Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "Man Out of Time"

5 August 1982

"Excellent, but so it everything Elvis does. What he needs is another "Oliver's Army" — a big hit that will become a standard — and this is not it."

— Tim De Lisle

Did The Beatles give everyone the wrong idea about creativity and success going hand in hand? The fact that they were able to parlay their wildly popular early hits into works of increasingly greater experimentation, introspection and sophistication all the while maintaining their commercial dominance is probably more astounding today since no one else has been able to replicate it. Even among the Fab Four's contemporaries there was little correlation between artistic achievement and the charts. The Beach Boys were starting to falter commercially just as Brian Wilson was delivering his masterpiece Pet Sounds, The Byrds found themselves releasing one better album after another with ever decreasing sales and The Kinks best album suffered the indignity of missing the charts completely. (Of course I'm cherry picking examples that suit me here but it only goes to show that there was never a rule to go by; not that anyone ever suggested there was a rule...is it possible to strawman yourself?)

The Beatles example may have been what virtually everyone aspired towards — even if they had denied at the time — but few could have expected even a fraction of the same for themselves. Elvis Costello, a passionate devotee of every genre of music from rag time to ye ye and something of a pop music scholar, would've known that better than most.

Tim De Lisle is concerned with Costello's lack of Top 40 action, urging readers to "Buy This Now!" all the while acknowledging that his self-composed singles hadn't gotten nearly enough punters to shell out the requist bob since "Oliver's Army". (I wonder if it rankled the man a touch that following his almost number one hit he only had two more placements on the Top 10, both of which were covers; on the other hand, maybe the old scamp musicologist took extra pride in getting his renditions of "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and "Good Years for the Roses" into the upper echelons of the charts) Last week, I wrote about Marshall Crenshaw's "Cynical Girl" and how critics must have scratched their heads in wonder at the clever singer-songwriters they'd slather with praise that would never catch on beyond a loyal cult following. That's Elvis Costello, ramped up to someone people generally knew about and whose albums still sold pretty well but just didn't get the mass acceptance the press felt they deserved.

The centrepiece of one of Costello's three truly flawless albums, Imperial Bedroom (along with This Year's Model and Trust), "Man Out of Time" is its lengthiest track but it's a swift five and a half minutes nonetheless. Opening with some a chaotic (possibly drunken) rock-out from the L.P.'s early sessions, it glides smoothly into the song's piano/organ-led dream-like melody. (So effortless is the abrupt transition that you'd think it all been recorded en masse, rather than splicing together an early take of the song with the more stately recording that dominates the single) Tinkling away as if randomly at the keys, Steve Nieve's playing acts as a response to Costello's lyrics with some gentle mocking, adding some levity to what could very easily be an over-melodramatic tale. The nobleman/prominent politician depicted in the song is about to be found out, his entire life is about to crash down upon him — maybe he's going to get caught up in a sensational tabloid scandal or maybe a murder-suicide or maybe he's just a great big paranoid git who's built up guilt in his head and imagines that everything is about blow up: who the hell knows? Whether real or delusional, the pleas of "Will you still love / A man out of time?" are among the most poingiant Costello ever crafted, indicating that his own experiences or thoughts are hidden in the at least a part of this, his greatest song. (Significantly, he would divorce his first wife within two year's of the release of Imperial Bedroom, as chronicled on the flawed though somewhat misunderstood Goodbye Cruel World)

Applied to Costello as well is another meaning in the title. Clearly by 1982 he wasn't especially interested in contemporary pop — or even if he was, he certainly wasn't about to start making some of his own, or so everyone must have thought — and he was situating himself deliberately in another era. (At least as far back as the sixties but stretching even further to the days of Gershwin and Porter, two of his nibs' prime musical heroes) Drafting in Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick is evidence enough of that. Hence the lack of chart success that everyone felt he merited. But he'd soon be giving it all a rethink.

With his music heritage and catholic tastes, Elvis Costello would have wanted nothing more than to compose pop music standards. While others from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan have mined the Great American Songbook, he is the type who wishes he could have added a chapter of his own ("Everyday I Write the Book" indeed), even if he's British and wouldn't and shouldn't qualify. Much as I love his work from 1978 to 1986 (though not a whole of it lot since then), I can't say he ever composed a true classic. "Oliver's Army" is of course beloved in the UK but it's not especially notable elsewhere and its lyrics have become problematic of late. "Alison" is another firm favorite (though not so much by me: there's no reason to bother with boring Elvis) but it's popularity seems tied to the generation that first encountered it back in the late seventies. Indeed, Costello appears to be fading in the public consciousness. Those fussy melodies and arrangements are all well and good but they necessarily limited the number of people who could fully appreciate his genius. Even his best songs (to wit) suffer from this.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Scritti Politti: "Asylums in Jerusalem" / "Jacques Derrida"

