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[mcramahamasham]

ALMOST BLUE

March 2004. Entering my dressing room at the Ryman Auditorium, I find a card attached to a gift basket wrapped in cellophane. Tearing open the envelope, I read:
“Have a wonderful show at the Ryman. Sorry we can’t be there. Regards. George and Nancy Jones.”
I pull out the foil-covered bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice from amidst the fruit and fancies. Things have surely changed…
My first trip to Nashville in 1978 had not been such a sober affair. Columbia A&R man Gregg Geller had forwarded a copy of “Stranger In The House” – and “outtake” removed from My Aim Is True because it was “too country”—to producer Billy Sherrill. Soon I received news that I had been invited to duet with George Jones on a version of the very song I had written with him in mind while still working in an office. As if this wasn’t a weird enough dream come true, I would be appearing in the company of everyone from Willie Nelson to the Staples Singers on an album entitled My Special Friends. George and I had never met.
I arrived in town in time to buy a cowboy shirt with horses on the shoulders and stayed in a hotel overlooking the guitar-shaped swimming pool of Webb Pierce’s show-house. In the evening I was taken to see another Columbia act performing material from his upcoming album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and met Bruce Springsteen for the first time. I imagine he thought I was wearing some kind of disguise. The record company were excellent hosts, also introducing me to Roseanne Cash and Rodney Crowell and to a couple of fine and wild musicians who played with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
The session itself was something of an anticlimax. Mr. Jones did not show up. Rumour had it that he was down in Florence Alabama, and couldn’t come into the state, as one of his more famous ex’s was looking for alimony. But maybe they told me this just to give me a taste of the Nashville soap opera mythology and make me feel better about making the trip in vain.
The session then took an odd turn. Guild guitars had shipped a brand-new instrument to me, seeking an endorsement. It was standing in a cardboard packing case against the studio wall. Mr. Sherrill asked me, “Do you pick, son?” He said he was thinking of replacing the steel guitar solo on the cut. I asked him who the player was, and he replied: “Pete Drake”. I was horrified that he would consider erasing the work of this legendary musician to accommodate my twanging, but that is how I came to make my debut as a Nashville session player.
George’s absence from my first visit gave rise to the rumour that our vocals on “Stranger In The House” were recorded at separate sessions. In fact in the middle of our 1979 tour of America, we returned to Nashville and I was able to complete the track side by side with George. I can’t say I was much of a vocal match for Mr. Jones at the time, but we do have the pictures to prove that the session did take place.
It would be nearly two years before I returned to Nashville. Much had happened to me in that time – from scandal to disgrace, near-divorce, and the end of something like pop-stardom. We were touring the U.S. playing songs from our latest release, Trust. It included a country-style ballad about infidelity, written when I was 20 years old. It was called “Different Finger”. Now I had developed the notion that I might better express my feelings through other people’s words and music. Country ballads suited my blue mood most of all.
We stopped into Columbia Studio B (home of Stand By Your Man, Behind Closed Doors and Blonde On Blonde) and cut an R&B version of Hank Cochran’s “He’s Got You” first made famous by Patsy Cline, although I had learned it from the Loretta Lynn remake. We also cut Bobby “Blue” Bland’s hit “I’ll Take Care Of You”, as I was thinking that the next record might include all manner of blue songs. The steel player on the session was once again Pete Drake. He started out playing rather cautiously, obviously a little bewildered by our take on country music. Knowing little about the working of the steel guitar, I asked why he restricted his playing to only one of the twin necks of his instrument. He replied, “Oh you want me to play on the fun neck”. From there on he was flying.
It wasn’t the first time I’d turned to country music in the face of disenchantment. In February 1979 I had been nominated for a Grammy as “Best New Artist”. Rather than attend the ceremony, I had elected to play a country music set at the Palimion Club in North Hollywood. While Chic and I lost out to “Boogie Oogie Oogie” by A Taste Of Honey, The Attractions and I plus our pal (and My Aim Is True guitarist and steel-player) John McFee were charging through a recent George Jones hit, “If I Could Put Them All Together (I’d Have You)”, and playing a version of Leon Payne’s “Psycho”.
Now obviously, I didn’t grow up listening to country music. Chart successes tended to be of either the cloyingly sentimental ballads or novelty record variety. This all changed when I heard Sweethearts Of The Rodeo. Truthfully, as a fan of the Byrds at their most adventurous, I had actually passed this album up at first simply because it was country. I mean “country” was Ringo singing “Act Naturally”, right? When I finally picked up the album in a Liverpool secondhand shop in 1970, I realized my mistake. I loved the songs Gram Parsons contributed to the group, even though by this time he had left both the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. When I tracked down The Gilded Palace Of Sin, everything started to fall into place.
Not only did these records illustrate that there was more soul to Johnny Cash than you could get from a hit like “A Boy Named Sue”, but it also made me curious about the original version of the songs written by Merle Haggard and the Louvin Brothers.
Gram Parsons’ own original songs were fragile and often strangely beautiful, full of dark longing and foreboding, but to my surprise The Gilded Palace also included two Dan Penn songs, “The Dark End Of The Street” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, the second of which I already knew from my favorite R&B record, Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You.
The odd collision of American musical threads could be found in the contemporary recordings of both the Grateful Dead and The Band. It was old and new at the same time. However, when Gram Parsons’ solo records, G.P. and Grievous Angel, found their way into England, they were full of wonderful duets with Emmylou Harris and much more traditional-sounding material backed by several members of Elvis Presley’s T.C.B. band, such as James Burton and Glen D. Hardin.
In 1986 I did several sessions for King Of America with James, Glen D., Jerry Scheff, and Ron Tutt. It was assumed that I wanted then because they played with The King, but actually I was more impressed that most of them played on the Gram Parsons albums.
Following Gram Parson’s early death, I turned to the solo recordings of Emmylou Harris. It was through her rendition that I first truly appreciated the soul in Bobby Sherrill’s “Too Far Gone”. It might sound like heresy, but after hearing Bobby “Blue” Bland’s take on the song, I felt that Tammy Wynette’s original came in a distant third place.
Oddly enough my next country music recording was made not in Nashville, but in Shepherd’s Bush in West London. My pal (and producer of my first five albums) Nick Lowe could be said to have married into country music aristocracy when he wed Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter and granddaughter of Mother Maybelle of the legendary Carter Family. While visiting the newlyweds in the last days of 1979, his stepfather-in-law had called a recording session for Christmas day. After a rebellion by the wives and families of the prospective backing musicians, the session was rescheduled for the Feast of St. Stephen.
I arrived at Nick’s and C.C.’s discreet address, a four-story Victorian terrace house that contained the Am-Pro Recording studio on the ground floor. As I entered the hallway from the garden path, the door to the “front parlour”, which h now housed the recording room, swung open and the frame was filled by a familiar figure greeting: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”.
This story would be so much better if I could say that we went on to cut a great track together. Unfortunately, our voices were somewhat mismatched. I sounded like a whimpering schoolgirl next to John. Nevertheless, our intentions were good. We cut a rare George Jones composition to send to Nashville in lieu of a get-well card, as George had been suffering some bad health at that time. “We Ought To Be Ashamed” is really a Johnny Cash gospel record with someone making the occasional spirited intervention in the background. Although the track is not exactly either artist’s most shining hour, I’m glad that it has finally found the way off the shelf. Nick Lowe’s “Without Love” was also cut at the same session (although I didn’t play on it) and was later included on Columbia’s The Essential Johnny Cash, so the session wasn’t a complete washout.
Shortly before beginning this album, I traveled to Los Angeles to take part in a cable television special celebrating the long delayed release of George Jones’ My Special Friends album. After arriving from London, I awoke to find my neck swelling up alarmingly, and a trip to the doctor quickly confirmed a case of the mumps. As the illness only marred my looks and didn’t really inhibit my singing, I was determined to take this opportunity to perform onstage with George Jones. I had even assembled a special band for the event with a rhythm section of Pete Thomas and Nick Lowe, John McFee on steel guitar and John Hiatt joining us on guitar and vocals.
Needles to say I was quarantined from most of the performers and had to watch Tammy Wynette, Waylon Jennings, and Emmylou Harris rehearse with George from a distance. Having had the illness in childhood, George had no trouble inviting me to the trailer in the parking lot that doubled as his dressing room. I took the opportunity to tell George of my upcoming plans to record several songs that he had made famous. I mentioned how much I loved “The Window Up Above”, although I told him that I couldn’t possibly tackle that one, and he confirmed it by singing a few glorious unaccompanied measures of the tune. Just then a boisterous Tanya Tucker burst through the door and our song session came to an abrupt end.
By the time I first arrived in Nashville to record this album, my country music collection contained the accumulated swag of five U.S. tours with many spare suitcases being bought to carry home hordes of thrift store vinyl. My tastes were running to Stonewall Jackson, Ray Price, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, and Janis Martin. I had a shelf full of George Jones albums on Starday, Mercury, and recent releases on Epic. I was working my way through everything by Charlie Rich from Sun through Smash to Epic, a bunch of great Johnny Cash songs, Jerry Lee Lewis’ country sides on Mercury, early Willie Nelson songs and great albums like Red Headed Stranger and Stardust, Patsy Cline, anything by Loretta Lynn, and the only Hank Williams that I knew existed, the one the now call “Senior”.
When I went to Billy Sherrill’s office to discuss the repertoire, there was a big dustbin liner sitting on his desk. He tipped out the contents to reveal a stash of cassettes submitted by publishing houses from all over town. I suppose this was standard practice for a new artist coming to record, but the songs ranged all the way from the lame to the downright bizarre. Hill and Range submitted “Heartbreak Hotel” with all apparent seriousness. Best of all was an early Willie Nelson demo of a song called “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” (unreleased until the Teatro album), a homicidal ballad that contained the chilling lines: “The flesh around your neck is pale/Indented by my fingernail”. I told Billy that I already had all the songs we needed.
The South Bank Show documentary of the making of this album contains a wonderful sequence in which Billy Sherrill is questioned about my song choices while driving his speedboat. He admits that he is “worn out on” a lot of the songs (he had engineered the Sun version of Charlie Rich’s “Sittin’ And Thinkin’” and produced the Epic remake in the early ‘70s), but he was willing to see what we could do with them … “unless we write a new one”. He certainly took extra special interest in his own composition “Too Far Gone”, cajoling me to attempt the “spoken” second verse with the timeless advice: “There isn’t a woman in the world who ain’t a fool for a talking bit”.
Some people expressed surprise that I didn’t approach a wilder individual to produce the record, someone like Cowboy Jack Clement, but I had genuine love for the tension between the emotion of the singer and the smooth backing of Bobby Sherrill recordings. At the time, I didn’t know that Billy had started out as a saxophonist in a Memphis R&B band, but he did have something of a Jerry Lee look about him, with his slicked-back blonde hair and penetrating stare. At any rate, we had been warned, if he lost interest in the session he might retreat to his office and direct operations over his intercom.
Another unexpected bout of “childhood” illness had meant that we had rehearsed 30 or so songs with Paul “Bassman” Riley filling in for Bruce Thomas. Paul had been Pete Thomas’ rhythm partner in Chilli Willi and passed on my request to assemble a band in London shortly before the formation of The Attractions. Things got so close to the deadline that Paul actually traveled to Nashville before Bruce made a timely recovery.
My memory of the session is that they were not so much drunken rampages as tremendously hungover. Most of the mischief and misbehaviour went on after dark. This is not to say that there was no alcohol in the studio; on one occasion I picked up a Styrofoam cup believing it contained some very necessary black coffee, only to find that one of the producers had been steadily sipping bourbon all afternoon, not that anything about his demeanour would have given any indication of the fact.
I had previously described this album as having been recorded when “I was trying to rid the world of alcohol by drinking it”. I think it is quite possible to detect alcohol on the breath of the singer on the outtake version of a song made famous by Conway Twitty. It was appropriately called “Darling, You Know I Wouldn’t Lie”. Booze was certainly in my blood and on my mind, and this led to us cutting both Merle Haggard’s “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down” and Charlie Rich’s “Sittin’ And Thinkin’”, which begins “I got loaded last night on a bottle of gin”, my drink of choice at the time.
The there was the occasion when engineer Ron “Snake” Reynolds and Mr. Sherrill began discussing their brand-new handguns, and one of them (I can no longer recall which) produced a small revolver from his back pocket so that the other could admire the firing mechanism. To my knowledge, Nick Lowe had never come to the studio bearing firearms.
Other than these strange local customs, the sessions proceeded pretty swiftly and uneventfully, at least that is what is the evidence of the session log suggests. We cut far more songs than we needed during our nine-day stay. I plundered my record collection to come up with songs such as Webb Pierce’s version of “Wondering”, Janis Martin’s “Blues Keep Calling”, and Ray Price’s take on “My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You”. Only the last of these was ever in serious contention for inclusion on the album, and many of the songs were not completed vocally or mixed until we returned to England and I went into the studio with Paul Riley.
Obviously, some songs received more careful attention. I had heard Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams” as recorded by Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Emmylou Harris, but our version really took off from a Jin Records B-side rendition, out of Louisiana, by Tommy McClain. Steve Nieve, who had been absorbing something of Floyd Cramer’s style in preparation, came up with the cascading piano line that leads “Brown To Blue” and the rolling accompaniment that defines our arrangement of Gram Parsons’ “How Much I Lied”.
This guilt-stricken song lay at the heart of my song choices. The previous four years had seen my marriage come close to collapse on several occasions, and despite my relative youth at the time, I really thought I could feel my way through songs like “Colour Of The Blues”, “Good Year For The Roses”, and another Gram Parsons’ song that we renamed “I’m Your Toy”. Although my original idea for the record had been to include songs such as “I’ll Take Care Of You” and even “Gloomy Sunday”, we now stuck entirely to country heartbreak songs.
When the tension got too much for at least one member of The Attractions, there was a small rebellion against the stately pace of the material and we cut a version of Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?” in an up-tempo arrangement that sounded like Rockpile on amphetamines. As we ended the take Billy Sherrill hit the talk-back button, stating, “Hank’s on his way over”, and the so as not to be trumped by our sudden burst of energy he suggested that we double-track the entire performance, although I’m unsure whether it made any difference in the final mix. We also cut Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush” but in an arrangement that was taken from the Johnny Burnette Trio version, with John McFee leading the way on electric guitar. The only original composition attempted was an early version of “Tears Before Bedtime” (it later appeared on Imperial Bedroom), which was a country song in lyrical theme if not in music. It was not a successful session.
Some of the above antics and postures might have been a little exaggerated due to the fact that a documentary film crew was capturing most of the proceedings. The director, Peter Carr, had made a documentary about the spectacular fall of the flamboyant football manager Malcolm Allison. You might say that hubris and alcohol play no small part in both films. Peter filmed us in the studio and making a brief but bizarre visit to the seedier bars of Broadway, long before it became the more welcoming tourist destination of today. Most of all he filmed me looking very pale and hungover, talking earnestly about country music.
At a crucial point during the sessions we were at our hotel, “The Close Quarters”, during one of our drink-fuelled crises. I was sulking because the band wanted a meeting to air grievances and I had waitresses to chat to. Meanwhile Peter Carr filmed us drunkenly arguing about the merits of Billy Sherrill’s production approach. It should have been the most dramatic moment of the film, but the camera operator suffered some sort of malfunction and none of the footage was usable.
Having failed to capture this evening of absurd tension, a confrontation of some kind was needed to conclude the film. Consequently, upon our return to the U.K., we were booked to play a set at the Music Machine in Aberdeen to an audience of surly oil-workers and hard-core country and western fans (Play some Charley Pride!” shouts a very Scottish voice at one stage) who were far from impressed by the news that we had just returned from recording an album in Nashville. Frankly, I don’t think they believed a word I was saying and saw us as some washed-up pop act who used to sing a song called “Oliver’s Army”. The more antagonized they were, the more we reverted to type. We started out playing ballads, but by the end of the set, we were making our feelings pretty plain by playing Charlie Rich’s “There Won’t Be Anymore” (track 24 on the bonus disc). Our take on “Honey Hush” that night (track 26 on the bonus disc) has the fire we just couldn’t get into the studio version.
The video for “Good Year For The Roses” was filmed the day before the Aberdeen gig at Meldrum House, a National Trust listed building that accepted guests. The people running the place were adamant that we couldn’t drag an organ or piano into the wooden-floored salon in which we had chosen to film. This meant that Steve Nieve had nothing to play. The only solution was for him to mime the string parts with a violin, an instrument that Steve had probably never held in his life. Only we didn’t have a violin. The rather spooking girls miming the backing vocals were the daughters of the music teacher from the local village who lent us the violin that Mr. Nieve is seen playing.
Perhaps the charm or sheer weirdness of this clip helped make a big hit single out of “Roses”, reaching No. 6 in the U.K. charts and becoming one of the most played records of the year. I found myself approached in supermarkets by what I then regarded as “older women” who thought that the record was “very romantic”.
Nevertheless, when we approached the Royal Albert Hall with a view of staging a concert there, we were obliged to submit our new recording minus the rowdy Hank Williams and Big Joe Turner cuts. The very conservative management had banned rock and roll after an incident at a Frank Zappa concert and maintained a middle-of-the-road booking policy. It was only by this subterfuge that we were able to appear with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
We engaged Robert Kirby – perhaps best known for his wonderful chamber music charts on Nick Drake’s recordings – to write arrangements of some of my older songs, such as a very melodramatic version of “Watching The Detectives” and an opening take on “Shot With His Own Gun”. Unfortunately, I was in full “more money than sense” mode. When told the price for hiring a 60-piece orchestra, I asked, “How much would 80 cost?” with little idea of what we would do with the extra players. At least we had recorded most of Imperial Bedroom by this time, so we could include Steve Nieve’s string arrangement for “Town Cryer” to complement the orchestral accompaniment of songs from Almost Blue.
We had “Evening Dress: Optional” printed on the tickets, and members of the audience responded to this in many imaginative ways. I planned on making an entrance with a hand-held microphone in my brand-new Savile Row suit and bow tie. My father, a man with considerable experience singing in front of a different kind of orchestra, called me on the eve of the concert to ask if I knew what on earth I was getting into. He then gave some invaluable singers’ advice: “Never look up to a note, always look down”.
Rehearsals were very brief and the concert on 7th January 1982 was a fairly shaky affair, underlining the mutual suspicion of “legit” players and pop musicians at that time. At one point, John McFee took off into the introduction of “Sweet Dreams” without waiting for the conductor’s baton and the younger members of the orchestra fell in behind him. However, many of their colleagues resolutely refused to follow without direction from the podium and the song ground to a screeching halt. The concert was even filmed, but we were never able to agree upon a credible fee with the orchestral management for use of more than a few screenings of the version of “I’m Your Toy”, the solitary highlight of the concert to be released on record.
Sadly, the appeal of the record did not extend to the U.S., where it was ignored by radio stations of every persuasion. During a short tour we returned to Nashville and were told that we would be performing at the home of the Grand Ole Opry, only to find that the Ryman Auditorium was closed prior to its renovation and we would be playing in the rather soulless Opryland Theatre, part of the themepark complex at the edge of town. I recall coming away with the gift of a pair of complimentary Opryland cuff links with a mandolin design. That was about the best it got in America.
March 2004. After a great evening in the Ryman with Steve Nieve and The Brodsky Quartet, I return to my dressing room to find that my first (and unexpected) visitors are Emmylou Harris and her mother, Eugenia. We had appeared a couple of years previously on the “Concert For A Landmine Free World” tour and Emmylou had been kind enough to learn a new song of mine on which to duet. It is called “Heart Shaped Bruise”, and I would say it is my tip of the hat to the composers Felice and Bouldeaux Bryant. Now I can hardly believe my good fortune when she consents to come and record the song for my next record and am very glad that she had liked our closing rendition of “The Dark End Of The Street”. It seems that something good is always going to come of passing on some love or curiosity about these songs, wherever they begin and end.
Near the end of the concert I had also played a solo piano version of “I Still Miss Someone”. I wanted to acknowledge tow departed people who had been kind to us at the end of our Almost Blue adventure.
Our final day in Nashville in 1981, two limousines arrived at our hotel to take us to the Cash residence by a lake in Hendersonville. Being pals with their son-in-law, Nick, seemed to afford us some kind of “friend of the family” status with Johnny and June, and they gave us a very generous welcome to a group of pale and trembling young men.
A banquet table extended through two rooms, enough to accommodate all of our party and several Carter and Cash children and their friends. Naturally, Billy Sherrill arrived by speedboat. Before dinner Johnny took us on a tour of the grounds and property. We visited his writing cabin in the woods, decorated with Native American artifacts and frontier memorabilia, and Johnny called out to peacocks roaming the estate, scaring the hell out of all of us. Then he walked us though an orchard that he had planted on the land where his friend Roy Orbison’s house had once stood and been destroyed by fire, claiming the lives of his sons. This was pretty dreadful to hear about when we were in such a fragile state, but it gave us some measure of the man.
Back at the house he walked us through deep plush carpets, past closets full of black stage clothes and countless awards and citations, as we marveled at photographs of Johnny with Presidents and all sorts of notable people. Struggling to find anything coherent to say, my attention fell upon a Sun 45 of “Cry, Cry, Cry” propped up on an old-fashioned display stand. I told Johnny that we had just cut a version of this song of his. He promptly snatched up the disc and signed it: “To Elvis” at the top of the label and “Your friend, Johnny Cash” just under the title and handed it to me. Then June said a very touching prayer of grace and we all sat down to eat.
Needles to say, the minute I got home, I had the record framed and hung it on the wall. A few months later June was visiting London again and I happened to drop in at the Carter/Lowe household. Nick told me that during her stays, she could be found “improving” on the housecleaning of this rather rock and roll abode, while sporting a mink hat or diamond rings worn over rubber household gloves. This sight quickly went into local musician folklore.
On this occasion, she stopped her labours to say that she was mad at “Johnny Cash”, as she always seemed to call him. Apparently, the Sun 45 had been a gift to June, long before their romance, when John had been a guest on a radio programme which also featured the Carter Family. The significance of the disc had been forgotten among all the memorabilia. Naturally, I offered to return the memento, but June said I should keep it as it was now dedicated to me.
My final thought is of another concert at the Royal Albert Hall in the late ‘80s, where Nick Lowe and I both made guest appearances with Johnny and the Carter Family. Having joined Johnny to sing “The Big Light” a couple of nights earlier during his surprise appearance at a Carter Family show at the Mean Fiddler club, I repeated the duet in the big hall. Finally, we were all called up for the finale of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”. During one of the solos, June sidled up to me and said, “You take the next verse”. I replied, “I can’t. You’ve already sung all the verses I know”. June smiled and said, “Make one up”. So I did. When one of The Carter Family tells you to make up a verse of an old song, you just obey.
-Elvis Costello

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Rykodisk Liner Notes

"After the album "Trust" failed to set the world on fire I decided to take a break from songwriting. Having developed the strong conviction that I could better express my current feelings through other people's songs, I started to collect material to record. As the title might suggest "Almost Blue" was not originally intended to be a "country" record, rather a collection of melancholy songs of many styles. I had already made trial recordings of "Love for Sale" and "Gloomy Sunday", while our live set sometimes included Bobby "Blue" Bland standards: "Two Steps From The Blues" and "I'll Take Care Of You". However the country ballads soon became my main passion. This wasn't exactly a new fad. I had played Hank Williams songs in the folk clubs and pubs, while, as daft as it may sound, I recall being advised to remove "The Best Of George Jones" from the stiff tour buss sound-system in case it "confused" visiting journalists (it was 1977). The song "Stranger In The House" had been removed from my first album, "My Aim Is True", for similar reasons, but when George Jones began his "My Special Friends" album in 1978, I was invited to Nashville to sing it with him. The trip was somewhat anti-climatic. Mr. Jones did, indeed, not show. However, I should stress that this was due to some extra-musical legal hassle rather than any lurid reason.
"Producer Billy Sherrill enquired of me: "Do you pick, son?" and I, rather improbably, dubbed an acoustic guitar solo onto the "Stranger in the House" track.
"CBS Nashville were also excellent hosts, introducing me to musicians and producers who had worked with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and taking me to meet songwriters suck as Rodney Crowell, Roseanne Cash and a guy who was visiting called Bruce Springsteen. Somehow this trip gave rise to the rumour that the vocals on "Stranger in the House" were recorded at separate sessions. In fact in the middle of our "Armed Funk" tour of America in 1979 we returned to Nashville and I was able to complete the track with George "live" in the studio.
"In a roundabout way my link with country music was strengthened by Nick Lowe's marriage to Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter and granddaughter of Mother Maybelle of the Carter Family, not to mention the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash. None of this would have been of any relevance had had Johnny not suggested a Christmas day recording session in the ground floor studio of Nick and Carlene's large terraced house in Shepherd's Bush. In fact the session finally took place on St. Stephen's day where I was among the musicians greeted in the narrow hallway outside the tiny studio by the imposing figure of Nick's father-in-law, who rumbled "Hello I'm Johnny Cash", just like on "Live At San Quentin". Cut at this session were Nick's "Without Love" (Which appeared on Cash's "Johnny 99" album) and a rare George Jones composition entitled "We Ought To Be Ashamed" which, I'm sorry to say, proved to be prophetic. While it was great fun to sing with the big man it seems our duet did not make the grade."
"I should add that some years later Johnny did cut two of my songs, "The Big Light" and "Hidden Shame", on the albums "Johnny Cash is Coming to Town" and "Boom-Chicka-Boom"."
"On our next tour in January '81 we managed to fit in a trial session with Billy Sherrill. At this date, which took place in the legendary CBS Studio B (Home of "Stand By Your Man", "Behind Closed Doors" and, for that matter, "Blonde on Blonde"), we were augmented by Pete Drake on pedal steel guitar and cut two sides: "I'll Take Care Of You" and "He's Got You" (both lost). This last song was a Hank Cochran Tune which I had learned from the Loretta Lynn recording, although our treatment of it was more as a R 'n' B ballad.
"In April '81, with Pete Thomas, Steve Nieve, Nick Lowe on Bass and John Hiatt on guitar, I took part in a cable television special based on George Jones' My Special Friends album. However, having flown to Los Angeles, I discovered that I had contracted mumps. I put vanity aside, as I was determined not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sing with George on stage. Fortunately he had the immunity which the childhood illness gives, so despite my gargoylic appearance (and although I was quarantined from most of the other artists, who included Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette and Emmylou Harris), our duet went ahead. After the show I went to George's trailer/dressing room to say "Goodnight", but, upon mentioning some of the obscure titles that he had cut and that we were planning to record, I was treated to a private George Jones concert of a few bars of each song.
"At the last moment it seemed as if we might lose Bruce Thomas from the sessions due to illness. The unsung hero of that hour was Paul "Bassman" Riley, Pete Thomas' comrade from "Chilly Willi And the Red Hot Peppers" and engineering brains behind Nick Lowe's Ampro Studios, who deputized throughout the rehearsal of more than forty songs. Paul was still on stand-by when we arrived in Nashville. However Bruce recovered just in time to play on the first session."
"John McFee, who had played on "My Aim Is True", now joined us on lead guitar and pedal steel as I believed he would better understand our intentions and blend with the Attractions' approach to country music."
In fact John had already had some practice at a one-off show at the Palomino, North Hollywood in 1979, where Elvis and the Attractions included several country songs in honour of the occasion.
"The task of recording the album in under two weeks was complicated by the presence of a documentary film crew, fearlessly directed by Peter Carr, who were to capture our adventure for the "South Bank Show". Upon arrival I as dismayed to find that as CBS had decided to re-fit Studio B, we were to be diverted to the more modern and less atmospheric studio A. This is perhaps the best place to mention misgivings about some aspects of the recording. Although Billy Sherrill had been the producer of many classic country hits, he was sometimes accused of diluting the "feeling" with swathes of strings and background singers. However I held the conviction that this treatment could, sometimes, create a desirable tension if the song is strong and the singing heartfelt.
"Anybody who has seen the "South Bank Show" will know Mr. Sherrill as an impatient man with an overwhelming interest in purchasing speedboats. I suppose this is one quite valid view. However, the Billy Sherrill who met me in his office to discuss the repertoire was curious, if somewhat bemused by my desire to re-cut tunes that he clearly regarded as "Worn-out". In typical Nashville fashion he had canvassed publishing houses for likely material and presented me with a bin liner full of cassettes. They made interesting listening if only to illustrate what Nashville though should be recorded by a "limey-punk". The highlight was undoubtedly a Willie Nelson ballad which contained the immortal lines: "The flesh around your neck is pale, indented by my fingernail." On the other hand I was also sent "Heartbreak Hotel", apparently in all seriousness. Thankfully we were not short of songs to record.
""Almost Blue" was recorded between the 18th and 29th May 1981 at which twenty-five or more different titles were recorded, as well as the sessions to add Tommy Millar on fiddle and the "backgrounds" of the Nashville Edition (It had been agreed that the strings would be added after our departure). Coming after the genial (if sometimes berserk) atmosphere created by Nick Lowe, the business-like Nashville style was quite a shock. If Mr. Sherrill's enthusiasm did occasionally wane, as the film record seems to show, the pace was always picked up by engineer Ron "Snake" Reynolds.
"My only uneasy moment was during one break when I came across Billy and Snake discussing the merits of their handguns across the mixing console. This may well have been as much for our benefit as our treatment of "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do?" had been for them. After a while it was less of a collaboration and more of a contest in cultural differences and after all it cannot be ignored that cameras were rolling much of the time. Nevertheless despite all of this and the lure of the honky tonk, where, as the song says, I was occasionally "Drawn to the neon lights, tortured by the truth", the record was completed on schedule. In fact there was time to accept an invitation to spend an evening with Johnny, June, and members of the Cash and Carter clans, who graciously welcomed our be-draggled band to their lakeside house outside Nashville (They also invited Billy Sherrill, who quite naturally arrived by speedboat). There was consternation amongh the other patrons and staff of our small country music-business hotel when they heard that we were going to be guests of such people, as they had previously believd we were only in town to rid the world of alcohol by drinking it. It was all a little hard to explain. They should write a country song about it."
"Listeners who are already familiar with these tunes will please pardon the following notes on where I found the songs and a few other matters."
" "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do?" was written by Hank Williams although it never sounded much like this. For some strange reason the entire performance was double-tracked in a bizarre double dare showdown."
"Sweet Dreams": "Written by Don Gibson and recorded by patsy Cline and later Loretta Lynn in whose fan club we were all given complimentary memberships while walking in Nashville one day."
""Success" was also recorded by Loretta Lynn...."
""I'm Your Toy" was written by Chris Etheridge and Gram Parsons under the rather inelegant title of "Hot Burrito No. 2". It appeared on The Flying Burrito Brothers' "Gilded Palace Of Sin" album which, along with The Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo", provided my first sustained interest in country music and inspired a curiosity in the artists whose songs they covered - for example: Merle Haggard who wrote "Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down"."
" "Brown To Blue" and "Good Year For The Roses" were both recorded by George Jones, but were not very well known tunes. As evidence of this I offer the fact that the only other version of "Brown To Blue" was by former Lovin' Spoonful member Zal Yanovsky, who cut it on his "Alive And Well And Living In Argentina" album."
"Good Year for the Roses" reached number six in the British charts which was followed by a top ten placing for the album.
" "Sittin' and Thinkin'" was written by Charlie Rich and originally recorded for Sun Records. The engineer on that session was Billy Sherrill who also produced Rich's Epic Records remake in the 70's.
" "Colour of the Blues" was a song recorded by George Jones for both the Starday and Musicor Labels."
"The recording of "Too Far Gone" certainly commanded Mr. Sherrill's attention but then again it was his song. I heard it first by Tammy Wynette, but, in keeping with the original idea behind "Almost Blue" , I knew it also by Bobby "Blue" Bland."
"Honey Hush" started out as an R'n'B tune. it was written by Big Joe Turner, however our version owes more to the Johnny Burnett Trio record.
"How Much I Lied" comes from "G.P.", Gram Parsons' first solo record for Warner Brothers. Together with it's follow up "Grievous Angel" this record had the greatest influence on "Almost Blue"."

