Hot Press, February 23, 1989: Difference between revisions
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<center><h3> Elvis | <center><h3> Elvis unmasked </h3></center> | ||
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<center> Neil McCormick </center> | <center> Neil McCormick </center> | ||
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'''Out from behind the grease-paint that adorns his face on the cover of ''Spike'', Elvis Costello emerges to talk about the music that runs in his family from big-band to speed-metal, his much-touted Irish connection, working with Paul McCartney, his contempt for much of today's pop music, and the feelings that inspired his death wish for Margaret Thatcher. | |||
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Call it coincidence, call it synchronicity. Maybe we should settle for bad planning. I was in Heathrow Airport, waiting to board a delayed Aer Lingus flight from London to Dublin. It was a hastily arranged trip to interview Elvis Costello in the Gresham Hotel. I was skimming through some old Costello articles I had long had on file, not so much in-depth examinations as evasive skirmishes from a time when Elvis spoke to the press infrequently and, it seemed, reluctantly. | |||
"The press were looking for something to crucify me with, and I fed myself to the lions," said the singer in a rare 1982 ''[[Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982|Rolling Stone]]'' interview, referring to the petty, drunken argument with Bonnie Bramlett, when Elvis shot his mouth off about black music and then was forced to duck as American journalists returned fire. ELVIS COSTELLO REPENTS said the cover headline over a photo of a completely unpenitent pop-star, gazing suspiciously out through large, black-rimmed spectacles, as if irritated at having to break his self-imposed silence to explain off the unfortunate and unwarranted stigma of racism that was then still damaging his American career. I looked up from the page... and straight into the same face gazing vacantly back at me from across the departure lounge. | "The press were looking for something to crucify me with, and I fed myself to the lions," said the singer in a rare 1982 ''[[Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982|Rolling Stone]]'' interview, referring to the petty, drunken argument with Bonnie Bramlett, when Elvis shot his mouth off about black music and then was forced to duck as American journalists returned fire. ELVIS COSTELLO REPENTS said the cover headline over a photo of a completely unpenitent pop-star, gazing suspiciously out through large, black-rimmed spectacles, as if irritated at having to break his self-imposed silence to explain off the unfortunate and unwarranted stigma of racism that was then still damaging his American career. I looked up from the page... and straight into the same face gazing vacantly back at me from across the departure lounge. | ||
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Elvis insists that the context of the story is unimportant. To paraphrase Bono, 'this is not a rebel song.' "The story is one that keeps happening," says Elvis. "It's happening right now. People will say it's about the North but I spoke to someone from Tel Aviv the other day and they said it could be Palestine." | Elvis insists that the context of the story is unimportant. To paraphrase Bono, 'this is not a rebel song.' "The story is one that keeps happening," says Elvis. "It's happening right now. People will say it's about the North but I spoke to someone from Tel Aviv the other day and they said it could be Palestine." | ||
Although of Irish lineage and married to an Irish woman, Elvis lays no claim to an Irish identity. "I don't think I have an anything identity, I'm just me. I've spent a lot of time in Ireland, I like it here, but I don't think there can be anything more nauseating than a cod-anything. I do notice that I tend to be Irish in the eyes of the press when it suits them now. I was on [[Self-Aid]], me and Chris Rea were the only non-Irish. Chris Rea got on it because he called his album 'Shamrock Diaries'!" Elvis laughs. "That's a tenuous connection isn't it?!" he says, indicating that he is only being mildly facile. | Although of Irish lineage and married to an Irish woman, Elvis lays no claim to an Irish identity. "I don't think I have an anything identity, I'm just me. I've spent a lot of time in Ireland, I like it here, but I don't think there can be anything more nauseating than a cod-anything. I do notice that I tend to be Irish in the eyes of the press when it suits them now. I was on [[Concert 1986-05-17 Dublin|Self-Aid]], me and Chris Rea were the only non-Irish. Chris Rea got on it because he called his album 'Shamrock Diaries'!" Elvis laughs. "That's a tenuous connection isn't it?!" he says, indicating that he is only being mildly facile. | ||
