plays. Bruce Thomas, however approached this album with a Jerry Jones recreation of a Danelectro Longhorn. Pete Thomas played a Gretsch drumkit with what Elvis calls “the very bright characteristic Attractions snare. It goes konk” and Zildjian cymbals.
Steve Nieve played an assortment of cheap upright pianos purchased for the sessions so that he could stick tacks into the hammers and other mutilations not acceptable with studio rentals. He also arranged a little house of keyboards so that if the track called for a switch from, say, piano to organ on the chorus, he made the change live in the studio, rather than have to go back and overdub. Around him were a Hammond Organ, a Vox Continental, Wurlitzer and Roland electric pianos. Although a Chamberlain pops up once or twice on Brutal Youth, the “Mitchell Froom subculture” did not appear much this time out. They used Sennheiser 441 mlkes for vocals, Shure SMS7s on most of the instruments, and Neumann KM-IOOs with binaural heads on the drums.
In the middle of E.C.’s music room sits a Roland RD-bOO, MIDI’d up for his film scoring, and a Bechstein grand piano. Over in the corner are a couple of old Yamaha synths and an antique harmonium Mitchell Froom dragged into the Brutal Youth sessions and Costello liberated.
Re: 1993/94 , Brutal Youth sleevenote
We had all the tracks with Nick Lowe on bass "in the can" before The Attractions assembled at Olympic Studios to attempt their first recording session in eight years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 20725.html
Legendary Olympic recording studio to burn out
It is the studio where scores of artists have recorded hits, from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Queen to Madonna, Oasis, Goldfrapp and The Killers – so why is Olympic facing closure? Pierre Perrone reports
Friday, 2 January 2009
Re: 1993/94 , Brutal Youth sleevenote
I haven't heard this so can't verify this description -
http://crustyoldwave.com/
March 30, 2009
COW #139 02-JULY-1994 “free speech”
It was the Fourth of July, 1994, and freedom was much on our minds
this episode ... specifically, freedom from Orlando’s oppressive and
unfair curfew on teens. Appropriately enough, this episode’s musical
focus was on the new Elvis Costello album, “Brutal Youth.”
COW #139 – 02:38:13
Be forewarned -- there’s a 20-minute interview-slash-overview with EC
going over the second half of “Brutal Youth” (like that’s a bad
thing!) that kinda disrupts the flow of the show a bit, but I think we
more than make up for it with some fresh, delicious Liz Langley skits.
Surrounding those bits are chunks of refreshing, soul-stirring
alternative stuff, including the Pogues, R.E.M., the Dead Milkmen,
China Crisis, a-ha, John Foxx, Kirsty MacColl, Billy Bragg, Iggy Pop,
the Boomtown Rats, Icehouse and a whole lot more -- including an ABBA
tribute band covering Erasure in the ABBA style -- wait, what?
Enjoy.
http://crustyoldwave.com/
March 30, 2009
COW #139 02-JULY-1994 “free speech”
It was the Fourth of July, 1994, and freedom was much on our minds
this episode ... specifically, freedom from Orlando’s oppressive and
unfair curfew on teens. Appropriately enough, this episode’s musical
focus was on the new Elvis Costello album, “Brutal Youth.”
COW #139 – 02:38:13
Be forewarned -- there’s a 20-minute interview-slash-overview with EC
going over the second half of “Brutal Youth” (like that’s a bad
thing!) that kinda disrupts the flow of the show a bit, but I think we
more than make up for it with some fresh, delicious Liz Langley skits.
Surrounding those bits are chunks of refreshing, soul-stirring
alternative stuff, including the Pogues, R.E.M., the Dead Milkmen,
China Crisis, a-ha, John Foxx, Kirsty MacColl, Billy Bragg, Iggy Pop,
the Boomtown Rats, Icehouse and a whole lot more -- including an ABBA
tribute band covering Erasure in the ABBA style -- wait, what?
Enjoy.