Green Gartside's highly unprolific organization has been dealt with a lot in this space but I just can't pass up the chance to bask in their lush cleverness (there's that and I don't feel like writing about anything else in this fortnight's uninspired batch). A typically excellent double A side that nearly got them into the Top 40 which is no small feat when you consider the subject matter of the two songs. De Lisle avoids knocking them for being "too clever by half" possibly because his SOTF is the similarly swotty and persnickety Elvis Costello. The reggae-influenced "Asylums in Jerusalem" is the stronger of the two but the skiffle-esque "Jacques Derrida" isn't as heavy going as the title would suggest — and Green's rap near the end makes me wonder why he sought out the likes of Shabba Ranks and Mos Def when he was more than capable of the deed himself.

(Click here to see my original review)

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "From a Whisper to a Scream"

5 March 1981

"E.C. serves up another gem-like effort from the mighty "Trust" (every home should have at least one) and this time it's to be hoped that a few hundred thousand people do some serious purchasing."

— David Hepworth

Befitting an individual who earned a healthy amount of praise (four Singles of the Fortnight in the eighties, tying him with The Cure and Pet Shop Boys), Elvis Costello's relative lack of success proved to be an ongoing concern for Smash Hits writers. Tim De Lisle felt that his nibs needed a "big hit that will become a standard", something that wasn't in the cards for SOTF "Man Out of Time". Ro Newton was too busy appreciating the man's genius and the overall brilliance of "Tokyo Storm Warning" to get caught up in something as trivial as his chart potential but Richard Lowe is hopeful that "Veronica" will bring him back into the "Fun 40" (it did indeed do so even if he was probably thinking of something better than number 31). The critics loved him so what was wrong with the record buying public?

It hadn't always been this way. Costello's early career had seen him enjoy a decent run of nine Top 40 hits on the bounce, from "Watching the Detectives" through to "New Amsterdam", a period that coincides with the closest he ever came to being a singles act. Debut album My Aim Is True is a big favourite of many fans but the highlights ("Less Than Zero", "Alison", "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes", as well as "...Detectives" off the American edition, amazingly the only hit of the bunch) are those that were also released as 45s. Follow-up This Year's Model is strong from top to bottom but it almost sounds like thirteen singles shoved together. 1979's Armed Forces is a bit uneven like My Aim Is True and there's a reason everyone's favourite number from it is "Oliver's Army". Again, Get Happy!! from a year later sounds like a giant sprawl of singles, its label reading '20 GREAT HITS' in the top right corner being only somewhat of a joke. Costello's best songs were singles; his best albums had as many singles as possible.

Fifth album Trust came out at the start of 1981. For the first time, it didn't feature any major standouts; on the other hand, it was commendably low on LP filler. There's the sense that its fourteen tracks all belong, even if "Lover's Walk" and "Luxembourg" aren't quite as solid as the others. Having fourteen cuts may not seem like anything special but most of The Beatles' classic albums had that many tracks (A Hard Day's Night and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band would have if not for rejected George Harrison numbers) and, indeed, Trust has something of the throwback sixties record about it for that reason. Many of these great Fab Four albums didn't include singles on them — With the Beatles, Beatles for Sale, Rubber Soul, Pepper, as well as double set The White Album — and, in spite of the demands of their American label Capitol, didn't need them. Standalone and/or film tie-in singles kept them at the top of the charts while their albums remained largely untouched. (The much ballyhooed Revolver had the double A-side "Eleanor Rigby"/"Yellow Submarine" released from it but it's unlikely that the single made much of a difference in how it has been appreciated)

"From a Whisper to a Scream" was the second and final UK single culled from Trust and it makes me wonder how Costello, his fellow Attractions, label F-Beat and any other concerned parties went about choosing their 45's. First release "Clubland" only got to number 60 in Britain and it too seems like an unlikely chart hit. Was "You'll Never Be a Man" deemed potentially too sexist? Did Costello fear alienating his fans by putting out the XTC-inspired "White Knuckles", a song whose inspiration he had to keep secret from his laddish bandmates? Was "Strict Time" nixed for being too bloody wordy, even by Costello's lofty standards? All fourteen of its cuts comes with at least one 'but' as far as commercial potential, with "From a Whisper to a Scream" and American release "Watch Your Step" as perhaps the closest.

Still, single or deep cut, hit or flop, "From a Whisper to a Scream" is indeed a gem as David Hepworth says. With some crunchy guitar chords and Bruce Thomas' bouncy guiding bass, it opens with a pop. The dueling vocals of Costello and guesting Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze manage to contrast each other in the verses while the two come together effectively in the chorus. The harsh and occasionally nasty singing of the former makes the more child-like singing of the latter a welcome addition. Its a relentless track and it's only until long after the fact that you realise he never bothered with a middle eight.

