Some Costello Thoughts

[Update: I did, soon after writing this, record my episode of Stu’s podcast: you can hear the resulting discussion here.]

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My friend Pam recently went on Dangerous Amusements, an Elvis Costello-themed podcast, to talk about her favourite EC tracks, one per decade from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and teens. She was excellent, as you can hear if you click through, here. More, knowing how much I also love EC, she recommended me to Stu Arrowsmith, the podcast’s host, as a possible future guest. He’s been in touch and I will be appearing on the show in the coming months. Accordingly I have been trying to get some of my thoughts in order with respect to EC.

In addition to deciding which of my many favourite EC songs will make the stringent cut the podcast’s format requires, I have been thinking more generally about what I get from EC, why I keep coming back to his music. It’s not what you’d call easy listening, after all. I mean, I say that, although actually I think Elvis possesses a considerable gift for melody, an aspect of his songwriting for which he doesn’t get enough credit. When he collaborated with Paul McCartney for 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt and Spike and some other albums (I’ll come back to McCartney later in the post) the talk at the time was that he would be bringing a Lennon-y something to the songwriting partnership. He didn’t, I think: his musical and lyrical sensibilities are not like Lennon’s were, really. In fact he brought a different quality to Macca’s work, and I’ll come back to what in a moment.

I mean, it is surely a misapprehension to think that Lennon-McCartney was a mixture of two stark contrasts: Paul’s extraordinary melodic gift and musical variety with John’s less melodic, more intellectual, sardonic and monochrome musical style, blues licks and tin-pan-alley chord-progressions and eastern monotones reworked to carry barbed, or satirical, or sometimes visionary-spiritual meanings — as if Lennon’s Beatle songs didn’t include some of the most melodically gorgeous in their entire catalogue (‘Norwegian Wood’ to pick only one example). And the idea that, untethered from his collaboration with Lennon, McCartney drifted away into a haze of soppy sentimentalism, though it has its adherents, is, manifestly, equally nonsensical.

Still, there’s something there, isn’t there: something in the difference between Lennon and McCartney, something in the comparison between Elvis C and Lennon.

But before I get into that, some context concerning my own personal history with EC. So: I was, as a teen, aware of Elvis through his occasional flirtations with chart success: ‘Oliver’s Army’, ‘Alison’, some of the singles from Punch the Clock — songs I liked well enough without really finding myself moved to buy the albums. My entry point was, as it happened, 1986’s Blood and Chocolate. I was an undergraduate at the University of Aberdeen, and somebody I knew had a copy (had, indeed, the special ‘faux-bourneville’ packaged cassette) which I borrowed. I loved it. My musical tastes hitherto had skewed heavily mainstream melodic pop-ish. I listened to a lot of music, but I wasn’t the sort of teenager who sought-out weird or avant-garde music. I had friends who assiduously listened to John Peel, and went to micro-gigs with oddball, rebarbative or strange music, but that wasn’t me. Still I had more quirkish interests here and there, over and above listening to all the Beatles albums obsessively (although I also did that). At any rate, something about Blood and Chocolate really got to me.

I bought my own copy, and soon after bought King of America. Those still seem to me, with Imperial Bedroom, the crown of EC, and they are broadly speaking three suites of songs about love not running smoothly, about jealousy and misery, rage and lust and disgust and disillusionment, about the separations and relationship upheavals Elvis was going through as he wrote the albums. Hardly comfortable listening. But I loved, and still love, those albums, and listen to them all the time.

After this initial entry point, I acquired EC’s entire back catalogue and bought each new EC album as soon as it was released, listening to each new release over and over. Sometimes I fell for the new release straight away; sometimes it took me a while, and repeated listenings, to work my way into an understanding, and love, for the newer things, although there are works in the 90s and noughties I still go back to. But then again there are albums I hardly ever listen to now.

I have the legend ‘The Poets Rest’ tattooed onto my left shoulder, although this has less to do with Costello fanboydom than it has with the specific phrase, and the fact of the tattoo. To digress a little: back in the 1990s I was living on the outskirts of Windsor, and every time I walked into the centre of town I passed a tattoo parlour. One morning, on a whim, I went inside and waited my turn. When asked what I wanted I told them those three words. They sat me in the chair and a huge and hugely bearded tattoo artist wrote them on my shoulder in a fine script and afterwards drilled them into my skin with his gun. As he did so my eye wandered over the framed pictures he had on his wall: a selection of celebrities who had all subjected themselves to his attentions. One was Billy Connolly, and when the tattoo-guy was finished he said to me — I remembered watching Connolly interviewed on a BBC chat show, and relating the story — what he had also said to the Big Yin: ‘well,’ he said. ‘That’s one more of us, and one fewer of them.’ It cost me £5, the base rate of that establishment. Whilst I was sitting on the chairs of the waiting area I did wonder if I might regret my decision, but, walking out of the emporium I felt no regret whatsoever, and in fact a kind of glorious elation. This wasn’t to do with the specific nature of provenance of the tattoo, I think. It was, rather, that I had marked myself, indelibly. That I had written onto myself: in some symbolic sense, taken control of myself. I have never regretted my tattoo. Quite apart from anything else, it will literally last me the rest of my life (indeed: it will last my life and beyond — will outlast me). What else can you buy for a fiver with such guaranteed longevity?