[mcramahamasham]

IMPERIAL BEDROOM

A familiar scene must have greeted Ringo when he walked into the studio. His former producer was stooped over the grand piano, talking through detail of an orchestral score. Our producer, Geoff Emerick, had asked George Martin to cast an eye over a madly ambitious Steve Nieve chart for the song “…And In Every Home”. Forty musicians were due at AIR Studios, and George agreed to look the music over to see if there were going to be any tricky passages that might require special attention. He would have encountered several musical allusions to his own arrangements. Ringo and I retired to the control room to discuss a record that was never made, and George and Steve went back to the score…
To some extent Imperial Bedroom was the record on which The Attractions and I granted ourselves the sort of scope that we imagined The Beatles had enjoyed in the mid-‘60s. We had engaged the engineering skills of the sonic, and somewhat unsung, genius behind many of those productions. The studio was booked for an unprecedented 12 weeks. I we needed a harpsichord or Mellotron, we hired one; if we required a 12-string acoustic guitar, marimba, or accordion, we went out and bought one; if we heard strings and trumpet and horns, we booked the musicians and Steve began writing out the parts
It had not begun in this fashion. After our excursion to Nashville, during which we recorded nearly 30 tracks in nine days for the album, Almost Blue, we reconvened at a country cottage to rehearse my new songs. This followed our working method for the album Trust. Once again, we recorded the rehearsals on an 8-track machine (one of which appears on CD 2). Even when we entered the vastly more sophisticated AIR Studios, we still intended to record the album “live” with few overdubs.
The first two weeks did not go well. The only thing that really survives on the final record from those chaotic and undisciplined sessions is the screaming introduction and tag of “Man Out Of Time”—a fair indication of the tone of those days. We were trying to beat the songs into submission. A few of these drunken and berserk items can be found on CD 2, if you care to attend the autopsy.
Somewhere around the end of the second week, a moment of sober reflection set us on a new course.
The major change of the previous 18 months had been a gradual switch to piano as my main composing instrument. This not only invited a more arranged approach to the songs, but also reflected the music to which I was listening. This consisted of a lot of hours with a handful of mid-‘30s Billie Holiday recordings—“Ghost Of Yesterday” and “Gloomy Sunday” being my favourites—the “Glad To Be Unhappy” side of Rodgers & Hart, as found on the late Billie Holiday album Lady In Satin and Frank Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours collection, the Round About Midnight album by Miles Davis, a The Left Banke compilation, the piano music of Erik Satie, and a cassette of “La Mer” by Debussy. Hardly any of these choices had a detectable influence on the songs on this record, but I also returned to the albums of David Ackles with which I had spent an awful lot of time as a teenager. Now as an adult, there was certainly something attractive about the way these records felt out of step with fashion and had a connection to so many musical threads.
It was being an “adult” that was most of the problem, that and the fact there seemed to be little time for “sober reflection”. The public and private upheavals of the previous four or five years had heightened my already melancholy disposition. I intend that most “private” matters should remain that way, but when the opening track is called “Beyond Belief”, and the key song of a record is entitled “Man Out Of Time”, you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to work out what was going on.
Disgusted, disenchanted, and occasionally in love, “Man Out Of Time” was the product of a troubling dialogue with myself that continued through my more regretful moments. I recall looking at my reflection in the frozen window of a Scandinavian tour bus without any idea who the hell I was supposed to be. I was trying to think or feel my way out of a defeated and exhausted frame of mind to something more glorious.
This was resolved in song, one shivering, hungover morning in the manicured gardens of a remote Scottish hotel. The house in which we were staying had played a very minor part in one of Britain’s most notorious political scandals, apparently serving briefly as a bolt-hole fort one of the disgraced protagonists. I actually delighted at the thought of this sordid history; it suited my mood. I can’t say that the words and ideas that emerged from these experiences were exactly welcome news to some of the band members. Like I could give a damn.
Strangely, I do recall telling the artist Barney Bubbles that we had made our brightest and most positive record around the time that he commenced work on the cover painting. I had asked him to illustrate what he heard, in what I hoped would be the first of a series of such covers. I was delighted with the wit and humour of the Picasso references in the painting, which contains the inscription “Pablo Si”. However, I was startled by the darker, carnal aspects of the canvas that Barney had correctly identified in the songs and placed at the center of his composition. Sometimes you can bee too close to the frame to see the picture. Even the album title, which I had intended as reference to the comparative opulence of the recording, started to take on another meaning. This was shortly after I had abandoned the working title: P.S. I Love You.
Occasionally I used a little craft to put some distance on the emotional contents. Before we even entered the studio, I was toying with the notion of abandoning some of the responsibility for the words, asking Chris Difford to make sense of the title “Boy With A Problem”. I had also made an attempt to connect with a lyricist from the pre-rock and roll era. Sammy Cahn had written “All The Way” for Sinatra, along with many other lighter pieces that dare listeners to mock (“You go to a spot that just a spot on the MAP” is rhymed with “WHAP!” in “The Tender Trap”). He was also a brilliant radio raconteur and writer of the spoof “special lyrics” sung at conventions for Presidential nominees. He may not have has the tortured soul of Lorenz Hart, but he was a link with another less self-obsessed era of lyricism, when personal confessions were couched in elegant romantic language and sung with restraint and discretion.
Mr. Cahn was frankly bewildered by the music that I had sent him on tape. At an after-show session in a Huddersfield recording studio during the Trust tour of England, I had recorded a rather ham-fisted piano sketch of what later turned out to be “The Long Honeymoon”. We had an entertaining telephone conversation, but Sammy diplomatically removed himself from the enterprise, seemingly surprised that I would simply be writing a song to record and not for a show or event of some kind. Oddly enough, this seemed to clear my mind as to what needed to be written, and the song was soon finished.
“The Long Honeymoon” tells the story of a young wife waiting by the phone for her husband to call or come home. She half suspects that he is with her best friend but can’t bring herself to pick up the phone to find out. It is a story that I might have found in Nashville, but the music here belongs more to the cabaret.
The arrangement is a pretty good example of the approach to this record. The rhythm section plays a sort of vague Latin pulse while Steve leads the way on both the piano and accordion. In fact it took three of us to execute this part. Laying the instrument on the table, Steve played the keyboard, while one of us worked the bellow, and a third party held the beast in place. I play a composed melody on the tremolo guitar in the middle of the track, and the song concludes with a trio of French horns arranged by Steve Nieve.
In those days the relationship between “legit” players and pop musicians was not always an easy one. Steve had intended the part to be plaintive and noble like a Wagnerian hunting motif, but after on of the players adjourned to the pub during the mid-session break, the execution began to resemble something from an after-hours club in New Orleans. By complete accident, I actually preferred this effect.
It was not as if outside players were ever likely to steal the attention from The Attractions’ playing on this album. The demos of these songs reveal and approach similar to Trust, which itself had a number of very fine ensemble performances. However, once we were in AIR Studios with Geoff Emerick, it was possible for each player to be featured while never distracting from the songs. There is some particularly fine playing from Bruce Thomas on the tag of “Shabby Doll” and in the final verse of “Human Hands”, where his bass counterpoint sits elegantly below my overdubbed vocal group. My favourite among Steve Nieve’s many musical highlights must be the dazzling bridge passage of “The Loved Ones”.
One afternoon, Pete Thomas arrived at the studio straight from a night of carousing, he confounded all of us by turning in the single inventive take of “Beyond Belief” that transformed the song into the opening track of the record. It was originally entitled “The Land Of Give And Take” with an almost improvised sounding text. The strength of Pete’s performance meant that I was able to consider a more ambitious and confidential vocal approach. I re-wrote the song over the existing backing track, achieving a more coherent structure. There was less explosive playing required on many of the other tracks.
The melancholic domestic mood is carried through the songs “The Long Honeymoon” and “Boy With A Problem”—the backing track for which was recorded by The Attractions and posted through my letter box when I had to leave the studio early one evening. “Tears Before Bedtime”—which was the sole original composition attempted during our Almost Blue sessions—is one of a number of tracks that employ an overdubbed vocal group or disguised voice in order to distort the perspective or the identity of the narrator.
After the band sessions were concluded, I worked alone for several weeks, experimenting with odd overdubs and vocal approaches. It is possible that I lost as much as I gained. The raw and borrowed style of the “Tears Before Bedtime” take on CD 2 might well be a little closer to the truth.
The most disguised of these songs is “Little Savage”; one of several cuts rehearsed and even recorded in different tempi and time signatures. The slower pace of the album demanded the up-tempo arrangement to be included, but the meaning of the song would have been better served by the approach of the unfinished version found on CD 2, even though the vocalist seems to be trying to escape the confines of the harmony.
Most concentrated of these songs is the ballad “Almost Blue”. It was written in imitation of the Brown/Henderson song “The Thrill Is Gone”. I had become obsessed with the Chet Baker recording of that tune, firstly the trumpet instrumental and, later, the vocal take. It is probably the most faithful likeness to the model of any of my songs of this time. It has become my most covered composition.
Two years later, when Chet Baker came into the studio to play the trumpet solo on our recording of “Shipbuilding”, I gave him a copy of this album and suggested that he might listen to one track in particular. Although we met up again at his subsequent London engagements and even worked together on one occasion, he never mentioned the record again. It wasn’t until several months after his death that I found out that he had been including “Almost Blue” in his later sets and that it would feature in photographer Bruce Weber’s documentary on Baker, Let’s Get Lost. Chet’s performance of the song, before an indifferent film festival crowd, makes for very uncomfortable viewing, but there is a wonderful version, featuring an extended trumpet solo, on a late “live” album from Japan. He finally seemed to get what I hoped he would recognize in the composition.
Many of the remaining songs on the record take their cue from the opening track, “Beyond Belief”. They exhibit a malaise of the spirit and a sinking feeling about happy endings. The souring and spoiling of England was just under way. Passing from town to town on the tours of the early ‘80s, I came to know some people who seemed just as disenchanted and discouraged. Their stories found their way into these songs.
It was about two in the morning when I visited the coffee bar. It was doing a brisk trade in salt fish, dumplings, and hot, sweet drinks. It was about the only place to go after the bars had shut. The girls, who looked like over-the-hill boxers in pink stretch nylon, were coming in from the cold to negotiate with their pimps. I’d gone there with a girl I knew and a couple of her friends because my parents had lived in the area shortly before I was born. My folks had just got out in time. I’d nearly been a Yorkshireman. My visit was during the Trust tour of England, and the area had long since tipped into decline. Shortly afterwards it was revealed that this had been the beat of the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.
My Chapeltown tour guide was probably the model for the character in “…And In Every Home”, even though we were barely acquainted. It is a snapshot of a disappointed young women, with the boyfriend in prison and a strong feeling that life should be offering something more. The least that I could offer her was that this story should be decorated with an ornate orchestral arrangement. As the chorus remarks:
“Oh heaven preserve us
Because they don’t deserve us”
My one regret is that none of us thought to capture the remarkable sight of Maestro Nieve at the conductor’s podium before the 40-piece ensemble.
These nighttime excursions got mixed up with images of the cigar-stained function rooms of our “grand” touring hotels, where rotten businessmen and craven local government figures could be found selling the ground under everyone’s feet. The personal doubts and fears expressed in “Man Out Of Time” and “Beyond Belief” were presented before this backdrop.
Another song in this group was “Shabby Doll”. The title came from a music hall poster hung in a hotel dining room. I’d heard the tale of John Lennon writing “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” from a similar source, the difference being that the one that I came across was a blurred facsimile decorating a fake Victorian façade. Perhaps this was entirely appropriate for such an unflattering self-portrait.
Although I am fond of the “Shabby Doll” demo on CD 2, with its prominent dissonant bass figure, the finished ensemble version is both more powerful and mischievous. It is a rare example of the words becoming harsher in the final draft, with the line: “being what you might call a whore, always worked for HIM before”, being amended to the more truthful first person.
Despite the talk of “drinking to distraction” and the entreaty to “drink yourself insensitive”, not all of the songs exist in the realm of guilt and despair. “The Loved Ones” joyfully trashes the myth of the romantically self-destructive artist and “You Little Fool” is a cautionary word to a young girl who is about to throw herself away on an unworthy fellow. A version with an entirely different vocal line appears on CD 2.
“Human Hands” was a song of reconciliation, but the original lyric seemed to raw and easily read, closing it off to the experience of others. The original vocal take can be heard on CD 2. Among the colloquialisms and lyrical puzzles of “Pidgin English”, there is a longing for the simple words to express love.
The odd song out on the second half of the record is “Kid About It”. Originally, styled as a slow r’n’b ballad, I made the decision to pitch the recorded vocal in my lowest octave for greater intimacy. An early run-through take of the first draft appears on CD 2.
The song is a rejection of tarnished and jaded games of adulthood. There is even a small, improbable sense of hope at the end of the second verse. It was composed on the morning after John Lennon’s murder. I went out walking to clear my head of the dreadful news reports, and this song came to me. I wouldn’t have done anything as presumptuous as write a song “about” the event and even edited out a passing reference to it in the original second verse. However, the line “Singing the ‘Leaving Of Liverpool’ and turning into Americans” seems to be about a place where dreams begin and end.
A short time after completing the record, we were sent into a tiny basement studio to cut a series of self-produced “covers”, mostly sings originally cut by Merseybeat groups. I was then a co-owner of Demon Records and our “Edsel” re-issue imprint was making some of these records available. I had the berserk notion that we might be able to scare up some extra interest in the re-releases by cutting the same songs. Quite apart from anything else, there was an innocence about the tunes that had been absent from the Imperial Bedroom sessions. These tracks and the trio recording of an early song of mine, “I Turn Around”—Steve Nieve was out of town, so I played organ—were cut without the burden of meaning and dark emotion. One of them, the Smokey Robinson song “From Head To Toe”, was actually a bigger U.K. hit than any of the Imperial Bedroom singles.
Even during the album session there were some moments of levity. The record closes with “Town Cryer”, a truthful if rather self-pitying lament. The song is taken at a grand slow tempo with the decoration of Steve Nieve’s Philly-style string chart. However, late one evening—and concerned about the gathering gloom—armed only with a wah-wah pedal and a beat group’s attempt to imitate Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, we recorded an up-tempo arrangement, briefly issued (in mock-French) as the “Version Discotheque” and presented here once more for your amusement.
I continued the album theme for a little while, writing the “title song”, a sick waltz about the seduction of a bride by the best man. It was not a natural choice for the former ABBA singer Frida, but it was nevertheless originally submitted for inclusion on her latest solo album. It was not thought suitable by her producer, a Mr. Collins. He was probably right for once.
The album was not a big commercial success, despite Columbia Records absurd “Masterpiece?” ad campaign—which was really asking for it. The choice of singles did little to indicate the change of scene from the previous albums, although many of the songs established a place in the live repertoire.
Several years later, while working on the album King Of America, I was in a Hollywood hotel bar and a man introduced himself and started talking about this album. He turned out to be the renowned pianist, singer, and connoisseur of arcane and obscure lyrics of the Broadway era, Michael Fienstein. He had once worked as an assistant to Ira Gershwin, and he told me that when a New York Times review compared some of the writing on Imperial Bedroom to his brother, George, Mr. Gershwin had requested that his assistant purchase a copy of the record.
It conjures a horrifying image of a despairing Ira Gershwin being assailed by the howling introduction of “Man Out Of Time”, believing that this is what the people made of his brother’s legacy. He had no way of knowing that I would have been delighted by this small contact with the musical world that existed before rock and roll. Having read the cutting remarks in Mr. Gershwin’s volume of annotated lyrics, I probably don’t want to know his true reaction to the record.
Listening again to the raw and ragged early takes, demos, and rejected songs, I am not sorry to have employed just a little restraint and reserve in the final draft. I suppose that just came naturally to writers like Ira Gershwin. The record is not exactly easy listening as it is, but I trust that it isn’t just the experience of one person. Thanks to the playing of The Attractions and the sonic expertise of Geoff Emerick (and his assistant, Jon Jacobs), it sounds like music rather than a confession.
-Elvis Costello

________________________________________

Rykodisk Liner Notes

"Imperial Bedroom" was my first record of original material to be produced by anybody other than Nick Lowe. We had made five albums between 1976 and 1980 - four of them with the attractions - as well as touring together, so we had all heard each other's jokes at least once by this point. In any case I knew that I wanted to try a few things in the studio that I suspected would quickly exhaust Nick's patience.
Of course we still worked together: on a duet version of "Baby, It's You" and for Nick's track "L.A.F.S.", which I produced, before he came back in to produce our album "Blood and Chocolate".
As it was our first album to be recorded without the benefit of extensive "live" experience of the songs, work on the arrangements and even some of the writing continued through rehearsals and into the studio sessions. This was only possible because we were to allow ourselves an extravagant twelve weeks of recording time. That this opportunity was not squandered must be credited to Geoff Emerick who was listed on the sleeve as producing the record "...from an original idea" by myself. This was not the conceit it may have appeared to be at the time. I had observed how the production of Squeeze's "East Side Story" had come, in a very short time, to be attributed to myself alone, with co-producer Roger Bechirian's name often omitted from reviews and articles. I did not want this process to be repeated, so although I was nomianlly co-producer with Geoff, in truth he did nearly everything that could be called "production" in terms of sound, while I concentrated on the music. Of course we were well aware that Geoff had engineered The Beatles' most ambitious records. "Revolver", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" were just a few of his vast and varied "credits". In those days it was standard practice for only "the producer" to be listed on the record sleeve, although by the time we worked with Geoff I'm sure that most people with an appreciation of his contribution must have thought that this was terribly unfair. Nevertheless we swore not to bug him for old Beatles stories, but as the sessions wore on, Geoff volunteered a few "behind the scenes" anecdotes and would occasionally surprise us by conjuring up a trademark echo or effected that he had more or less "invented", through experimentation, in the days before these sounds were so readily available in little digital boxes. A constant reminder of his illustrious work at AIR studios where George Martin and Paul McCartney were producing "Tug Of War". In fact Geoff was also the main engineer on that album, as "Imperial Bedroom" was supposed to be made during a hiatus in their recording schedule. In fact a few sessions actually ran simultaneously with Geoff departing for an hour or two to engineer a McCartney recording while we fooled around in the studio. This proximity was later to prove quite fortuitous. As with "Trust" the rehearsals took place in a friend's cottage in Devon, only on this occasion the local scrumpy pub played a smaller part in the proceedings. We could draw from material written during the end of the "Trust" sessions ("Boy With A Problem"), through my work on "East Side Story" ("Kid About It"), during our Nashville adventure ("Tears Before Bedtime"), as well as time at home with my piano ("Almost Blue", "...And In Every Home" and "Long Honeymoon"). We did not make any attempt to have the songs obey an arrangement or production style, rather we tried to make the most out of this musical variety.
During the rehearsals we made quite credible 8-track recordings of most of the songs. That tape suggests an album very close to "Trust" and during the first two hectic weeks of recording we maintained this "live - first take" attitude. All that survives of those sessions is the "intro" and "outro" of "Man Out Of Time". The listener is spared our reckless attempt to play the song at this frenetic tempo, instead the "random racket" was used to break with the mood of the surrounding tracks. Despite a few junked experiments with tape loops and some radical editing, the basic group performances are as "live-in-the-studio" as on our previous albums. Songs such as "Almost Blue" and the main body of "Man Out Of Time" have few if any additions to the basic ensemble. The Attractions actually recorded the perfect "Boy With A Problem" track while I was absent from the studio and posted it through my letter-box one evening.
It is probably the vocal and instrumental additions that set this album apart from our previous records. Having decided to use some orchestral instruments, Steve Nieve began writing the charts; for a trio of French horns on "Long Honeymoon" (which he later told me was supposed to sound like Wagnerian hunting horns, although as one of the players might have swallowed something that didn't agree with him, that effect came closer to a New Orleans funeral band), a brass and woodwind section on "Pidgin English", a Philly-style violin section on "Town Cryer" and a full forty piece orchestra for "...And In Every Home". Prior to that last session Geoff asked George Martin to cast an eye over Steve's score (which contained a couple of musical jokes and allusions to George's orchestrations for the Beatles), as he might make a few valuable suggestions regarding the booking of particular players to negotiate the trickier passages. On the big day Steve conducted the orchestra himself, a remarkable sight which non of us had the foresight to capture on a snap-shot camera.
Another feature of the recording was the use of additional instruments which we attempted to play ourselves. Some were layered in ways that might have been bewildering without Geoff's expertise. On other occasions instruments were adapted in unlikely ways; a twelve-string Martin guitar was "bugged" and run through a Hammond Leslie speaker on "Shabby Doll", while a National Steel Dobro was used for the sitar-like line in the introduction of "Pidgin English" while a Danelectro Sitar-Guitar was used like an electric harp on "Human Hands". A beautiful harpsichord was hired in for "You Little Fool", although its effect was subverted in the closing choruses when the part was redubbed using the backwards-tape technique. Most ridiculous was the accordion part on "Long Honeymoon" which it took three of us to play; Steve at the Keyboard (which we lay flat across the table) Bruce to work the bellows and myself to wrestle with the beast and stop it from crawling onto the studio floor. For "Long Honeymoon" and "Pidgin English" I wrote the guitar interludes into the original composition rather than improvise, while both Steve and Bruce added more crucial musical detail of their own invention than ever before. In saying this I am thinking of Bruce's final verse in "Human Hands" and the fade of "Shabby Doll", while I once again commend Steve's spectacular bridge in "The Loved Ones" to the listener, not to forget his solitary guitar playing cameo in the final seconds of "Tears Before Bedtime"! The fact that there is less explosive music contained herein could lead to Pete Thomas' contribution being underestimated. However as you listen again I am sure you will hear the range of his playing from "Almost Blue" to "Man Out of Time". Without doubt it was his singular frame of mind that shaped the performance of the album's most spontaneous and unexpected music: "Beyond Belief".
The outcome of the "Beyond Belief" session caused me to reconsider the role of the vocal line in some of our arrangements. I then worked for several weeks with just Geoff Emerick and Jon Jacobs as I experimented with different vocal combinations. Sometimes lowering the lead voice by an octave as in "Kid About It" or contrasting two stylings as in "Pidgin English" or using a combination of falsetto voice (which I can never sustain outside the studio) and an overdubbed "vocal group" as with "Tears Before Bedtime", "The Loved Ones" and "Town Cryer". This way I tried to create some more contrast with the straightforward approach of "Almost Blue", "Man Out Of Time", and "Long Honeymoon". I must confess that I also tinkered at the organ and vibraphone on the "Kid About It" backing track which didn't meet with band approval, but we were to some extent hearing different things in the songs by that point. "Beyond Belief" (Which had originally been entitled "The Land Of Give And Take") was most transformed by my solo sessions. I completely "re-composed" the song over the existing track altering both the metre of the lyric and the register of the vocal line and creating an uneven structure leading to a more defined chorus of a less ranting tone. In a later concert performance the songs had to be stripped of many of the above embellishments; the "Kid About It" vocal line was returned to the higher octave as it made a more powerful "live" impression that way, while other songs such as "The Loved Ones" and "Tears Before Bedtime" never really found a place in our live repertoire without their studio-created vocal arrangements. Nevertheless the process of making this record was both a "do-it-yourself" education in using the studio like blank manuscript paper on which to work out the arrangements and...I nearly forgot...enormous fun.
About the cover: Given most of the lyrical content, you might be surprised to hear that I had imagined this to be my most optimistic album to date. Perhaps I was distracted by some of the sunnier instrumental sounds borrowed from the late 60's pop music. I was therefore taken aback when I first viewed Barney Bubbles' cover painting. In what was intended to be the first in a series I had asked him to pain an impression of the finished record as a change from the usual cover photograph. You can see that he obviously responded to the more violent and carnal aspects of the songs. The large canvas now hangs in my music room, so I am fondly reminded of Barney, his with and panache.
"Recently in Spain somebody asked me about the cover and its obvious pastiche of Picasso's "Three Musicians". I could have said that Barney was tipping a large hat to the masters as we intended to do on the album, but instead I pointed out the lettering on each of the zipper-like creatures. It spells out "Pablo Si""
Although "Imperial Bedroom" reached No. 6 in the U.K. charts and No. 30 in the U.S. charts, the single released did not fare well in the hit parade. Both Warner (F-Beat's Distributor) and Columbia (in the U.S.) were rather cautious in releasing "You Little Fool" as the first single ahead of a bolder choice such as "Beyond Belief". So by the release of "Man Out Of Time" the initial interest in the album had cooled somewhat and a wider audience received a very sketchy idea of the music on the album.
"Perhaps inspired by Columbia's bizarre "masterpiece ?" ad campaign (the question mark was surely asking for trouble) and secure in the knowledge that commercial success was unlikely, many U.S. review were extremely positive. I believe The New York Times ran an article making a flattering, if rather far-fetched, comparison to George Gershwin. Several years after initial release I was in a Los Angeles hotel bar when the man who had been informally performing at the piano introduced himself as Michael Feinstein, who I later learned was a respected singer, pianist and connoisseur of the arcane and obscure among the songs of the Broadway era. He told me that he had assisted Ira Gershwin for a time and that Mr. Gershwin had been intrigued by the reference to his brother in the review of a new pop record and requested that Mr. Feinstein obtain a copy. As this comparison was probably based on a mere two tracks I could only imagine the horror on Mr. Gershwin's face when confronted with some of the remaining music and the idea that it conjured up thoughts of his remarkable brother in the writer's mind. Mr. Feinstein was far too tactful to elaborate on this reaction but having read some of Gershwin's own volume of annotated lyrics (a recommendable, if intimidating read for any lyricist) I think I can imagine the worst.

EXTENDED PLAY:
"FROM HEAD TO TOE" (F-beat single)
"THE WORLD OF BROKEN HEARTS" (B-side of the above)
"NIGHT TIME" (realeased on the B-side of the 12 inch single of "Everyday I Write The Book")
"REALLY MYSTIFIED" (previously unreleased)
These tracks were recorded at Matrix Studios, London shortly after the completion of "Imperial Bedroom". Inspired by Demon Records re-release of various "Merseybeat" recordings I selected a few songs that would provide a contrast to the production approach of the album. "From Head To Toe" was originally recorded by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, but as the backing vocals here are by "The Indulgences", this version owes more to the Liverpool group The Escorts, who also recorded the original "Night Time". The Merseybeats' "Really Mystified" had been in our repertoire since our first London club dates but this was our first studio recording of this song, although we had once included it on a B.B.C. radio session. The odd song out is the Pomus/Shuman composition "World Of Broken Hearts" which I learned from an Amen Corner record.
"I TURN AROUND" (previously unreleased demo)
"This is a re-working of a chorus written when I was 19, although the words were a recent stab at the esperanto of pop. A few lines survive to re-appear in "The Invisible Man". The demo, also recorded at Matrix features Bruce and Pete on bass and drums but as Steve was away on holiday I added the piano and organ as well as the guitar.
"SECONDS OF PLEASURE"
The third part in the continuing saga of a wandering song. This version was rewritten as a woman's song with the addition of a bridge and along with "I Turn Around" and "Imperial Bedroom" were sent to Anni-Frid Lyngstad (or "Frida") for possible inclusion on her first solo album after the break-up of our beloved ABBA. I never found out what she made of this rather odd selection of songs, but I know that her producer, a certain Mr. P. Collins didn't think much of any of them as I heard it from his own lips. The rest, as they say, is history. Steve played the piano, I added the bass and vocals. What was rescued from this song may be found in its final resting place on the album "Punch The Clock" under the title "The Invisible Man".
"STAMPING GROUND" (Pathway Studios demo - released on the Demon Records Compilation "Out of Our Idiot")
"SHABBY DOLL" (Pathway Studios demo - previously unreleased)
Both of these tracks came from a solo demo session shortly before we began work on "Imperial Bedroom". "Stamping Ground" never got beyond the rough version, but "Shabby Doll" has something odd in this six-string bass part that sets it apart from the album version.
"IMPERIAL BEDROOM" (Eden Studios Demo - Released on Demon Records compilation "Out Of Our Idiot")
This "title song" was actually written after the completion of the album. I have always avoided naming any album after any one song, as it asks a lot of that tune to the possible detriment of others. However the lyrical possibilities of the title were too tempting, just as I had written "Almost Blue" after our return from Nashville having been inspired by Chet Baker's instrumental version of "Thrill is Gone". "Imperial Bedroom" the song is supported by comical percussion, the result of my first encounter with a Linn Drum Machine. The vocal features some truly rotten French.