Great as it is, however, it doesn't come close to the full scope of Costello's considerable abilities, as well as those of his fellow Attractions. A better appreciation of them can be found on the Trust album itself, something that would carry forward the following year on the similarly hit-free masterpiece Imperial Bedroom. (The two albums bookend the release of Almost Blue, a collection of country music covers which resulted in the Top 10 single "A Good Year for the Roses"; I once worked in a bookstore with a guy who said it was his favourite Costello album which is tantamount to saying "I don't like Elvis Costello all that much") These two LPs represent him at the peak of his powers. So what if the hits had all dried up?

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Yoko Ono: "Walking on Thin Ice"

People have softened on Yoko Ono over the last few years but you still don't hear people praise her singing very much, do you? When people make fun of her unique vocals they don't appear to be referencing this song, even though it happened to be the biggest hit she made under her own name. Hepworth reckons that its chances of doing well are mainly down to the aftermath of John Lennon's murder (he was "working on [it] the night he was turned into a crime statistic") but surely they could've scraped the bottom of the barrel with something under his name if they really were after yet another sure-fire hit. It did all right (number 35, a peak it would hit again over twenty years later) but it has since been hailed as a bit of a classic, better than much of what ended up on John and Yoko's Double Fantasy album. Hepworth points out that Lennon's "sheet lighting guitar solo" is an example of how he "decided to leave the boundary-breaking" to his wife and he's right, especially considering how shockingly conventional Ono sounds on this same record. In any case, "Walking on Thin Ice" was a baby step towards her eventual rehabilitation in the eyes of the public and it would go on to be covered by (well, fancy that!) Elvis Costello. Fuzzbox would also go on to do a version of it at the end of the eighties; I wonder what it's like...

Elvis Costello: "Veronica"

22 February 1989

"It also boasts the best funny noise on a record this fortnight courtesy of a bloke called Benmont Tench who does his stuff on a "Baldwin spinnet". And you thought it was all done on computers these days."

— Richard Lowe

There are a lot of questions I would love to pose to former Smash Hits writers. I'd ask William Shaw how he managed to make the transition from pop journalism to mystery novelist. I'd ask David Hepworth if having to the review the singles was really the chore that he made it out to be. I'd ask Tom Hibbert why he felt the need to make bloody Limahl his Single of the Fortnight. But most of all, I'd ask Richard Lowe what made him so damn cheerful in this issue.

Lowe was the newly-appointed editor of ver Hits and, not unlike predecessor Barry McIlheney, he chose to do the singles at the start of his reign. And he didn't exactly give himself the easiest bunch of records to sift through. Of the ten he evaluated, seven failed to make the "Fun 40" and two more weren't exactly big chart movers either. He had faded giants (Boy George, Howard Jones), recent fluke number one artists trying to make failed attempts at another big hit (Robin Beck, Gene Pitney), acts that were clinging to Top 10 glories from several months earlier (Breathe, Tanita Tikaram) and a fine if inconsequential live track that no one asked for (Depeche Mode). The one flop of note is "Info Freako" by Jesus Jones, a group that was busy fusing Brummie grebo with the emerging sound that would soon be known as "baggy" or "Madchester" and seemed like an act to keep an eye on (though no one would have predicted just how popular they'd become two years later).

Little of note on offer yet Lowe is smitten with all of it. Breathe's "Don't Tell Me Lies" has a "brilliant singalong chorus" while Howard Jones' "Everlasting Love" sounds "just like his old ones" and has an "infernally catchy chorus". Tanita Tikaram's "World Outside Your Window" is "ace" while Gene Pitney's cover of Roy Orbison's "It's Over" ought to be loved by everyone unless you are in reality a "dead sheep". Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" is still a "perfectly agreeable tune" which sounds much the same as it did only now it's recorded in a "basketball stadium or something" while Jason Donovan's "Too Many Broken Hearts" (see below) has Lowe proclaiming that the Stock Aitken Waterman writing/production team is the "bee's knees" (one of the things that made Lowe such a perfect Smash Hits writer for this period is that he was equal parts indie rocker and pop kid). Boy George's "Don't Take My Mind on a Trip" is a "cracker", Robin Beck's "Save Up All Your Tears" is "very stirring" and Jesus Jones' "Info Freako" is a "smashing record" that will "definitely frighten your grandmother". Blimey, Lowe's Single of the Fortnight must be the greatest pop song ever written next to all these supposed heavy hitters!