If you’re an EC fan you’ll know from where ‘The Poets Rest’ derives (I have argued with some over whether it should have been ‘The Poet’s Rest’, and am happy to argue the case with you too if you like). If you’re not, it hardly matters.

I still get EC’s every new release when it comes out, but something changed in my relationship to his music-making when he put out 1998's Painted From Memory, his collaboration with Burt Bacharach — an album of which Elvis himself is rather proud, but which I actively disliked. I bought it, played it a few times, and then returned it to the shop for a refund. Whatever it was that was there for me in Blood and Chocolate, King of America and Imperial Bedroom simply wasn’t there in Painted From Memory, and has been there only intermittently in the later albums. I do admire his restlessness as a writer, the way he refuses simply to settle into a groove rehashing ‘Alison’ and ‘Less Than Zero’ over and over, but I wonder if his very restlessness hasn’t diffused his focus, and greater contentment in his personal life (God knows, I don’t begrudge him that!) diluted his attack as a writer.

Diluted what, though? It’s a number of things, working together, I suppose. It has to do with his lyrics, which are tartly witty or sardonic, sharply expressive, playful and memorable. It also with his melodies, and with his tonal idiom — the tenor of his sometimes grating or driving, acerbic guitar-bass-drums sound (with, often, Steve Nieve’s sneering keyboards), although as his career has progressed he has developed a variety of different musical styles. Much early Costello is quite angry, but not in the facile liberatory sense in which punk and post-punk was angry. John Lydon self-aggrandizingly and myopically chanted that Anger Is An Energy: but Elvis gets how anger is both exhilarating and contaminating, how it spoils and degrades as well as energises — how much of despair and depression is actually a mode of repressed, asphyxiated anger. But if all of EC’s songwriting was angry, he’d be a one-note composer, a one-trick pony. As his career has developed he has broadened and diversified his repertoire, and brought brilliant and eloquent songwriting skills to bear on a range of topics and moods.

But alright: Elvis C has written a wide variety of different types of songs (so has McCartney, of course), but let’s consider his love songs— sometimes angry, often not. Or not exactly.

We could say that Elvis writes complicated love songs, both in the sense that he writes songs about the complexities and ironies of love, and that he is musically and lyrically a complex rather than a naïve or sentimental artist. I suppose this spoke to me as a late teenager, early twentysomething: connected with my own experience, my sense that love is complex, that desire and lust and yearning and connection are all iterations of the complexity of intersubjectity, or indeed of an amputated monosubjectivity ridden by unaccomplishable love.

For Marcel Proust, love is inextricable from jealousy. For Vladimir Nabokov love is intertwined with cruelty (although there is also enormous and I think underappreciated tenderness in Nabokov’s rendering of love). Both these apperceptions of the nature of love appear in Costello’s writing too, but his writing is not quite so singular in what it saying. He is a man, acutely and sometimes agonizingly aware of both the brutalities of masculinity and its insecurities — he is, not coincidentally, a small, bespectacled man in a world where tallness and physical strength are valences of a particular kind of desirability, (as the woman witheringly tells him in ‘Worthless Thing’: ‘If you were ten feet taller and almost handsome/I might pay this king’s ransom, you worthless thing’). But rather than simply deploring or satirising toxic masculinity, he is more likely to ironize it, to paint it, like the ape Nabokov mentions in the endnote to Lolita, who was given paint and a canvas and ended up producing his first artwork: a picture of the bars of his own cage. Consider ‘Poor Fractured Atlas’, a pretty unforgiving self-portrait.

Poor fractured Atlas
Threw himself across the mattress
Waving his withering pencil as if it were a pirate’s cutlass
I’m almost certain he’s trying to increase his burden
He said “That’s how the child in me planned it
A woman wouldn’t understand it”

Charles Atlas is one of those slightly sepia-tinted cultural references of which Costello is surprisingly fond: Bakelite instead of plastic, for example. I suppose that when in ‘No Action’ he says ‘when I hold you like I hold that Bakelite in my hand’ he is invoking the more brittle nature of the older material.

This all has a relation to his lyrical fondness for puns and punning, something I find often brilliant and eloquent, although I know some find it offputting: absurd, sophomoric, diminishing. I don’t have space here to get into this in any detail, although I am ready to mount a defence of puns. Puns are a kind of rhyme of sense, sometimes facile or funny, sometimes more profound (as when Public Enemy talk of ‘all the lies buried in the library’). Song-lyric puns are a fitting accompaniment for song lyrics as such, since pop-lyrics actually rhyme sonically, and in various ways (consider the internal rhyming of the title ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’), and they do so because music itself ‘rhymes’ — that is, harmonizes, discords-to-accords, resolves and plays — both sonically and sensibly. This latter strikes me as essential to what makes music as powerful an artform as it is, although to justify my assertion would take a long time and might not convince you.

