|
If he had never written another song, Elvis Costello would have won an eternal place in the hearts of blocked writers everywhere with the wittily anguished words of his 1979 hit "Accidents Will Happen." "Oh, I just don't know where to begin," it began. But then, certain kinds of writers have always adored Costello anyway. Brighter rock journalists were tickled both by his outré subject matter — after all, his first single was about Sir Oswald Mosley — and by the manifest literacy of his lyrics. At a time of studied vocal economism, Costello's driven wordplay and mildly surrealist narratives made his songs seem like some improbable hybrid of mid-Sixties Dylan and Lorenz Hart. All that, and you could jump up and down to them, too.
Before long, the younger generation of novelists on the other side of the Atlantic, started sprinking Costello references throughout their books. The heroine of Jay McInernery's Story of my Life gushes about songs like "Party Girl"; Brett Easton Ellis, he of the present American Psycho stink, named his first novel Less Than Zero after the aforementioned Mosley song. (And if he thought the track was a piece of hip nihilism, Ellis is an even worse judge of irony than his critics suggest.) The singer's response to such acts of hommage was predictably cool. Always suspicious of the press — there have been long periods when he has refused to give interviews — Costello says that Ellis's condecension left him less than flattered.
"I met him briefly, and it was like I should be very pleased to meet him. He seemed like a bit of a jerk to me and he's gone on to confirm it. Ellis, McInerney — they're all a lot of clowns, really. I don't think any of them are any good. But then I don't think any writers are any good these days. That evening of Graham Greene's death made you realise how bitchy and stupid the literary world is, how trivial and irrelevant."
Blanket put-downs like these can look pretty arrogant in print, so it's worth stressing that, in person. Costello is a much milder, more civil and generally more agreeable fellow than he has been painted — or indeed, painted himself in outraged songs from the first album's "Angry" to "Hurry Down Doomsday" on his new record Mighty Like a Rose. (Very Costellian, this title — a quotation from an old-time song that starts you musing about the ways in which a bloom can be powerful.) Not that he doesn't see the point of bile: "I think it's foolish for pop music to have become obsessed with youth in the way it has. It's got to the point where there's only polite music beyond a certain age, "there's no 'Angry Old Man' music." He laughs. "Yeah, Angry Old Man, I think that's what I'll call my next album."
Even in a youth-obsessed industry, however, 37 is a trifle young to be easing into slippers and writing off for a free bus pass, and Costello shows no sign of reducing his workload. The fact that he hasn't released an album since Spike is due rather, he says, to the increasingly monolithic nature of the record industry than to any failure of energy or inspiration. "Before I was able to put out material pretty much as I wrote it, but I'm signed to a worldwide contract now, and co-ordinating an international company to release anything, whether it be an aspirin or whatever, it quite an undertaking. The whole mechanism has changed. But if you leave a couple of years between albums then there's a sneaking suspicion that it's a comeback, as if you've been drying out in a clinic or something."
Among the things which have been keeping Costello busy in his new home outside Dublin are the songs he has written for the likes of Roger McGuinn and Johnny Cash and the recordings he has made for compilation albums of compositions by Mingus and the Grateful Dead. (Not only does he confess to an unexpected fondness for the Dead, but his rustic beard and long hair make him look closer these days to a relaxed Jerry Garcia than — the hackneyed comparison — a manic Buddy Holly).
He has also co-written the score for Alan Bleasdale's forthcoming Channel 4 series GBH — the latest development in an association with the writer which includes playing a bit part as a bungling conjuror in Bleasdale's film, No Surrender and writing the theme song for the series Scully. Add to these the baker's dozen of songs which makes up Mighty Like A Rose and it becomes apparent that there has been little, if any, slackening off in his prolific ways.
Though the Costello voice and attitudes are unmistakable on Mighty Like a Rose, he insists that its lyrics are different in being "incredibly plain — at least they're written with that intention. I'm not very self-conscious about what I do because if you become too aware of these things you stop being able to write. The only things I have thought about over the years were to do with taking out some of the things that became mannerisms, like puns — at first it's cute, but then it becomes just a clever-dick thing to do, like a nervous tic."
This disavowal of complexity seems true to the extent that there are only occasional flickers of the inveterate punster at work here — he substitutes "sucker" for "succour," for example, and crashes religious terminology into Mills and Boonery in the line "One day my Prince of Peace will come." ("Well," he concedes, "if you make everything too puritan....") Moreover, at least one of the songs — a desperate love lament called "Broken" co-written with his wife Cait — has a simplicity you would never have associated with the man who once sang "Your mouth is made up but your mind is undone" (and vice-versa).
Yet Costello's claims to plainness are misleading if they suggest that there's not a cryptic line in earshot. Such assertions are particularly wide of the mark when it comes to the more politically charged songs on the album, since Costello's treatment of current affairs can be more far more oblique that of love affairs. While it's clear enough that "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" is an exercise in apocalyptic black humour — Costello's answer to Betjemen's "Come Friendly Bombs," as it were — listeners might be at a bit of a loss to construe lines like "The man in the corner of this picture has a sinister purpose / In the teeming Temple of the Railroad Kings...."
Similarly while even the most literal-minded listener could grasp the fact that "Invasion Hit Parade" waxes sardonic about the US Army ("The liberation forces make movies of their own / Playing their Doors records and pretending to be stoned"), the obvious assumption that it concerns the Gulf War proves mistaken: it was written earlier last year, and "came from Panama, with Noriega holed up inside the Papal enclave. The images in the song come from the nightmarish nature of the television coverage, the way it's turned into gladiatorial combat." Television has always been a staple of Costello's songwriting — the inspiration for "Less Than Zero" was an over-polite documentary about Mosley and he even takes time out from discussing the new album to comment on the Late Show's self-conscious use of a bakelite set for their on-screen telephone calls. (Costello himself contrived the most memorable use of the word in rock history: "When I hold you like I hold that bakelite in my hand...")
As he once wrote, "Some things you never get used to," and just as the televising of global politics still has the capacity to enrage him, so the smaller distortions of rock journalism can still be an irritation. In interviews he has been giving to the American press about Mighty Like A Rose, Costello has found himself replying to suggestions that the album is down-beat and gloomy by pointing to its varied instrumental texture — everything from a night-club hand on "Couldn't Call It Unexpected" through the sunny West Coast harmonising of "The Other Side Of Summer" to a sweet wind quintet break in "Harpies Bizarre" that sounds like something George Martin might have cooked up for the Beatles circa 1966.
He's right: there is more variety and humour on the record, and throughout all his albums than you would guess from reading his reviews across the years. All of which suggests that professional writers are not, perhaps, his ideal audience — though Costello is inclined to believe that the record-buying public has also been included to take him a little too solemnly. "I take what I do absolutely seriously and at the same time I don't give a damn about it. People think that's an arch thing to say, but it's the closest thing to a working philosophy I've ever had."
|