I had never heard of Elvis Costello until reading Lowe's review of "Veronica". Had I been twenty-one at the time, my initial reaction would have been that his name sounded made up (which, of course, is true); instead, I was eleven and figured that he was old. Dead old. Had I been asked about his age in relation to Neil Tennant's, I would've guessed that he was about ten years older than the Pet Shop Boys frontman. Turns out, he's a month and a half younger.

In fairness to my poor judgement, there were plenty of reasons for assuming that he was of advanced years. First, this was Smash Hits I was reading and anyone over twenty-four was basically a cranky old pensioner in their eyes. Lowe mentions that Costello "has been knocking around for donkeys' years" and that he was now working alongside Paul McCartney ("the legendary Fab Macca out of the so-called "Beatles"", as he mysteriously notes). Then there's the fact that this latest single happened to be about an old lady slipping into senility, hardly the subject matter for youngish pop types. The accompanying photo one the singles page is of a unsmiling man who looks well into middle age. Yeah, this Elvis Costello bloke must've been ancient — or so I thought.

In the first ten years of his recording career, Elvis Costello released eleven albums. Artists tended to be more prolific back then but this is still an impressive feat. In both 1981 (with Trust and Almost Blue) and 1986 (King of America, Blood & Chocolate) he put out a pair of LP's and 1985 would be the only year he wouldn't put out at least one album. But such creative hot streaks don't last and Costello was going to have to take his feet off the gas at some point. Seemingly cut from the same cloth as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and, yes, Paul McCartney, he was never the same once he began to slow down.

"Veronica" was the first single taken from Spike, Costello's first album since Blood & Chocolate. Working with McCartney paid off for both of them as they also wrote songs that would appear on Macca's Flowers in the Dirt, released later on in 1989. Notably, these were their first LP's recorded in the CD era and it shows. Spike in particular is guilty of filling up as much compact disc space as possible, with a generous fifteen tracks and over an hour of listening "pleasure". (In spite Lowe's love for "Veronica", he was none-too-thrilled by the album as a whole in a review the following fortnight; if anything, the score he gives is inflated given his critique) It also suffers from being recorded in a multitude of studios in Britain and America with a vast selection of session musicians and special guests. This disparity makes Spike an uncharacteristically generic record. There's no attempt at the sort of album unity he managed with the soul/Motown influenced Get Happy!! or the country-roots romp King of America. Not only are deep cuts "God's Comic" and "Chewing Gum" both subpar songs for him but the swampy, Bayou rock of the former and the Celtic folk of the latter ensures that they aren't even able to mesh well. 

"Veronica" is one of the better songs on the album but it still has its flaws. For whatever reason, he chose not to record it in the UK sessions with McCartney, Nick Lowe and Chrissie Hynde but cut it instead in Hollywood with a large group that included Mitchell Froom, Jim Keltner and Roger McGuinn, as well as then-regular collaborators T-Bone Burnett and Cait O'Riordan of The Pogues. Costello had some talented folk working with him but it was a lineup that needed paring down. A basic quartet or quintet could have done a much more efficient job of recording a song like "Veronica". Kettle drums? Those weedy (possibly synthesized) "Beatlesque" trumpet bits? That "Baldwin spinnet" [sic] thing?

Costello's singing doesn't really suit the song's subject matter either. While often spitting out (in Lowe's words) lyrical "tongue-twisters" in the vein of "Love for Tender" or "Tokyo Storm Warning", he could often utilize his strained voice to a more sensitive effect on the likes of "Allison" and "Little Angel" but he takes the lightning-fast spittle approach on "Veronica" as if covering up the narrative of an elderly woman with dementia in order to appeal to younger listeners. If this was his intention then it worked as it gave him sizable American hit and even took him to the top of the US Alternative Rock charts. It was just a minor success in the UK, however, and it quickly became forgotten in his homeland. Elvis Costello wrote and performed many stronger songs in the previous decade than this — and he would even compose a few more in the coming decades.

The Costello-McCartney pairing didn't prove to be as fruitful as promised. A lot of people have speculated that Macca was interested in finding a talent and personality not dissimilar to John Lennon but for whatever reason the two didn't work well. They didn't appear to fully embrace their team-up and I wonder if that's what really held them back. Instead of Spike and Flowering in the Dirt as separate releases, there should have been a cohesive album combining to the two. But this only aids Costello's case: McCartney's album is the stronger of the two and proved to be his best LP since Tug of War. The gradual rehabilitation of Macca was beginning while Elvis Costello began to fade from relevance in the nineties. No wonder he seemed so old.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Jason Donovan: "Too Many Broken Hearts"

"Jason sings it perfectly adequately," enthuses Lowe; I wonder if this was meant to be funny. Jason Donovan struggled through the horrible "Nothing Can Divide Us" and managed to be badly out-sung by Kylie Minogue — not a strong vocalist herself — on the duet "Especially for You" so I suppose doing the job "perfectly adequately" is an achievement of sorts. Donovan had been a throw in pop star up until this point (Kylie was doing just fine so why not her male counterpart?) but "Too Many Broken Hearts" marks territory of his own. Perhaps acknowledging this, Stock Aitken Waterman inserted a guitar "lick" onto the beginning — either that or they were trying to mask what was becoming formulaic pablum. Yet, what did it matter? Jase looked great, he seemed to be enjoying every second of his life and everyone either looked up to him or wanted to go to bed with him. Who needs to be able to sing if you've got all that?