[mcramahamasham]

PUNCH THE CLOCK

Preface 2003
It was rather like one of those anxiety dreams in which the groom finds himself at the altar, without his trousers. I was onstage at the “Red Parrot” nightclub in Manhattan with the entire Count Basie Orchestra behind me. I opened my mouth to sing, but all I could utter was a hoarse croak.
I had accepted NBC’s berserk invitation to take part in a television special in which I would sing with Tony Bennett, backed by the Basie band. I was certain that somebody would have the good sense to pull the plug before it ever was visited upon the unsuspecting viewer. But if it happened, it would be something to tell the grandchildren, that for one night you had sung in front of the same band as Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughn, and Jimmy Rushing, the band that had once featured Lester Young. What I hadn’t considered was that the preceding three nights would consist of howling, bawling mayhem in front of a sonic battle between The Attractions and the TKO Horns that would reduce my voice to a whisper.
My choice of solo song seemed quite fortuitous at first. I had learned Neal Hefti’s “Lil’ Darling” at ten years old from the Georgie Fame recording. I could probably get through the verse even with a shot throat by singing very softly, but the bridge, in which John Hendricks’ words are set to the original saxophone solo, proved to be nearly impossible to negotiate. However that was nothing compared to having to duet with Tony Bennett on “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”, a number I’d have had second thoughts about tackling in the shower.
Any illusions I might have harboured about “holding my own”, or even springing a few surprises, were rudely dashed. Throughout rehearsals Mr. Bennett was patient, sympathetic, and paternal. From the looks on their faces, the same could not be said of the saxophone section, Their expressions ranged from comic through pitying and all the way out to a sullen and contemptuous “How in the hell did this guy get the gig?” resignation.
Mr. Bennett was also very, very good. If I had been less mortified, I might have started to formulate a conspiracy theory in which NBC had tempted me into this humiliation as revenge for our song-switching act on Saturday Night Live in 1977. After several half-hearted attempts, I did what any grown man would do—I broke down and pleaded for mercy.
Count Basie, who was in the last months of his life and suffering from chronic arthritis that required him to sit at the piano astride a little motorized buggy and play even less than his economic style had previously allowed, fixed me with his big, sad eyes and said, “Young man, I’m seventy-nine years old, and I can’t get my arm above this”, indicating the extent of his movement, “You can do it”.
So I had no choice. My reward, though hardly deserved, was to stand two feet away from the piano as The Count took his solo and introduced his big finale. Of course there was a technical hitch with the cameras, and this perfect piece of music was lost, forcing a retake that was obviously very painful for him. I’m happy to say that all of these indignities remain buried in an NBC vault somewhere and long may they moulder. “No” rolls off the tongue a lot easier these days.
None of this has very much to do with the making of Punch The Clock, but I have begun each note accompanying this programme of re-releases with an anecdote in hope of capturing something of the moment in which the album was made. Sadly, I have been unable to recall a single further entertaining incident that occurred during these sessions.
As a consequence, I have decided to re-print the following essay from the previous edition. It is a truthful account and seems to accurately reflect my feelings about the material and the times in which it was recorded. I do not believe I can improve upon it, other than add some words about the additional tracks on CD2 in a “postscript”. In the end, I trust your decision to purchase this edition is rewarded by the music on the discs.
Your friend in hi-fi,
Elvis Costello

"Punch The Clock" was our chance to get reacquainted with the wonderful world of pop music and still maintain a sense of humour. After Nashville and the labyrinth of "Imperial Bedroom" I was ready to find a different production approach.
Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley certainly knew where the charts were but they also made great records. They had produced hits for The Teardrop Explodes, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Madness. In fact I first met Clive as a fellow producer for Two-Tone Records. By the time I had finished The Specials' debut album Clive and Alan had moved with Madness to Stiff Records where the cut some of the best pop singles since the finest days of the Kinks.
Despite making the most "English" music on the planet "Clanger and Winstanley" even managed to get Madness to No. 1 in America with "Our House". By 1983 they were pretty irresistible and unstoppable. (Clive was also an excellent songwriter. "Clive Langer and the Boxes" opened for us on the "Get Happy" tour of seaside towns and out of the way places. I produced a version of Amen Corner's "If Paradise Is Half As Nice" for his "Splash" album on F-Beat. Alan, the quiet and patient one of the team, also had some pretty mean credits to his name including engineering The Buzzcocks' best records.)
They favoured the "building-block" method of recording: retaining very little from the original "live" take (often only the drums) and tailoring each instrumental overdub to best serve the arrangement. This system naturally precluded the spontaneity of our past "happy accidents" but could yield startling results when the last piece was in place.
Now to be honest I haven't always been kind about this album. I find it hard to ignore the benefit of hindsight. However I shall try to explain how we fared among the passionless fads of that charmless time: "The Early 80's".
Being in a fairly feckless frame of mind I had dashed off a couple bright pop tunes that didn't have much else to them. The chorus of "Element Within Her" consisted entirely of the immortal words: "la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la" (although I liked the silly Liverpudlian-slang joke in the last verse: "He said "Are you cold?" She said "No but you are La...la-la-la...etc.) "Everyday I Write The Book" was written in a spare ten minutes on tour as a spoof of a Mersey-beat tune. In rehearsal Clive guided us towards an arrangement that was unlike anything we had ever recorded. Although we borrowed a few touches from the r'n'b styles of the day I have witnessed, firsthand, the record's ability to clear a nightclub dance floor in seconds. Despite this it remains one of our very few entirely cheerful recordings and was even a minor hit on both sides of the Atlantic - reaching No. 28 in the U.K. and No.32 in the U.S. charts - then our best placing for a single.
The vocal responses on "Punch The Clock" were improvised by Claudia Fontain and Caron Wheeler, known at the time as "Afrodiziak". They had not appeared on that many pop recordings and their spontaneous approach was a welcome contrast to the jaded cliches demanded of other groups of "session singers". (Both went on to grace many hit records. Caron is probably best known as the lead voice on the Soul II Soul smash "Back To Life".)
The other addition to our ensemble was the horn section led by trombonist Big Jim Paterson. He brought with him saxophonists Paul Speare and Jeff Blythe who had also recently left Dexy's Midnight Runners. So that we did not duplicate that group's sound we added trumpet player Dave Plews to the line up. (However it is true that the "T.K.O. Horns" employed something of the rude, unison sound that the "Stax" comparison was often made in the press. I was only happy if we sounded like Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers on their version of "One Way Love".)
Though I scatted all the main horn refrains on my demo recordings, Clive and the players worked out a [Note: this was incorrectly done in the book, I'm doing it as exact as possible] some of the more sophisticated punches and flourishes. I soon found myself writing them into the other tunes.
("The Invisible Man" was the final resting place of lyrics which had been part of the "unreleased" songs: "25 to 12", "Seconds Of Pleasure" and "I Turn Around" - see the re-issues of "Trust" and "Imperial Bedroom". Now this song and "Let Them All Talk" - originally "beat-group" tunes - revolved around horn figures. "The Greatest Thing" even contained a reference to my Dad's years with The Joe Loss Orchestra by way of a quote from "In The Mood" - complete with Paul Speare doubling on clarinet. "The World And His Wife" was re-written from a solemn folk song about a drunken family gathering into a bilious knees-up with the horns playing their part in the scene.)
All of the above is not to suggest that I entered into the writing and recording of this record in a haphazard or lackadaisical manner. On the contrary I was still writing most of my songs at the piano and almost all of them were melancholy ballads. Clive cajoled me into picking up the guitar at least for the purpose of writing some more lively material. he argued that there was a danger in becoming known for only the most cynical and disillusioned songs of "Imperial Bedroom". I remained allergic to the happy ending but in reply I managed a pair of proud and wishful songs on Love and marriage: "The Greatest Thing" and "Let Them All Talk" and a couple about the Ugly Truth: "Mouth Almighty" and "Boxing Day".
"They put the numb into number
They put the cut into cutie
They put the slum into slumber
and the boot into beauty."
-"T.K.O. (Boxing Day)"
Between 1979 and 1983 something strange happened. The British government mutated from an annoying and often disreputable body, that spent people's taxes on the wrong things, into a hostile regime contemptuous of anyone who did not serve or would not yield to its purpose.
"Work" was transformed from a right into a privileged reward. There were a few passionate and coherent calls to resistance (most notably Alan Bleasdale's "Boys From The Blackstuff") and I could offer little more than a puny echo and some of the crude references which litter the lesser songs. I might have tried to argue that this was all very ironic -- while fashioning a bauble and feeling for a faint pop pulse but I've always been a dunce at making up that kind of alibi. Anyway most of what I wanted to get out of my head had gone into two songs recorded before we began work on "Punch The Clock".
The phrase "Pills and Soap" was originally inspired by "The Animals Film", while the sound of the record was indebted to "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel. The former was a long harrowing portrayal of man's abuse of animals as pets and exhibits, in factory farming and scientific research. It didn't take much to extract that we are willing to do unto each other as we do to the animals. Beyond that it was a catalogue of the lovely times with the tabloid press just beginning to hone their skills of assassination, exploitation and phony indignation, the country's blind, sad affair with the lucky family in the palace and the new rank breath of jingoism.
I'd been fooling around at the piano with a piece that I told myself sounded something like something Ramsey Lewis...or Mose Allison....or Dave Brubeck might play...when I heard "The Message" ....
It was the first rap record that I had encountered that was anymore than an invitation to dance. It spoke about ugly life. It was the best and only record of it's kind that I heard since The Last Poets' "Wake Up Niggers".
I could not adopt such a vocal delivery but I wanted to set my litany to a drum machine beat. So I turned the piano part over to Steve Nieve (who could actually play it) and switched on the device....that was on a Wednesday, the acetates were cut and distributed to the press and radio the following day and the finished single was in the shops by the following Friday. A week later it appeared in the charts. (The Ability to achieve all this so quickly had everything to do with the fact that I was not, for the moment, being distributed by a major record label. "Pills and Soap", credited to The Imposter, a "Fairley/Imposter Production", appeared on the "Imp Records" - a Demon Records imprint. It was released for a limited period only and melodramatically deleted on the eve of the 1983 general election. The need to re-issue it the following day on a celebratory red vinyl 12" sadly never arose).
This seemed to alarm the BBC who feared that the lyrics might somehow contravene the rules of broadcasting "balance" during the election campaign. A senior BBC producer questioned me about the song's subject matter. I said it was about "man's abuse of animals", a strictly truthful but slippery explanation worth of a Tory cabinet minister. The producer then threatened me with banishment from the national airwaves if I should ever reveal that the song had a hidden agenda and more importantly...gloat about it...How very English.
Given the outcome of the election that I was supposed to be trying to sway and all the miserable years since I can hardly say that the episode gave me much satisfaction other than to get such an unusual song to No. 16 in the charts without anyone noticing.
"Shipbuilding" started out as a piano melody composed by Clive Langer. He asked me if I could come with some words that would suit Robery Wyatt... "perhaps something to do with the hours of the clock" being the only clue. Robert had recorded a beautiful soulful version of "I'm A Believer" so I did not feel that the song had to be inspired by current events. Anyway he had a way of narrowing the distance between a simple love song and an obviously political number. Take a listen to his reading of Chic's "At Last I Am Free" and then hear his version of Victor Jara's "To Recuerdo Amanda" and you'll see what I mean.
I was leaving for an Australian tour with Clive's demo in my bag. The government was in the process of reversing their disastrous fortunes by springing to the defense of an obscure and obsolete imperial coaling station and sheep farming outcrop. In as much as you spring to the defense of The Falkland Islands when you are in the Northern Hemisphere and they are in the South Atlantic. Especially after the nincompoops in the Foreign Ministry have done everything possible to suggest to the particularly vicious junta in Argentina that their claim to "Las Malvinas" might go unchallenged if they would only care to invade...Oh what a lovely war. Except that it was never called "A War". It was always referred to as the "Falklands Crisis" and later the "Falklands Conflict". Thank god CNN wasn't what it is today or we'd have had a theme tune and a log overnight: "South Atlantic Storm: The Falkland Countdown".
By the time I reached Australia the bloody liberation was underway. I thought I'd seen it all in the British media coverage: grown men drooling over the hardware, the sick illusion of invincibility before H.M.S. Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile, The Sun's "Gotcha" headline when 300 Argentine sailors drowned when the Belgrano went down, the construction of the odd heroic myth to cheer everyone up after a series of blunders had lead to a pointless and brutal slaughter of Welsh Guards and of course the Real star of the show: The Prime Minister arriving on our screens each day as if directly from the theatrical costumiers. Sometimes as Boadicea. Sometimes as Britannia. Oh! I nearly forgot the raving lunatic who reared up from the Tory backbenches to suggest a nuclear attack on Buenos Aires. However none of this could prepare me for the depravity of the Australian tabloid coverage. To listen to them the "Poms" were getting slaughtered Gallipoli-style and the "Argies" were eating Falkland babies.
Most of the above was beyond words but the notion that this might really drag on and become a war of attrition seemed as believable as anything else. Ships were being lost. More ships would soon be needed. So: "Welcome back the discarded men of Cammell Laird, Harland and Wolff and Swan Hunter. Boys are being lost. We need more boys. Your sons will do...just as soon as those ships are ready."
For what it's worth this was pretty much the thinking behind the words of "Shipbuilding". That it didn't come pass was a blessing. It was always less of a protest song than a warning sign.
Clive, Alan and I co-produced Robert Wyatt's recording of "Shipbuilding". He sang it beautifully and the single reached many people in Britain. Despite being daunted by the prospect of "covering" the song I wanted to include it on "Punch The Clock" so that it would be heard by a wider audience. As Steve Nieve played the piano on Robert's version I thought we should feature a trumpet soloist on our rendition.
Truthfully my ideal was Miles Davis, though I was probably thinking of the Arabic lines of "Sketches of Spain" rather than his recent fusion records. (I had even attempted to imitate some of those figures in the background voices on both Robert's "Shipbuilding" and "Pills and Soap". This last arrangement also took a cue from parts of Joni Mitchell's album "Hissing of Summer Lawns", although my vocal delivery obviously disguises this quite well.)
If that seemed improbable then what happened next was almost miraculous. I opened the paper to find that Chet Baker was playing a hurriedly announced residency at The Canteen. I went alone to find Chet in a wonderful musical form despite the presence of several drunken bores who would loudly cal for more booze in the middle of some of his most delicate playing. You got the feeling that this happened most nights but it seemed particularly appropriate that the main culprit was said to be one of London's leading jazz critics. Between sets I introduced myself to Chet who was wandering about in the club untroubled by patrons. There is no false modesty in saying he had no idea who I was. Why the hell should he? However he accepted my invitation to come and play on the "Shipbuilding" session the next day. I mentioned a fee. He said "Scale". I think I probably doubled it.
It was a tense but rewarding session. Chet took a little time to grasp the unusual structure of the song but once he had it he played beautifully even if he looks pretty deathly in the studio photos. I'd also say it was one of The Attractions very best performances. At the end of the session I handed Chet a copy of "Almost Blue" a song which was modeled on his style. He ended up recording it but that's another story.
My one regret about the track is that I was tempted to put a spin echo onto a couple of Chet's phrases. I suppose I still had "Sketches of Spain" in the back of my mind. Then again at the time I didn't really understand what composer David Bedford was trying to do in the arrangement of the strings and had them rather buried in the mix. Now I'm really glad that we are all on the record.

Footnote: From then on I always went to see Chet whenever he played in London. Jazz club patrons, who'd probably never heard "Shipbuilding", looked a little startled when he picked me out in the crowd or dedicated a number. We'd have a drink and he'd say funny things about the "jazz singer" who was wowing house with less than a pink dress and little talent. however he seemed somebody that you "knew" rather than somebody you were "friends with". I even interviewed him once for a video special and sang a few numbers, including "You Don't Know What Love Is", with his trio. I think he knew I didn't want to talk about "the drugs". However, despite the fact that he once said in an magazine interview that he didn't care for that fateful echoed phrases he never raised that matter with me and I never got round to apologizing. I guess you can't change history.

EXTENDED PLAY
"HEATHEN TOWN" and "FLIRTING KIND"
Both these songs should have been part of Punch The Clock. I was still so uncertain about the running order that I even had a scheme to substitute "Heathen Town" for "Love Went Mad" after the initial vinyl pressing. It was written as an "answer" to Gram Parsons' "Sin City" with just little pinch of "Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat" (from "Guys and Dolls") thrown in. "Flirting Kind" was originally written in the same time and idiom as "Kid About It" (from "Imperial Bedroom"). There was more than a tip of the hat to Burt Bacharach in my demo. However the mania for "pace" whcih infected some of our wrong-headed choices lead to this pretty but less tragic version. Nevertheless we put quite a lot of time into the arrangement. Somehow it just doesn't really fit the song. (In contrast "King Of Thieves", a tricky tune about the trials of a blacklisted scriptwriter, benefited from the production process. It created a bridge between the somber songs and the brash attractive noise. I woke up from a dream with the first line of the song in my head... "I had forgotten all about the "Case of the Three Pins"...I still have no idea what it means but it sounds like the beginning of a detective novel.
"WALKING ON THIN ICE"
During the "Clocking on across America" tour I received an invitation to meet Yoko Ono at a New York City studio. She had recently begun mixing and compiling the two albums she and John Lennon had been working on at the time of his death.
"Milk and Honey" might have been an album of rough and unfinished Lennon recordings but hearing them in a dimly lit studio with the widow, who had only recently been able to face listening to the tapes, was a very emotional experience. This was probably due to the fact that Lennon's unedited "between-takes" banter was blasting out of the control room speakers while the studio itself was in darkness. The effect was quite unsettling. Yoko asked me to contribute to "Every Man Loves A Woman" (the other work-in-progress album): a collection of other artist's recordings of her songs. Although I would not pretend that her records are exactly a fixture on my turntable I was happy to help complete one of her husband's last projects which one must imagine was conceive out of love.
We were to cut a version of "Walking on Thin Ice", certainly one of Yoko's strongest pieces. However our touring schedule required that we record on one of the few days when we would not be either traveling or performing. Our itinerary suggested Memphis or New Orleans. Now we needed a producer. I suggested that Yoko's office might approach Willie Mitchell in Memphis or Allen Toussaint in New Orleans. After all both these producers had created unique horn-section sounds and we just happened to have one with us.
I don't know if Yoko's people ever heard back from Willie Mitchell but the next thing we knew we were at Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans with Allen Tousaint behind the board. Pete Thomas was delighted to be in the same drum booth as used by the Meters' Ziggy Modeliste while Allen worked closely with Bruce fashioning a very original bass part and swapped keyboard ideas with Steve Nieve. Ironically the main horn frame was a quote from an obscure Willie Mitchell production: "Let The Love Bell Ring" although Allen naturally tailored the overall arrangement and phrasing to a recognizably Toussaint sound. I don't believe that horn section ever sounded better than on this recording. During our stay we too in a couple of Neville Brothers shows where I first heard drummer Willie Green who, long with Allen Toussaint, later played on the New Orleans sessions for my Warner Bros. album "Spike". As for our concert in the city...it was cancelled due to lack of ticket sales.
"TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL"
The result of an experimental Eden Studios session between "Imperial Bedroom" and "Punch The Clock". Pete Thomas provided the drum loop (With my "vocal percussion") and I added the rest of the instruments. Much later I re-worked some lyrics for a song written with Ruben Blades: "The Miranda Syndrome".
"SHATTERPROOF"
This 4-track home demo is my only recording of this song. It is my unsubtle revenge on the landlord who swindled me out of my last penny when I was a twenty-one year old "newly-wed". It was later recorded for a solo single by Rockpile's Billy Bremner.

Postscript 2003
Thanks to some enthusiastic digging in the vaults by my friends at Rhino and Demon Records, CD2 now presents the listener with an alternative Punch The Clock, constructed from raw, pre-production studio run-throughs, demos, and live tapes. Here are a few words about the new inclusions.
EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK:
I have absolutely no memory of cutting this version of the song, but it is how it was originally intended to sound and replaces the inferior lo-fi live take on the previous edition.
BABY PICTURES:
This song is actually supposed to be a ballad. It was written around 1980, at the same time as the Trust cut “Shot With His Own Gun”, and occasionally performed in concert on my ‘80s solo tours. This abandoned studio take is out ill-advised attempt to play it in the English Musical Hall style. Careful listeners may notice an inserted musical quote from The Move’s “Fire Brigade” at the end of the bridge. Everyone else will find it hard to avoid the singer’s bewildering decision to vocalize after the fashion of the “David Jones” who was not in The Monkees.
BIG SISTER’S CLOTHES / STAND DOWN MARGARET and DANGER ZONE:
This cut is the product of a BBC radio session, and even that usually resulted in us becoming extremely “pissed” in both the US and UK definitions of the word. On this occasion we recorded this live arrangement in which we made a transition from the final song on the Trust album into Dave Wakeling’s more plainly spoken appeal to the Prime Minister, as originally recorded by The Beat. This session also produced another Cold War favourite that had recently become rather too timely. I had known this Percy Mayfield song since childhood, after discovering it on the B-side of the Ray Charles 45 “Hit The Road Jack”.
SECONDS OF PLEASURE:
This was the third attempt to record this material, following versions of the song included on recent editions of Trust and Imperial Bedroom. According to our highly qualified researchers, it is being returned to the correct chronological sequence by its inclusion here.
THE WORLD AND HIS WIFE:
A solo studio recording of the original version of this song, prior to a reworking as a band and horn section number. This take includes a few extra lines, none of them very memorable, but it does replace the lo-fi live recording included on the previous edition.
LET THE ALL TALK, KING OF THIEVES, THE INVISIBLE MAN, THE ELEMENT WITHIN HER, LOVE WENT MAD, THE GREATEST THING, MOUTH ALMIGHTY, and CHARM SCHOOL:
Most of these songs were the product of a challenge from Clive Langer for me to provide more up-tempo material for the album. Listening again to these fuzzy four-track demos, it seems that there was a possibility that this record might have continued in the beat group direction suggested by the early version of “Everyday I Write The Book”.
Many of the songs feature passages of two-part vocal harmony, and the influence of Lennon and McCartney and Roy Wood is much more apparent than on the final horn-driven recordings. Certainly the “direct” electric guitar accompaniments all seem to take their cue from very early George Harrison parts… only played by someone wearing boxing gloves.
I have to confess that I now prefer the less produced approach to “King Of Thieves”, as the story seems more concentrated. Certainly, even a slight and lyrically laboured song about life in a nuclear shelter such as “Love Went Mad” is clearly musically rooted in the 1960s, and I suppose Clive saw it as his job to bring us more into the moment, hence the voguish arrangement that the song barely deserved.
There seems to be a deal more doubt in the slower rendition of “The Greatest Thing”, I referred to it in the notes above as “wishful”, and that would be a generous view of this version which includes more references to deprivations that I was no longer suffering and edited out of the final text along with the odd surreal observation: “There’s a world of coffee-table books and no coffee table”.
Obviously some of these demos are more intimate and conversational. There is a slightly different melody in the chorus of “Charm School”, and I think I can detect references to a Pretenders song in this version of “Mouth Almighty”.
I’m not sure that anything vital was really lost in submitting these songs to the Clanger/Winstanley method, as we took to the recording process with some gusto. However, whenever I return to any of these songs today they usually come out sounding closer to these original drafts than the recording found on CD1.
POSSESSION, SECONDARY MODERN, THE BELLS, WATCH YOUR STEP and BACKSTABBERS / KING HORSE:
These excerpts from a radio concert from Austin, Texac, illustrate the influence of the TKO Horns on the material from Get Happy!! They sound most reminiscent of that great siren sound that three of the members created in Dexy’s Midnight Runners when playing the original organ line from “Possession”. They also add some drama to a rather frantic verse of The O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers” that tumbles into “King Horse”.
“The Bells”, an obscure Motown number arranged and produced by Marvin Gaye for The Originalsm became a favourite of mine around this time. I became possessed of the belief that I should sing it, even though the strain on my voice during these shows frequently left me unable to do that much with the melody. Sometimes I think I only called the number to infuriate certain members of The Attractions. On this rendition it sounds as if Steve Nieve was retaliating, using some rather literal sound effects on his brand-new Emulator keyboard. Then again it was the ‘80s. The decade that music and good taste forgot.

[mcramahamasham]

GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD

In 1999 I was making a small cameo appearance in a movie called 200 Cigarettes. The story was set in 1980, and with the help of some clever lighting and a hat I was playing “myself”. The film was a comedy that did a pretty good job of catching the mood of those days between punk and the real onset of the dreadful ‘80s.
The cast contained many young actors, including Paul Rudd, Martha Plimpton, Chistina Ricci, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, and even Casey Affleck and his brother, Ben. As some of the these people were only children during the period of the film, I was quite surprised that any of them had ever heard of me. In fact, one of the actors asked if I would sign an album that she had first bought when in college. She produced a dog-eared and much-played copy of this album, and I felt a little guilty that I had begun the liner note of a previous CD edition with the words:
“Congratulations! You’ve just bought our worst record!”
It seems I wasn’t exactly in a cheerful and optimistic mood when I made this album and that hadn’t really changed by the time the disc was first reissued. Now, with the benefit of a little more distance, I am able to say that it is probably the worst record that I could have made of a decent bunch of songs. I hope, for the sake of those who cared for it in the first place, that this edition will go some way to making them feel a little better about their purchase. That’s if any of them ever read this little note…
Although the title was meant with black humour, I used to quit about once a week in those days (I still do). My first marriage finally collapsed between the recording and the release of this album, so it is not hard to imagine where some of the desperation in the lyrics originated.
I’ve previously made much of the fact that I almost completely thwarted the efforts of my producers, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, and it is true to say that they were probably ill-equipped for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time. A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been more appropriate.
“Langer and Winstanley” are widely associated with a huge run of successful pop recordings throughout the 1980s, beginning with Madness and taking in Dexy’s Midnight Runners and our own Punch The Clock. They did develop certain techniques that defined their “sound”, but this is to ignore that London-born Clive is also a witty and talented composer (the music of “Shipbuilding” is entirely his), who had begun his career in the vibrant post-punk, art-school band scene in Liverpool and that Alan had engineered the early records of the might Buzzcocks, among many others.
Perhaps if I had confided in them more we might have shaped a sound that better suited my dark mood and the songs that it created. Instead the record became a battle to sustain some pace against my desire to make everything slow and mournful. It was also not exactly undesirable that we continue to address the larger audience that we had enjoyed with the success of Punch The Clock. So in the end we agreed to a truce. Clive and Alan would produce two selected songs to the height of style and I could make the rest of the record as miserable as possible. That might be a slight simplification of the proceedings, but I was trying to make the best of the pop music scene of the time.
Goodbye Cruel World was recorded in Trevor Horn’s SARM West Studios at the same time that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were recording “Two Tribes”. We managed to record an entire album in less time than they took to record their single (I think I even had time to go on tour, realize that I hated the album, and come back to England only to find they were still recording “Two Tribes”).
In fact Goodbye Cruel World was released right in the middle of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s nine-week run at No.1 in the U.K. charts with “Two Tribes”. One of those weeks we were scheduled to appear on Tops Of The Pops to perform our new single, “I Wanna Be Loved”. As the song ended, “a representative of the Elvis Costello Group” was testily summoned over a public address system.
Being the only barely responsible person on hand, I presented myself at the foot of the iron stairs to the production gantry above the studio floor. When the producer finally emerged, he attempted to give me a dressing down because Pete Thomas had ruined the illusion of live performance on an entirely mimed programme by playing the final drum fill of our song on his head, while in tight close-up. The fact that the drummer from the group Tight Fit had got up from his drums in the middle of “The Lion Sleep Tonight” and bent over so his bandmate could mime beat out a marimba solo on a keyboard design printed on the arse of his loincloth was completely lost on the apoplectic BBC stooge. If I had continued to argue that Frankie were miming to six months of accumulated recording, I believe he might have needed medical attention.
You might say that during this time The Attractions and I had a troubled and peculiar relationship with pop music. At Pathway and Eden Studios and in Holland for Get Happy and in Nashville for Almost Blue, we always worked behind closed doors. However from Imperial Bedroom onward we found ourselves working in multi-studio facilities, and there always seemed to be someone next door making a big pop hit.
While recording Imperial Bedroom, Paul McCartney was down the corridor making Tug Of War. When we returned to AIR to begin Punch The Clock, Paul was back making Pipes Of Peace (with Michael Jackson popping in for his guest vocals), with the Jam in the middle studio cutting “Precious”, and Alice Cooper mixing an album in another suite. You didn’t always become friends with the other artists, but you might nod to each other on the way to the coffee machine and start up a conversation. When Duran Duran had been at AIR, I remember Simon LeBon telling me, over a game of pool, that they were off to Sri Lanka the following morning to make a “video on a boat” and that he envisaged a time when they would make the films first and fit the music to them later. It is an idea that has surely found its time.
While mixing at Genetic Studios, outside London, we were adjacent to the Human League making Hysteria, the follow-up to Dare, and the previous year the Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley making his solo album XL1. Boffins cluttered up the hallway, developing a primitive computer programme that was pressed onto the last track of the album. With my usual flawless powers of clairvoyance, I thought, That’ll never catch on.
You would think that this would have made me a little more competitive, but by the time we got to Goodbye Cruel World, I was way beyond worrying about such things. Unsurprisingly, my favourite album was Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights. I even toyed with the idea of asking Richard to play on the album, but the notion never got as far as making the call. I had thought we might open up “Joe Porterhouse” into something upon which Richard might fly into space in the manner of “The Calvary Cross”. The tight and sterile final version could not be further from that imagining.
The heart of the record that might have been lies in the songs “Home Truth”, “Love Field”, and “Inch By Inch” and in the idea of covering a lyric of such self-pity and despair as “I Wanna Be Loved”. These are the songs to which I have returned over the years. They contain a strange combination of guilt-stricken regret and erotic intrigue and were as true to my feelings as I could bring myself to be. All these songs can be found in raw demo (or live) form on CD2.
Having made much of the influence and presence of guilt in my songs during an early, drunken interview, I had now lived long and selfishly enough to really know what lay beyond those brash words. “Home Truth” is as stark, unguarded, and unpolished a lyric as I had written to this point. I could not find any disguise for the simple recitation of falling out of love with someone that I’d adored for many years. The closest thing to distraction is the lyrical allusion to Dan Penn’s “It Tears Me Up” in the bridge. Within the year I would add both Penn’s “Dark End Of The Street” and Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone to my repertoire.
The obverse of this song could be found in the illicit and shamelessly erotic content of both “Love Field” and “Inch By Inch”. The former is one of the few songs that did not suffer fatally from the instrumental sound of the record, although I believe that the song can be performed more lyrically. “Inch By Inch” was a revision of an outtake from Imperial Bedroom. Given the content of the song, I wish I could claim that there was some conscious humour in borrowing the bass figure from “I’m Only Sleeping”.
With a lighter touch of execution, the narrative and contemporary songs, “Worthless Thing”, “The Deportees Club”, “Joe Porterhouse”, “The Comedians” and my second songwriting collaboration with Clive Langer, “The Great Unknown”, might have been a fine compliment to the first group.
Although often written in disguise, these songs contain hints of the unhappiness and self-disgust I was feeling. “Joe Porterhouse” seems to be about the funeral for a local strongman, but refers to marital strife and children sitting on the stairs “high above a valley of tears” and “broken branches of the family tree”. Even though “Worthless Thing” talks of infamy and Elvis Presley and the arrival of 24 hours of everything that you don’t need, the title alone tells another tale. An earlier draft of the song appears on CD2 under the title “Blue Murder On Union Avenue”.
Disillusionment runs through several of these songs. “The Great Unknown” is a fantasy about burying the title characters of various songs that have been repeated to the point of cliché. “The Deportees Club” took some scenes from a real Roman nightclub and transplanted then into the tale of a lost soul…
I pray to the saints and all the martyrs
For the secret life of Frank Sinatra
But none of these things have come to pass
In America the law is a piece of ass
The song then goes on to list a series of drinks for deadening the pain. Unfortunately, the music of this recording was crude and uninspired, but I thought enough of the words to revise the song with a new ballad melody and simplified title (“Deportee”), which was later wonderfully recorded by Christy Moore.
“The Comedians” takes its title from a Graham Greene book but other than that has no connection with his work. The lyric has something to do with temptation without being too specific. The music was originally patterned after a Roy Orbison ballad, but in the mad pursuit of faster tempi, we stumbled into a rather bizarre arrangement, which drained any drama out of the song.
Three years later I had the opportunity to reclaim the original music and completely rewrite a lyric for inclusion in Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl album, it also turned out to be the only new composition performed by Roy in the famous Roy Orbison And Friends: Black & White Night television special. My demo of the original version can be heard on CD2.
Despite my emotional disarray, I had written many of the songs for this album by going to a recently vacated office of Demon Records and keeping regular working hours in what I imagined to was the Brill Building style. I also set up an easel, so that when I ran out of song ideas, I might fling a little paint around. The result of this daubing was a rather crude visual joke named after the Hepburn and Tracy movie Pat And Mike. Not all of the songs that I composed turned out to be much more coherent.
“Sour Milk-Cow Blues” may have been written as some distant relation of a New Orleans song like “Holy Cow” or “Get Out My Life Woman”, but the recording lack much wit, grit, or charm. However the notion of no longer recognizing the person you once loved is played out in a few telltale lines:
Somebody’s putting ideas in your head
They took the girl of my dreams and left you here instead
All Along with just your own device
They give you something and it isn’t advice
To break the hearts of a million listeners
Start out as lovers and you end up as prisoners
Several of the first drafts of songs can be heard in demo form on CD2, and it is pretty clear that I cannibalized most of this material to complete the lyrics that appear on the main record.
The song that underwent the most radical revision was “Mystery Voice”. The demo on CD2, recorded on a cassette player during one of my writing sessions, reveals a light ska tune with a surreal lyric. A few lines from the first verse eventually appeared in “Worthless Thing”. Later, I adapted the music to tell the nightmarish tale of a pair of illicit lovers who are walled-up in a hotel room, a scenario from a television play that had terrified me as a child. The new song was called “Room With No Number”. The idea of identity being difficult to sustain returns in these regretful lines in the bridge:
And I wish he could be
The man he was before he was me
The opening song on this album, “The Only Flame In Town”, was originally written in the style heard on the live version in the final section of CD2. It was composed with Aaron Neville in mind. Our laboured attempt to record a band rendition with just such arcane arrangement (which opens CD2) goes a long way in justifying the modern R&B treatment to which it was finally subjugated.
This was one of two track that were given the concentrated production approach and, like many cuts on the record, makes excessive use of the new DX7 synthesizer, the tone of which might as well date-stamp the album to an exact week in 1984. It is not a sound that has improved with age.
This was also the first of my album with The Attractions to feature guests. Gary Barnacle was a very able a ubiquitous session sax player who had appeared on other Langer and Winstanley productions. Unfortunately, when I now hear the sax entrance on “The Only Flame”, I can’t help but think of the theme from Moonlighting. Ah well, it all seemed like a good idea at the time.
More people seemed startled by the appearance of Daryl Hall, who sings the high harmony on “Only Flame”. I would later use the Hall & Oates rhythm section of T-Bone Wolk and Mickey Curry on the King Of America sessions. It was Daryl’s good looks that helped set up one of the better video clips that we made after our early 16mm adventures in France.
Shot by Rock ‘N’ Roll High School director Allan Arkush, “The Only Flame” clip featured a “Win a date with The Attractions contest”, in which the band are actually credited with individual personalities, funny little thumbnail sketches of the real guys. Naturally, my romantic rival was Daryl, but my only real humiliation was in having a Columbia promotion woman hector the makeup girl: “Make him look handsome”, while a very hungover Daryl sat in the next chair looking like a movie star. His hair was perfect.
I found the original Teacher’s Edition version of “I Wanna Be Loved” on a Hi Records compilation in a cutout bin in Newcastle, while on tour. The halting piano run-through on CD2 was as close to the original mood as I could get. Although less heavily produced than “The Only Flame”, it still contains the saxophone interjections that fix it in the times. Green of Scriti Politti provided the high vocal harmonies on this occasion.
The video clip made for this song is the only one that I feel really adds anything much to the performance. It was shot by Evan English while we were on tour in Melbourne. Having insisted that I stay up all night so that I was feeling quite overwrought, and this being a period of particularly difficult personal circumstances, Evan then placed me in a photo-booth set. As I performed the song, sometimes singing live over the track as well as lip-synching, a great variety of people entered the frame, whispering, blowing in my ear, or kissing me on the cheek. The effect was very unsettling, and the range of reactions seen were entirely genuine and somehow added gravity to a rather plastic-sounding record.
Guitars don’t really feature that much in the songs recorded for this album. The exception is the outtake “Turning The Town Red”. The basic track was cut at SARM, but I completed the more intricate guitar and vocal arrangement at AIR Studios with Jon Jacobs, who had worked on Imperial Bedroom.
The song was written for the opening titles of Alan Bleasdale’s comic serial Scully, in which the title character dreams of leading out the Liverpool football team in front of their most dedicated fans on the Kop terrace. I also made a supporting appearance in the story as a nearly mute member of the central family who is obsessed with railway timetables.
A demo of the first draft (CD2, track 11) appears to have a lyric that is being free-associated, but the final version (CD2, track 3) sounds like another of my many attempts to write a Chrissie Hynde song (“Men Called Uncle”, “Kid About It”, “Mouth Almighty”).
Several of the track on CD2 feature warm up songs from various sessions. “Young Boy Blues” was a Ben E. King song (written by Doc Pomus) that I had recently fallen for on Joe Camilleri’s Black Sorrows Sonola album. “Get Yourself Another Fool” is a Charlie Brown cut that I had learned from Sam Cooke’s Night Beat album.
“Baby It’s You” was cut for a joint-promo single, publicizing a U.S. tour on which Nick Lowe & His Cowboy Outfit were opening up for us. Ludicrously, Columbia refused to release it because, according to them, it was “too good” and they feared it would distract from both artists’ current single releases.
Another oddity is my guest vocal appearance on Madness’ “Tomorrow’s (Just Another Day)”. I had known the group since they had first recorded for Two-Tone. They were now well into their phenomenal run of success on Stiff Records. This version of a hit tune was cut for a B-side, illustrating a streak of melancholy that runs through their later work. My decision to perform the vocal in the style of Anthony Newley may have been ill-advised. Variations on a new vocal identity also appear on the demo of “Joe Porterhouse” and yet another version of the allusive “The Town Where Time Stood Still” that was in contention for a third time.
The rest of the acoustic performances on CD2 are songs featured in the repertoire of my first solo tour. “Withered And Died” is one of two Richard Thompson songs that I performed, the other being “The End Of The Rainbow”. Along with John Hiatt’s “She Loves The Jerk”, these titles underline the mood of many of my performances.
By the end of a U.S. tour of concert halls and colleges, in the company of T-Bone Burnett, I realized that the record that I had just made was terribly flawed. Unfortunately, my financial circumstances at the time were such that to shelve the record would have invited bankruptcy.
My only consolation was that I got to reclaim a number of songs in concert that had lost their way in the studio, including several of the recent recordings and marry them to other people’s songs that mirrored my state of mind. The last six tracks on CD2 give a glimpse of these concerts.
Although between solo and band tours throughout the year, as my private life went into considerable turmoil, I recorded only one more new song in 1984, when I took The Attraction into the studio during our Y.K. dates. The result didn’t really match the emotional intent of “I Hope You’re Happy Now”, which had to wait for a more sarcastic reading on Blood & Chocolate before being officially issued.
The final piece on this album is the song “Peace In Our Time”. For years, I’ve regarded this composition as being rather too self-conscious in its attempt to follow on the commentary begun with the songs “Shipbuilding” and “Pills And Soap”. Indeed the track was unsuccessfully released as another “Imposter” single and performed in the U.S. on the NBC Tonight Show, making little or no impression on the audience.
It certainly didn’t take a shy or modest view of the subject matter, opening with a reference to the Munich Agreement and post-war European alliances and continuing into a second verse that talks about Cold War blacklists and has an atomic scientist doubting his handiwork.
The songs does have a pretty melody that inspired by Paul Simon’s “Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War” and the record concludes with a beautifully played trombone solo by Big Jim Paterson on a theme of mine entitled “World Without End”.
Although I once referred to the song as being a “relic from the days of nuclear dread”, some of the lines seem sadly to be coming into their time once again. Though the last verse refers to then-current events: the invasion of Grenada, the conflict in the Falkland Islands, one of the Rocky films, and the Presidential candidacy of astronaut John Glenn, their counterparts can easily be found in today’s headlines.
If I were to sing this song today, final lines of the last verse would address someone with the appearance of a moral and intellectual vacuum, a mere pitchman for the company store that has ruled America on and off for the last 60 years. An illegitimate authority that is aloof and apparently contemptuous of the general decency of the very people it purports to represent.
Politicians and their apologists in the media often patronize musicians and other artists. We are supposedly naïve and don’t understand the cruel and cold realities of the world. Then again we are not the ones who have provoked or underwritten countless military confrontations and hypocritically promoted global instability through fear, in the guise of defending freedom, justice, and corporate profit. The only difference in those they oppose being a willingness to glory in a relationship with evil that goes undisguised.
Writing in the late spring of ’04, the title of this piece seems a more distant prospect than ever. I have to hope that this flawed song doesn’t sound like a sick joke by November.
They’re lighting a bonfire upon every hilltop in the land
Just another tiny island invaded when he’s got the whole world in his hands
And the Heavyweight Champion fights in the International Propaganda Star Wars
There’s already one spaceman in the White House what do you want another one for?

And the bells take their toll once again in victory chime
And we can thank God that we’ve finally got peace in our time
-Elvis Costello

________________________________________

Rykodisk Liner Notes

Congratulations! You've just purchased our worst album. At least that is the impression I've given over the years and I am sure that you could find many people who would agree with me. However as you are reading this I will assume that you are curious, rather than morbid. I can explain everything....
Many very private and personal concerns influenced the fate of these songs and sessions. A "sleeve note" is certainly not the proper place to discuss them. It must suffice to say that I began the year as a married man and after a fraught and futile period, I found myself living alone by the time this record was released. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa", as we used to say in church without being really sure what it meant. I was about to find out.
Musically speaking the year began positively. I decided to stop rushing into songs as soon as a single idea sprang into my head. Instead I collected many fragments and then applied myself to an intense period of writing. Moving a piano and a couple of guitars into F-Beat Records' recently vacated Acton office I went to work during ordinary business hours "Tin-Pan Alley Style". Most of the time writing went quite smoothly and if I got stuck I had installed an easel so that I could attempt a little oil painting.
(In fact "Eamonn Singer" ended up daubing "Pat and Mike" - a very corny visual joke which makes up part of the "artwork". He is still awaiting an offer from the Getty Foundation).
My gravest mistake for all concerned was in asking Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley to produce this record. This is far from a criticism of Clive and Alan's abilities. In truth I didn't need a producer, I probably needed a nurse (or maybe a priest). "Pop Music" was among the things about which I was depressed and demoralized. Despite the success of Punch The Clock I fought every attempt to apply the Clanger/Winstanley method to these songs. That I thought of approaching Richard Thompson to add guitar to a couple of cuts is a clue to dark tone I was really after. Like so many of my notions of the time it came to nothing.
After two tense and fairly unproductive weeks of playing "live" in London's SARM WEST STUDIOS we called a truce. I'm almost certain that Clive wished he could get out of the project but stuck it out more as a friend than a professional. I agreed to let them work their magic on a few cuts and give the record company some commercial focus while the rest of the tunes went fairly unadorned. It was a happy, if fatal, compromise.
All of Clive and Alan's techniques went into "The Only Flame In Town". Bruce and Pete were locked to a clatter of mechanical percussion and Steve worked up the dizzy keyboard arrangement (including a little Bach.)
Our first guest musician was Gary Barnacle who added the kind of part that was popular in those days on an instrument that I have come to despise in the hands of all but a few.
(On the subsequent tour Gary was our solitary horn player. In an attempt to duplicate the "Punch The Clock" section sound he played through an extravagant array of harmonizing and octave-dividing devices, achieving a very passable impersonation of an Italian traffic-jam).
Our second guest was Daryl Hall who added some effortless high harmonies to the chorus. He was also adored by the camera during the shooting of the accompanying "Win A Date with Elvis and The Attractions" video -made by Allen Arkush - director of both Rock'n'Roll High School and early episodes of Moonlighting. Daryl made the rest of us look as if we had just crawled out of a hedge. My humour wasn't helped by the record company representative shrieking at the make-up girl: "Make him look handsome" as I was about to go under the pancake. Ah! The eighties.
(Even though the finished record was a minor hit single in the US it hasn't dated very well. Some the lines tumble off the tightrope without the justification of the original ballad treatment).
The other big production number on the album was a cover of an extremely rare Hi Records/Willie Mitchell cut: "I Wanna Be Loved" by Teacher's Edition. From the foundation of a cranky souning drum machine we made one of our very few slow-dance records. The high harmonies on this cut were provided by Green of Scritty Politti.
(Despite a few dated touches this track remains closer to my heart than it's companion, particularly when heard in conjunction with "photo-booth" video which was directed in Melbourne, Australia by Evan English. This is one of the only occasions that a video actually improved one of our records. "I Wanna Be Loved" was also my last U.K. hit single in the company of The Attractions for nine years. In fact we were banished from the BBC's "Top of the Pops" studio after Pete mimed his final drum-fill by playing it on his head. According to the preening producer this revealed the state secret that we were not actually playing "live".)
There isn't much rock'n'roll on this record. There is a detached, an almost sedated quality to the remaining songs and performances. However I believe that the words are a big improvement on most of "Punch The Clock". Although many of the stories are dense and obscure they can't disguise the fears, doubts and desires. If some of the songs fail to hold up then that is because they are a product of my gloomiest and least inspired days.
"Somone's putting ideas in your head
They took the girl of my dreams
and left you here instead"
"Sour Milk Cow Blues"
I couldn't always muster much technique when feelings were running high. "Home Truth" was the saddest song that I had ever written but it struggled to seem so in the clipped and sterile studio sound. meanwhile the bewildered tales of adulterous life fared much better, which I suppose I was fitting. As someone once said "deep down I'm very superficial".
"Inch by Inch" had a chorus which seemed to be trying to cross Henry Mancini with The Impressions while I started to believe that "Love Field" sounded a bit like a Serge Gainsbourg production. I even tried to make the words sound as if they had been badly translated from another language.
My second songwriting collaboration with Clive produced "The Great Unknown". In it, infamous characters from celebrated songs have spiteful things done to them. I was having my doubts about being "known" at all and this was probably the least awkward way of expressing it. The dolorous mood continues with "Joe Porterhouse" which is about the funeral of a family strong man.
(I adapted the music and some of the words from "I Love You When You Sleep", a song I had written for Respond Records artist Tracie.)
"Worthless Thing" was written when the mausoleum-builders of the T.V. and magazine trade had only just started catching lightning and turning it into a museum piece. It mentions a lot of things in passing: Game Shows, bodysnatchers, "Elvis Presley Wine", obsessives, cable television, and "an obituary... for every clockwork cat and conceivable kitten" but most of all it was about the lack of surprises. It is a pity that self-loathing wasn't more fashionable at the time.
I think I probably wanted to make a kind of "folk-rock" record but instead of an open ringing sound we ended up with a muted background against which events were supposed to occur. When we did attempt to produce a more detailed song we produced "Room Without A Number", which believe it or not started out as a perfectly good country mystery-story.
(I'm afraid we also fell under the spell of fashionable hardware. Steve had always used synthesizers to colour his keyboard parts. They had a rarity because they were not exactly cheap and seemed to bend to the player's style. The latest fad was the Yamaha DX7. This light, inexpensive device seemed ideal for about six months by which time almost every group in the world seemed to have one. It has a tinny, unyielding tone for which I will never be nostalgic. Along with the veneer of Solid State recording the omni-present DX7 does more than anything else to "datestamp" this record).
Sometimes perversity ruled the day. I trivialized the drama of "The Comedians" by my willful decision to re-arrange it in 5/4 time, while "Deportees Club" was simply the wrong music for the right words. Thankfully none of this proved fatal in the long run.
Between the competition and the release of this record I discovered some of the mistakes I'd made. During that time I played my first professional solo concerts on a tour of the United States. I got a chance to reclaim several old tunes that had got lost in the studio but most of all I began to rescue my newest songs from the recorded fog. I even went so far as to re-compose the music of "Deportees Club". Stripping off the over-wrought racket I found a tune more in keeping with an exile's lament. Several years later Christy Moore cut a great version of it for his album "The Voyage".
The opening act on the solo tour was T Bone Burnett. We got along like several blazing houses. During the three tours we did together in the following twelve months I wrote the songs that T Bone would produce for my album "King Of America". A couple of years after that T Bone asked me if I had a suitable song for Roy Orbison's "Mystery Girl" album. It didn't take much to return "The Comedians" to its original arrangement, which sounded something like "Running Scared". However I added new words and a few extra modulations before I gave the finished tune to Roy. When the "The Comedians" appeared on Roy's last record I felt that I had done everything possible to rescue what was left of this squandered material.
The last track on "Goodbye Cruel World" is "Peace In Our Time". If it now seems like a relic of those days of anti-nuclear dread then I hope it stays that way. In the instrumental refrain trombonist Jim Paterson plays the melody from another unfinished song of mine: "World Without End".

EXTENDED PLAY
"TURNING THE TOWN RED" (Double-A-Side of "I Wanna Be Loved" single)
This was written for the opening titles of Alan Bleasdale's television series "Scully". The basic track was cut dring the "Goodbye Cruel World" sessions but for the vocal and guitar overdubs I returned to AIR studios and worked with Jon Jacobs (who was assistant engineer on "Imperial Bedroom").
"BABY IT'S YOU"
This track was recorded at Nick Lowe's "Ampro Studios". As Nick and his Cowboy outfit were to join us on the U.S. leg of our "Goodbye Cruel World" tour Columbia Records suggested that we cut something "extra" for a joint twelve-inch promo record featuring each of our latest single releases. Despite all our studio work together this was our first duet on record. Unfortunately the record company deemed the track "too good", fearing that it would draw airplay from the "real" singles. Such was the complex strategy of the modern recording industry. Consequently "Baby It's You" saw very little exposure until it's release on the Demon Records compilation "Out Of Our Idiot".
"GET YOURSELF ANOTHER FOOL" and "I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW"
These tracks come from an EDEN STUDIOS session during the "Goodbye Cruel World" tour.
It was a year full of contradictions and a rather erratic tour. There was one night when SAM MOORE joined us for a great duet on "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" but on other evenings I struggled to connect with even my own songs. The shows tended to ramble. Sometimes we stayed on stage for over three hours until I found what I wanted in other people's songs. These tunes included "Dark End Of The Street", "I Still Miss Someone", "I've Forgotten More Than You'll Ever Know" and "I'll make it all up to you".
"I knew then what I know now
I never loved you anyhow...."
"I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW" was written during a brief summer trip to Italy. I planned to make another "Instant Single" of this track but it failed to come out sounding quite the way I felt. Instead we cut a brace of r'n'b ballads of which "GET YOURSELF ANOTHER FOOL" was the best. I learned it from the Sam Cooke record "Night Beat" although I later found out that this version paid tribute to the style of Charles Brown.
"ONLY FLAME IN TOWN", "WORTHLESS THING", "MOTEL MATCHES", and "SLEEPLESS NIGHTS"
A few snapshots from my first solo tour.
"DEPORTEE"
A demo recording of the new melody of this song.

[mcramahamasham]

KING OF AMERICA
The two interviewees wore large sunglasses. The tall one wore a Western-style jacket with lapels completely covered in rhinestones. The sullen one in white, floral brocade jacket wore a bolo tie and was perspiring in the California sunshine. They looked furtive and shifty. The CNN title card indentified them as “Henry and Howard Coward”.
They spun a completely improbable and possibly libellous tale of how their management had persuaded them to fake their own deaths, retire to “The Island”, and then stage the “Ultimate Comeback”. Only some of these ludicrous falsehoods made it onto the satellite broadcast.
Onstage, they were known to falsely claim authorship of most of the very famous songs that they performed and clearly didn’t write. They were now peddling their “Second Comeback Tour” after the money from the first one had run out.
The press corps, who were killing time while waiting for President Reagan to emerge from his holiday hideaway and give them a reason to exist, jumped at the chance to amuse themselves when The Coward Brothers had stumbled into their poolside barbecue for a drink.
Later that evening, the Cowards drove back to Los Angeles and stopped into a crowded Beverly Hills bar, finding themselves next to Less Than Zero author, Bret Easton Ellis. There was an uneasy moment. It’s hard to know how far to push these things.
This masquerade was really an excuse for performing songs ranging from their theme tune, the George Jones classic “Ragged But Right”, through Bobby Charles’ “Tennessee Blues” and Los Lobos’ “Matter Of Time” to a medley of “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” and “If You’re Going To San F…” You probably get the picture…
As their ghostwriters, T-Bone and I composed “The People’s Limousine” during a long and occasionally surreal journey through Italy.
In early ’85 The Coward Brothers’ first and only single was recorded in Los Angeles with David Miner on bass and Ron Tutt on drums. The B-side was a Leon Payne song made famous by Hank Williams, “They’ll Never Take Her Love Away From Me”, on which the Cowards were joined by D. Miner and Stephen Bruton on mandolin.
A proposed guest appearance on the A-side by Bonnie Raitt never came to pass after the singer and guitarist was taken out to supper by the Brothers and all forgot to return to the studio.
During the same visit, I went into Sunset Sound Studios to record solo versions of all the then-completed songs for my next record. T-Bone and engineer Larry Hirsch were extremely patient as a collision with a bottle of whiskey gradually undid the session.
Despite the ragged nature of the demos, T-Bone and I were able to plan the album sessions while on The Coward Brothers’ final comeback tour of Australia and Japan, on which we were the “special guests”. We passed the in-flight hours writing out the song titles and then putting the musicians’ names against them that might best serve each tune.
From the spring of 1984 to the spring of 1985, I had undertaken three separate “solo” tours to pay off my legal bills, armed only with a couple of guitars and some clumsy fingers at the piano. On each occasion I shared the bill with T-Bone.
Our travels together gave me plenty of time for writing and performing new tunes. Most of these songs were supposed to be performed with the same accompaniment, despite the fact that I am credited throughout this record as “Little Hands of Concrete”. This is a name given to me by Nick Lowe after I smashed another set of string off my guitar during a frantic take early in my career.
This is not the time for me to speak specifically about some the personal events behind this album. These are pretty plainspoken songs. “Indoor Fireworks” is a lament to the end of love. “Poisoned Rose” and “I’ll Wear It Proudly” are songs about the danger and uncertainty of desire. They point to the tone of the succeeding album, Blood & Chocolate. There was a sense of new dedication in “Jack Of All Parades”.
Several songs employ a narrative form to make the private details seem less self-regarding. “American Without Tears” compares my own experience to my grandfather’s travels to New York in the 1920s. Other songs focus on macabre tales and some of the grotesques that I had encountered on my own American travels. “Our Little Angel”, “Glitter Gulch”, and “Brilliant Mistake” continue the theme of exile and a simultaneous attraction and repulsion to an ideal. That is why the album is called King Of America. It is inherently contradictory.
During my visits to Hollywood, I found myself sitting around hotel rooms late at night with other songwriters, drinking and swapping stories and songs. This was entirely new to someone who had started out in the rather more insular and competitive London scene. I would meet a lot of interesting characters in T-Bone’s company over the next few years, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Dixon, Harry Dean Stanton, Kris Kristofferson, and Lucinda Williams.
I recall throwing the hotel room curtains open to the descending panoramic view of the streets departing from the spine of La Cienega Boulevard, as Victoria Williams sang a lovely song about the lights looking just like someone always thought they should. Pete Case was there also. T-0Bone played “Shake Yourself Loose” and then Bob Neuwirth arrived and put everyone away with his great song “Annabelle Lee”. T-Bone ended up recording these last two titles with some of the same musicians who appeared on King Of America, in an even more unadorned style.
By the time we entered Hollywood’s Ocean Way Studios, we had booked several line-ups to tackle the songs. The first consisted of Ron Tutt on drums, Jerry Scheff on bass, and James Burton on guitar. This trio had been a major part of Elvis Presley’s “T.C.B.” band, although I was actually more familiar with Ron and James’ recordings with Gram Parsons. It turned out that Jerry, whose musical background included the Navy and modern jazz, had also featured on records ranging from The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up, And Away” to The Doors’ “L.A. Woman”.
James Burton is one of the few guitar players who is almost always called “legendary”. This is because he is amazing, and his credits stretch from Dale Hawkins’ “Suzie Q”, through his years with Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley to a fantastic range of session and stage appearances, Jerry Lee Lewis, Emmylou Harris, and Randy Newman being only three of my favourites from the hundreds of artists he has played with.
These sessions were cut as “live” as possible. T-Bone and engineer Larry Hirsch had miked me so that my vocal and guitar performance were central to the sound picture. With the exception of some trickery on “Jack Of All Parades”, there were few effects employed other than reverb. The distortion of the piano on “Sleep Of The Just” was achieved by running the mikes through a Leslie cabinet.
After balances were achieved the musicians gathered around to learn the changes. My task was made much easier as the players were referring to charts transcribed from my demos by T-Bone’s associate producer David Miner. Where I intended to straighten out the wayward bars of the solo renditions only remained to be determined.
The first song recorded was “Our Little Angel”. It took about four attempts to get the finished take. The original intention was to concentrate this ensemble’s efforts on any country-styled ballads, but instead I called “The Big Light”, a fast, grim comedy that was written in the awful wake of a drunken solo acoustic demo session earlier that year. I had imagined that the accompaniment should be something like The Tennessee Two (and indeed Johnny Cash would later cut it in that very style). However, James kicked off a series of guitar figures reminiscent of the “T.C.B.” treatment of “Mystery Train”, Jerry and Ron fell in behind, and we were away. Take One! Elated by this, we went ion to cut “American Without Tears”.
This song was based on a chance meeting with a couple of former G.I. brides during a tour of Florida. They had volunteered their stories while I was drinking at an adjacent table. The names and locations were changed, but it stayed pretty true to their tale of exile and escape. It is as close as this record comes to having a theme.
With the exception of later adding Jo-El Sonnier’s French accordion part to “American Without Tears”, three of our most valuable tracks were totally finished in the first few hours of recording.
The next day was not quite so successful, but we had a lot of fun racing through “Glitter Gulch”, the tale of a game-show swindle, which features James on guitar and dobro, and we cut the ballad “Shoes Without Heels”. We even attempted versions of “Lovable” and “Indoor Fireworks” before concluding that these were better left for another day.
Recording with members of Elvis Presley’s band might have seemed daunting or even provocative. However, none of this could quite prepare me for the threatening prospect of our next session.
When T-Bone had pencilled these names next to studio dates somewhere over the Pacific it had seemed like a brilliant idea. It had never been my intention to hire off-the-peg “legends” for the hell of it. The first two players through the door were unknown to me. They were pianist Tom Canning and keyboard player Mitchell Froom, who was to play Hammond B-3 on the session.
It was the rhythm section that was daunting. On drums: Earl Palmer who, among many other things, had starred on most of the great Little Richard sides. On bass: Ray Brown, whose recording credits could, and probably do, fill a book… Dizzy Gillespie… Charlie Parker… Duke Ellington… and most memorably, Oscar Peterson.
While the introductions were under way, T-Bone was musing as to why nobody seemed to be able to achieve the spontaneity that we had heard on a Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald side playing on the in-flight music around the time we were planning this very session. Being the diplomat, Earl informed us, “Of course, you know, Ray was Ella’s first husband…” and added after a beat Ray added, “I think I might have played on that session”.
“Oh yeah”, I was thinking, “and now we’re going to play this stupid little song I’ve written”.
Actually, I think they both might have thought I was out of my mind when I said that I didn’t give a damn if this record was a hit, so long as it sounded right. This was clearly not the sort of talk they were accustomed to. Still, with Tom and Mitchell quietly taking care of their parts, we eventually got a take of “Poisoned Rose”. I just had to get my nervous voice under control and catch a first verse where my performance sat right with Ray’s solitary bass accompaniment Cue the celebration and crack open the Glenlivet!
It was then that T-Bone called “Eisenhower Blues”, an obscure J.B. Lenoir side that I had just learned. There was no real reason to cut it except that it gave everyone a chance to relax and play a bit (I think T-Bone just wanted to hear Ray Brown let loose on a tune like this and sat in on electric guitar). We did one long double take and cross-faded the highlights together. It certainly gives the album a kick in amongst all these ballads.
The session ended with suitably blurred photos being snapped. They seem to have got lost. Even if Ray and Earl thought I was some kind of crazy, limey millionaire who went ‘round hiring my jazz and R&B heroes on a whim, I wish I could find that damn photograph.
Unfortunately the “Poisoned Rose” celebrations went on far too long, and I arrived for the next day’s session in pretty poor shape. Now if this is probably starting to sound like one man’s slide to alcoholic oblivion, then I think that the results contradict the evidence. Arranged around me in a semicircle were James Burton on acoustic guitar, Jerry Scheff on string bass, and Mitchell Froom on organ. Only shaking slightly, I took up my position and after one complete take we had “Indoor Fireworks”.
Naturally, we always went on to record several further attempts just in case there was any temptation to take the easy way out. It was probably best that we cut it quickly as this kind of romantic obituary is not something you would want to labour over.
Over the next few days, a new band emerged with Mitchell Froom on keyboards, Jerry Scheff on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums. Jim had played on so many great recordings by John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and George Harriosn, as part of the “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” troupe with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell, and all the way back to his days in Gary Lewis & The Playboys. I really loved his playing on Ry Cooder’s records, and yet I had been strangely resistant to T-Bone’s suggestion that Jim play on the sessions.
Somehow I had got it into my head that we might end up with an overly familiar L.A. approach to the rhythm. It took about five minutes to realise that Jim actually was one of the most wonderfully unpredictable and magical players with whom one could share a studio or stage. Over the next ten years, he would provide the most important drumming contributions to my records next to those of Pete Thomas.
This line-up cut the slight but swinging, “Loveable”, which features a wonderful one-take harmony vocal from Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, and two songs that I regarded as crucial to the album, “I’ll Wear It Proudly” and “Sleep Of The Just”. In some ways they were the heart of the record. Just a few highlights are Mitchell’s mysterious introduction to “Sleep Of The Just”, Scheff’s swinging bass line on “Lovable”, and Keltner’s kick-drum fills on the bridge of that cut and the fade of “I’ll Wear It Proudly”, where Mitchell plays the organ melody that I had sung to him. He would make good use of it, turning a variation of that theme into a hook on his production of the big Crowded House hit, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”.
This is just the kind of detail that was almost impossible to isolate on my recording with The Attractions, although that doesn’t mean that you cannot hear such fine playing. It is just that you would have to listen a little harder due to the claustrophobic nature of our sound. Anyway, where were The Attractions during all of this?
I had originally intended to feature The Attractions on half of this album so that the contrast of accompaniments would be heard to best effect. The news of this plan was not exactly received with wild celebrations, and I suppose I became pretty high-handed about my recording plans. On all sides the old cliché about “familiarity” probably had some substance.
Anyway, by the time The Attractions arrived in Hollywood there was more than half an album’s worth of material in the can. This meant that our sessions had a doomed air of suspicion and resentment. After spending so much time together on the road T-Bone and I had a rapport based on rumour that unwittingly drove a wedge between the band and myself. In these circumstances I suppose it is hardly surprising that The Attractions delivered some of their worst performances.
I had little patience for our failure to get to grips with the one song I had been certain would suit the band’s sound and was fast becoming the session’s theme song: “Brilliant Mistake”. Apart from the lyric providing the album’s title, I had always seen this song as the record’s opening track. Despite any other departures, I wanted to lead off with an Attractions recording. This was not to be.
I can’t recall the exact sequence of events. I know we cut rather lacklustre versions of “Blue Chair” and “Next Time Round”, both of which would have to wait until the Blood & Chocolate sessions to be more fully realised. Then we cut to a throwaway number that we could have played in our sleep and about which the title was probably the best thing: “Baby’s Got A Brand New Hairdo”.
This steadied everyone’s nerves, but we weren’t exactly having fun. It was at this moment that we cut “Suit Of Lights”, a dense lyric written from the jaundices performer’s perspective about mob instinct and how one man’s amusement is another man’s job of work. The song was written after watching my father, Ross, sing of experience and tenderness to an uncomprehending rabble of karaoke-trained dullards.
Our pent-up frustrations went into making this one of the most passionate Attractions recordings. Alas nothing else seemed to fall into place, and the recording schedule had to move on. This left my sullen and estranged band hanging around our hotel harbouring a grudge or honing an embittered anecdote.
The most absurd slander naturally originated from the least committed member of the band and has been repeated in print often enough to bear being refuted here, namely that I was in the grip of some unlikely collision between and identity crisis and megalomania.
I had already shot the photo session for the album sleeve with the great Terence Donavon. I sported an embroidered jean jacket (far from my usual black attire of the time) and an elaborate jewelled replica of the crown of the Kings and Queens of England. The photographs had turned out wonderfully and would have been an obvious visual joke to all but the humourless paranoid.
In the days before computer visuals, it was necessary to assess a number of large contrasting prints before settling on the final cover image. When this working process was glimpsed by chance, it sparked the accusation that I was decorating my hotel room with the crowned heads of my own ego.
If our most persistent chronicler had been capable of any self-awareness, then it might have been acknowledged that I not only wrote all the songs but also took responsibility for such matters as sleeve design and all the publicity activities that didn’t actually require performance. This is what it took to keep our ship afloat, while everyone else was on holiday or in the bar.
Aside from such pettiness, I had found myself in the darker implications of adulthood and stilled being billed as some kind of “vengeful geek” just didn’t make it anymore. It was the exact opposite of an “identity crisis”. Unfortunately, in a fit of bravado, I had briefly changed my name by deed poll to “Elvis Costello”. This meant that it appeared on my passport, and I could brandish it at smartarse customs officials or obnoxious journalists who accused of being a novelty act. It took me a while to realise that these were unworthy battles. I now decided to re-claim my family name and began using all of my given names in the writing credits.
King Of America might have been credited to “Declan Patrick Aloysius Mac Manus”, but anxious management and the record company people prevailed on me to retain something of my popular identity in attributing the album to “The Costello Show”. There was nothing so mysterious or troubled about all of this confusion. Hell, I had unsuccessfully attempted to make a video clip for a song on my previous album without my glasses, only to realise that some noses are best diminished by a pair of spectacles.
Into the tense atmosphere created by the disappointing Attractions sessions came the rhtymn section that was intended to be T-Bone’s production trump card. Certainly Mickey Curry and T-Bone Wolk did not get to work in the relaxed atmosphere of the earlier sessions.
The essential difference between English and American musicians could be very crudely defined in these terms: American musicians will always ask, “How do we end?” English Musicians only ask, “How do we begin?” There are, of course, virtues in both approaches. T-Bone and Mickey probably lie somewhere between these extremes. I knew them as the fine R&B rhythm section with Hall & Oates, but they were also fans of the English approach and were frankly bewildered by my decision to use them ahead of The Attractions until they witnessed how strained that relationship had become.
Our recording of “Blue Chair” stayed in the running order for some time after the session, but as the final sequencing drew nearer I started to doubt the track, feeling it seemed too brash and too eager to please without really doing so. So, the backing track was shelved until I re-worked it with the addition of an intricate vocal arrangement for a “stand-alone” Demon Records single following the release of Blood & Chocolate.
This line-up, which also included Mitchell Froom on Hammond organ, also cut “Jack Of All Parades”. Without the pressure to deliver a “hit sound” the band worked very well, with fine touches such as T-Bone’s volume-control bass interlude before the coda. Steve Nieve added piano to this track, as we searched for the right combination of musicians to capture the last few elusive titles.
Premier among these was “Brilliant Mistake”. When we finally hit it, the rhythm section was Mickey Curry playing with brushes (something he was hardly ever asked to do) and Jerry Scheff on string bass. Mitchell Froom took care of the organ and harpsichord while our other bass-player, T-Bone Wolk, played the Fender Telecaster and later added the accordion part.
The King Of America sessions were spread over a period of just under three months due to my reluctance to spend any extended period in California. The actual “record dates” were quite few in number. Very few of the attempts at re-mixing and embellishing the sounds met with success. Most of the tracks were mixed at the end of the session. These became the definitive balances as surely as if they had been cut to wax.
There were two further dates for this album. The first was a solo session at which I attempted Eric Bogle’s “My Youngest Son” and Richard Thompson’s “End Of The Rainbow”. However, the track which made the album was my own “Little Palaces”, which was as close to a folksong form as I had ever used. I dubbed on a scratchy mandolin part that was set off to better effect after Jerry Scheff suggested adding his string bass to the instrumental sections.
My final trip to Hollywood was made with the intention of adding “I Hope You’re Happy Now” to the album. Having previously failed in an attempt to cut it as a single with The Attractions and stumbled through it on my drunken demo session, I was determined to capture it with the Keltner/Scheff/Froom line-up that had provided the heart of the record.
Almost before we had the instrumental balances my voice started to vanish. We struggled through a few tentative takes, but it was useless. Rather than scrap the session we cut a slow, violent version of The Animals/Nina Simone song: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. The next day we borrowed Michael Blair from Tom Waits’ band to add a marimba part, and the record was complete. This may seem ironic as I attacked the song with a vocal capacity that Tom might have rejected as being too hoarse.
My U.S. record company, Columbia, showed their customary imagination in releasing the safe “cover” song as a single ahead of any of the more unusual and heartfelt balladry I had composed. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” made little impression, and my mounting debt to the company seemed to make them unwilling to risk any further effort on my behalf.
However, I nearly pulled off a plan to play entirely new arrangements of these songs “live” on MTV with a different band, in a different U.S. city, every day for one week. Although the musicians’ responses—Los Lobos, ZZ Top, The Heartbreakers, and John Mellencamp’s band among them—were very positive, the money to pull this off was never found, and the idea went unrealised.
Nothing was ever done with “We Don’t Even Try Anymore”, a song written at this time with X’s John Doe, who was then performing as part of The Knitters. My collaboration with David Weiss, “Shadows And Jimmy”, was also composed during these sessions. It was featured on the Was (Not Was) album What Up, Dog, but for me the most enduring part of our meeting was a conversation in which I accidentally stumbled on the expression “Brilliant Mistake” while describing my ever-changing impressions of America.
The U.K. release of the record coincided with a terminal conflict with our distributor, RCA, that cost us any sustained promotion. No serious attempt to locate and address the audience for King Of America was made until the first re-issue edition appeared in 1995.