I’m not suggesting that music conveys easily reducible semantic content in the way words often do, although I am suggesting that music is more than merely formal, that it contains and communicates in ways that are associative, semantic and especially emotional. A lyric like ‘you lack lust — you’re so lacklustre’ may strike you as cheesy on a semantic level, but I like the light (the lustre) the off-rhyme in sense and sound casts back upon the sentiment.

But to get back to the main throughline of this blogpost: Costello as a writer of love songs. I’m suggesting that he writes complicated love songs, and I think is true. But I’m suggesting something something else too.

I note above that Costello’s version of love as complex and difficult chimed with my twentysomething sense of the matter. I have to say: now that I’m in my fifties I wonder about this. I’m not sure I think that, any more. It’s a big question, I know: but it’s pertinent because how we think about love is going to inform the proper idiom for art about love. Do the complex metaphysical knots of John Donne’s poetry capture something important about love? Does the obsessive iteration and reiteration of praise and denigration, of desire and self-disgust at lust, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets? Does the elegant wasted hopelessness of Keats’s ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’? Or is love actually a purer connection and consummation? Is love complex, or simple, actually? (Conceivably, love poetry is pastoral in the Empsonian sense of the word, which is to say: putting the complex into the simple.)

To go back to McCartney again: he, generally, writes — usually beautiful but — simple love songs. Not necessarily musically simple (although this is the man who wrote ‘All Together Now’ and ‘Queenie Eye’), but texts that apprehend love itself as wonderful in its directness, its simplicity. Take, for example, ‘Silly Love Songs’ (1976), where the titular self-deprecation is turned, in the song itself, into a glorious badge of honour. This great song’s chorus of ‘I Love You’ could hardly be simpler in its directness and sincerity. There is, perhaps, a kind of profundity in this: a sense that, though it doesn’t come in a minute, and sometimes doesn’t come at all, when love does come its glory is precisely in its decomplexifying intimacy and simplesse.

EC doesn’t write songs like that. Fundamentally he doesn’t understand love in those terms. He sees love as complicated, sometimes by anger, bitterness, betrayal, odi-et-amo, but more fundamentally by what I might call irony. And that seems to me to speak to something important in what he does. McCartney, for all his genius, does not write ironic songs. ‘Silly Love Songs’ — like ‘She Loves You’, and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ — treats love as perfectly unironic, perfectly uncomplicated, and as wonderful and sustaining and beautiful for that reason. ‘Yesterday’ is a song of unironic sorrow that a love affair has gone wrong. But EC’s sensibilities are quite complexly ironic, in this and in other respects, and that comes through in his music. McCartney reclaims the ‘silliness’ — that is, the banality, the simplicity — of love to celebrate its uncomplicatedness. Costello writes about how complicated love and desire can be in a song called, ironically, ‘Uncomplicated’.

And that’s one of the ways he’s unlike Lennon — the man who wrote and sang, with perfect earnestness, that all you need is love and love is all you need.

Irony is, I suppose, out of favour in culture more generally, and certainly in pop songs, which I guess are more often characterised by a kind of youthful ingenuousness: ingenuous declarations of love and desire, or earnest laments of the misery of broken hearts (or, in Grunge, of depressed and broken souls). Not that pop isn’t playful, or that it doesn’t sometimes include sacrcasm. But when Randy Newman recorded ‘Short People’ a great many people assumed he literally hated short people and was using his platform as a song-writer and performer to attack them. The reaction to the song took Newman by surprise: ‘I had no idea,’ he later said, ‘that anyone could believe that anyone was as crazy as that character, to have that kind of animus against short people.’ But there we are. People are uncomfortable with irony, and often blind to its very existence. In 1978, Isaiah Dixon, a State of Maryland delegate, even attempted to introduce legislation making it illegal to play ‘Short People’ on the radio. Although the attempt fell foul of the First Amendment, we could identify it as an early example of something that has become much more common — what I mean is: Dixon heard the song not as an ironic commentary upon the arbitrariness of prejudice, but simply as hate-speech. And we all know what has to be done with hate-speech, nowadays, don’t we, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls?

Even as straightforward an irony as the main line of 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ has to bolster its message with all that over-produced gasping and breathy panting, the woman’s soothing voice, laying on with a trowel that, you know, he is in love, and is only caught in a, we assume, temporary period of denial, the silly old sausage. In ‘What’s the Frequency Kenneth’, to the accompaniment of earnestly crashing guitar, Michael Stipe goes so far as to declare that ‘irony is the shackles of youth’. Maybe he’s right?

I don’t know though. That I love irony so much, in my favourite art (as also in the, ahem, ‘art’ I myself produce) may mark me as out of sync with my larger culture, but I cleave to it nonetheless. And there are wonderful, rebarbative and scintillant and exhilarating ironies all through Costello’s art, lyrically and musically: passionate ironies, angry ironies, cunning ironies, tender ironies, even that apparent oxymoron heartfelt ironies. You’ll never be alone in the bone orchard.