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "Tokyo Storm Warning"

27 August 1986

"The appealing thing about Elvis is that he wraps his ideas up in strong melodies which don't detract from what he's saying. And you can dance to them..."

— Ro Newton

This fortnight's singles were reviewed by Ro Newton, a Hits critic I don't know a great deal about. Very brief bios online say she now goes by the name of Rosemary Barrett but either way she doesn't have a huge social media presence, if she at all. But two things of note about her back in the day: (1) she was a presenter on The Old Grey Whistle Test alongside fellow music journalists Mark Ellen and David Hepworth and (2) she made that most unlikely of jumps from Number One to Smash Hits.

As a boy it would sometimes puzzle me when competing sides would act like their main rival didn't exist. There was no trace of Superman in the world of Marvel Comics and the Avengers were nowhere to be found in DC. A newcomer hero or villain at one wrestling promotion would never be acknowledged as having previously been a part of another. Newton's arrival at ver Hits wasn't trumpeted with a 'she's joining us after a successful stint at rival pop mag Number One', nor was her departure from Numero Uno given a 'she's off to improve the fortunes of Hash Smits and jolly good luck to her!' One can only imagine the hurt leaving her old job caused as well as the suspicion with which her new co-workers held her. Being a Whistle Test presenter, she might not have given a toss which teen pop mag she was toiling for since her heart may have been in indie rock. And who better to give props to in her first singles review at bat than Elvis Costello?

1984 saw the release of Goodbye Cruel World, Costello's disastrous post-divorce ninth album that almost no one likes. He has subsequently gone into spin mode on it, declaring that it's his worst album of good songs or best album of crap songs or something but in any event, the entire experience was enough to get him to try something new. With that in mind, he ditched the eighties production and sythns and did a roots country work called King of America. He even ditched his longtime band The Attractions in favour of some crack American sessioners. It's a big improvement on Goodbye... but still flawed. After a while the clever yarns, funny lyrics ("She said that she was working for the ABC news, it was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use" is still one of the best lines he's ever come up with) and rootsy tunes get a bit on the wick and I'm never able to make it much past the tenth track "Eisenhower Blues". Again, a different approach was in order.

Getting back with fellow Attractions Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas with King... in the can, Costello discovered that there wasn't much left for him musically. No one in the group liked each other anymore and so they made the best of a bad situation by thrashing away at their instruments. As if to compensate, Costello put his pen in overdrive, writing lengthy verses for at least two tracks of their latest release Blood & Chocolate. A big favourite among his still-loyal following, it's a good marking for just how much Declan MacManus one can take. Turns out, I can only take so much but it's his most avowedly rock album since This Year's Model so there are people out there who reckon it's one of the best things His Nibs ever did.

Newton praises his melodies but in this respect Blood... is probably his weakest album to date. His bandmates often sound like an especially glum bar band so perhaps he just didn't have much to work with. Lyrically it's all over the shop with the twice rejected "I Hope You're Happy Now" ("...it almost sounded like pop music," admits its author, doing his best to justify an uncharacteristically bland song) making the cut along with the unnecessarily long "I Want You". But this approach wasn't for naught as it did get a piece like "Tokyo Storm Warning" out of his system.

They say that a day in Bangkok is too much but a week isn't enough. Apparently that's Costello's take on the Japanese capital too. You arrive and there are neon signs with chicken scratch hiragana and katakana characters, grotesque cosplay youths and oddball mascots and, bloody hell!, where am I?!? Culture shock is bad enough just crossing the Atlantic but here in the Far East? At least they speak some form of English in Vegas! Of course, you eventually come down and discover that the people are friendly, the food's great (if a little too salty) and all that crap that bugged you out at first is actually pretty cool. You love Japan — until you come back.

The above has never been my experience visiting Japan (aside from all the good stuff) but I know what it's like to be alienated by a massive Asian city. Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Seoul: they've all irritated and freaked me out at various times for different reasons. What I never did was equate any of them with conflicts in Afghanistan or Kosovo. I don't know where Costello gets the idea that his aggrieved and jet lagged self is somehow looking at Tokyo through the prism of the Falklands, Palestine and South Africa but at least he got a good song out of it. Verses come at you in waves with loads of impressive imagery ("Between the Disney abattoir and the chemical refinery", "Japanese God, Jesus robots telling teenage fortunes") that either means everything or nothing.  Indeed, the chorus shrugs its shoulders ("what do we care?") but I'd much rather sing along with whatever the hell Costello's going on about.

