Shindig! #173 – Elvis Costello
HUW THOMAS pieces together the story of how genre-averse pop agitator ELVIS COSTELLO created a monster and, once The Attractions had joined him, how the burgeoning powerpop scene repaid them with lip service.
“I could never imagine a lot of people wanting this ugly geek in glasses ramming his songs down their throats. I’m in it to disrupt people’s lives”
That band arrived in time to join Costello and Jake Riviera when they departed Stiff in favour of Radar Records. Pete Thomas, a drummer of formidable invention previously managed by Riviera in Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers, was the first to be hired. Bassist Bruce Thomas was next; once a member of psych loons Village and later part of Quiver and Keith West’s project Moonrider, he had a melodic precision that clashed beautifully with Pete’s bombast. Keyboard whizz Steve Nieve completed this new, muscular unit, and it really was a unit; Costello would refer to The Attractions as “the band I’m in” rather than his band.
He was by now the unwilling enfant terrible of new-wave (a label he later told Record Collector was invented by Polygram “to sell a bunch of crap American records like The Runaways”) and much of the material that would appear on the first Attractions album was limbered up on the landmark Live Stiffs tour of late 1977. Costello wrote ‘Pump It Up’, a breathless rocker that would become a calling card, in response to the pandemonium he witnessed on the tour with Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric and others. “Every night the encore would be [Dury’s] ‘Sex And Drugs’ right? But it quickly reaches a point where the tour started to take on the manifestations of the song,” he told Nick Kent in ’79. “I was compelled to write ‘Pump It Up’ as, you know, well just how much can you fuck, how many drugs can you do before you get so numb you can’t really feel anything?”
Costello’s new songs were more intense than his last batch, more tactile. There were still vintage references behind them – ‘You Belong To Me’ was based on the Stones’ ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Pump It Up’ borrowed its breathless meter from Dylan and Chuck Berry – but The Attractions scrambled the signal so effectively that few noticed the old wave disturbing the new. The reggae-inflected ’I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea’ “sounded like ‘I Can’t Explain’ when I first played it,” Costello told The Face in ’83. “I had it in that Kinks stop-time rhythm, but Bruce’s bass line transformed it from a sort of pastiche to something quite unusual.” Nieve’s twitchy organ lines would be particularly distinctive; he told the NME in ’79 that his favourite part of playing with The Attractions was “when it gets weird and spooky. I really like those bits”.
The resultant album This Year’s Model is ear-splitting in comparison to My Aim Is True. Now the band sounded as hostile as the singer. Opener ‘No Action’ (“I don’t want to kiss you, I don’t want to touch / I don’t want to see you because I don’t miss you that much”) alone is more alive than anything on the first album, with Pete’s Moon-like fills, Bruce’s thundering eighths and Steve’s nutty organ competing for space. ‘Lipstick Vogue’ ups the stakes even higher with its breakneck, almost hypnotic rhythm and sputtered lyrics from the very bottom of romantic despair. Even the lighter ‘Hand In Hand’, a Brill Building take-off not dissimilar to ‘No Dancing’, is amped up, with Costello buttering up delicious lines like “If I’m gonna go down, you’re gonna come with me” like a deviant Ronnie Spector. This style – sneering, subversive relationship studies wrapped up in bright, jerky arrangements – would be central to the third wave of powerpop.
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