Re: 1993/94 , Brutal Youth sleevenote
Craig posts to listserv-
It's the Words And Music promo that was issued at the time.
http://www.elviscostello.info/disc/offi ... fo_a02.htm
It's the Words And Music promo that was issued at the time.
http://www.elviscostello.info/disc/offi ... fo_a02.htm
Re: 1993/94 , Brutal Youth sleevenote
http://www.anthonybreznican.com/#!A-Tri ... 8ab24c64a7
A Tribute To Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth,' Released 21 Years Ago Today
Anthony Breznican
March 9, 2015
We all have pieces of pop culture that stand as more than just songs, movies or TV shows. They become part of us, and we carry them within us everywhere we go. For me, one of them is Elvis Costello's 1994 album Brutal Youth, released 21 years ago today. That collection of 15 songs became so vital to me that I named my debut novel after it. That’s the equivalent of naming your first-born child after someone.
Twenty-one is an odd milestone to mark, but it’s the age at which we are recognized as fully grown up, isn’t it? For me, Costello’s album, recorded with both Nick Lowe and The Attractions (keyboardist Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas on bass, and drummer Pete Thomas) was about that very subject: growing up, looking back, clinging to the savagery of those younger years until we can’t anymore. So, 21 years. That actually seems like an appropriate anniversary to celebrate.
On March 8, 1994, I was an angry, sarcastic, hopeful but needy kid, 17 years old and on my way out of high school and into the God-knows-what of adulthood and the future. Here was a tape I'd picked up for sale at the Pharx-Mor by the Tarentum Bridge in my hometown, an album full of songs that were just as crankily optimistic as I was. Talk about music that makes you feel less alone in the world. Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth felt like a friend – one you could cause a lot of trouble with.
It was also the kind of friend who knew your weaknesses. One who could make you laugh with both infinitely clever wit and eye-rollingly dumb jokes. It managed to do something useful with all that anger and love that simmers inside, unsettling the soul. It was full of rage and humor and love and disappointment and imagination. It put those things on a shelf, like tools you could pull off when you needed them. There's a song on it called "My Science Fiction Twin," a bass-heavy geek-out about a doppelgänger who's everything you want to be times 10,000 – and that's what that Brutal Youth tape meant to me. I wished I could create something that had all these same feelings packed into it.
I listened to that tape until it wore out and broke; then I bought the CD and listened some more.
The first track is the raucous "Pony St.," about a once wild parent whose daughter is rebelliously . . . conservative and obedient. Even the boyfriends are duds.
"And when they come calling
I think it's appalling
they're sober and they're polite.
They’re deeply respectful
when I would expect them
to keep her out all night."
I'd have loved that parent. The mother of the song, a former hellraiser, also sings:
“If you need instruction
in mindless destruction
I’ll show you a thing or two.”
Please, I thought, adopt me.
The acidity of Track 14, his kiss-off song "All The Rage," fortified the side of me that was tired of being quiet and taking other people's crap, tired of having others step on my hopes and dreams and shove me backward. There's another side within us, a weaker side, the go-along, get-along side, that can sometimes spend too much time with its hands on the wheel. It needs to be told to move over. This song did that for me, but it had a sense of humor about its angst:
“So don’t try to touch my heart
it's darker than you think.
And don’t try to read my mind
because it’s full of disappearing ink”
The felt like the perfect description of the storms that brew inside us – as well as a perfect mockery of it.
I fell hard for "Sulky Girl," as I tended to do in real life. I laughed my ass off as the sardonic and rude "This Is Hell,” which posits that “heaven is hell in reverse,” where “My Favorite Things” plays on a loop, but it’s Julie Andrews’ version, not John Coltrane’s. (Sorry Sound of Music fans.)
“20% Amnesia” is a scream at a public that quickly forgets the failings of a corrupt or ignorant authority. Just because people end up in charge doesn’t mean they belong there. The world is full of fools with badges, bad parents, teachers walling themselves off behind dark sarcasm, and leaders who are merely manipulators.
“What is your destiny?’ the policewoman said?
(20% amnesia)
The word that she wanted was destination I’m afraid
(20% amnesia)
This is your future boy, this is your fate
(20% amnesia)
You’re obsolete and they can’t afford to educate you.”