"Obviously there's some sort of connection there in the blood but the problem is it's kind of green beer territory," he continues. "That stuff really bugs me. There's things in my life where I find sympathy with here but there's problems with wholly identifying with a culture, where you just go blindly into accepting that all things Irish are great. You usually find the worst offenders of that are the ex-pats or the 4th generation people. Whether it be politics or culture or anything, they're the ones that are blindly, uncritically Irish, and it's kind of dumb really, isn't it? You have to look at the place for its best points and its worst points." | "Obviously there's some sort of connection there in the blood but the problem is it's kind of green beer territory," he continues. "That stuff really bugs me. There's things in my life where I find sympathy with here but there's problems with wholly identifying with a culture, where you just go blindly into accepting that all things Irish are great. You usually find the worst offenders of that are the ex-pats or the 4th generation people. Whether it be politics or culture or anything, they're the ones that are blindly, uncritically Irish, and it's kind of dumb really, isn't it? You have to look at the place for its best points and its worst points." | ||
Elvis admits that he no longer feels very at home in England. "It seems like I feel more and more like a part of a minority that don't feel the way a lot of people seem to about the society, and those things aren't any better here, but there are other things about this country where I feel certain things are valued more. Just... people have a different attitude to life here. But it's down to individuals that you get it from. Your friends. It's dangerous to make sweeping generalisations like 'I love the Irish'. It's like these people you see in restaurants..." Elvis puts on a contrived whisper, accurately mimicing snobbish pretensions, and chuckles to himself at his own impersonation. "'Oh, well of course, I love the French.' Every one of them. Every fucking nasty, horrible murderer!" Elvis laughs gleefully. "'I love those French people.' You know that kind of person? It's stupid. Countries are just made up of people, you have to work out what the individuals are about. I've always thought the 'national characteristics' are such a lot of shit." | |||
His personal feelings of statelessness essentially derive from belonging to a state that is being systematically dismantled. His song "Tramp The Dirt Down" is a bitter, peasant attack on Thatcher that would make Morrissey blush. Elvis doesn't even like to talk about Britain's leader, a woman who has elicited more rock 'n' roll bile than any living politician. "She's a fairly repugnant person," he says, with obvious distaste. "The song is a very extreme version of the way I feel about her. I've felt more beyond words at times when some things happen and with her attitude to certain things. You end up with this sort of helpless catalogue of her doings, and I don't really want to go back through that, it's not very pleasant to contemplate." | |||
For someone with an Irish background, who received his primary school education from Catholic nuns, Elvis' work, angst-ridden as it often is, has somehow avoided the prime topics of lapsed-Catholic guilt: God and religion. "God's Comic," a surreal, funny and oddly sad view of the afterlife is possibly the first time this most secular of writers has dabbled in the supernatural. His vision of God is penetratingly atheistic, a close relation of Randy Newman's singing deity in "God's Song", wearily observing that too many people mistake him for Santa Claus. "It's the big white beard I suppose," he sighs. | |||
Elvis pictures God "lying on a waterbed full of exotic tropical fish, surrounded by everything that's useless. He's drinking coca-cola, he's got 3 televisions on with Sky on one and a colourised version of ''It's A Wonderful Life'' on another, and he's reading a book with each eye -- a Jeffrey Archer novel with one and a Bret Easton Ellis with the other one -- and listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's ''Requiem'', and he's just horrified about what's happened and thinking 'well I could have given the world to the monkeys.' Then he plays 'Last Train To Clarksville' on the guitar!" | |||
Elvis laughs at this last elaboration. "I don't know whether it's really about religion," he says, "I think it's about frailty. I went up to Greenland on holiday and it's one of the most uncluttered places in the world, there's a few people clinging to the side of a rock next to a glacier, ekeing out a living, and thoughts occur to you out there about the comedy of what we call civilization. This big blue office block floats past the porthole, this ice, a beautiful pure looking thing that can just crush you. It reminds you how puny we are." | |||