NOTES ON CD2
The process of making any record is one of transformation from the first private inkling of song to the final mix of a recording intended for public release. Sometimes things get lost along the way.
For this record, I began with a tight group of emotionally stricken songs that witnessed the slamming shut of a series of doors in my life just as I tumbled through another. Although the final album included a lot of things that I could not have imagined before my first trip to Hollywood, it probably became a little less concentrated and intense than I had first imagined.
CD2 begins with eight performances that hint at what might have been achieved. Unfortunately or otherwise, several of them are from the raw and sizzled session in early ’85. My cassette of this session was rather grimly labelled “EC as JR”, meaning “Jimmy Reed”, who apparently used to drink until he fell off his chair. At that time, I was drinking a lot of whisky, which was a poison that I could never drink.
Consequently, there was one just passable take of the piano song, “Having It All”. I have held it back from release in the past, always imagining that I might re-record it. The song hints at both “Scarlet Ribbons” and Cole Porter’s “True Love” and was one of two contributions to the musical motion picture Absolute Beginners. It was intended for Patsy Kensit to sing in the scene at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Those were the days.
There follows a version of an otherwise unrecorded song called, “Suffering Face”, which was briefly considered for the final album in this performance before being lyrically dismantled to make the Blood & Chocolate album track “Crimes Of Paris”, which I can assure you was not a comment on the above movie scene.
Before I descended into increasingly incoherent, multiple takes of “Poisoned Rose” and “Indoor Fireworks”, I did manage the more concentrated versions included here and a sombre and almost regretful reading of “I Hope You’re Happy Now”.
Another song rescued from the recent past was “Deportee”. This ballad re-write of a song first included on Goodbye Cruel World had been featured during many of my recent solo shows. It seems clear to me now that its inclusion might have made the personal implications of both “American Without Tears” and “Brilliant Mistake” much more obvious to the listener. The song picks up the idea of America as a place where dreams and ideals are as easily misplaced as they are realised. Songs such as “New Amsterdam” and “Kid About It” had spoken in passing about this possibility:
“The transparent people who live on the other side
Living a life that is almost like suicide”
or
“Singing ‘The Leaving Of Liverpool’ and turning into Americans”
Now “Our Little Angel” referred to “the place where I make my best mistakes” and “Deportee” closes with the final verse about disappointment and personal detachment:
“When I came here tonight my pockets were overflowing
They took my return ticket without me even knowing
Now I pray to the saints and all the martyrs
For the secret life of Frank Sinatra
But none of these things have come to pass
In America the law is a piece of ass”
The version of “I’ll Wear It Proudly” is from another demo session recorded at Red Bus Studio in London (which also included the inferior versions of “Next Time Around” and “Sleep Of The Just”). I have no memory of recording this early demo draft of “Jack Of All Parades”, which still includes lines that ended up in “Suit Of Lights”. I know that it was cut in Hollywood, as the song was not complete until the sessions were underway.
The A and B-sides of The Coward Brothers’ solitary single release are followed by two full band outtakes from the King Of America sessions. “King Of Confidence” only narrowly avoided being included on the album before being replaced in the sequence by “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. It might have been a better inclusion, even if the bridge does owe quite a lot to George Jones’ “The Last Town I Painted”.
“Shoes Without Heels” was cut towards the end of the T.C.B. Band sessions and sounds as if we might have been running out of luck by then. Nevertheless, for a song written in ten minutes on the back of a hotel cocktail napkin, it has a couple of good lines and a fine James Burton guitar coda.
The solo recording of “Little Palaces” was preceded by a sombre performance of Richard Thompson’s “End Of The Rainbow”, which had been in my recent repertoire, not necessarily to the delight of audiences across the world. An earlier version of this song, recorded for a rehabilitation benefit record, had been utterly ruined by unauthorised overdubs.
The lyrical focus of these titles was certainly no America or the emotional regrets and the self-inflicted exile of the other songs. The cold, grim Victorian characters of “End Of The Rainbow” could have come from any recent day of British news. A division in the country culminated in the year-long miners’ strike and all the attendant strife and misery for the families, while the Thatcher government seemed willing to sacrifice whole sections of a society that they denied even existed.
The Attractions and I had played a benefit concert for the National Union of Miners on the very night the strike collapsed. It was unrealistically defiant and hopeful evening, which included a great performance from a renowned choir of Welsh miners. I pressed Merle Haggard’s “No Reason To Quit” into some attempt at timely meaning. We also debuted a hurriedly written song of provocation that was being planned as a benefit single at the time of the strike’s collapse.
Obviously, the opening line of “Betrayal” was bound to have impact under the circumstances, days when the country was the prostrate host to the last of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War manoeuvres:
“When England was the whore of the world
Margaret was her madam”
However, from that opening, the song was underwritten and diluted by a detour into personal matters. By the time it was attempted during the Attratcions’ session for King Of America, it had lost both its meaning and its fire. The Material and intent would have to wait tree years to re-appear in “Tramp The Dirt Down” on the album Spike.
Following an unlikely and uneasy rapprochement with the Attractions and the recording of Blood & Chocolate, I took to the road playing music from both that album and King Of America. The tour took the form of multiple nights in each city, featuring “The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” evening, a solo set and shows with both the Attractions and the band assembled from the players on these sessions. This line-up was billed as “Elvis Costello and His Confederates”, just in case anyone imagined that we were the grey uniformed counterpart to Gary Puckett & The Union Gap.
On this initial tour, the band featured the rhythm section Jerry Scheff and Jim Keltner, Mitchell Froom on keyboards, and the electric guitar of James Burton. By the time we reached the Broadway Theatre, New York City, we were augmented by two musicians from Tom Waits; band, Michael Blair on vibraphone and percussion and Ralph Carney on saxophones.
The King Of America songs were always central to the set, but we opened and closed the show with the Dave Bartholomew number “That’s How You Got Killed Before”. The repertoire also included Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “It Tears Me Up” and a version of Mose Allison’s “Your Mind Is On Vacation” that lead to Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Your Funeral And My Trial” with a rare outing from the singer on amplified hard.
We got a chance to hear a little more of James Burton’s hot electric guitar on both “The Big Light” and the Waylon Jennings hit “The Only Daddy That’ll Walk The Line”, and there was an encore rendition of Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways”, featuring another special guest, T-Bone Wolk, on accordion. Brother Henry Burnett also joined the band on rhythm guitar for the finale. The Coward Brothers were always lurking in the wings, waiting for their moment in the spotlight.
I continued to tour Europe, Japan, and Australia with a changing Confederate line-up, featuring first Benmont Tech and later, Austin Delone on keyboards. Jerry Scheff and Jim Keltner both made vital contributions to my Warner Bros. albums Spike and Mighty Like A Rose, and we were re-united with James Burton for the Kojak Variety sessions in 1990. James also contributed a dazzling solo on the Mighty Like A Rose track “Hurry Down Doomsday”, a composition for which Jim Keltner and I collaborated. Jerry went on to play in the Rude Five rhythm section with Pete Thomas.
Jim Keltner and I last worked together on my album with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory, and also played on “My Mood Swings”, a rock and roll song written for the Cohen Brothers’ movie The Big Lebowski.
T-Bone Wolk contributed some fine bass parts to both Spike and co-produced both Mighty Like A Rose and my first session with Burt Bacharach for the song “God Give Me Strength”.
Mitchell Froom went on to play on Spike and co-produced both Mighty Like A Rose and my first recordings with the Attractions after these sessions for the album Brutal Youth.
T-Bone Burnett produced the complex sessions at multiple locations for the album Spike. We continue to work together whenever the opportunity arises. I contributed a bridge to his co-composition with Bob Neuwirth, “It’s Too Late”. Henry produced “My Mood Swings” and his work in motion pictures led to our co-writing “The Scarlet Tide” for Alison Krauss to sing in the movie Cold Mountain. The song received an Oscar nomination in 2004.
I last saw Ray Brown hauling his double bass across the lobby of the Benson Hotel, Portland, Oregon, on his way to a gig in May 2002. I hadn’t seen him since a couple years after these sessions, when he had startled an audience of jazz buffs at “Ronnie Scott’s” club in London by a giving a shout out to me from the bandstand.
We talked for a few minutes about a mutual friend, a former protégé of his, who since became my wife. We then went off to our respective shows. Two months later Ray passed away in his sleep after a game of golf. The next time I was at the Benson, in the autumn of the same year, I found a piano in my room and began writing the songs for the album North.
My favourite experience of working with some of the cast of this record came in 1987 at the taping of Roy Orbison’s “Black And White Night” at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. T-Bone Burnett put together an impressive ensemble to faithfully re-create the almost symphonic arrangements of Roy’s songs.
This little orchestra included a string section, guest musicians Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, and a vocal group comprised of J.D. Souther, Steven Soles, Jennifer Warnes, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and k.d. lang. The rhythm section was the T.C.B. Band, including pianist Glen D. Hardin.
My role was that of utility player, covering parts on harmonica and using my elbows on the Vox Continental organ, as I’d seen John Lennon do on the film of the Shea Stadium concert. I played all of the acoustic guitar parts from sheet music. Roy’s sole new number of the evening was my song “The Comedians”, but I had the responsibility of kicking off the correct tempo for such classic numbers as “Running Scared” and “It’s Over”. I barely had time to consider that I was playing rhythm guitar in what had been Elvis Presley’s band.
The filming ran from 7.00pm to 1.00am, but the results justified the long hours. After just a few hours’ sleep the town was shaken awake by a major earthquake. The temperature rose to well over 100 degrees in the following days as the aftershocks continued. It didn’t bother me too much. It would have been a decent way to go out.
-Elvis Costello

________________________________________


Rykodisk Liner Notes

From the spring of 1984 to the spring of 1985 I completed three separate "solo" tours with only a couple of guitars and some clumsy fingers and thumbs at the piano. On each occasion I was joined by T-Bone Burnett. Our travels through America, Europe, Japan, and Australia gave me plenty of time for writing and performing new tunes. Most of these new songs were written on the acoustic guitar, but unlike many in the past they were intended to be accompanied in the same way.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I became involved with The Pogues, who were also know to do things to acoustic instruments. I saw my task of producing their second album, "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash", as that which I had attempted with The Specials. That was to capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up. The fact that some earworrying folk music frauds were blind to the excellence of Shane MacGowan's songs was their loss.
After that, I pretty much gave up producing other people's records. You can only marry the bass player once.
Then there were The Coward Brothers..... Declaring this to be their "Second Comeback Tour", these embittered characters made several unscheduled appearances in my shows with T-Bone. Despite claiming authorship of most of the very famous songs they performed, the profits of their "First Comeback Tour" had been squandered when they were persuaded to fake their own deaths in advance of the "Ultimate Comeback Tour." These and other shabby admissions were exclusively revealedin The Cowards' impromptu television interview with C.N.N. - whose news crew happened to be killing time while waiting for President Reagan to emerge from his holiday hideaway - when the Brothers - Howard resplendent in a white brocade jacket, Henry in that sober little Nudie nuber with the rhinestone lapels plus sunglasses - stumbled into their poolside barbecue for a drink.
This masquerade was really an excuse for performing songs ranging from their theme tune, the George Jones classic "Ragged But Right", through Bobby Charles' "Tennesee Blues" to a medly of "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" and "If You're Going to San F..." You probably get the picture...... As their ghost writers T-Bone and I composed "The People's Limousine" during a long and occasionally surreal journey through Italy.
In early '85 The Coward Brothers' first and only single was recorded in Los Angeles with David Miner on bass and Ron Tutt on drums. The b-side was a Leon Payne song made famous by Hank Williams "They'll Never Take Her Love From Me" on which the Cowards were joined by D. Miner and Stephen Bruton on mandolin.
During the same visit I went into the Sunset sound studios to record versions of all of the then completed songs for my next record. T-Bone and engineer Larry Hirsch were extremely patient as a collision with a bottle of whiskey gradually undid the session. However this was not before I had recorded several incresingly incoherent takes of "Poisoned Rose", "American Without Tears" and "Indoor Fireworks".
(A very ponderous reading of "I Hope You're Happy Now" was briefly released from this session but for this issue I have chosen another almost entirely unpublished recording: "Suffering Face". I say "almost" because parts of the lyric found their way into a song featured on the album "Blood And Chocolate" called "Crimes of Paris").
Despite the ragged nature of the demos, T-Bone and I were able to plan the album sessions en route for The Coward Brothers' final comeback tour of Australia and Japan, on which we were the "special guests". By the time we entered Hollywood's Ocean Way Studios we had booked several line-ups to tackle the songs.
The first consisted of Ron Tutt on Drums, Jerry Scheff on bass and James Burton on guitar. This trio had been a major part of Elvis Presley's "T.C.B." band, although I was actually more familiar with Ron and James' recordings with Gram Parsons. It turned out that Jerry, whos musical background included the navy and modern jazz, has also featured on records ranging from The Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" to The Doors' "L.A. Woman".
James Burton is one of the few guitar players who is almost always called "legendary. " This is because he IS amazing AND his credits stretch from Dale Hawkins' "Suzie Q" through his years with Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley to a fantastic range of session and stage appearances, Jerry Lee Lewis, Emmylou Harris, and Randy Newman being only three of my favourites from the hundreds of artists he has played with.
These sessions were cut as "live" as possible. t-bone and engineer Larry Hirsch had miked me so that my vocal and guitar performances were central to the sound picture. With the exception of some trickery on "Jack Of All Parades", there were few effects employed other than reverb. The distortion of the piano on "Sleep Of The Just" was achieved in the studio (by running the mikes through a Leslie cabinet) so that we could play to the altered sound.
After balances were achieved the musicians gathered around to learn the changes. My task was made much easier as the players were referring to charts transcribed from my demos by T-Bone's associate producer David Miner. It only remained to determine where I intended to straighten out the wayward meter of the solo renditions.
The first song recorded was "Our Little Angel". It took about four attempts to get the finished take. The original intention was to concentrate this ensemble's efforts on any country-styled ballads, but instead I called "The Big Light", a fast, grim comedy that was written in the awful wake of the drunken "Suffering Face" session earlier that year. I had imagined that the accompaniment should be something like The Tennessee Two (and johnny Cash later cut it in that very style). However James kicked off a series of guitar figures reminiscent of the "T.C.B." threatment of "Mystery Train" and Jerry and Ron fell in behind and we were away. Take one! Elated by this, we went on to cut "American Without Tears".
This song was based on a chance meeting with a couple of former G.I. brides during a tour of Florida. They had volunteered their stories while I was drinking at an adjacent table. Of course the names and locations were changed and I added in a little of my own family history but it stayed pretty true to their tale of exile and escape. It is as close as this record comes to having a theme.
With the exception of the adding Jo-El Sonnier's French accordion part to "American Without Tears", three of our most valuable tracks were totally finished in the first few hours of recording.
The next day was not quite so successful, but we had a lot of fun racing through "Glitter Gulch", the tale of a game-show swindle, which features James on guitar and dobro, and cut the ballad "Shoes Without Heels", a song dashed off in solidarity with footsore waitresses everywhere. With time in hand we even attempted versions of "Lovable" and "Indoor Fireworks" but concluded that these were really for another day.
(Jerry and james both toured in the "Confederate" bands after the album's release. In fact Jerry Scheff was also the bass player in both "Rude Five" line-ups which toured after the albums "Spike" and "Mighty Like A Rose". James and jerry also feature on my much delayed covers album "Kojak Variety".
The only other time I played with Ron Tutt was when, along with James, Jerry and pianist Glen D. Hardin, the "T.C.B. Band" (plus guest acoustic rhythm guitarist!) accompanied Roy Orbison and "Special guests": Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, jackson Browne, T Bone Burnett, k.d. lang and Tom Waits - to mention a few - for the "Black and White Night" T.V. special in 1987).
Recording with members of Elvis Presley's band might have seemed daunting or even provcative, However none of this could quite prepare me for the intimidting prospect of our next session.
When T-bone had pencilled these names next to studio dates somewhere over the pacific it had seemed like a brilliant idea. After all the intention had never been to hire off-the-peg "legends" for the hell of it. In fact the first two players through the door were unknown to me; pianist Tom Canning and keyboard player and producer Mitchell Froom who was to play Hammond B-3 on the session. It was the rhythm section that was alarming! On drums: earl Palmer who, among many other things, had starred on most of the great Little Richard sides. On Bass: Ray Brown who's jazz recording credits could and probably do, fill a book... Gillespie...Parker...Powell...Peterson...Ellington.... You name them. He's played with them. While the introductions were underway T-Bone was musing as to why nobody seemed to be able to achieve the spontaneity that we had heard on a Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald side playing on the inflight music around the time we were planning this very session. Being the diplomat Earl informed us... "Of course, you know, Ray was Ella's first husband..." and after a beat Ray added "I think I might have played on that session".
"Oh yeah" I was thinking, "and now where going to play this stupid little song I've written".
Actually I think they both might have thought I was out of my mind when I said I didn't give a damn if this record was a hit, so long as it sounded right. This was clearly not the sort of talk they were accustomed to. Still, with Tom and Mitchell quietly taking care of their parts we eventually got the take of "Poisoned Rose". I just had to get my nervous voice under control and catch a first verse where my performance sat right with the Ray's solitary bass accompaniment. Cue the celebration and crack open the Glenlivet!
It was then that T-Bone called "Eisenhower Blues", an obscure J.B. Lenoir side that I had just learned. There was no real reason to cut it except that it gave everyone a chance to relax and play a bit (I think T-Bone just wanted to hear Ray Brown let loose on a tune like this). We did one long double take and cross-faded the highlights together. It certainly gives the album a ckik in between all these ballads.
The session ended with suitably blurred photos being snapped. They seem to have got lost. Even if Ray and Earl thought I was some kind of crazy, limey millionaire who went around hiring my jazz and r'n'b heroes on a whim, I wish I could find that damn photograph.
Unfortunately the "Poisoned Rose" celebrations went on far too long and I arrived for the next day's session in pretty poor shape. Now if this is probably starting to sound like one man's slide to alcoholic oblivion then I think that the results contradict the evidence. Arranged around me in a semi-circle were James Burton on acoustic guitar, Jerry Scheff on string bass, Mitchell Froom on organ. Shaking only slightly, I took up my position and after one complete take we had "Indoor Fireworks".
Of course we always went on to record several further attempts just in case there was any temptation to take the easy way out. However, it was best that we cut it quickly as this kind of romantic obituary is not something you would want to labour over.
Over the next few days a new band emerged with Mitchell Froom on keyboards, Jerry Scheff on bass and Jim Keltner on drums.
(Truthfully, I had originally vetoed T-Bone's suggestion of Keltner as I naievely associated him with some of California's most cliched and formula recordings. Not only did this show an unusual ignorance of my own record collection - Jim had played with Ry Cooder, John Lennon and Bob Dylan not to mention starting out with Gary Lewis and the Playboys! - but I soon discovered that he was one of the most creatively eccentric, inventive and bohemian drummers alive).
This line-up cut three of the album's most personal songs: "Lovable", which features a one-take harmony vocal from Los Lobos' David Hidalgo (and my only electric guitar playing on the record - credited to the "Little Hands of Concrete" as I had once been dubbed by Nick Lowe after trashing yet another set of strings.). "I'll Wear It Proudly" and "Sleep Of The Just".
We also recorded a song called "King Of Confidence" which I had always imagined I would re-cut, until a recent hearing made me wonder why it had not made the album. Obviously the fact that I was playing acoustic guitar and singing "live" guided the arrangements but the players made wonderful use of all of this extra space. Just a few of the highlights are Mitchell's mysterious introduction to "Sleep Of The Just", Scheff's swinging bass line on "Lovable", and Keltner's kick-drum fills on the bridge of that cut and the fade of "I'll Wear It Proudly". This was just the kind of detail that was impossible to isolate on my recordings with The Attractions (although that does not mean that you cannot hear such fine playing). It is just that you would have to listen a little harder due to the claustrophobic nature of our sound. Anyway, where were The Attractions during all of this?
I had originally intended to feature The Attractions on half of this record so that the contrast of accompaniments would be heard to best effect. The news of this plan was not exactly recieved with wild celebrations and I suppose I became pretty high-handed about my recording plans. On all sides the old cliche about "familiarity" probably had some substance.
Anyway, by the time The Attractions arrived in Hollywood there was more than half an album's worth of material in the can. This meant that our sessions had a doomed air of suspicion and resentment. After spending so much time together on the road T-Bone and I had a rapport based on a humour that unwittingly drove a wedge between the band and myself. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that The Attractions delivered some of their worst ever performances.
I had little patience for our failure to get to grips with the one song which I had been certain would suit the band's sound and was fast becoming the session's theme song: "Brilliant Mistake". Apart from the lyric providing the album's title I had always seen this song as the record's opening track. Despite any other departures, I wanted to lead off with an Attractions recording. This was not to be.
I can't quite recall the exact sequence of events but I know we cut a throwaway number that we could have played in our sleep and about which the title was probably the best thing: "Baby's Got A Brand New Hairdo". This steadied our nerves but we weren't exactly having fun. We also cut a song about work and respect called "Suit of Lights". This was inspired by watching my father, Ross, sing of experience and tenderness to an uncomprehending rabble of karaoke-trained dullards. The lessons I might have learned from my own words seemed only to have dawned on me after the event.
Nevertheless I believe that something of those pent up frustrations went into making this one of the most passionate recordings with The Attractions.
(Perhaps this is a very subjective and personal observation but I know we regained some of the looseness that was second-nature to us while we were recording such songs as "Posession" and "Clowntime is Over" during the "Get Happy" sessions in Holland).
Sadly nothing else seemed to fall into place. The recording schedule had to move on and it left my sullen and estranged band hanging around our hotel harbouring a grudge or honing an embittered anecdote. I say this with more than a little unflattering hindsight as by the time I had developed serious tunnel vision and was equally resentful at the disappointing outcome of our sessions.
Into this ugly atmosphere came the rhythm section that was intended to be T-Bone's production trump card. Certainly Mickey Curry and T-Bone Wolk (this brace of "T-Bones" starts to get confusing) did not follow on from the relaxed approach of the earlier sessions.
One of the features of this record is the way in which the instrumentalists arranged themselves in support of the singer, rarely offering an unbidden challenge for the spotlight. This was what I was responding to, and was the complete opposite to my relationship with The Attractions.
The essential difference between English and American musicians could be very crudely defined in these terms: American musicians will always ask "How do we end?", English Musicians only ask "How do we begin?". There are, of course, virtues in both approaches. T-Bone and Mickey probably lay somewhere between these extremes. I knew them as the fine R'n'B rhythm section with Hall and Oates but they were also fans of the English Approach and were frankly by my decision to use them ahead of The Attractions until they witnessed how strained that relationship had become.
We got to work on the song that was intended to give the record company a point of entry into the new/old world of this record. I was still resisting the process of isolating one song from the body of the record by applying the kind of varnish that usually betrays a "hit single attempt".
The original recording of "Blue Chair" stayed in the running order for some time after the session. We maintained the space that the acoustic rhythm-guitar gave us but also had the driving motor that T-Bone and Mickey provided. However as the final sequencing drew nearer I started to doubt the track, feeling that it seemed brash and too eager to please without really doing so. So, the track was shelved until I re-worked it with the addition of an intricate vocal arrangement for a "stand-alone" Demon Records single following the release of "Blood and Chocolate".
(The finished version, along with the above mentioned "Baby's Got A Brand New Hairdo" can be found on the "Extended Play" section of "Blood and Chocolate". CD time capacity does not allow their inclusion here.)
This line-up, which also included Mitchell Froom on Hammond organ, also cut "Jack Of All Parades", an unapologetic companion to "I'll Wear It Proudly". Without the pressure to deliver a "hit-sound" the band worked very well, with fine touches such as T-Bone's volume-control bass interlude before the coda. Steve Nieve added piano to this track, as we searched for the right combination of musicians to capture the last few elusive titles.
Premier among thes was "Brilliant Mistake". When we finally hit it the rhythm section was Mickey Curry playing with brushes (something he was hardly ever asked to do) and Jerry Scheff on string bass. Mitchell Froom took care of the organ and harpsichord while our other bass-player, T-Bone Wolk, was playing Telecaster and later added the accordion part.
The "King Of America" sessions were spread over a period of just under three months due to my reluctance to spend any extended periods in California. The actual "record dates" were quite few in number and were determined by the titles, players and the spontaneous style of the recording. Very few of the attempts of remixing and embellishing the sounds met with success. Most of the tracks were mixed at the end of the session. These became the difinitive balances as surely as if they had been cut to wax.
There were two further record dates for this album. The first was a solo session at which I attempted Eric Bogle's "My Youngest Son" and Richard Thompson's "End Of The Rainbow". However the track which I included was my own "Little Palaces", which was as close to a folksong form as I had ever used. I dubbed on a scratchy mandolin part which was set off to better effect after Jerry Scheff suggested adding his string bass to the instrumental sections.
My final trip to Hollywood was made with the intention of adding "I Hope You're Happy Now" to the album. having previously failed in an attempt to cut it as a single with The Attractions and stumbled through it on my drunken demo session, I was determined to capture it with the Keltner/Scheff/Froom line-up that had provided much of the heart of the record.
Almost before we had the instrumental balances my voice started to vanish. We struggled through a few tentative takes but it was useless. Rather than scrap the session we cut a slow, violent version of The Animals/Nina Simone song: "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood". The next day we borrowed Michael Blair from Tom Waits band to add a marimba part and the record was complete. This may seem ironic as I attacked the song with a vocal capacity that Tom might have rejected as being too hoarse.
(In Fact I had just seen Waits and his band perform two mind-bending concerts in Paris. I was very impressed by Blair and guitarist Marc Ribot. Both featured on the album "Spike" and the subsequent tour. Marc went on to play on both "Mighty Like A Rose" and "Kojak Variety" and be part of the "Rude Five" touring bands).