Of course, the album wasn’t just jihad and jeremiad. “London’s Brilliant Parade” is a nostalgic, dream-fueled stroll through Costello’s hometown, one that was far from my own of New Kensington, Pa. But in his bridges and struggling streets there was a reflection I recognized.
Also on the hopeful side, “Still Too Soon To Know” was about a man who has lost his lover to another person. But it’s also a positive portrait of regret, a caution against failing to enjoy the things in front of you: “Blessings that don’t count / small mercies and such,” as mentioned in the album’s final song, “Favourite Hour.”
In my novel, someone says to the main character “I’m sorry for you … You always hold on to the worst things – and you lose everything else.” That was a message to myself, one I first heard in “Still Too Soon To Know,”
“When I think back
a couple of days,
if I wasn't happy then,
I never will be.
I wonder was this
ignorance or bliss?
It's still too soon to know.”
Even at 17, and every year I’ve aged since, I hear those lyrics and think about the times I’ve been frustrated or sad, how I’ve been angry at myself, or bitter toward outside powers outside my control. I’m no longer thinking back “a couple of days,” but over the four decades of a lifetime. I still let happy times slip through fingers that are clenched into fists. So … I keep listening. Keep trying.
Twenty-one years later, Brutal Youth feels like a window into the span between generations. I realize that, at 38, Costello was about the age I am now when he was working on it. Maybe there's something about this point in one’s life, a transition far from that shift from childhood into adulthood, that makes us especially reflective. We're straddling that middle fulcrum of our see-saw existence and trying to stand tall upon it. It's our last chance to see as far as we can in either direction.
Writing this, I wondered: Can I really call myself middle aged? One grandfather, Steve Breznican, died at 60, when I was just a baby. The other, Prosper “Bert” Frerotte, was 72 when he died – a giant in my life who exited it when I was 19. It never occurred to me until now – just now, writing this – but the anniversary of his death is also today, March 8. It has been 19 years now. Another middle fulcrum.
I named my first book after Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth. I named my first and only son after Pap. One inspiration entered the world on this date; another departed it. Symmetry like this never feels like coincidence to me. I can only read it as a wink from the universe.
If you’re inclined to read about what that old man, a housepainter and paperhanger, meant to me, you can see what I wrote about him when my little boy was born two years ago.
But this album, a collection of music by a stranger, it also meant something integral to my life. Not the same, of course. Not by a logn shot. But music is a language we use to decode the things that can’t be said any other way, things that would destroy us if they went unspoken.
Brutal Youth shaped me. It showed me what I could be and what I once was. I revealed what it felt like to talk back and know what you’re talking about. It echoed things I was feeling and told me some others I’d have never guessed on my own. When I fell, there were times it helped me up. When I was struggling, it was my fight song. When I was on top of the world, it was my victory music.
The final song on the album is “Favourite Hour,” and it includes the lyric that gives both the album (and my twisted little coming-of-age novel) a title.
“Now, there’s a tragic waste of brutal youth,
Strip and polish this unvarnished truth.”
I’ve talked about the influence of those words a lot since my book came out, trying to give credit where it’s due. (Although it rips a hole in my heart every time I notice in the acknowledgements that some proofreader changed the spelling of the song to “Favorite Hour,” without my knowledge. UGH. Humiliating. The paperback will be fixed.)
That lyric meant everything to me when I was 17. It was another way of warning against holding on to the bad and losing the good. All that drama and high emotion and belligerence of that age . . . Couldn’t it have been put to better use?
I had the opportunity to meet Elvis Costello briefly this past September. I hung out in his dressing room at the Hollywood Bowl with a mutual friend who reminisced about old times with him. When it came time to leave, I just shook his hand and said, “I just wanted to tell you something, because it means a lot to me. 'Favourite Hour' is a song I carry with me, always. I just wanted to tell you in person: Thank you.”
He smiled, pointed a finger, and said, “That is a good one.”
I’m sure I weirded him out. But that was the truth, unvarnished.
Happy Birthday, Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth. Now you’re old enough to buy a drink. If you were a person, I’d buy one for you.