Recollecting our bumpy plane journey, he observes, "We all have moments of panic. On the plane today I wasn't quite down to praying but there have been times: 'I won't drink any more gin if you let the plane land!'" He laughs, but he is cagey when pressed on his spiritual leanings. | |||
"Religion to a lot of people probably means a ritualistic manifestation of belief and I believe those things can be very individual and very subjective. I have religious feelings. I can't really say any more than that, they're difficult things to find the words for. I believe a lot of strange things, and I'm not being enigmatic." | |||
He uses as an example the McCartney/MacManus song "Veronica" from his new album, about a senile person who is content within her interior world. "I believe that," says Elvis. "I suppose a Jesuit theologian might argue that what I'm saying there is there is a soul. My grandmother in the last few years of her life was what they call senile, she was going backwards and forwards in time, and talking about one thing one minute and the next minute leaping forward a number of years. And some of the time she was very happy in this world. | |||
"They're always saying they've now got life down to its smallest fraction, they get the smallest possible division of matter and then twenty years later they discover there's a smaller one. It's not that long ago that they used to put leeches on people and cut them to bleed then, thinking that would make them well. Science is a fairly maverick entity I think, particularly medicine, and I just don't understand the brain to anything like the degree they understand the plumbing and the engine and all that stuff. And that's maybe a wishful sort of song but that's a religious belief. I believe that the person is somewhere that we don't know yet and when the body just stops being workable as a casing that the mind goes somewhere else, that it isn't without hope." | |||
As a collection of songs, ''Spike'' is far removed from the intense meditations on love, lust and relationships that made up the bulk of his last two albums, but to Elvis that does not make it any less personal. "It came out of my head, didn't it?" People think there's some more distance in it because it's not confessional about my life, but if I thought those things and I was moved enough to write them. It's still me. All the songs are." | |||
He concedes there are more third-person songs than ever before but points out that people are often mistaken in thinking that just because a song is written in the first person, then that person is the writer. "It might not always be," Elvis points out. "'God's Comic' is first-person the comic, then it's first-person God, and I don't think I'm God!" | |||
As a writer who first came to prominence as a purveyor of "revenge and guilt," punk's most bitter observer of love and life's darker sides, Elvis is dismissive of the idea that his obviously greater personal contentment with his lot in life in any way threatens his abilities. He gives no credence to the cliche that "great art develops in adversity." | |||
"The least happy that I can recall being for a sustained period I made the worst record I've ever made," he says, referring to his 1984 offering ''Goodbye Cruel World''. "It's the most confused, least well-realised bunch of recordings of some reasonable songs where nearly always the emphasis was misplaced. Whereas I think this is as good a record as I've ever made. It's different to other records and I think that some people will say it's less personal but I don't feel that way. I think maybe it's less self-obsessed, but I don't think that's an entirely bad thing. There's eleven other albums, a lot of which are very self-obsessed. Maybe I've just reached a time chronologically where I start to look outwards. It might have nothing to do with being a happier person. Happier personally, yes, but with what? Happier personally on the day to day basis of being married and having a life that you enjoy and then having it brutally interrupted, albeit not in a very personal way, when you have the sort of thoughts that bring about writing a song like 'Tramp The Dirt Down'!" | |||
Elvis stares intently over the top of his glasses, as if trying to communicate the bitterness of that song. "That's not a very pleasant thing to write," he says, earnestly, "I don't like having those thoughts. As much as I find the woman repulsive I don't enjoy contemplating anybody's death, actually wishing for it. I don't like being driven to that language. It's horrible." | |||
Somehow I find it hard to believe him. There's still something in Elvis Costello, this amiable man, that takes pleasure in his venom, pride in the idea that, however small, he might be a thorn in Thatcher's side. "Try telling me she isn't angry with this pitiful discontent, "he sings in "Tramp The Dirt Down." | |||