FOOTNOTE: Needless to say Columbia, my U.S. record company, showed their customary imagination in releasing the safe "cover" song as a single ahead of any of the more unusual and heartfelt balladry that I had composed. I suppose in recording such a different sounding track I presented them a way of ducking the problem of presenting the gentler songs to suspicious radio stations. By now my mounting debt to the company seemed to make them unwilling to risk any further effort on my behalf.
However I very nearly pulled off a plan to play entirely new arrangements of these songs live on a cable music channel with a different band, in a different U.S. city, every day for one week. Although the musicians' response (Los Lobos, Z.Z. Top, The Heartbreakers and John Mellencamp's band among them) was very positive, the money to pull this off was never found and the idea went unrealised.
Similarly nothing was ever done with "We Don't Even Try Anymore", a song written at this time with "X's" John Doe (who was then performing as part of The Knitters). My collaboration with David Weiss, "Shadow and Jimmy", was also composed during these sessions. It was featured on the Was Not Was album "What Up, Dog", but for me the most enduring part of our meeting was a conversation in which I accidentally stumbled on the expression "Brilliant Mistake" while describing my ever changing impressions of America.
The U.K. release of the record coincided with a terminal conflict with our distributor RCA. This was resolved by the dissolution of our business relationship at the cost of any sustained promotion. In some ways this marks the first serious release of "King Of America".

[mcramahamasham]

BLOOD & CHOCOLATE

The Milanese audience did not respond to my enthusiastic introduction quite as expected. They caught sight of our "Special Guest" and collectively uttered a sigh of "Oh no, not her again"... only in Italian. Our promoter had sold us the idea that she was the "Princess of Italian Pop". She looked vaguely familiar. It was only later I remembered where I had seen her before. She had been one of the transparently attired models, obviously hired at short notice, to dance vacantly while inaccurately mouthing backing vocals for the immense Greek love-God, Demis Roussos. That was during one of our early '80s excursions into the wasteland of European pop television. Now here she was, blowing kisses to the crowd Zsa-Zsa Gabor-style at just another fabulous showbiz event. So, this is how it ends.
We were in the final weeks of the "Spinning Songbook" tour. What had started as a flip suggestion for solving the problem of deciding which songs to perform was now a towering, illuminated piece of carnival apparatus. The game-show wheel could be arranged with a rotating choice of song titles. Victims (or "members of the audience", as we preferred to think of them) were led to the stage by the looming presence of "Mr. Xavier Valentine"--"your guide from your place in the stalls to your place in the stars". Once in the spotlight they would be met by an unpleasant M.C., "Napoleon Dynamite", in whose guise I was able to leer at young women and insult their dates. Once they had spun the big wheel and chosen the next song, contestants could retire to a part of the stage called "The Society Lounge", where they might enjoy a refreshing alcohol-free cocktail. Alternatively, those who were not already on drugs and attempting to take off their clothes had the opportunity to enter a go-go cage for the duration of the chosen song. Our experience suggests that the world is full of frustrated go-go dancers.
Occasionally, "the house" had to fix the selection, if the hour was getting late and an audience favourite still hadn't come up. But on the whole it made for an interestingly random evening. It also gave us the opportunity to occasionally delight audiences with such unexpected selections as "Ferry across the Mersey", Prince's "Pop Life", Tom Petty's "American Girl", and the great ABBA tune, "Knowing me, knowing you".
We were assisted in this endeavour by a series of guest M.C.s, the finest of which by far was Tom Waits. He had both the animal magnetism and the lion-tamer's charm to entice and corral our most outstanding contestants. Others, including Buster Poindexter, Penn and Teller, and members of the Chicago Bears football team tried gamely to match the opening night mayhem, but it was not until the final night of the tour in Rome that the proceedings approached that same surreal edge. Our guest M.C. that evening was the actor Roberto Benigni, who deliberately translated my announcements into utter nonsense. In a few other European countries the idea of the show lost a little in translation, but on no other occasion did it gain quite so much.
The Spinning Songbook had been just one element of the "Costello Sings Again" tour of America. Having released two albums in quick succession and touring with two bands, I had also invited guest artists such as Tom Petty, The Bangles, and Aimee Mann to join us onstage. I was either going to make a success of this or go bankrupt, whichever came first.
The tour culminated in a five-night stand on Broadway. On successive evenings, we presented: an Attractions concert based on our back catalogue, a solo concert, a set featuring The Confederates playing the songs from King of America, the Spinning Songbook, and another show with The Attractions presenting the songs from the new album, Blood and Chocolate.
This is a record of people beating and twanging things with a fair amount of yelling. It was recorded just over six months after the Hollywood sessions for King of America. The Attractions sole contribution to that album, "Suit of Lights", had been made during our least successful and most bad-tempered days in the studio. The air of suspicion and resentment still lingered as King of America was released and we entered Olympic Studios, London, to make what proved to be our last record together for eight years.
Nick Lowe was producing us for the first time in five years and together with engineer Colin Fairley, agreed to an approach that would get the music recorded before the band and I fell out completely. Olympic's control room still contained some of the Bakelite switches and other arcane features left over from the days when it had hosted sessions by Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The live room was big enough for a full orchestra, so we filled it with our live monitor system and played at something approaching stage volume. Although it commonly thought that high volume in the studio creates an uncontrollable sonic picture this, approach seemed to suit the material entirely.
I had written most of the songs very quickly using a 1930s' Gibson Century acoustic guitar that had an attractively clanky sound but provided little invitation to intricate harmony or melody. You can hear what it sounds like in the introduction of "Crimes of Paris". When "Honey, are you straight or are you blind?" came to me in a dream, I had to capture it on a cassette player with just the accompaniment of my slapping on the kitchen counter, as there was no guitar to hand. These were not songs that you had to worry about.
Nick Lowe took hold of my willfully "stupid" rhythmic ideas and drove them to extremes on "Uncomplicated". He even joined us in the studio to keep a steady acoustic rhythm guitar running through several tracks. Consequently, we rarely cut more than three takes of any tune. The longest performances, "Tokyo Storm Warning" and "I want you", were both captured on "Take One". All vocal fixes and most of the overdubs were added immediately after we had decided on a master take.
The events of "Tokyo Storm Warning" travel from Narita to Heysel via Pompeii, Port Stanley, Paris, and London. Tokyo is just the place where these things begin and end. It is a city for which I am never prepared. Each arrival is shocking and slightly alienating-- particularly if you land there in a late-summer storm when the cloud cover is below the top of the skyscrapers. It is only when you are about to leave that the rhythm of the place starts to make sense and you wish you had more time. It's then that crazy little purchases like the "God-Jesus Robot" seem strangely comforting. What should one take home from this extraordinary place? What else but a fortune-telling sci-fi droid that is supposed to "answer" the romantic questions of Japanese teenagers with a wave of a plastic cross? Two thousand years of theology reduced to a battery-operated toy. The song continues in this vein for six minutes or more, alighting on the absurd details that can accumulate during ten years of world travel and how little we know. It arrives at the conclusion that there is precious little that one can do about it.
"They say gold paint on the palace gates comes from the teeth of pensioners They're so tired of shooting protest singers that they hardly mention us".
"Home is anywhere you hang your head" was the tale of a man driven insane by love. It originally had a bright pop melody, but for this version I pitched in an almost impossibly low key, so I sounded as if I was either seething or gasping for breath. I suppose you might call it "Method Singing". "Poor Napoleon" is about a very raw affair. At one point, this track was rather perversely obscured by sheets of white noise and guitar feedback, but I later stripped them away to reveal the vocal performance and an acting cameo by Cait O'Riordan as "The Voice of Pity".
I played a Fender Telecaster on most of the cuts. This lent a harsher edge to the guitar parts as the intro figure of "Uncomplicated" demonstrates. When the spill from bass channel bled onto the drum microphones, we simply turned down the direct signal in order to rebalance. This accounted for both the murky, booming sound of some tracks and our inability to play at a very low dynamic throughout this record. In fact it often made us sound as if we were playing wearing boxing gloves. But somehow this also became a virtue. The intimate final bars of "I want you" were achieved by switching off each of the instrumental tracks until all that can be heard is the sound of the band's performance bleeding into my vocal mike.
A few of the songs required a little more finesse or ingenuity. "Blue Chair" had failed to make the grade at the King of America sessions but was now successfully arranged around Steve Nieve's keyboard part. The more sarcastic tone of "Next Time Round" had also not found a place on the previous record, but it now provided a rave-up finale for an album that stays mostly in the dark.
"Battered Old Bird" was a song about the tenants of the house in which my family had a small basement flat until I was five years old. I only altered a few of the details. Our landlady actually taught me to swear in Welsh rather than French, but "Welsh" didn't rhyme. However, the "old maids" on the first floor, the suicide who danced in the bonfire, the scriptwriter who drank burgundy for breakfast, and the eccentric man who kept a Christmas tree in a cupboard by the stairs "in case of emergencies" were all real people.
We attempted three different arrangements of this song until Nick Lowe arrived at the idea of joining two contrasting performances together with a combination of vari- speeding and bold editing using a smear of harmonium in the way a scene might dissolve in the movies. An earlier attempt to play the song in the style of Johnny Allen can be
heard on CD 2.
"I hope you're happy now" was another song being cut for the third time. Having recorded it as a possible single with The Attractions in 1984, I attempted to rework it without much success at the final King of America sessions. Time had lent the song a little humour to lighten its originally murderous intent. Now it almost sounded like pop music.
When it comes to the other tracks on CD 2, I am glad to report that our take on Little Willie John's "Leave my Kitten Alone " has finally been located. It probably should have made the album.
I have no memory at all of recording "New Rhythm Method ". I do recall writing a song of this title in 1977, so this may be a reworking, but what I am actually singing remains something of a mystery.
There are three different recordings of "Forgive Her Anything " in existence. It seems I was never totally satisfied with the way this song worked out. This newly discovered version replaces the one issued on the last edition of Blood and Chocolate, as I believe that it is the best of the three.
"Seven Day Weekend " was written and recorded with Jimmy Cliff and The Attractions (!) for a film called Club Paradise, starring Peter O'Toole, Robin Williams, and Twiggy. Oh, the horror. I don't suppose either the film or the song will go down in history, but Jimmy is a great man, and I did get to play a lot of very loud guitar.
"Blue Chair " was a complete reworking of a King of America outtake which was released as a single in the U.K. after the two Blood and Chocolate singles ("Tokyo Storm Warning" and "I want you") unsurprisingly failed to trouble the charts. "Baby's got a brand new hairdo " was the only other Attractions cut from those unhappy Hollywood sessions. It later escaped on a B-side.
"American without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version) " is a sequel to the song recorded on King of America.
The final sequence of cover songs may well be one long take. I know I performed most of these tunes on solo tours after 1984, and this was probably a vocal warm-up session where the tape just happened to be rolling. I first heard "All these things " by the Louisiana group The Uniques, while "Tell me right now" was originally cut by Joe Tex. "Lonely Blue Boy " was an early Conway Twitty side. I learned "Running out of fools " from Aretha Franklin's Columbia recording, and James Carr's version of "Pouring water on a drowning man " was one of my favourite songs at the time. I would return to these last two songs at the Kojak Variety sessions in 1990.
The album title and Eamonn Singer's crude cover painting reflected some intense and uncertain sensations. The record might as well have been a blurred polaroid: a smashed-up room, a squashed box of chocolates, some broken glass, and a little blood smeared on the wall. These were just a few of the images I had in mind.
The intimate, if not almost pornographic, tone of "Crimes of Paris", "Poor Napoleon", and "I Want You" were typical of my mood at this time. The album was a pissed-off 32- year-old divorcé's version of the musical blueprint with which I had begun my recording career with The Attractions.
My relationship with the band had now soured almost beyond repair. We would soon be playing our last concert together for a great number of years. The final song we performed was an improvised take on "Instant Karma". I'm sure it was supposed to mean something at the time.
Having said all of this, the year I made this record was also the year of my marriage to Cait O'Riordan. There were a lot of things that I wouldn't have to do again. Like messing up my life just so I could write stupid little songs about it.
--Elvis Costello

________________________________________

Rykodisk Liner Notes

There is not an awful lot that needs explaining about this record. It's a rock'n'roll record with a couple of weird ballads and few pop songs thrown in. by the time we started recording it, "King Of America" was just about to be released, having been completed less than six months previously. The terrible experience of The Attractions' Hollywood sessions was far from forgotten. There was a good chance that this was going to be our last work together. For the first time in five years our producer was Nick Lowe. The engineer was Colin Fairley. He had worked with both Nick and myself on a variety of productions. The venue was Olympic Studios, London.
Although it was a 24-track studio I liked the arcane look of the control room. In my memory I see Bakelite switches and knobs although I am sure I must be romancing this. Certainly, the recording room couldn't have looked much different when Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones were recording there in the sixties. The songs were extremely simple to learn. I wrote most of them very quickly on an old 1930's Gibson Century guitar. It had a suitably clanky sound (that's it at the beginning of "Crimes of Paris"). When a guitar was not on hand I found the rhythm I needed by slapping the kitchen counter as I pieced together "Honey Are You Straight (Or Are You Blind?)" from a very confusing dream. "Uncomplicated" was my latest failed attempt to write a song based on one chord. We set up in the studio as we would in rehearsals, using monitor speakers rather than headphones. We also played a lot closer to "stage" volume so that there was little or no separation. If there was too much bass "spill" on the drum mikes we simply turned down the direct bass channel. This made for a booming, murky sound that made subtly impossible. If we tried anything fancy it sounded like we were playing wearing boxing gloves. This suited most of the songs perfectly.
Nearly all of the songs were cut entirely "live." Any vocal repairs and harmonies were dubbed on as soon as we had called a "master take." Because of the volatile nature of both the method and the musicians many of the tracks were either first takes or took no more than three or four attempts. On several cuts Nick Lowe joined us in the studio to lay down a steady acoustic rhythm guitar track.
I played Telecaster for much of this album, giving my parts a very harsh edge. The intro of "Uncomplicated" will give you the idea. from then it all hangs on the "stupid" beat that Nick suggested until we finally get off the one chord and Steve brings in the chorus. Nick also borrowed the guitar figure and accent that drives "Honey Are You Straight?", although it is anybody's guess where from. We also finally got a take on "I Hope You're Happy Now" that had a little more humour to it than its originally murderous intent. It almost sounded like pop music.
"Tokyo Storm Warning" is a thug's nightmare travelogue from Narita to Heysel. From Pompeii to Port Stanley, Paris and London. It was cut on "take one." I then added the background vocals, distorted guitar figure and backwards solo. In case you were wondering, a "Japanese God-Jesus Robot" is a little electric fortune-telling toy that waves a cross to indicate whether your boyfriend or girlfriend loves you. The first verse of "I Want You" borrows a Japanese folk song tune and then goes somewhere very dark. As far as I can recall we only played this once. Our "sound" meant that no matter how quietly the band had played there still seemed to be too much accompaniment in the last verse during playback. We fixed this by switching off the band, track by track, until all you can hear at the end is what was bleeding onto my vocal mike.
The final song of our first burst of recording was the tale of a man driven mad by love, "Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head." The music had started out as a bright pop melody but now I placed it in an almost impossibly low register which made me sound as if I was either seething or gasping for breath. "Method Singing," I suppose. This was backed by a droning accompaniment and features some fine bass playing from Bruce in the coda as accordions and spoons fly past his window. Next come three fairly straight pop tunes rescued from the "King Of America" sessions. "Blue Chair" was given a treatment borrowed from the Prince songs "Manic Monday" and "Raspberry Beret." "Crimes of Paris" quotes my own "Suffering Face," bits of the Kinks, Slade and slivers of "Wild Mountain Thyme." It features Cait O'Riordan on harmony vocals. Little Willie John's "Leave My Kitten Alone" also gets name-checked and I'm pretty certain we recorded a version of it during these sessions but it seems to have gone missing.
The comical tone of "Next Time Round" was overlooked in Hollywood but provided a pretty good rave-up finale for an album that stays mostly in the dark. In fact, there is a hint of the California sound in the background voices and on the subsequent "Spinning Wheel" tour (see below) we took the song back where it belonged. Among our many concert guests were members of The Bangles who improvised a sort of Mamas (and Papas) vocal arrangement. The remaining two cuts were the product of some extreme studio experiments. We seemed unable to agree about anything to do with "Battered Old Bird." We tried it in faster tempi, different keys and vocal deliveries but nothing could be sustained for the entire song. It is a very long song based on the tenants of the house in which my family had the basement flat until he was five years old. Of course I changed some of the details. I was actually taught to swear in Welsh by our landlady but it doesn't rhyme. Some of the more nightmarish characters have been distorted by time but others, like the "old maids," the scriptwriter who drank burgundy for breakfast and the fellow who always kept an old plastic Christmas tree in the cupboard by the stairs in case of emergencies, were real enough. Because the song contained those childhood memories I found it hard to make any cuts. One night, during mixing Nick hit on the solution. By a combination of vari-speeding and bold editing, two separate versions were spliced into one (a lesson learned from "Strawberry Fields Forever"). A growling harmonium was dubbed onto the cracks and while the hybrid isn't perfect, I'm glad we didn't simply scrap the song entirely.
"Poor Napoleon" was originally completely covered up in the sheets of white noise and feedback that can be heard briefly before the band's entrance. Little by little I pulled it out in order to reveal the song in which a proud and vain character finds his love fatally compromised. Cait has a speaking role as the "voice of pity" and I dubbed on the instrumental duel between Hofner bass-guitar and tambourine. My only other unusual contribution was to add a very simple Vox Continental part to "Honey Are You Straight?" or I should say "Vox Kontinenta" as all of the album credits were written in Esperanto for reasons I can no longer remember.
(Our American record company had always seemed to want us to return to the sound that we had started out with, even though it had been more famous than successful. When we gave them something close to what they wanted: A pissed off thirty-two year old, divorcee's version of "This Year's Model," they hated it and buried it under a stone somewhere in Utah. I proudly walked away from the end of my Columbia contract owing them a million dollars. They had their chance and they blew it.
In saying this it shouldn't be forgotten that my relationship with the Attractions was now such that we were about to take an eight year holiday from each other's company.)
The following tour, "Costello Sings Again," was a bold, if financially suicidal, affair in which we played between three and five nights in each small-city theatre presenting a different show every evening. In various combinations these included: an Attractions set that drew on our back catalogue, a solo concert, a show with "...his Confederates" (James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner, and Mitchell Froom) featuring material from "King Of America," another Attractions set debuting the "Blood and Chocolate" songs and the "Spinning Songbook" concert.
I had often finished a long set only to be confronted with the obvious question "why didn't you play....?" Fill in the song of your choice. Now this seemed the perfect solution. Song titles would be printed on sections of a game-show wheel and a member of the audience would be invited to the stage by Mr. Xavier Valentine ("your guide from your place in the stalls to your place in the stars") in order to spin the wheel. The wheel would decide what we played next. We included what we though were audience's favourites but also slipped in a few unexpected choices like Tom Petty's "American Girl," Prince's "Pop Life" and Gerry and the Pacemakers' "Ferry Across the Mersey".
(We even tried a "Request" spot but the first time I switched on the big red sign the entire front row was transformed into figure-skating judges holding up neatly printed signs demanding the most obscure songs in our catalogue).
If a song came up twice you were allowed to spin again. If it came up three times...well...the rules got a bit vague then and "the house" was known to lean on the wheel on a few occasions if the hour was getting late and the wrong songs kept coming up. Our contestants were questioned by an unpleasant M.C. called "Napoleon Dynamite" in whose guise I was able to leer at the young women and insult the men. We were also joined -- "for one night only" -- by various "guest" M.C.'s. The finest was, unquestionably, Tom Waits who had both the animal magnetism and a lion-tamer's command to entice and corral our most outlandish and outstanding contestants.
(Other nights were joined by members of the Chicago Bears, Penn and Teller, Buster Poindexter and "The Princess of Italian Pop" (or so we were told). In Rome, where the whole enterprise took on a surreal edge, our M.C. was Roberto Bernini. He translated my remarks with all the conviction and accuracy of the character that he plays in the film "Down By Law").
After spinning the wheel our victims, surprisingly few of whom were actually on drugs and attempting to take their clothes off, were offered a choice of beverages (soft drinks only for legal reasons) at the Society Lounge Bar or a turn in the Go-Go cage. Our experience suggests that the world is full of frustrated Go-Go Dancers.

EXTENDED PLAY
"SEVEN DAY WEEKEND":
was co-written and recorded with Jimmy Cliff for a film in which he co-starred with Robin Williams and Peter O'Toole called "Club Paradise." I don't suppose either the film or the song will go down in film history. It always seemed a little odd to me that the film's producers requested that I write a rock'n'roll song with Jimmy Cliff. Anyway, Jimmy was a great man and I got to play a lot of loud guitar on the record. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.
"FORGIVE HER ANYTHING":
This is one of the very few outtakes from "Blood And Chocolate." I re-worked it a couple of times for inclusion on later albums but it always seemed to get lost. This very rough version is all that remains and may well confim what I said about "wearing boxing gloves."
"BLUE CHAIR":
After the unsurprising commercial failures of both the six minute-plus "Blood and Chocolate" singles ("Tokyo Storm Warning" and "I Want You"), I decided to look again at the "Blue Chair" backing track scrapped during the "King Of America" sessions. Truning up Mitchell Froom's organ and T-Bone Wolk's overdubbed Telecaster part we filled out some of the space above T-Bone and Mickey Curry's bass and drums. I then re-cut the lead vocal and added a vocal arrangement that took a very distant cue from Sly's "Everyday People".
"BABY'S GOT A BRAND NEW HAIRDO":
This Attractions outtake from "King Of America" snuck out on the B-side of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood". Groovy title. Shame about the song. The one redeeming moment is after the lines "She looks like Billy Boy Arnold saying "I wish you would" when Bruce quotes the riff.
"AMERICAN WITHOUT TEARS NO. 2 (TWILIGHT VERSION)":
This track, which was the B-side of the "Blue Chair" single, fulfilled a small ambition. When 12" singles had been all the rage during the mid-80's I had thought it was a pity to simply repeat and extend the existing song. What if there were extra verses? A continuation of the story or even a sequel? I never actually got round to it until this cut. The new edition of the story is told from the perspective of the vanished husband of one of the women in the King Of America version of the song.
He tries to pluck up courage to return from his South American exile but in the end he becomes cynical and loses his nerve. Some of the locations have also slipped in a "Twilight Zone" way. This is alluded to in the sub-title and the electric guitar part. The rest of the instrumentation, all of which I played, is: acoustic six-string and bass guitars, piano, celesta, organ, harmonica, marimba and timbale.
"A TOWN CALLED BIG NOTHING":
Is a piece that was written in America, Spain during the shooting of Alex Cox's movie "Straight To Hell." This pastiche of a Spaghetti Western (which, I suppose, means it was a pastiche of a parody) starred The Pogues as a family of teetotal, non-smoking, coffee-addicted desperados. Ah! Typecast again. The flick also featured Joe Strummer, Ed Harris, Kathy Burke, Dick Rude, Xander Schloss, Courtney Love and rather briefly, John Cusack, Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper to list a few names one night recognize.
I only went along to visit Cait and found myself playing the family butler "Hives," and toting a pump-action shotgun. Another friend of mine came to take some on-set photographs and quickly found himself stripped to the waist and strapped to a wagon wheel in the noonday sun. So, I suppose two weeks of Andalusion desert heat without a change of costume was getting off lightly.
An instrumental version of the track "A Town Called Big Nothing" Actually appears briefly in the film but as it is currently out of circulation, even on video, I include the full version here.
The narration is spoken by actor Sy Richardson, who played one of the rival desperados in the film. The story that he tells has nothing to do with the movie, in fact it probably has more plot than "Straight To Hell!" On the other hand I would not say that I wrote this with an entirely straight face. The musicians were as follows: I played the Spanish, electric and acoustic-bass guitars. Obviously, I did the "Big Nothing" whispers while Cait and I did the fairground voices. Pete Thomas turned on the drum machine and then added any tambourines and percussion. My father, Ross MacManus played the trumpet part and did the Flamenco clapping.