Both of us are still brutal, I hope, even if we aren’t so youthful anymore.
A Tribute To Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth,' Released 21 Years Ago Today
Anthony Breznican
March 9, 2015
We all have pieces of pop culture that stand as more than just songs, movies or TV shows. They become part of us, and we carry them within us everywhere we go. For me, one of them is Elvis Costello's 1994 album Brutal Youth, released 21 years ago today. That collection of 15 songs became so vital to me that I named my debut novel after it. That’s the equivalent of naming your first-born child after someone.
Twenty-one is an odd milestone to mark, but it’s the age at which we are recognized as fully grown up, isn’t it? For me, Costello’s album, recorded with both Nick Lowe and The Attractions (keyboardist Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas on bass, and drummer Pete Thomas) was about that very subject: growing up, looking back, clinging to the savagery of those younger years until we can’t anymore. So, 21 years. That actually seems like an appropriate anniversary to celebrate.
On March 8, 1994, I was an angry, sarcastic, hopeful but needy kid, 17 years old and on my way out of high school and into the God-knows-what of adulthood and the future. Here was a tape I'd picked up for sale at the Pharx-Mor by the Tarentum Bridge in my hometown, an album full of songs that were just as crankily optimistic as I was. Talk about music that makes you feel less alone in the world. Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth felt like a friend – one you could cause a lot of trouble with.
It was also the kind of friend who knew your weaknesses. One who could make you laugh with both infinitely clever wit and eye-rollingly dumb jokes. It managed to do something useful with all that anger and love that simmers inside, unsettling the soul. It was full of rage and humor and love and disappointment and imagination. It put those things on a shelf, like tools you could pull off when you needed them. There's a song on it called "My Science Fiction Twin," a bass-heavy geek-out about a doppelgänger who's everything you want to be times 10,000 – and that's what that Brutal Youth tape meant to me. I wished I could create something that had all these same feelings packed into it.
I listened to that tape until it wore out and broke; then I bought the CD and listened some more.
The first track is the raucous "Pony St.," about a once wild parent whose daughter is rebelliously . . . conservative and obedient. Even the boyfriends are duds.
"And when they come calling
I think it's appalling
they're sober and they're polite.
They’re deeply respectful
when I would expect them
to keep her out all night."
I'd have loved that parent. The mother of the song, a former hellraiser, also sings:
“If you need instruction
in mindless destruction
I’ll show you a thing or two.”
Please, I thought, adopt me.
The acidity of Track 14, his kiss-off song "All The Rage," fortified the side of me that was tired of being quiet and taking other people's crap, tired of having others step on my hopes and dreams and shove me backward. There's another side within us, a weaker side, the go-along, get-along side, that can sometimes spend too much time with its hands on the wheel. It needs to be told to move over. This song did that for me, but it had a sense of humor about its angst:
“So don’t try to touch my heart
it's darker than you think.
And don’t try to read my mind
because it’s full of disappearing ink”
The felt like the perfect description of the storms that brew inside us – as well as a perfect mockery of it.
I fell hard for "Sulky Girl," as I tended to do in real life. I laughed my ass off as the sardonic and rude "This Is Hell,” which posits that “heaven is hell in reverse,” where “My Favorite Things” plays on a loop, but it’s Julie Andrews’ version, not John Coltrane’s. (Sorry Sound of Music fans.)
“20% Amnesia” is a scream at a public that quickly forgets the failings of a corrupt or ignorant authority. Just because people end up in charge doesn’t mean they belong there. The world is full of fools with badges, bad parents, teachers walling themselves off behind dark sarcasm, and leaders who are merely manipulators.
“What is your destiny?’ the policewoman said?
(20% amnesia)
The word that she wanted was destination I’m afraid
(20% amnesia)
This is your future boy, this is your fate
(20% amnesia)
You’re obsolete and they can’t afford to educate you.”
Of course, the album wasn’t just jihad and jeremiad. “London’s Brilliant Parade” is a nostalgic, dream-fueled stroll through Costello’s hometown, one that was far from my own of New Kensington, Pa. But in his bridges and struggling streets there was a reflection I recognized.