Soon we will both be returning to Thatcher's Britain, after flying hundreds of miles to share this conversation. As I leave the suite in the Gresham, Elvis is seated in an armchair before a rather poor, plastic imitation of a coal fire, chuckling over a photo of himself that appeared in the ''Evening Press''. An enterprising art director had impaled a picture of Thatcher's head on the top of the singer's guitar. Elvis reads the caption aloud to himself." 'Elvis blows his chance of a knighthood!' I like that," he laughs, "But I don't think there was much of a chance!" | |||
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'''Hot Press, February, | {{Bibliography next | ||
|prev = Hot Press, July 16, 1987 | |||
|next = Hot Press, April 18, 1991 | |||
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'''Hot Press, February 23, 1989 | |||
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[[Neil McCormick]] interviews Elvis Costello. | [[Neil McCormick]] interviews Elvis Costello. | ||
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[[Bill Graham]] reviews ''[[Spike]]''. | [[Bill Graham]] reviews ''[[Spike]]''. | ||
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''Hot Press'' reports on upcoming tour dates. | |||
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[[image:1989-02-23 Hot Press cover.jpg| | [[image:1989-02-23 Hot Press cover.jpg|360px|border]] | ||
<br><small>Cover.</small><br> | <br><small>Cover.</small> | ||
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<center><h3> Spike </h3></center> | |||
<center>''' Elvis Costello </center> | |||
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<center> Bill Graham </center> | |||
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'''Rating: 11 / 12 | |||
{{Bibliography text}} | |||
Back in our tenth anniversary [[Hot Press, July 16, 1987|issue]], Elvis Costello was explaining why "I would rather be a folk musician than a teen idol." That squares with any early critical read-out on ''Spike''. If it isn't exactly his own tribute to the rhythms and regimes of the world, ''Spike'' nonetheless is an album of musical exploration and diversification which both flexes disused musical muscles and restlessly refuses to settle in any single slot. | |||
Clocking in at an almost spendthrift 60 minutes 21 seconds – and that, bargain-hunters doesn't include the extra CD/cassette track, "Coal Train Robbery" – and recorded with an assortment of musicians in Dublin, Los Angeles, London and New Orleans, ''Spike'' is like one of those over-generous multi-course Chinese banquets that don't allow easy digestion. Furthermore all this globe-trotting with its variety of local flavours – jazz, Irish, trad, crescent city funk and waspish keyboard pop to name the most tangible – also means ''Spike'' lacks any common thread, any single immediately identifying sound to guide you through its maze. | |||
Costello just isn't trying to claim or capture any particular pop territory. Instead taking "album" in its original meaning as a collection, a bagatelle, ''Spike'' could just be his own ''White Album'', a record which lets each song dictate its own code and colour, veering from the essentially sell-made acoustic "Baby Plays Around" to the lavish Gothic melodrama of "Miss MacBeth" with its twenty-four separate instruments. | |||
So while some songs immediately startle, others shyly malinger at the back of the queue. Much as I appreciate Allen Toussaint's warm piano and the Dirty Dozen Brass band on "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror." I'm flummoxed by its obscure last verse, while Costello's preference to play the objective story-teller leaves me searching for the emotional focus of "Chewing Gum." "Satellite" too takes time though it's blessed by a swaying chorus harmonized by Chrissie Hynde at her most Junoesque. | |||
Certainly on ''Spike'', Costello enjoys playing virtuoso as the jack of all musical parades and trades, even leading off the second side with an instrumental, "Stalin Malone." But ''Spike'' will score most smartly for Irish ears when he tackles and toys with traditional music. As with "Any King's Shilling," his reflection on his soldier grand-father who got caught on the wrong side of 1916. Yet both this and "Tramp The Dirt Down" are coloured by a jazz inflection – Costello's personal musical manifesto will always unapologetically acknowledge both Christy Moore and Charles Mingus – which show his technical-skill in both subduing and harnessing styles, other lesser writers would find mutually incompatible. | |||
That cunning means "Tramp The Dirt Down" is no crude protest song or anti-Thatcher rant. It isn't just that he sings "When England was the whore of the world/Margaret was her madam", it's how he sings it, caressing that damning couplet like a regretful poisoner's kiss. As with "Shipbuilding," there's a sense of the embitteredly elegiac, a feeling that mere vituperation is not enough and he also widens the song out into an indictment of any war-monger who "takes all the glory and none of the shame". | |||
