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Elvis Costello once shouted mockingly to an audience in Washington: “Next time we come back … we’ll bring an army and take over!” It was one time when Costello’s brazen boasting was sadly misplaced – it’s taken six years for the British to invade America’s airwaves, and Elvis is definitely not in the landing party. While the sweet new fa(e)ces of English pop have been converting Americans by the stadium-full, Costello’s last tour of America consisted of several low-key solo concerts in small venues.
Like The Clash and Sex Pistols before him, Costello assumed that he could tackle the U.S. with the same arrogance and venom that had upended the British music industry. Instead, he very nearly upended his own career. The man who had vowed that he would never succumb to the trappings of rock careerism was in complete confusion by 1979. He had shut himself off from the press, left his wife, and taken on an inhuman schedule of touring, writing and recording. It was during this period that he toured Australia, playing erratically and causing a near-riot at Sydney’s Regent Theatre by walking off after only 50 minutes. Later in Ohio, when he tried to provoke a bunch of American musicians by making racist remarks about Ray Charles, Costello finally blew it. The event was widely publicised and he did not return to the U.S. for two years.
The aftermath of these events was documented in a long interview in The Face last August. Costello and the Attractions recorded Get Happy under “extreme self-inflicted emotional stress” and then did a short British tour which left Costello so disillusioned that he momentarily quit the band. Almost Blue, an album of country cover versions, was a vain attempt to capture the old creative spark and a new audience.
Yet unlike others who have lost the thread since the heyday of 1977, Costello has clawed his way back to produce music of equal substance to his early years. Instead of fracturing his career into a myriad of interests – acting and video being the pet interests of anyone from Sting to John Lydon – he has sought to re-establish himself as one of Britain’s most ingenious songwriters. Imperial Bedroom was perhaps the peak of his fluency as a lyric writer and while Punch The Clock was a disappointing lightweight follow-up, four recent records have proved anything but light-weight.
Pills and Soap was a jaundiced view of Thatcherism where…
“… all we get are pictures of Lady Muck.
They come from lovely people with a hard line in hypocrisy,
There are ashtrays of emotion for the fag-ends of aristocracy.”
The Shipbuilding single recorded by Robert Wyatt, cleverly examined the Falklands War from the perspective of a shipbuilding town in England.
“It’s just a rumour that was spread around town,
Somebody said that someone got filled in,
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding.”
Subsequently, Costello produced The Specials’ single Nelson Mandela, a song about the jailed black African campaigner. His newest record is Peace in our Time, another bleak prognosis of world events.
Whereas once Costello would have set these songs to blustering, hard music, often his most vitriolic lyrics are set to plaintive and unadorned melodies. Similarly, the arrogance and confrontational nature of 1979 has been tempered. At 30, he is as affable as he once was arrogant. He arrived for the interview wearing baggy pants, a woolly jumper, leather coat and a well-worn porkpie hat. But behind the bookish appearance, he is still a man with an emphatic belief in his own worth and a complete disdain for many of his contemporaries. When Costello’s thoughts turn to those who displease him, his tongue is just as sharp as ever.
I’ll start with a couple of general questions. The last few things that I have heard of you being involved in were Peace In Our Time and a television series that you were possibly going to be involved with.
Well Peace In Our Time is out in England as an Imposter record, which is just to separate it from the next record. Then we’ve got an album coming out, Goodbye Cruel World, at the beginning of June. Peace In Our Time was recorded at the same time, I just wanted to put it out ahead of it, just as a song. I think its good to use different identities, different labels, just to make people approach a song differently.
Well, that certainly worked with Pills And Soap.
Yeah, it did. Of course that was more tricky, there was more intrigue with the release.
What about this television series?
Oh well, I play a very small role in that. I’ve written the title song for the series. The series is called Scully, the song’s called Turning The Town Red. It’s about a young fella’s ambitions and dreams, sort of a tragic comedy written by Allan Beasedale who wrote a series of plays about a group of unemployed fellas in Liverpool, about 18 months ago (a reference to Boys In The Blackstuff, recently screened on ABC). This is by no means as bleak as that, but some of the conclusions are quite tragic. It’s about this lad and I play his elder brother. It’s a very small part, I’m just a figure of fun in most of the scenes. I speak once.
Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
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