The downside, however, is that it's best consumed just the once. Just as albums like Dark Side of the Moon and OK Computer never sound as good on repeated listens so,too, does "Tokyo Storm Warning". There aren't any hidden elements or musical touches to rediscover and the endless verses can become heavy-handed rather quickly. That doesn't mean it can't be appreciated further, just that weaknesses do creep in after a few plays. Newton is reminded of The Rolling Stones' classic "Satisfaction" but for me it's more like Dylan's brilliant "Highway 61 Revisited", albeit without the humour, playfulness and siren whistle. The Bard is very much at the heart of what Costello is doing here and the comparison almost works. If it is his "Desolation Row" then it's only because nothing else qualifies.

Newton's recommendation didn't do much for its chart prospects as it stalled just inside the Top 75. In addition to its stream-of-consciousness lyrics, radio programmers and listeners may have been turned off by having to flip the single over just to hear the second half of the song. In any case, it never had much commercial potential but it retains a special place in the Elvis Costello canon, despite it being a bunch of codswallop. Or, and here's a thought, perhaps precisely because it is.

~~~~~

Also Review This Fortnight

New Order: "State of the Nation"

Nowadays everyone sings with their eyes closed and likes New Order but that wasn't always the case. They made a string of good but not great LP's and had a run of singles that was pretty damn impressive but they seldom put out anything that people went bananas for and were kind of taken for granted by the pop world — and I can certainly see why with "State of the Nation". Another six minute-plus single, it's helped rather than hindered by Factory having the good sense to edit it down for the 7" mix. A supposed protest song, the lyrics are really just a textbook example of how Barney Sumner would telegraph his rhymes. The tune a is vaguely jangly throwback to "Everything's Gone Green" but which seems out of date next to follow-up single "Bizarre Love Triangle". Nothing special and they did much better — even if they also did worse.

Lene Lovich: "Lucky Number"

22 February 1979

"Overloaded with quirky ideas on everyday situations, assorted extraordinary voices for each different mood and no mean talent as a sax player, she is more original than any half-dozen New Wavers put together."

— Cliff White

There's something condescending these days about labelling someone a 'performance artist'. It could be down to critics having to resort to such a descriptive because they can't fathom anything else. It may be due to right wing YouTube trolls like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos being described as 'performance artists' by their allies defenders apologists (the very same people, incidentally, who complain incessantly about campus radicals who allegedly don't respect freedom of speech while refusing to acknowledge that these students might also be performance artists in their own right; I dare say a blue-haired nineteen-year-old collegian knows a thing or two more about performance art than a so-called "classical liberal" with a Patreon account). Or it could be just sexism: men express themselves, women are 'performance artists'.

The post-punk/new wave period of the late-seventies saw a spike in performance artists in pop — and, naturally, the bulk of them were of the fair sex. Much of it came from them having roots in glam rock but one that was dependent on the charity shop: one couldn't afford giant platform shoes and colourful face paint and, thus, had to rely upon dungarees and scarves and god knows whatever else happened to be available. Queue Lene Lovich, whose image of braided pig tails, black lace handkerchiefs and silk dresses was as DIY as any of her music.

This also happened to be a time in which women in pop either looked beatific, tough or were dripping in sex. Folk singers had their long hair and their jumpers and their cats and rockier types wore jeans and t-shirts and all looked like Suzy Quatro and the sex kittens all wished to be Debbie Harry or one of Charlie's Angels. But the generation coming out of punk wanted none of that (Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith would be the exceptions) and went about trying to look alluring but not quite sexy, scary but not tough, independent but not cozy. Kate Bush wore leotards and frilly dresses but she did grotesque ballet routines in the promos of her great batch of early singles. Siousxie Sioux was never beautiful but you couldn't look away from her. The Slits got their kit out for the cover of their remarkable album Cut yet they look way too much like they don't care what you think to provide titlillation — and, indeed, the same goes for Bowwowwow's Annabella Lwin a couple years' later (which was for the best considering how worryingly young she was). All this got female artists the attention and respect they deserved until Toyah came along and ruined it for everyone. Male rock critics didn't know what to do with them and so they became 'performance artists'.

Lene Lovich wasn't selling sex, women's lib or happiness, just the concept of being Lene Lovich. She's in a state but plays to the camera in the video for "Lucky Number" without a shred of bashfulness. It appears at once greatly rehearsed and wholly natural: every little quirk — her eyes popping out, the way she pranced in the direction of the audience or camera — would have been honed over the previous decade as she developed her craft yet seems very much an extension of her unique personality.