Also on the hopeful side, “Still Too Soon To Know” was about a man who has lost his lover to another person. But it’s also a positive portrait of regret, a caution against failing to enjoy the things in front of you: “Blessings that don’t count / small mercies and such,” as mentioned in the album’s final song, “Favourite Hour.”
In my novel, someone says to the main character “I’m sorry for you … You always hold on to the worst things – and you lose everything else.” That was a message to myself, one I first heard in “Still Too Soon To Know,”
“When I think back
a couple of days,
if I wasn't happy then,
I never will be.
I wonder was this
ignorance or bliss?
It's still too soon to know.”
Even at 17, and every year I’ve aged since, I hear those lyrics and think about the times I’ve been frustrated or sad, how I’ve been angry at myself, or bitter toward outside powers outside my control. I’m no longer thinking back “a couple of days,” but over the four decades of a lifetime. I still let happy times slip through fingers that are clenched into fists. So … I keep listening. Keep trying.
Twenty-one years later, Brutal Youth feels like a window into the span between generations. I realize that, at 38, Costello was about the age I am now when he was working on it. Maybe there's something about this point in one’s life, a transition far from that shift from childhood into adulthood, that makes us especially reflective. We're straddling that middle fulcrum of our see-saw existence and trying to stand tall upon it. It's our last chance to see as far as we can in either direction.
Writing this, I wondered: Can I really call myself middle aged? One grandfather, Steve Breznican, died at 60, when I was just a baby. The other, Prosper “Bert” Frerotte, was 72 when he died – a giant in my life who exited it when I was 19. It never occurred to me until now – just now, writing this – but the anniversary of his death is also today, March 8. It has been 19 years now. Another middle fulcrum.
I named my first book after Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth. I named my first and only son after Pap. One inspiration entered the world on this date; another departed it. Symmetry like this never feels like coincidence to me. I can only read it as a wink from the universe.
If you’re inclined to read about what that old man, a housepainter and paperhanger, meant to me, you can see what I wrote about him when my little boy was born two years ago.
But this album, a collection of music by a stranger, it also meant something integral to my life. Not the same, of course. Not by a logn shot. But music is a language we use to decode the things that can’t be said any other way, things that would destroy us if they went unspoken.
Brutal Youth shaped me. It showed me what I could be and what I once was. I revealed what it felt like to talk back and know what you’re talking about. It echoed things I was feeling and told me some others I’d have never guessed on my own. When I fell, there were times it helped me up. When I was struggling, it was my fight song. When I was on top of the world, it was my victory music.
The final song on the album is “Favourite Hour,” and it includes the lyric that gives both the album (and my twisted little coming-of-age novel) a title.
“Now, there’s a tragic waste of brutal youth,
Strip and polish this unvarnished truth.”
I’ve talked about the influence of those words a lot since my book came out, trying to give credit where it’s due. (Although it rips a hole in my heart every time I notice in the acknowledgements that some proofreader changed the spelling of the song to “Favorite Hour,” without my knowledge. UGH. Humiliating. The paperback will be fixed.)
That lyric meant everything to me when I was 17. It was another way of warning against holding on to the bad and losing the good. All that drama and high emotion and belligerence of that age . . . Couldn’t it have been put to better use?
I had the opportunity to meet Elvis Costello briefly this past September. I hung out in his dressing room at the Hollywood Bowl with a mutual friend who reminisced about old times with him. When it came time to leave, I just shook his hand and said, “I just wanted to tell you something, because it means a lot to me. 'Favourite Hour' is a song I carry with me, always. I just wanted to tell you in person: Thank you.”
He smiled, pointed a finger, and said, “That is a good one.”
I’m sure I weirded him out. But that was the truth, unvarnished.
Happy Birthday, Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth. Now you’re old enough to buy a drink. If you were a person, I’d buy one for you.
Both of us are still brutal, I hope, even if we aren’t so youthful anymore.
Re: A Tribute To Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth,' Released 21 Years Ago Today
My review, updated and expanded:
https://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/20 ... youth.html
https://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/20 ... youth.html