|
|
When I Was Cruel
Elvis Costello
Review printed in Third Way, September 2001.
After seven years of collaborating with mezzo-sopranos and
easy-listening legends, and no fewer than four 'Best of'
releases, Costello has re-read his job description. The king
of bile is back, full of raucous energy, bitter
word-twisting observation, and a bona fide rock and roll
band (including two-thirds of the Attractions). It is
superbly well worth the wait.
Costello was in the mood for 'a rowdy rhythm record' again, he says, and wrote the songs 'with a Silvertone electric guitar, a 15-watt amplifier and a kid's beatbox with big orange buttons'. That rawness runs through the album, but leavened with some sophisticated arrangements, the currently obligatory techoloops and a horn section, creating a delightfully multi-textured soundscape.
With drum programme in the foreground, 'Spooky Girlfriend' provides the familiar sleaze, showcasing the fantasies of a record company executive. 'She says, "Are you looking up my skirt?"/When you say no, she says, "Why not?"' In 'Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a doll revolution)', the sex object joyously turns the tables. Costello claims to have written it as the theme for a US TV show he was going to make about a band consisting of Russian supermodel secret agents trying to bankrupt America by wasting record company money, which would be a typical piece of self-mythologising, if it did not happen to be true.
The menancingly beautiful title track - now this is what I call a best of - is a series of blurred, unflattering snapshots from a society wedding. Costello must be the only person who could write a line that is as innocuous on paper as 'She was selling speedboats in a tradeshow when he met her', and spit it out with such violence as to turn it into a squalid accusation. He also creates a new verb: 'Not quite aside, they snide, "She's number four"'. Finally, the perfect way to describe his own singing.
In the same vein, 'Alibi' (his most overused word now gets a song to itself, in which he repeats it 50 times) sounds like a remake of Blood and Chocolate's 'I Want You'. Costello snipes at a succession of excuses for moral failure, kicking away pop psychology crutches. 'You were weak couldn't help it, but you never had a pony', he snides.
There are bona fide love songs too, but always eschewing simple sweetness and rock and roll cliché. There is the wonderful '15 Petals' with its high-octane Arabic feel, and peppery horns, declaring 'I love you twisted and I love you straight'. 'My Little Blue Window' celebrates a tough love that is too true to be nice: 'My lovely hooligan,/Come and smash my pain/pane'. [Simon - not sure how best typographically to show this pun.]
'Soul for Hire', more accessible and more generous than most of his songs, glimpses a moment of crisis in a compelling moral drama, with a lawyer appalled by the failure of the justice system, and desparate 'to be more than just a soul for hire'. 'Speaking for myself,' Costello sings, 'I wouldn't take the fame, the fees, the glory/For whoring in the practice of the law', and surely the man who turned down Nike's offer of a million pounds for the use of 'Pump It Up' is entitled him to talk this way, more so than some of his more spiritual colleagues.
So what is it that makes Costello's trademark rancour and derision so popular? Is it simply that it appeals to the worst part our nature that finds self-affirmation in contempt for 'the other'? Maybe that is part of it. But there is also the simple fact that it is dramatic, in both senses. We find his vitriolic contempt compelling in the same way that peaceful souls love to get caught up in a well-scripted TV slanging match or bloody crime movie. It is a harmless outlet for whatever in us likes that kind of thing, though I would not want to over stress its therapeutic value.
There is a third reason as well, I think: although Costello rather revels in the sordid, one senses behind his vitriol an anger that the world is not what it should be. The ideal Christian response might be more consistently compassionate, but it is still good to have him rocking the boat. Steve Tomkins