[mcramahamasham]

SPIKE

Away from London, after being a bandleader, out of the cold shadow of the Black Rock, I wrote these songs. In a Dublin hotel room, in a ship’s cabin off the coast of Greenland, on a summer’s afternoon in a house next to windmill as the English countryside rolled down to the coast.
Some of them came out of the newspapers and everyday anger – "Tramp the dirt down", "…This town…", "Coal Train Robberies". One of them came out old newspapers and ugly arguments – "Let him dangle". The case of Derek Bentley had been brought up in every capital punishment debate since I had been a child, so I put it in a song.
The location of one song is Dublin. My Grandfather was a military bandmaster who was demobilised there from the post-First World War infantry at Beggar’s Bush Barracks. He was an Irishman with an English accent, courtesy of the military school of music at Kneller Hall, walking round in a British Army uniform at exactly the wrong time. His story went into "Any King’s Shilling". He then took the safer occupation of ship’s musician and travelled the world on the White Star Line during the mid-1920’s and 30’s. You could see the funnels of ships in the dock from my Grandmother’s window. Some of that view got into the lyrics of "Veronica" and "Last Boat Leaving". They are set in my Father’s hometown, Birkenhead.
A handful of titles came out of my own travels and misadventures – "Chewing Gum", "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" and the one written amongst the big blue icebergs: "God’s Comic". I am happy to say that "Satellite" is pure fantasy.
Songs don’t always give the precise facts. Other times, an entirely fictional song is laced private details and coded phrases. They help the singer connect with something personal inside. The listener doesn’t have to know about this. They are entitled to their own version. I’ve found that creative mishearing often improves a lyric.
There are three co-written tunes on this album. One afternoon I went out to buy a paper and when I got back, my wife, Cait O’Riordan, had composed "Baby Plays Around". All I did was harmonise the bridge and memorise the chord sequence.
I began writing with Paul McCartney, for his album "Flowers in the Dirt", in 1987. We went on to compose a dozen songs together. "Veronica" was one of the very first songs that we worked on. It is a wishful song about my Grandmother’s failing hold on memory and reality. As the subject was so personal, I didn’t find it so easy to edit the song. Paul put some shape into the music of a rambling bridge and tightened up a few of the lyrical lines in the verses. The title "Pads, Paws and Claws" was taken from a junk shop book. Song didn’t take long.
I called T Bone Burnett to co-produce the album. He put Kevin Killen behind the controls and away we went. Sessions were planned for Dublin, New Orleans, Hollywood and London. Having just signed to Warner Brothers for the entire world, I was working with the budget of a small independent movie. I was hoping that they weren’t expecting any change
I had the blueprint of five albums in my head. Having felt hostility turn into invisibility at Columbia, I offered W.B. their choice. I would even shoot it out with a highly commercial producer if they so desired - believing the songs and my voice could hold their own. They told me to make whatever record I wanted. I seem to have elected to make all five albums at once.
We began in Dublin. I didn’t want to borrow anyone’s clothes, I wanted people knew each other but hadn’t necessarily all played together in one group. So Donal Lunny gathered a unique ensemble from all quarters of Irish music: his former Moving Hearts colleague, Davey Spillane was on Uileann Pipes and low whistle, De Dannan’s Frankie Gavin played the fiddle along with Steve Wickham from The Waterboys, who had recently moved to Ireland. The great singer and songwriter, Christy Moore was ready to set up a mighty rumble on the bodhran while the Chieftans’ Derek Bell talked of micro-tonal tuning and the mysteries of the snow leopard from behind the Irish harp and cimbalom. Donal himself threaded a line through the songs on bouzuki or guitar and Pete Thomas joined us for "Tramp the dirt down" on snare drum.
"Let me dream on it" said Kirk Joseph, as went out of the door at Southlake Studio in New Orleans. His sousaphone had driven along the Dirty Dozen Brass Band when I first saw them at a New York City club in1985. Now I was asking him to take the bass line on "Chewing Gum", a tune that already had the Neville Brothers’ Willie Green on drums. He and the rest of the Dozen had laid down an instrumental version of "Stalin Malone", and put horn their parts next to the pipes and fiddle that we had recorded in Dublin on "Miss Macbeth".
The recording method was established by now. I would lay down a vocal and guitar to a very spare drum machine. It played anything BUT the backbeat, so as to keep things loose. Then we assembled the arrangement piece by piece. The only musicians who performed simultaneously were the Dirty Dozen and those at the Dublin sessions.
I had worked with Allen Toussaint before in 1983. He had produced an unusual version of Yoko Ono’s "Walking on Thin Ice", recorded with the Attractions and the T.K.O. Horns. Now he pretty much set the scene for "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" with his colossal piano part – the Dozen played off his performance and so on. At best, it was like seeing a sketch turn into a painting.
By the time we left New Orleans, we had half of the record in the can. I had also asked Roger McGuinn to play on our next session in Hollywood after crashing into his dressing room at a French Quarter club in, what he has since generously referred to as, "high spirits". Not everything on this record was quite so well planned.
The Hollywood sessions featured several players who had worked on the "King of America" record in 1985; drummer, Jim Keltner, the bass players, Jerry Scheff and T-Bone Wolk plus Mitchell Froom on an array of strange keyboards such as the Chamberlain. T Bone Burnett and I had pretty much cast each them for their parts before we had left Dublin. Needless to say there were plenty of surprises during the execution.
Two musicians, who I had first heard in Tom Waits’ band, had a lot to do with the sound of these sessions. Marc Ribot doctored the bridge of his guitar with bulldog clips to get a kalimba sound on "Pads, Paws and Claws". He got well outside reason on "Chewing Gum" and "Let him Dangle" but played a delicate Spanish guitar on "God’s Comic". Michael Blair brought in a breaker’s yard full of metal junk and hubcaps plus a magician’s table laden with arcane percussion.
While we were putting marimbas and timpani on "Satellite" we found out that Burt Bacharach was working in the next studio. As far as I was concerned, this track was a shameless steal from Burt’s arrangement style. He graciously agreed to come in to listen to the track, seemed amused by a few touches and went on his way wishing us well. It was only when we were composing and recording together eight years later that I realised how very far "Satellite" was from his actual writing and arranging style.
My own instrumental contribution was limited to a few quirky overdubs – banging the bass pedals of a Hammond organ with my fists under the "live" guitar coda of "Baby Plays Around" and the daft Hofner bass line in the bridge of "God’s Comic". Most of my studio time went into singing and arranging.
There were other musicians who I was working with for the first time in the studio. Buell Niedlinger added double bass to "Any King’s Shilling" and both bass and cello to "God’s Comic". Jerry Marotta played the final drum parts on "Veronica" and "Let him Dangle" with the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench adding piano to the same two tracks. "Veronica" was still missing a bass part when we left California but we had been able to build "…This Town…" around Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker 12-string.
The case of missing bass parts was very quickly solved upon our arrival in London. My co-writer came in to add his famous Hofner bass to "Veronica" and the "McCartney/McGuinn/MacManus" trio was established when he went on to also play on "…This Town…".
Chrissie Hynde then added the kind of vocal harmony to "Satellite" that I had imagined for years and it was time to return to Hollywood for the mixing sessions.
During the early planning of this record, it was called "Pantomine Evil", in honour of my childhood nemesis, "Miss MacBeth" and another mad woman who was haunting England at the time. By the time I’d finished writing "Tramp the dirt down", the situation seemed too grim for that title. The album was also briefly called "The Beloved Entertainer" but this was relegated to a subtitle on the trophy plaque upon which my head appears to be mounted on the sleeve. The cover was not done by trick photography. I was actually made-up in clown face and had to poke my head through an opening in the backdrop, like one of those seaside amusements – always remembering not to scratch my face and smudge the greasepaint.
The artist and photographer, Brian Griffin, probably still has the macabre and comical production video of my disembodied head roaring and growling only to freeze in increasingly demented expressions – it would make a good short horror film. The fact that the shield that I was mounted on resembled the W.B. crest seemed a happy accident and an incidental comment on my departure from Columbia Records. This similarity was not lost on the W.B. legal department who threatened to block the design as it infringed the copyright of their trademark – even though the record was actually on their own label. Perhaps I should have taken this as a warning of darker days to come.
Reading all of this, it may seem a very eccentric way to make an album. At the time, I couldn’t write musical notation and this was a way of using the 24 track tape like piece of music manuscript – "writing" ideas in and then erasing them if they didn’t work. In fact, the demos on the second CD indicate that I had many of the parts worked out long before we began our travels. The execution on those versions is quite raw. Unsurprisingly, they sound as if I am making it up as I am going along. There are one or two lyrical variations that I later edited out and "Satellite" is played in an entirely different time signature. These ragged demos may actually be more to some people’s taste than the finished album.
Given the method of recording, there are no true "out-takes" from "Spike" except a version of "Stalin Malone" on which I recite the text, originally printed on the back of the record jacket, while the Dirty Dozen Brass Band play down the tune. I later abandoned the idea but this rough take is included for your amusement.
Returning to London after the "Spike" mixing sessions, I went into Wessex Studios to cut "B-sides" for the up-coming singles releases. The band on these sessions consisted of Pete Thomas on drums and Nick Lowe on bass. I played everything else. We put down "The Ugly Things", a song of Nick’s of the same vintage as "(What’s so funny ‘bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" and the Goffin/King tune, "Point of No Return", which I first heard on the Georgie Fame E.P., "Fame at Last". I also cut a solo version of John Sebastian’s "The Room Nobody Lives In", with an odd extended coda of de-tuned, delayed echo guitars. My favourite cut from this session is "You’re no good", a song forever associated in my mind with Liverpool’s mighty Swinging Blue Jeans. My version was recorded with a toy drum machine jammed through a Fender Twin Reverb, a kalimba and a tremelo guitar. "Put your big toe in the milk of human kindness" is a demo of a song originally written for a Disney movie. Mercifully, the Mouse declined the tune and I was able to cut it a few years later with Rob Wasserman and Marc Ribot for Rob’s album, "Trios". It now sounds to me as if I was attempting to write something like the Cahn/Van Heusen song, "High Hopes". The closest I ever got was "God’s Comic".
I’ve performed most of the songs on "Spike" many times in concert. I may have played some of them better than on this disc but there are all sorts of unusual holes in these recordings that I like. I really wouldn’t change a note. Without having broken out of the conventional style of band recording, I wouldn’t have known where to begin the next ten years.
T Bone Burnett and Kevin Killen shaped "Veronica" into a record that could be played on the radio. Evan English delivered a video clip that gave people a greater sense of the song’s content. The single went into the U.S. Top Twenty. If it had not done so then this album might have been counted amongst the most obscure in my catalogue. Instead of which, during its original release, it became the best-selling album of my career to date. When I listen to it now, this seems pretty curious – not because the songs are bad but because they are rather odd, each track being very different from the next. I’m not so sure that anyone would bankroll a record of this kind these days. So I am rather glad that we made "Spike" while I had the chance.

[mcramahamasham]

MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE


The “Works Outing” had not turned out as planned. After many weeks in the studio under a pall of Hollywood smog, I had arranged for us all to go on a sailing trip off Long Beach. My co-producers, Mitchell Froom and Kevin Killen, must have thought the voyage doomed; after all, I wasn’t exactly the ocean-going type. They cried off at the last moment, leaving lust my wife, Cait, and I to take to the high seas.
The Santa Ana winds were blowing, driving everyone crazy on land. I was told that they wouldn’t make for ideal sailing weather, not that I knew anything about it. Far from the crew that I imagined would be the minimum requirement for the adventure, we had a sole yachtsman at the helm of a 70-foot vessel. I was suspicious that this was not strictly how these things were done. This feeling was confirmed when the wind direction changed, the sea kicked up, and “the Captain” told me to grab the wheel while he edged precariously along the narrow deck towards the bow in order to trim a sail or two. One freak wave at that moment, and I might not be writing; I’d still be sailing to Fiji.
Now we had the wind behind us, and we ran down the coast at an exhilarating speed until we turned for home and were becalmed once more. The gentle rocking of the vessel and the sea air soon lulled us to sleep. When we awoke were under motor power and entering the harbour. I turned on the radio as soon as we got back into the car. War had broken out.
By the time we arrived back at out hotel, CNN was trailing every bulletin with their new “Desert Storm” logo and musical fanfare. It promised to be an all-star production. The business of bringing another ruthless dictator to account was well under way. Curiously, there was little mention of the years in which he had been a “strategic ally” or at least a “necessary evil”. The “New World Order” seemed to have a way of provoking bouts of mass amnesia.
Needless to say, I did not imagine that I would be recording any of this record during wartime when I wrote it, although I was looking at the world without much affection. Many of my early records have been described as being “angry”, a quality that I think is exaggerated by a quirk in my vocal delivery. However, if you really want to hear an angry record then this disc is for you.
Three songs at the center of this album summon up what can only be described as “Cold War Nostalgia”. The first is “Invasion Hit Parade”—a fantasy about a decent man who has been working in the resistance of a recently “liberated” country, only to find that his new role is to be patronized and force-fed consumer goods and pop anthems. He must assume a posture of supplication and gratitude while triumphal forces of the Free World hijack his revolution in the pursuit of better TV ratings. These images of the post-Stasi world of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Panamanian invasion might have been assembled while surfing the news channels any day at the turn of the decade.
The music uses a deliberately unsettling piano theme that threatens to turn into something grand, a sequence of guitar chords that don’t seem to want to follow each other, and my father, Ross McManus, playing a sort of Iberian trumpet fanfare before taking off into some free blowing over the tag. The effect was somewhat like having interference between two adjacent radio stations on the dial.
The next song, “Harpies Bizarre”, is about a naïve Eastern European girl being picked up by a man of the world. Perhaps she is working as a hostess at an embassy ball. She might stand for the “courtship” of her country. That I never told anyone what was in my mind when writing it means that the song has to work regardless of where you understand the scene to be located.
The instrumentation includes a woodwind group, arranged by Fiachra Trench from my originally material. I’d become interested in the “Windband” arrangements of famous melodies and arias from the 1790s. I’d read that it was the only way ordinary people could hear the music of court entertainments in those days. Popular music isn’t always so ubiquitous. This sparked the idea of the central interlude. It seemed to suit the scene I was hoping to set.
The same character is transformed in the third of this songs, “After The Fall”. Now she is the dominant lover, running new, decadent games. It was intended to be a comic song. Marc Ribot plays some very elegant Spanish guitar on this track.
This theme might have continued if I had included the song “Just Another Mystery” in the final sequence. Having completely forgotten about the studio recording until it was retrieved from the archive for this edition, I can only imagine that I found it lacking some of the feeling of the demo version (both tracks can be heard on CD 2).
The song sprang from a tiny newspaper article stating that the body of the composer Bela Bartok was to be returned to Hungary from the United States for burial. The odd footnote stated that the coffin would tour through Europe by train and that commemorative concerts would be staged along the way.
I seized on this last detail to write the story of the last journey of an unnamed exiled hero, one who had not exactly been feted and respected in his adopted country and one who was forgotten in his homeland. Clearly, it was not the true story of Bartok but it had more to do with the shifting sense of worth in years beyond 1989.
These may seem like very serious and earnest subjects for popular songs, but you have to remember that I was coming off my biggest hit record to date. The unlikely success of “Veronica”—a song that took as its subject the disintegration of an older mind—made Spike a big commercial success. That album was a collection of songs about drunken comedians, junk-bond saleswomen, satellite pornographers, a 1950s murder case, a pair of terrified soldiers, a woman who scares children, the alcoholically deluded, and various other potentially violent malcontents. Nothing seemed beyond the real of the pop song.
This album opens with “The Other Side Of Summer”. The arrangement is a pastiche of The Beach Boys after the fashion of The Beatles’ “Back IN The U.S.S.R.” In our case, the music and vocal parts take their cue from some of their early ‘70s album tracks like “The Trader” and “Funky Pretty”. The words are a catalogue of pop conceits, deceits, hypocrisies, and delusions. I include myself in this parade of liars and dupes.
The track was cut in the vast Studio One at Ocean Way, Hollywood, where most of this record was recorded. It features our own version of the “Wall of Sound”: drums, two basses, two guitars, and four keyboard players (including my own efforts on electric and toy pianos). When this proved insufficiently powerful, we simply double0tracked the entire rhythm section before adding the glockenspiel, castanets, sleigh bells, and the vocal parts.
It is not easy to isolate one instrumentalist in such a large ensemble, but I must salute Larry Knetchel’s towering piano part. Larry’s piano, organ, and bass credits include “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Good Vibrations”, and “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, although you could barely get a word out of him about having played on these legendary cuts. His modest demeanour and utterly musical sense lent a lot to these sessions.
“Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)” was written for the days when the mortal sins of the advertising world and the venal sins of the trash culture become unbearable. When the news fixates morbidly on the sentimental appeals of the parents of a missing child, only for it to be revealed that they are the ones who committed the crime. Small wonder that this song invites the end of the world.
It was composed over a series of drum and tuned percussion loops assembled in advance by Jim Keltner, a method to which I would not return until the album When I Was Cruel. This cut also features two of my favourite instrumental cameo appearances: Nick Lowe’s thumping bass entrance in the third verse and a dazzling James Burton guitar solo that is right on the edge of impossible.
“How To Be Dumb” is an instruction pamphlet for the innocent, the indiscreet, the snide, and the deluded who confuse freedom of speech with necessity and license, while “All Grown Up” recalls a practitioner of a jaded posture that I believed I had left behind when I departed from London in the late ‘80s. I might have thought to sing the tune as if I believed it were beautiful. It is hard to deny that I was in a contrary frame of mind at this time, subjecting even the tenderest melodies to an extremely violent and guttural attack.
Strangely, my original vocal idea for “All Grown Up” was Carl Wilson; at least it was listening to that voice that inspired the melodic shape of the song. I was fascinated by the way he appeared to be trying to inhale the words back into the mouth as they were uttered, a style that I can only describe as “backwards singing”. It was a very sensual effect, and you can hear my vain attempts to imitate this in the last verse of “Georgie And Her Rival”, although obviously without the supernatural purity of tone. You can also hear a very different vocal approach on the “All Grown Up” home demo on CD 2.
The musicians on this record consisted primarily of the American players with whom I’d been working since 1986, many of them members of successive touring outfits: The Confederates, The Rude Five, and The Filthy Four. After making King Of America and Spike together, it certainly didn’t feel like the sterile, clichéd idea of “working with studio musicians”.
Unlike Spike, where hardly two instruments were recorded simultaneously, there were full band sessions with live vocals for this album. I had sketched out most of the arrangements on a home-recording set-up that allowed me to illustrate the parts in more detail. I worked without a drum machine, preferring the ebb and flow of an ensemble but did play a number of odd percussion accents, most of which were faithfully incorporated within the percussion parts.
The album was originally supposed to feature The Attractions. The plan advanced to the extent that I recorded a series of “farewell” sessions with the American crew at Blue Wave Studios, Barbados—cutting a selection of my favourite songs that would finally appear on Kojak Variety Vol. 1. When The Attractions’ participation was scuppered by an unseemly legal squabble, I simply returned to Hollywood and kept on working.
There is an abrupt shift of mood at the top of Side Two (this was probably the last record that I imagined as a two-sided vinyl disc). Most of the songs in the programme from this point can be summed up with the line from the chorus of “Georgie And Her Rival”: “Well, heaven knows what fills the heart and makes you feel so alive”.
That song tells the tale of long distance seduction, disguise, and deception and is followed by the portrait of a departed lover, “So Like Candy”. This is the first of two songs written with Paul McCartney. By far the best versions of these songs were the vocal and guitar demos cut at Paul’s studio immediately after completing each composition. They remain in the McCartney vault. Paul and I had co-produced his band versions of both “So Like Candy” and “Playboy To A Man” during the early session for the Flowers In The Dirt album, but the tunes had not been included in the final running order. Now, with Paul’s approval, I laid claim to these titles.
“So Like Candy” is probably the best ensemble performance on the album; the Jerry Scheff/Jim Keltner rhythm section held down the slowest credible tempo beneath Larry Knetchel’s upright piano and Mitchell Froom’s Mellotron lines while Marc Ribot and I play the guitars. T-Bone Wolk even makes a cameo appearance with some fine Rickenbacker bass fills on the fade.
The Hollywood smog was playing havoc with my throat by the time it came to tackle the second McCartney/MacManus composition and several other songs, so much so that we had to return to London to complete the vocal sessions. I remember being possessed of the notion that the track should not sound like a rock and roll cliché. Perhaps I was guilty of over-thinking the material, as it is clearly quite a slight song.
Late on London evening, I attacked the tune with a piece of wrought iron. Singing at times down a length of rusty metal pipe, I arrived at a series of distorted character voices. At best this track is in the tradition of the ‘50s novelty vocal records. I think that the sequence of ballads from “So Like Candy” onwards would have dragged a little without it. If you are not in the mood for “Playboy To A Man”, then I’m sure you know how to work the pause or skip buttons on your CD player.
This track is preceded by a brief horn interlude, one of several fragments entitled “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected”. This one is “No. 2”. Following their appearance on Spike, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band traveled from New Orleans to join these sessions. They added the beautifully played brass lines to “Sweet Pear”, a song that also includes one of my rare guitar solos, part of the original composition rather than a spontaneous improvisation. The song itself, a tender tale of abject love, receives one of the more tender vocal performances.
Cait O’Riordan’s song, “Broken”, is the next in a sequence of three contrasting ballads. Kevin Killen knew that I was anxious that it should not sound like an imitation of traditional music and ensured that an uneasy atmosphere was sustained throughout via the placement of distant tones in heavy reverb. Cait never talks about her songs, so I am not about to add any of my own speculation.
Two cuts that do depart from Irish musical sources are to be found on CD 2. One is an antidote to mawkish Christmas song called “St. Stephen’s Day Murders”. The text, written for Paddy Maloney’s air, imagines lacing the festive bird with something to dispatch unwanted and unwelcome relations. It was originally released on The Chieftains’ seasonal album The Bells Of Dublin.
The second song, “Mischievous Ghost”, was commissioned by the filmmaker Philip King for his television series about the journey of Irish music called Bringing It All Back Home. The two-part arrangement begins with a strident, winding melody over guitar, bodhran, and Uileann pipe accompaniment before dropping into a more confidential and critical tone. The second part of the vocal line is shared by Mary Coughlan. She has just the right sardonic tone for a song that offers little sympathy for the half-dead, self-pitying drunken artist and his tales of romantic defeat. The small string group arrangement was sketched out on the keyboard by myself and transcribed by Fiachra Trench.
The album closes with a melody that is among my favourites of those I have composed at the piano, “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No.4”. The lyric contains what might be called an “agnostic prayer”, if such a thing can exist.
“Please don’t let me fear anything I cannot explain
I can’t believe, I’ll never believe in anything again”.
Given the fact that I am a former altar boy, perhaps it was inevitable that I would come around to this way of thinking eventually, and the title of the song reflects this.
The musical arrangement was recorded in a single take with six keyboards being employed simultaneously. Only the brass parts were added as an overdub. I can’t say that I am entirely happy with my recorded vocal performance. It has a lot of feeling but does not flatter the melody that much. I had similar reservations during my 1999 tour with Steve Nieve. I found that the best solution was to sing the song unamplified at the close of each concert.
The melody also found its way into the main title sequence of soundtrack music that I co-composed with Richard Harvey for Alan Bleasdale’s television drama series, GBH. I was sketching out musical themes for the 11-hour drama during the mixing of this album, making demos on my own recording set-up in the studio while Kevin and Mitchell were working in the control room. I was unable to write musical notation at the time, so all of the orchestrations and a good deal more of the atmospheric and textural material was Richard’s work.
The score won a BAFTA (British Academy Award) the following year. I did not attend the ceremony, but Richard received a kiss on the cheek from a young Catherine Zeta-Jones along with the statuette. He also turned to the camera and mimed opening a bottle, something that I might have been doing at that exact moment.
There is no doubt that my physical appearance gave people reason to assume that I had gone mad. Drinking did have something to do with the extremities of my moods and less than elegant profile, but the wild hair and beard emerged during the first cold winter at our new Irish hillside home and became a fixture once I realized how it infuriated people. There was always a strong streak of perversity in my fashion choices. I had no idea that people would be so sentimental about the disappearance of my face.
It seems that much that was written about this record at the time of the original release fixated on these superficial aspects. I was as detached from the world of pop as I wanted to be. You only have to listen to the highlights of our MTV Unplugged appearance for evidence. Despite the hostility and predictions of doom that attended the release of this record, it actually out-sold the first three, supposedly irreproachable, albums at the time of original release.
This record says that the world we are making is grim, and I believe that it is. We are cruel to each other, we lie and manipulate until the unworthy encounter a love to which we must surrender. It may come in the shape of a man or a woman or it may not. It’s just some songs that I wrote.
So it was that I found myself up on the precipitous Cornische between Nice and Monte Carlo in a large, black vintage Buick full of French models, pretending to sing “The Other Side Of Summer” for the benefit of the video crew up ahead. I had learned to drive at the age of 35. The brakes on the car were said to be unreliable. If I had plunged off the edge, then this might not be a bad place to conclude.
-Elvis Costello

[mcramahamasham]

KOJAK VARIETY

I walked from the blinding sunshine into the chill, air-conditioned gloom of the studio building. A shadowy figure was roused from a couch. He ambled toward us with an unfortunate air. He was an American who had been hired as second engineer for our sessions. Despite the lack of light in the lounge, he was wearing mirrored aviators. As we came face-to-face, he offered his introduction: “My future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades”, quoting a maddeningly catchy Timbuk 3 single from years before. He accomplished this with that twin finger-click and pointing gesture that you last saw executed by the Fonz on Happy Days. I fired him on the spot.
I hadn’t come to Barbados to fool around, even though I was bidding lighthearted farewell to a group of musicians with whom I’d recorded and toured for the previous five years.
In fact I had planned to make an entirely different album in 1990. The album that would become Mighty Like A Rose was originally intended to feature The Attractions for the first time since 1986. Unfortunately, contractual negotiations became a theatre for delusions and long-harboured grudges, and that version of the record was never made. By contrast, the simple idea of going to a Carribean island to record “some of my favourite songs with some of my favourite musicians”—as the original sleeve note defined the record—seemed like an inviting prospect.
The sessions for King Of America in 1985 had been my first experience of recording original material with musicians other than The Attractions since 1977. The lineup of “Elvis Costello and His Confederates” changed during three subsequent tours, but guitarist James Burton, bassist Jerry Scheff, and drummer Jim Keltner were common to all of them.
Jerry and Jim were among the moany players involved in the 1988 sessions for Spike, which also heavily featured the guitar playing of Marc Ribot and included a small cameo appearance by Pete Thomas. When it came time to tour, I invited Jerry and Pete to be the rhythm section and asked Marc to play guitar and Eb horn. Mitchell Froom, who had played keyboards on both albums and toured in the original Confederate lineup, was now so involved in production that he was unable to join the Spike tour. At Jerry Scheff’s suggestion we enlisted Larry Knetchel, who probably has some of the heaviest session credits in popular music. Having left behind both the security and creative impasse of a permanent group, I thought myself luck to be able to call on such a rich group of players in both the studio and during live adventures.
When planning the Barbados trip, I knew I could rely on Jerry Scheff for the bass playing but decided to invite both Pete Thomas and Jim Keltner, scheduling five days with each drummer, making sure that they overlapped for a couple of sessions in case we wanted to attempt anything unusual. I also guessed that the contrast between the styles of Marc Ribot and James Burton was bound to create some heat, but really only got to know Larry during the sessions. I soon discovered that he always knew the right thing to play.
Blue Wave Studios was located on the opposite side of Barbados from our hotel. Days began early, with a swim in the ocean before the sun became too intense. Mongeese could be seen scurryin around the grounds and were also seen dead and alive aloing the rough road that led to the studio. I drove a battered Mitsubishi, the only automatic transmission vehicle available. The steering wheel had been jolted by the rutted road surface so that it appeared that one was always driving sideways.
Kojak Variety was the name of a grocery store on the route to the studio. I imagine that the sign was put up during the “Who loves you, baby?” craze, it being the catchphrase of Telly Savalas’ lollipop-sucking detective. Somehow it fit my arcane selection of songs, and the sleeve design was even made to look like the logo of an old soap powder.
An early bout of laryngitis lent a unique vocal tone to a couple of cuts. It was brought on by over enthusiastic rehearsals and then falling asleep in the icy air-conditioning of our hotel blowing full blast. Nevertheless, we cut the songs pretty fast. In every case we listened to the recorded version of the song and decided if there was anything essential we should preserve from the original arrangement. I knew I could count on my own voice and the personality of the players to provide a fresh take on the material. It was pretty uncomplicated work.
Our afternoon breaks saw a table laden with green mangoes and flying fish. The evening began with rum and grapefruit cocktails and darkness was accompanied by the incessant songs of cicadas and tree frogs that inspired the sound of one track on this record. Wild monkeys had been briefly glimpsed in a field beside the studio. It was certainly a little different from Pathway Studios in Islington, North London, where my recording career had begun.
The Kojak Variety recordings were never intended to be issued immediately. I simply though this might be the last opportunity for me to work with this group of players. Given the frequency of my new work, it proved impossible to schedule the release of this material until 1995. Even then, I really wanted WB to issue the record without any fanfare, letting it simply appear in the racks. It was the kind of “lost record” that I had dreamed of discovering by one of my favourite bands while idly flipping through racks of vinyl during the thousands of hours that I had spent in record shops. Needless to say, the company couldn’t bring themselves to do anything so certain in end in commercial failure, even though I am sure that the record would have been more warmly received if issued in this fashion.
So-called “cover” records tend to come in seasons. The early ‘70s saw The Band’s Moondog Matinee (probably the unconscious inspiration for this set), David Bowie’s Pin-Ups, and John Lennon’s Rock ‘N’ Roll. Though they may not have been equal to the artists’ best original material, they told you plenty that was very personal about the musicians who made them. Unhappily, by the mid-‘90s such records were seen to simply denote a vanity or an absence of fresh inspiration. The Coincidence that three entirely differently motivated “cover” albums appeared in a matter of weeks cannot have helped the perception that these collections were just an indulgence.
These songs have only appeared occasionally in concert repertoire. I started singing “I Threw It All Away” on my first solo tour in 1984, adding “Running Out Of Fools” to later solo concerts. “Pouring Water On A Drowning Man” was first performed on the Confederate tours after the release of King Of America, and “Leave My Kitten Alone” was recorded (but originally left in the can) during the Blood & Chocolate sessions and was featured in some of the last Attractions appearances of the ‘80s. The rest of the material was only performed on a handful of occasions in ’95.
The release of Kojak Variety was attended by just a solitary concert at Shepherd’s Bush Empire ub London, which was broadcast throughout the world. Unfortunately, my voice had been left at a couple of television studio appearances that week and the show was not a success. Earlier in the day we had been guests on the Late Show With David Letterman, which was also visiting London. By a curious coincidence, the house band featured two famous guest musicians: Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Our scheduled number was Richard’s “Bama Lama Bama Loo”. Even at the rehearsal we tore into the number, and due to the traditionally frigid conditions, I also tore my throat. Right on cue, Little Richard appeared on the set, declaiming excitedly, “I heard you playing my song!!!” He was probably the last person to do so that evening.
What follows is the original sleeve note for this album. It was my first rock and roll record to contain such notes. I thought that this disc could stand something that tipped a hat to the likes of Tony Barrow, whose liner notes for The Beatles albums I had pored over for many hours, as reading them again and again would reveal more story…