Lost among all of Lovich's mannerisms and her appearance was "Lucky Number", a great pop song with hooks and everything. The early take which provided the flip side to her 1978 Charlie Gillett-produced cover of "I Think We're Alone Now" is an example of sturdy post-punk put together on a shoestring. Getting an advance from Stiff Records allowed Lovich and longtime personal and professional partner Les Chappell to add some bells and whistles and it comes across more like vintage new wave. Either way, it's a dynamic recording with Lovich in control with an expressive performance and a great madcap band to back her up. Handclaps,  a tambourine, surf guitar, tribal percussion, gentle backing vocals: had they not been careful there's no way it all would have worked. 

The one (minor) knock against it is that the song's narrative might be too swift. She moves from independence in its opening verses ("for me, myself and I is all I've ever known") to an uneasy feeling that she can't quite pin down ("an imminent attack upon my heart I fear") to finishing up with acknowledging that there's someone else out there for her ("I never want to be apart from you my dear") and it all progresses just a bit too easily. I'm all for brevity in pop but a more gradual progression in her feelings would make it more believable. But, then, why be believable when she's already so convincing?

Dressing up in S&M gear during the punk era may have been considered legit but when it came to Adam Ant dawning his famed 'dandy highwayman' look suddenly he was a sell out. But few would have thought to call him a 'performance artist'. Few were as shameless in their attempts to grasp pop stardom as Steve Strange and he, too, was never considered a performance artist. It's just the women from that time who had that label stuck to them. Maybe they were the only ones putting in the time to give a real performance and do something original with it.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "Oliver's Army"

This is the old scamp's finest three minutes but Cliff White doesn't see it that way. My "giving it a clever slant on the state of war" is his "serious 'message' song"; my "tune you can never get enough of" is his "clapped-out old pop melody". He even considers Costello to be as "humourless as a stuffed trout" which is...well, okay, I'll give him that. While I'm not again hearing people rip into my most disliked of favourite singers, I can't listen to "Oliver's Army" and not hear it as anything but perfect — except for his use of the n-word but, then, I'm not a YouTube "classical liberal".

The Catch: "25 Years"

16 August 1984

"The reviewer's dream: the mystery record which turns out to be an absolute gem."

— Lesley White

Over the last year and a half that this blog has been going, I've come across some very pleasant surprises. It was nice, for example, to discover that The Police were occasionally able to put their considerable talents together into something stirring and worthwhile rather than crass and irritating. Pink Industry's E.P. Forty Five was something I didn't expect would be up to much but the four varied tracks brought out the curious, inquisitive music obsessive side of me that hadn't been so enamoured with that type of indie noise in years. Weekend's indie jazz pop proved a charming delight and so, too, was the touching grace of Spectral Display's "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love". So many great songs that I would never have had the chance to hear had I not been doing this project.

Alas, "25 Years" is not one of them. Lesley White doesn't have her hopes up for a group she's utterly unfamiliar with — "the nostalgic, hand-tinted sleeve tells me that The Catch are Don Snow and Chris Whitton (which tells me nothing)" — but the record gives her oodles of pleasure. Hopes low, enjoyment-level high: I wish I could say the same for my experience. Expecting something else, I listened and re-listened over the past several days hoping it might grow on me or that I might hear an appealing groove or melody or a touching vocal or anything that makes singles of the fortnight. Yeah, nothing.

That's not to say there aren't surprises here, even if they don't do much to advance the record. With all due respect to White (I could never not respect a Smash Hits scribe, no matter how duff their taste in music) her analysis doesn't quite hold up. I don't hear the slightest trace of early Roxy Music, I'm quite certain that there's just the one saxophone wailing away — though, granted, it is the best part — and that vocal may be to trying a bit too hard to be "not a million miles from Bronski Beat" (a Catch member's voice cracks at the end of the line "now I'm trying to wash away the tears" which leads me to suspect that we've got a Jimmy Sommerville impersonator on our hands). Rather, we have a mix of white English soul, synth-pop and dramatic gospel which would sound fresh and stately if not for the crucial fact that it's not much cop at all.

I could blame it on dashed expectations but that doesn't help save a boring record, one which I very much wanted to enjoy. This mid-'84 batch of (mostly) lackluster SOTF's has been a tough slog and there may yet be a few more duds to get through before things get better (you know, assuming they ever do). Good thing, then, that there are a pair of nifty little singles coming up as a brief respite. Just don't expect too much.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "The Only Flame in Town"