"Last Boat Leaving" and "Baby Plays Around" will also be shoehorned into that same acoustic cabaret mode though the former, a leftover from ''The Courier'', has Costello and fellow producers, T-Bone Burnett and Kevin Kileen, having some mild psychedelic fun with the vocal echoes. As for the self-explanatory "Baby Plays Around" it must be the most starkly bereft and disconsolate track on ''Spike'', further proof of how the range of his singing has developed through the last decade. | |||
Because ''Spike'' is a Costello show of many voices. The blistering "Let It Dangle," his tirade against capital punishment, already ferociously previewed on The Season, spits gall ad acid yet he can then switch makes to be archly and teasingly malevolent on "God's Comic." | |||
That song can be entered on many levels – as a deft wind-up of shamelessly trendy clerics; as a salvo against those philistines who sit ''"reading an airport novelette, listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Requiem"'' that perfectly nails the yob crassness of the enterprise culture; or finally as the glum true confession of a grumpy and disillusioned God who now figures he "should have given the world to the monkeys". Yet musically, it's always tantalizing, sounding as if written in the afterglow of his collaboration with Paul McCartney with a playfully jazzy and vaudevillian chorus that's typically softshoe Macca yet drained of any charming, cloying facility through its ''"Now I'm dead… I was scared"'' refrains. All of which makes "God's Comic" the most achieved advance on this album of experiment. | |||
And though less weighty and ambitious, the two McCartney collaborations also work, "Pads, Paws and Claws" being another scampishly syncopated parable of marital claustrophobia while "Veronica" is a reminder of both partners' abilities to join an insightful character sketch to purring pop. | |||
We've got far away from the jazz and the trad, an indication of just how ''Spike'' ranges. Indeed "Miss MacBeth" uses both the Dirty Dozen crew and his Irish aides like Davy Spillane and Steve Wickham strictly for spooky sound affects and again as a sinister fairground organ brays in the background, like "Veronica," it's about an older woman who's not all her image seems. | |||
But if "Miss MacBeth" is the most playful track – the artist at recreation – "…This Town…" compounds the impression of the artist as moralist, angered at the now unashamed cruelties of the new self-made breed who can claim unabashed, ''"you're nobody 'till everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard.".. The typical creatures of societies that now almost glory in being publicly red and raw in tooth and claw. | |||
So ultimately ''Spike'' is an occasionally disjointed survey, a panorama of people and music that refuses easy and early framing and that finds Costello stretching towards and usually firmly grasping a new set of tools and artistic rules. Given the time and care he put into its creation, you'll soon find this ''Spike'' you'll like. | |||
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<center><h3> The Costello shows </h3></center> | |||
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<center> ''Hot Press </center> | |||
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Elvis Costello will play his first full scale Irish tour for over two years when he embarks on a series of dates here in May. | |||
After an extremely productive 1986 in which he released the two classic albums ''King Of America'' and ''Blood And Chocolate'' and toured extensively, Elvis decided to take a hard earned sabbatical and has only this month re-emerged with a new LP, ''Spike''. Recorded in London, New Orleans, Hollywood and Dublin, the album was produced by Costello himself along with T. Bone Burnett and Kevin Killen and features several Irish musicians including Donal Lunny, Steve Wickham and Davy Spillane. | |||
A sometime resident of this country, Costello has turned up as special guest at gigs by everyone from Los Lobos to Christy Moore over the last couple of years. For his forthcoming tour, he will be performing solo at all shows but will be joined by his old cohort, Nick Lowe, for the finale each night. | |||
Elvis Costello plays the Opera House, Belfast ([[Concert 1989-05-16 Belfast|May 16th]], [[Concert 1989-05-17 Belfast|17th]]) and Dublin's National Stadium ([[Concert 1989-05-19 Dublin|May 19th]], [[Concert 1989-05-20 Dublin|20th]]). Tickets are available from the usual outlets. | |||
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*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Press Wikipedia: Hot Press] | *[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Press Wikipedia: Hot Press] | ||
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Latest revision as of 04:57, 20 September 2021
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