Elvis Costello's standing began to take a beating at around this time and it's easy to see why. He was no longer content to show off either his vast musical knowledge nor some clever lyrical tricks and simply made due with the tired tunes that make up Goodbye Cruel World, which was both the nearest thing he ever did to a divorce album and an aborted attempt at quitting the music business. It's over-produced and the whole thing is a mess but there's something refreshing about him just getting on with writing a batch of songs that show you how he's feeling for once. Well sung with the aid of a guesting Darryl Hall, "The Only Flame in Town" is simple and catchy and, unusually for a Costello record, really quite likeable. There's a new-found vulnerability here, something that he would put to good use on the following year's mostly great follow-up King of America, but this is also about where on the fence Costello followers begin dropping off. Wouldn't you know it, just as he's getting interesting and people stop caring — I suppose they were expecting too much.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions: "Man Out of Time"

5 August 1982

"Excellent, but so is everything Elvis does. What he needs is another "Oliver's Army" — a big hit that will become a standard — and this is not it."
— Tim De Lisle

Did The Beatles give everyone the wrong idea about creativity and success going hand in hand? The fact that they were able to parlay their wildly popular early hits into works of increasingly greater experimentation, introspection and sophistication all the while maintaining their commercial dominance is probably more astounding today since no one else has been able to replicate it. Even among the Fab Four's contemporaries there was little correlation between artistic achievement and the charts. The Beach Boys were starting to falter commercially just as Brian Wilson was delivering his masterpiece Pet Sounds, The Byrds found themselves releasing one better album after another with ever decreasing sales and The Kinks best album suffered the indignity of missing the charts completely. (Of course I'm cherry picking examples that suit me here but it only goes to show that there was never a rule to go by; not that anyone ever suggested there was a rule...is it possible to strawman yourself?)

The Beatles example may have been what virtually everyone aspired towards — even if they had denied at the time — but few could have expected even a fraction of the same for themselves. Elvis Costello, a passionate devotee of every genre of music from rag time to ye ye and something of a pop music scholar, would've known that better than most.

Tim De Lisle is concerned with Costello's lack of Top 40 action, urging readers to "Buy This Now!" all the while acknowledging that his self-composed singles hadn't gotten nearly enough punters to shell out the requist bob since "Oliver's Army". (I wonder if it rankled the man a touch that following his almost number one hit he only had two more placements on the Top 10, both of which were covers; on the other hand, maybe the old scamp musicologist took extra pride in getting his renditions of "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" and "Good Years for the Roses" into the upper echelons of the charts) Last week, I wrote about Marshall Crenshaw's "Cynical Girl" and how critics must have scratched their heads in wonder at the clever singer-songwriters they'd slather with praise that would never catch on beyond a loyal cult following. That's Elvis Costello, ramped up to someone people generally knew about and whose albums still sold pretty well but just didn't get the mass acceptance the press felt they deserved.

The centrepiece of Costello's one true flawless album, Imperial Bedroom, "Man Out of Time" is its lengthiest track but a swift five and a half minutes nonetheless. Opening with some a chaotic (possibly drunken) rock-out from the L.P.'s early sessions, it glides smoothly into the song's piano/organ-led dream-like melody. (So effortless is the abrupt transition that you'd think it all been recorded en masse) Tinkling away as if randomly at the keys, Steve Nieve's playing acts as a response to Costello's lyrics with some gentle mocking, adding some levity to what could very easily be an over-melodramatic tale.The nobleman/prominent politician depicted in the song is about to be found out, his entire life is about to crash down upon him — maybe he's going to get caught up in a sensational tabloid scandal or maybe a murder-suicide or maybe he's just a great big paranoid git who's built up guilt in his head and imagines that everything is about blow up: who the hell knows? Whether real or delusional, the pleas of "Will you still love / A man out of time?" are among the most poingiant Costello ever crafted, indicating that his own experiences or thoughts are hidden in the at least a part of this, his greatest song.

Applied to Costello as well is another meaning in the title. Clearly by 1982 he wasn't especially interested in contemporary pop — or even if he was, he certainly wasn't about to start making some of his own, or so everyone must have thought — and he was situating himself deliberately in another era. (At least as far back as the sixites but even to the days of Gershwin and Porter, two of his prime musical heroes) Drafting in Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick is evidence enough of that. Hence the lack of chart success that everyone felt he merited. But he'd soon be giving it all a rethink.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Kate Bush: "The Dreaming"

There are people out there who think that the valley of her career — between the peaks of her astonishing debut single "Wuthering Heights" and her just-as-astonishing album Hounds of Love seven years later — is the real Kate Bush. I don't know any myself, I haven't bothered researching them but I know they're out there because of course they are. And they aren't necessarily wrong. Erratic, sure, but Kate's the type who needs to be all over the place. "The Dreaming" tackles issues with Australian aborigines but all in her own uniquely Bushian style. Barmy stuff but if Kate Bush isn't going to do this type of thing, who would?