This is a record of some of my favourite songs performed with some of my favourite musicians. The songs here date from between 1930 and 1970 so it really should be called "Kojak Variety -- Volume One."
I've tried not to cut songs that are too familiar. I found "Strange" on the B-side of a Screaming Jay Hawkins single on Roulette. It asks the musical questions: "How many wrinkles in a pickle? How many hairs in a head? How many waves in the ocean? How many crumbs in bread?... How many bubbles in soap? How many chewings in gum? How many rolls in wheel?" and most importantly... "Where did eyeballs come from?" Marc Ribot takes full advantage of the invitation to "go strange" during the solo and fade.
On "Hidden Charms" Larry Knechtel's wah-wah Hammond organ shadows Ribot as he delivers a long, swinging solo which tips a hat to Hubert Sumlin (The Guitar Player on the Howlin' Wolf original). Marc takes several choruses courtesy of some fine brushes work by Pete Thomas. "Hidden Charms" was written by the great Willie Dixon.
At different times in my life I have haunted such shops as Petter's Music in Richmond, where I also bought my first proper guitar and still get many of my favouite jazz and ballad recordings; Probe in Liverpool, where I stumbled through a teenage crisis brought on by trying to like psychedelic music; Rock On in Camden Town, where I bought the pile of Stax singles that helped shape the album Get Happy and, from the first time I traveled across America, the countless thrift stores and pawn shops which offered the chance of discovering an entire album by some group or singer that I had previously only known from singles or a scrappy compilation record.
Some of my best discoveries have been made in what may be the greatest record collecting store in the world: Village Music in Mill Valley, California. Any shop that confronts you with its own ever-changing "hall of fame" (Which might include a Lester Young, The Fairfield Four, some Bill Monroe and a great Otis Rush anthology) AND a rack called "sometimes the cover is enough" featuring such classics as Music For Sleepwalkers, Must be doing something right.
It was here that I bought The Supremes Sing Holland/Dozier/Holland. It included some of their own best-sellers and "covers" of other Motown artists' hits such as "Same old song" and "Heatwave". The odd song out was "Remove this doubt." There's a touch of film music about this one. The thing that sounds like a big zither in the solo is actually a plucked piano string.
One of the better known songs included here is Bob Dylan's "I Threw it All Away." It comes from his album Nashville Skyline. Such was the departure of that record's vocal and writing style that the simple beauty of this song seems to have been overlooked. I performed the song on my very first solo tour in 1984. Larry Knechtel leads the way in this arrangement with some mighty piano and organ.
One of the great albums in my parents' collection when i was very young was a ten-inch album by Peggy Lee called Black Coffee. I'm not sure wheter "Fever" was on that disc but I've listened to Peggy Lee all my life and somewhere along the way I got curious about the Little Willie John version. The only other time I had even seen his name was as writer of "Need your love so bad." Peter Green cut a superb rendition of this with the "original" Fleetwood Mac. If you don't already know Little Willie John's stuff I would suggest any anthology with such sides as "All around the world", "Big Blue Diamonds" and the "answer-songs" to "Fever": "Spasms," "My Nerves" and "I'm Shakin'." He also recorded "Leave my kitten alone," although I have heard it by the Beatles. I've played it with both The Attractions and The Rude Five. Our recorded account was cut with Pete Thomas and Jim Keltner sharing parts of a dismantled drum kit. Pete played snare, hi-hat and tom-tom while Jim played bass drum with a hand held beatuer -- telling Pete he would give him "The Best Right Foot He'd Ever Had". James Burton takes the solo.
I learned the name "Mose Allison" from Georgie Fame's records. His Fame at Last and Sound venture, introduced me to the music of Lambet, Hendricks and Ross, Goffin and King's "Point of No Return" and Neal Hefti's "Lil' Darlin'." Later I realised that the Georgie Fame record of Willie Dixon's "I love the life I live" was actually modelled on the Mose Allison version. Although Georgie did several Mose Allison tunes I don't think he ever cut "Everybody's Crying Mercy." I found it first on Bonnie Raitt's third album: Taking My Time. Marc Ribot leads this version which features a fine, funny coda from the whole band.
I don't know if many people will be familiar with Randy Newman's "I've Been Wrong Before." It was written before he started his own recording career and cut by both Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. I learned it from the Dusty Springfield version. In fact she recorded two of Randy Newman's pop masterpieces on her great album Dusty in Memphis: "Just one Smile" and "I don't want to hear it anymore" -- a song which I half-quote in my song "Accidents Will Happen." Larry and Marc combine well for the broken musical-box accompaniment in this new arrangement.
I first heard Little Richard's "Bama Lama Bama Loo" in 1964. It was released on a yellow "London: America Recordings" 45. I have the record in front of me now. It's an "A" label copy which means I got it from my father.
During my Dad's time singing with The Joe Loss Orchestra he used to bring home all kinds of "A" label advance copies and even acetates of songs he was to learn for that week's radio broadcast. The process of securing "Live" or radio covers was still crucial to both record companies and music publishers. As late as the release of The Beatles' Rubber Soul, when they hardly needed a helping hand, their publishers, Northern Songs, were still sending out acetates of non-single tracks such as "Girl" and "Michelle" so that the songs were covered by the radio dancebands. When my Dad had finished learning the song he gave me the record. This meant that I had far more singles than pocket money would have bought. It also meant that I used to keep my fingers crossed so that, out of the three band singers, my Father would be allotted my favourites of each batch of the new releases. It also certainly means that I am actually the second member of the MacManus Family to perform "Bama Lama Bama Loo."
I cannot attempt the famous Penniman "Whoooo!" so James Burton provides The Voice Of Lucinda. Once again Pete Thomas and Jim Keltner share parts of a drum kit. Ribot takes the first solo and James the second.
In some cases I've changed the style of the song quite a bit. Bill Anderson's "Must You Throw Dirt In My Face" was originally recorded by the Louvin Brothers but we did it as an R'n'B ballad.
When I was growing up most "Country" hits were novelty records. I didn't get curious about country until I heard The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and started seeking out the original versions by the artist they had covered. These included the Louvin's "Christian Life" but I didn't get the bug for them until I heard their songs cut by Gram Parsons. There's still a record exchange in Wadsworth where I picked up a bargain-priced import copy of G.P., his first solo album. It was the first record that I actually owned featuring James Burton and here he is playing on this arrangement.
Having recorded an entire album in Nashville I wanted to do something different with this song and took a cue from the way Percy Sledge approaches country ballads. Anyway, I didn't have anyone to harmonise with. Even though I have performed the Louvin's song "My Baby's Gone" with Nick Lowe, he does it much better on his own. I've also been known to reel off their very grim murder ballad: "Knoxville Girl." If you're a fan of The Everly Brothers or any of the great vocal duos who went before them then you probably know the Louvin Brothers' records. If you don't know their tunes then try to find Tragic Songs Of Life or one of the many re-issues now available.
Some years ago when I was in Japan I discovered "Pouring water on a drowning man" by James Carr on a brand new Goldwax Records issue. This was at a time when his records were shamefully absent from catalogues in the U.S. and Britain. For years I've take it to be another of the great Dan Penn songs. Perhaps this is because Carr shares the Moman/Penn classic "Dark end of the street" with Percy Sledge (Who also cut Penn and Oldham's "Out Of Left Field" and "It Tears me Up"). In fact "Pouring Water..." was written by the team of Baker and McCormick.
I included this song in my 1986 shows with the Confederates, a band which featured Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner and James Burton. However in this performance the spotlight should really fall on Larry Knechtel's piano playing.
You can now find this song on the very fine James Carr compilation: At the Dark End of The Street. By the way, Dan Penn's first album for twenty years, "Do Right Man," was issued in 1994. It contains new versions of some of his greatest songs including, I promise you... "You Left the water Running."
"The Very Thought Of You" was written by English Band leader Ray Noble around 1930 and later popularised by Nat "King" Cole. I have performed this song before for a video special with The Chet Baker Trio. During the solo on this rendition I join Marc Ribot's spanish guitar and Eb horn with a bit of "mouth trumpet". In fact this arrangement is a band effort, Jerry, James and Larry suggesting the simplified accompaniment of the opening to which I added the transition into the final verse.
Jesse Winchester's "Payday" is the most recent song on this record. It comes from his 1970 debut album which contains many very beautiful ballads and one terrifying song called "Black Dog." I still cannot listen to it in the dark. That album was produced by Robbie Robetson and features other members of The Band. If you see it snap it up! There is a very fine Jesse Winchester anthology but it would only be perfect if it contained all the tracks from that first record.
I've always wanted to record this song if only for the lines:
"I've got me this long legged girl to help me spend my dough
Her heart as big as your mama's stove and her body like Brigitte Bardot."
I asked Marc Ribot to play as if he was hearing lots of different music while walking past a row of nightclubs. Pete, Jerry and especially Larry really get going on this one.
When I first heard some of these songs there were only about three hours of "beat music" on the B.B.C. Light Programme per week. "Rock'N'Roll" was actually old people's music to anyone under thirteen --particularly as Elvis Presley was doing mock-operatic stuff like "It's Now Or Never." "Rhythm and Blues" was an exotic style that my favouite pop groups said they liked. For example the songs that The Beatles didin't write turned out to be by Arthur Alexander and Smokey Robinson.
Even if the original American version of a tune was issued it took up to six weeks to appear by which time a local facsimile by a familiar face was often already established. In some cases those "covers" were actually better. I love Smokey and the Miracles but I honestly prefer The Beatles take on "You Really Got A Hold On Me."
There were at least two other versions of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "Please Stay" but I learned it from a record by Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band. Now we present a version starring Larry Knechtel on Hammond Organ.
To complete the story, "Running out of fools" was one of the last Columbia sides cut by Aretha Franklin before she moved to Atlantic Records. It was the first song that we recorded for this album. The last song recorded was Ray Davies' "Days." It is the only track on which I join Marc Ribot on electric guitar. I plugged into my rather dilapidated old Music man stage amplifier and found that I could only get some strange feedback effects out of it. This happened to sound exactly like the tree-frogs that could be heard after dark and were almost as loud...
This album was recorded by Kevin Killen at Blue Wave Studios, Barbados in two weeks. The vocal backgrounds were added at Eden Studios, London. The tracks were mixed at Blue Wave and Eden Studios.
If you enjoy these recordings and do not already know the original versions then I Wish you a lot of pleasure in seeking them out. I look forward to recording "Volume Two" sometime in the next millenium.
Elvis Costello, February 14, 1995

Well, CD2 is not exactly “Volume Two” of Kojak Variety. In fact I am thinking of skipping Volumes Two through Four and starting straight into Volume Five any day now. However, the second disc does contain a number of songs written by other people and recorded during the ‘90s for a variety of reasons.
“Ship Of Fools” was cut during the Blue Wave sessions but was made exclusively for Deadicated, an album of Grateful Dead songs. The track is slightly more ordered in arrangement than the track on the album. James Burton plays the guitar tag of the cut that begins with the opening statement of Jerry Garcia’s original guitar solo and the goes somewhere that is entirely “James”.
Perhaps the strangest group of songs on CD2 is from Track 2 to Track 11. Let me explain, I have worked with George Jones on three separate occasions over 20 years, but was have always lost touch in between times. Nevertheless, I was approached in 1993 by Interview magazine to present a series of questions to the great man.
Our telephone conversation began bizarrely. I enquired as to George’s well-being, and he replied that he was doing well with the dog food. It was not until later that I found out that he was referring to a product endorsement that he had made. Eventually, the topic came around to songs from outside of country music that I imagined might very well suit such a fine singer, thereby turning them into “George Jones songs”. It didn’t seem as if George had been doing too much broad listening, as he had apparently never heard of some of the composers, let alone their songs.
I promised to send him a compilation of ideas for his amusement, but thought better of it when I actually assembled the tape of original recordings. So I decided to go into the studio and actually demo the songs in the manner in which I had read was quite common in Nashville, namely by mimicking the singer’s style to sell a song. Only in this case the songs were not mine but simply ones I loved and thought might be great for George. This might seem like a huge presumption, but like many George Jones fans from outside country music, I had often been disappointed by the inferior songs that he had sometimes been obligated to record.
So, taking just one day in the studio in the company of Pete Thomas and Paul “Bassman” Riley, we cut songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Tome Waits, Bruce Springsteen, T-Bone Burnett, Paul Simon, Dan Penn, Bob Dylan, and George Gershwin in my mad and, at times, comical approximation of the Jones style. I have no idea what Mr. Jones made of the tape or if he ever even received it. On the next occasion that we performed together, on TNN’s “Monday Night Concert with Ricky Skaggs” at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, George diplomatically failed to mention these recordings.
Nevertheless, I can still hear him singing Paul Simon’s “Congratulations”, although I must apologize for my accidental rewriting of Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”. I really did think that the line was “Relationships have all been bad. Mine have been like the lanes and rambles” rather than “Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s”. A few items from this demonstration record have been issued on B-sides and CD singles, but this is the first time that they have been released in their entirety.
Another cut that in some way referred back to my Nashville adventures in the early ‘80s is “Sleepless Nights”. I originally learned this Felice and Boudleaux Bryant song—first cut by The Everly Brothers—from Gram Parsons recording with Emmylou Harris. When Emmylou approached me to contribute to Return Of The Grievous Angel, a tribute album to G.P., I selected this song to illustrate the way he could almost rewrite a song in the process of interpretation.
My rendition, produced in London by Glyn Johns, features Pete Thomas on drums, B.J. Cole on steel guitar, Steve Donnelly on guitar, Roy Babbington on double bass, and me on piano and vibraphone. I first performed this song on my 1984 solo tour and more recently had the remarkable experience of harmonizing on the tune with Emmylou during the European leg of the “Concert for a Landmine Free World” tour in 2002.
Tracks 13, 14, and 16 were recorded for Family, a four-part dark and harrowing BBC/RTE television drama by Roddy Doyle. Each episode ended with a song that echoed the tone of the final scene. Given that the drama was about abuse and domestic violence (and that the fourth episode ended with “Kinder Murder” from Brutal Youth), it is probably not too hard to imagine how “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” and “Sticks And Stones”—a Titus song best known by Ray Charles—fitted into the story. “Step Inside Love” was obviously used in more ironic fashion. This wonderful Paul McCartney song was originally made famous by Cilla Black as the theme to her late ‘60s TV show. The band lineup on these songs included Pete Thomas, Steve Nieve together with bassist Trevor Barry, and guitarist Steve Donelly.
I first heard Arthur Alexander’s song “Anna” as recorded by The Beatles on their 1963 EP Beatles No. 1. Having always loved his songs whenever I came across them, I was happy to contribute this version of “Sally Sue Brown” to the 1994 tribute album Adios Amigo. It is a solo cut with an overdubbed guitar solo.
“That’s How You Got Killed Before” is a Dave Bartholomew song from the 1950s that served as the opening (and sometimes also the closing) number of every “Confederate” show in the late ‘80s. This version was produced in New York by Scott Billington for The Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s The New Orleans Album, which was issued in 1990, in between our collaboration on Spike and Mighty Like A Rose.
Two tracks included here were recorded in Dublin. The rendition of “Full Force Gale” with The Voice Squad was produced by Phil Coulter and Van Morrison for No Prima Donna: The Songs Of Van Morrison. The macabre traditional song “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched” was my contribution to Danal Lunny’s Common Ground (Voices Of Modern Irish Music) record. Donal has played a major part in the Dublin session for Spike, and although this track was cut shortly after the eventual release of Kojak Variety, it is included here as a part of a great variety of work that I did at this time.
One of the more unusual guest appearances that I made during these years was on Larry Adler’s The Glory Of Gershwin album. At the time of the recording, the mouth organ virtuoso (that, by the way, was his chosen description of the instrument usually called the chromatic harmonica) was in his mid-eighties, still playing a daily game of tennis and nearly as well known as a radio and television raconteur and ceaseless correspondent to the “Letters to the Editor” pages of various publications as he was as a musician.
The fact that he was the dedicatee of concerti by several notable composers and had received an Oscar nomination for his score for the 1953 English comedy Genevieve was sometimes lost in the face of his almost unstoppable storytelling. The again when Mr. Adler referred to “Mr. Gershwin”, he was talking about his encounters with George’s father. His meeting with “Mr. Capone” was also pretty interesting.
In selecting a song from the Gershwin catalogue, I found that I had been beaten to several of my favourite tunes by members of the large and starry contributing cast that included Elton John, Kate Bush, Cher, and Sting. The record also featured an astonishing version of “Rhapsody In Blue” by Mr. Adler.
After settling on “But Not For Me”, I met with George Martin, who was producing the record, to discuss the arrangement. Although it is entirely his work, in the introduction it does make use of a quote from an unrecorded chamber music song of mine entitled “The Trouble With Dreams”.
The track was originally cut live in a couple of takes with Larry and the ensemble, but I was unhappy with my performance and later returned to the studio to rerecord the vocal on a session overseen by George Martin’s son, Giles.
However, my favourite recollection relating to this track is of a lunch meeting held to discuss the upcoming session. I met Larry and George at a restaurant near AIR Lyndhurst Studios in Hampsted, London. Needless to say, the conversation was remarkable. I think my head started to spin around the time Larry recounted a performance of “Battle Hymn Of The Republic” for victory radio broadcast, which he said was made from a balcony of the gutted Reichstag, just after the fall of Berlin in 1945. He had been playing it to accompany the recitation of the Gettysburg Address by Ingrid Bergman. Almost as an aside he added, “Of course, I was in love with her…” Mr. Martin also had quite a few good stories.
I mention this tale to illustrate that there is really no rush with music. If I were to set out to make this record again, I would probably select many different tunes. The again if I were to make a list of my “favourite songs” on just about any day of the week, it would be a different proposition.
-Elvis Costello

[mcramahamasham]

JULIET LETTERS

So There was this professor in Verona who answered letters addressed to Juliet....
Well, if that sounds like the start of a tall story I suppose it is. My wife, Cait, pointed out the tiny newspaper item about a Veronese academic who had taken on the task of replying to letters addressed to "Juliet Capulet." This apparently continued for a number of years, until some gentlemen of the press exposed this secret correspondence. Quite how he came by these letters in the first place remains unclear. We can only make a guess as to their content. After all, these people were writing to an imaginary woman, and a dead imaginary woman at that. Perhaps they were simply scholarly enquiries, or letters of sympathy from others disappointed in love, or even a plea from somebody forced into an unhappy arranged marriage. Whatever was contained in those letters and their replies, the idea of this correspondence provided our initial inspiration.
I first saw the Brodsky Quartet play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in 1989. They were giving a series of concerts in which they were to perform all of the string quartets composed by Dimitri Shostakovich. Having arrived in town in time to attend the concert in which they played Quartets Nos. 7, 8, and 9, we returned on two subsequent evenings to hear them complete the cycle. I recall running out of a B.B.C. television studio where I had anxiously completed a programme presenting the album Spike in order to get to the last concert on time. Such was the impact of these performances. Not only did I come away with a clearer impression of the music, but also a strong sense of the love and dedication with which the Quartet played it. Over the next two years we went to see the Brodskys play some wonderful music: Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven and Bartok. Little did I suspect, but members of the Quartet had been to my London concerts during the same period. Somehow the connection was made, we exchanged letters and recordings, and finally arranged to meet after their next London appearance. It was after that lunchtime concert in November 1991 that we began our collaboration.
At first we just talked and talked and ... talked. This led to several informal musical sessions. We looked at the characteristics of the music that we loved and admired. The Quartet played pieces, I played songs, sometimes we listened to records. Naturally, some of the music introduced was unfamiliar, but this only added to the number of possibilities. Soon our own ideas began to emerge.
We wanted to explore the under-used combination of voice and string quartet, but were anxious to avoid that junkyard named "Cross-over." This is no more my stab at "classical music" than it is the Brodsky Quartet's first rock and roll album. It does, however, employ the music which we believe touches whatever part of the being that you care to mention. It also conforms to, and occasionally upsets, the structures found in our respective disciplines and indiscipline!
With The Juliet Letters as our title, we thought of the many types of character that the letter form would allow us. Somewhere there is a list of the letters we which we considered. Love letter, begging letter, chain letter, suicide note, etc. In order to make the work more personal we decided that each of us would contribute to the text, not forgetting the words written by Michael Thomas's wife, Marina. As the lyricist in the house, I could also act as a kind of editor. From these early drafts came a curious advantage. Of course, each of us had different approaches to the common subject, and through some unconscious poetry, and in the absence of much of the crafty language of the songwriter, we were able to assemble strong and varied texts. It seems that only poets and politicians write letters with a view to them being printed in collected form. In my experience the language of most letters swings wildly from the lyrical to the banal and from the courteous to the confessional, sometimes inside the same paragraph. I hope we've caught something of this in the words of The Juliet Letters.
The process of composition and arrangement was varied and is mysterious to contemplate. Some pieces arrived with both words and music complete. Bridges were then built between smaller related items, while at least one song and a crucial passage of the music was effectively composed "spontaneously." While the job of compiling and creating the "draft arrangements" was shared among the members of the quartet, the process of arranging was often one of trial and error involving all five of us. This has continued throught the rehearsals, the first two performances and even during this recording. Having previously been unable to read or write down music, my own recent studies have allowed me to progress, since January 1992, from picking out my ideas at the piano (using what is known as "the crab method"), through piano scores to full proposed four-part arrangements. I have to give credit to the Quartet for their perseverance in deciphering some of my early intentions from the most wayward of playing. As I have found with other collaborations, the music that you most confidently attribute to one party invariably turns out to be the work of the person you least suspect.
The Juliet Letters begins with a short composition entitled "Deliver Us." It simply serves to open the story, for although the following letters are not intended to create a dialogue, you may choose to draw your own conclusions from some of the resulting juxtapositions.
One of the conventions which we have taken from classical song, or for that matter folk-song, is the acceptance of a man singing a woman's story. In "For Other Eyes" a woman confesses her jealous suspicions and fears.
The "letter" in "Swine" takes a more unusual form, being a piece of deranged, political graffiti carved on a wooden door.
For the next song, "Expert Rites," I have taken the liberty of imagining a reply made by a character similar to the Veronese professor who unwittingly provided our title. If he should ever hear this piece I hope he will not be offended by our presumption -- in this version of the mystery the author of the letter is a compassionate and romantic soul. "Expert Rites" leads without pause into Paul Cassidy's "Dead Letter," which darkens the already melancholy mood into one of sadness and loss.
After a short introduction of my invention comes Michael Thomas's first song, "I Almost Had A Weakness," to which I added the tango passages. It is an eccentric aunt's curt reply to a begging letter.
The text of "Why?" was derived from Ian Belton's version of a child's note. I added the final repeated lines and the music.
Without dragging the listener through the mechanics of our working method, it should be stated that in naming the "main composer" we hope to indicate who was responsible for the initial music and defining structure of the collaborative pieces. Even if others have amended the melodic line or added further musical content, when such a credit is stated it is because we still regard it as "their" song. In the case of "Who Do You Think You Are?" this credit very much belongs to Michael Thomas. The song begins with a young man sitting down in a seaside cafe to write a postcard in which he details all his estranged lover's faults. The truth of the situation is gradually revealed.
In performance, "Taking My Life In Your Hands" concludes the first half of the sequence. The music was developed from a piece first outlined by Jacqeline Thomas. The letter portrays an obsessive and deluded person, writing letters never sent, expecting impossible replies.
The second part of The Juliet Letters opens with a rather extreme form of junk mail: "This Offer Is Unrepeatable."
The text of "Dear Sweet Filthy World" is a suicide note that turns from blase and bored with life to desperate, and is finally lost in a dream.
"The Letter Home" employs contrasting musical sections, predominantly from Ian Belton (I contributed the music for only the "Why must I apologize" section), as the story dissolves from the formal courtesies, through nostalgia, and into bitterness.
"Jacksons, Monk and Rowe" is the name of a firm of solicitors which reoccurs as a motif among images of both childhood and adult disillusionment. The authorship of the two verses is divided between brother and sister, Michael and Jacqueline, while the music is Michael's.
The music of "This Sad Burlesque" is mostly the work of Paul Cassidy, although between us Michael and I proposed the related material in the bridge section. The events described in the letter should be familiar to those who lived in England in the spring of 1992.
The next letter is spelt out by a moving glass. "Romeo's Seance" tells of a strange young man's struggle to contact his ghostly lover. He even claims that she composed this song. In fact, the music is by Michael Thomas, although I think I should admit responsibility for the rather daft tune which Jacky plays during the central "flying furniture" section. In concert performance, Michael, Ian and Paul all play standing up, with Jacqueline seated on a small platform. This not only allows us to maintain eye contact, but also to change the grouping of the Quartet in order to heighten the focus on certain unconventional instrument balances. Without the visual aspect we decided to minimize these changes of configuration in the studio. However, as Michael and Jacky create most of the rhythmic and percussive interest in "Romeo's Seance," Michael took up his "Concert Position" between the voice and cello. Do not, as they say, adjust your set.
In "I Thought I'd Write To Juliet" a cynical writer quotes the contents of a letter that he has received. This "soldier's letter" is closely related to one sent to me during the build-up to the Gulf War tragedy. I would not like to comment further, except to say that it is not included as a simplistic political gesture, either "for" or "against" anything, but rather to illustrate the predicament of the two characters in being forced to reconsider their assumed positions. From the concluding mayhem a single note emerges leading into Michael Thomas's "Last Post." Despite it's title this piece does not have any military significance. It seems to me to have a clear sense of peace, though not without strong feeling. It also serves as a preface to the trio of songs at the conclusion of the sequence as it runs without a break into "The First To Leave." In this song, a man who believes in the afterlife leaves a letter for his atheist lover, which, we must assume, she is reading after his demise. "Damnation's Cellar" gives a glimpse of a fantastic kind of immorality. The final letter is also delivered from a place beyond death, although the intention is not at all morbid. So it is a song of condolence and renewal, "The Birds Will Be Singing," which brings The Juliet Letters to, what I believe is, a hopeful conclusion.
The Juliet Letters was performed for the first time in public at The Amadeus Centre, London, on 1st, July 1992, and again at The Great Hall, Dartington, on 13th, August 1992. This recording was made and balanced at Church Studios, Crouch Hill, North London, between 14th, September and 1st, October 1992. It was recorded, as we say in the popular music parlance, "live in the studio".
Here follows a brief technical note. Our "Tonmeister" Kevin Killen, who engineered and balanced the disc, assures us that there was no equalization of the signal coming from the studio. There are no overdubbed or additional parts. In order to preserve the clarity of the Quartet's tone the vocals were recorded simultaneously, but behind isolation screens. Therefore, the only artificial reverberation that you hear is that added to the voice in order to match the natural reverberation of Studio B. Although this was a multi-track recording, employing a combination of close, distant and wide microphone positions, the very minimum of adjustments were made to the internal balance of the Quartet in order to preserve the integrity of the performances. The decision to make an analog recording was an aesthetic one, founded on my firm conviction that for everything that digital recording gains in noise reduction and supposed clarity, there are unacceptable losses of warmth and depth. For the same reasons, the record was mixed to half-inch analog tape. All other applicable methods of noise reduction were employed. We trust that the results justify these decisions.
--Elvis Costello
October 21, 1992

At this distance it almost seems strange to reflect that The Juliet Letters recording was funded and released by the pop division of Warner Bros. During this sequence of re-issues, I have had the occasional harsh word for my former label, but in this case I can only say that this might have been one of the last acts of the great W.B. label that I had admired as a record fan; the imprint that had backed and continued to issue releases by Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, even when they didn't seem to sell, simply because the music needed to be heard.
Following the completion and the first performances of The Juliet Letters, I took the idea of a recording to W.B. President Lenny Waronker. I told him that I thought we might be able to sell 100,000 copies -- a substantial sale for a "chamber musicâ€

[mcramahamasham]

BRUTAL YOUTH

From where I was standing, jammed up against the off-white acoustic tiles behind a smeared glass screen, Pete Thomas was just visible in the opposite booth. I counted off the tune and hit a few guitar chords over the beat distorting in my headphones. I was back in Pathway Studios, where my recording career had begun 15 years earlier. In the movie version of our lives, we would have been cutting a hit record. Unfortunately the song was a mess.
In the previous year I had learned to read and write musical notation, written and recorded The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky Quartet, and toured the world with them in under 25 days. At the end of it all, my wife and I had written ten trashy pop songs in one weekend for a girl named Wendy. I'd enjoyed making demos of those songs so much that I got the notion that I should just keep on recording. The only thing I forgot to do was write any more songs.
The record I set out to make was to be called Idiophone. The Collins Dictionary defines this as an instrument "made of naturally sonorous material". It is a term used to describe a percussion instrument, but I couldn't see why it should not also refer to a singer. It was also comforting close to the word idiot. I'd written an instrumental piece that took this title, although it was little more than a series of squalls and clusters on the guitar and piano over a programmed bass line. I'd also written some music to perform at the W.B. Yeats Festival in Dublin that year, a rowdy setting of his poem "A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety". It was a song close to my heart.
The only other complete tunes that I thought suitable were an attempted collision between musical styles of The Rolling Stones and that of a minor Russian composer and a grim tale of men hiding in armed forces to evade responsibility to the teenage mothers that they had abandoned. In other words, absolutely pure pop music. The bare bones of these two tracks were laid down in a couple of takes, but the session came to an ugly halt with the attempt to record a half-finished piece called "Poisoned Letter". This barely focused rant about intolerance contained a pretty decent bass figure and number of good lines, but I could feel I was forcing the pace.
I had enlisted the help of Kevin Killen, who had engineered Spike and recorded and co-produced both Mighty Like A Rose and The Juliet Letters. The technical limitations of Pathway held no attraction for him, and once the session faltered we relocated to another North London venue: Church Studios, where we could attempt some more sophisticated recordings.
I continued to work under the Idiophone banner, laying down the instrumental parts of the title piece. My son, Matt, came in to play bass over a drum loop provided by Pete Thomas for another work-in-progress, entitled "Abandon Words". Although that song was actually about some of the more fashionable and idiotic aspects of self-censorship, the title accurately reflected my more drastic moods and intentions.
Although Pete Thomas and I had continued to work together since the apparent demise of The Attractions, my relationship with Steve Nieve and Bruce Thomas was pretty non- existent. In the intervening years, Steve had enjoyed a career as a television chat-show bandleader and contributed to a great number of recordings. Bruce Thomas had also worked occasionally as a session player and made a not entirely successful venture into the world of pulp fiction. After my attempt to reassemble the band for the recording of Mighty Like a Rose had ended in an unseemly legal squabble, I assumed that we had cut our last record together.
Having added the bass part to the guitar and drums performance of "Kinder Murder" before we left Pathway, I now started to overdub on the other backing track from that session: "20% Amnesia". This was a reference to the amount of the proposed tax bribe that had apparently swung the most recent U.K. election to keep the Tories in power. I used the large Church recording room as a bass echo chamber and also laid down a simple marimba line in the chorus. However, when we came to the piano part, I found it was quite beyond my capabilities. It was time to call in Steve Nieve.
I had composed a number of slow tempo songs that year but had put them to one side since most of my contributions to The Juliet Letters were ballads. I wanted to do something different. Now it was becoming obvious that I needed to reconsider this decision.
The mood at our first session together for a number of years was a little formal, but Steve played brilliantly. We cut good exploratory versions of "London's Brilliant Parade", "This is Hell", "Favourite Hour", and an early draft of "You tripped at every step". Most of the time the instrumentation consisted of just piano and drums, while I concentrated on singing. The takes featured on the second CD of this edition illustrate how quickly the arrangements started to develop.
Despite taking this more musical approach, I was still pushing for a much harsher sound, and Kevin Killen and I agreed that this was unsuited to his production style. My mood swings were also affecting the progress of the sessions, one minute I believed we were really making a record and the next I was in despair. I took the decision to live with all the material cut so far, while intending to write the balance of material needed for a full album.
I did not imagine that it would all happen quite so quickly when I purchased a second- hand sunburst Gibson 160E. Although this model would always be associated with John Lennon in my mind, people were now appearing on MTV balanced on the edge of a canyon or perched on some windswept mountain range while strumming the same model of guitar. I thought it was pretty safe to be seen playing one, as it was unlikely that I would be confused for anyone who might be photographed from a helicopter.
I began writing again using the Gibson, and in a single day I composed the outlines of "Rocking Horse Road", "Pony St.", "Clown Strike", "Still too soon to know", "13 Steps Lead Down", and "Just about glad". This was an unprecedented and slightly frightening burst of inspiration. To these I soon added "Sulky Girl" and "All the Rage", which adapted some of the lyrics from "Poisoned Letter". The discarded bass figure from that song became the foundation for another new tune, "My Science Fiction Twin". It was a satire about a man who does five things at once.
I called Nick Lowe and asked for his help. Not as a producer this time but as a bass player. We met in Pete Thomas' basement home studio, The Napoleon Rooms, and ran through all of the songs that I had written recently. Nick was great at threading a figure through a song like "Clown Strike", and we had "Pony St." and "Just about Glad" worked out in a couple of hours with the tapes rolling all the time (these takes can be heard on CD 2). However, when we looked at the ballads, Nick, who has always remained understated about his instrumental abilities, claimed that they simply contained "too many Norwegians" for his style of playing. In other words: too many damn chords.
I called in Mitchell Froom to co-produce the next sessions. He had played keyboards on both King of America and Spike and had joined Kevin Killen and me in producing Mighty Like A Rose. Now he arrived with his usual production partner, Tchad Blake. They favoured a quirkier sound created with arcane devices, lengths of metal pipe and a bizarre portable P.A. system that Tchad had dragged back from a trip to India, which he used to rebroadcast voices and instrumental sounds. They had also employed another bass player on their recent sessions for other artists. At their suggestion, I made the call to Bruce Thomas.
We had all the tracks with Nick Lowe on bass "in the can" before The Attractions assembled at Olympic Studios to attempt their first recording session in eight years. There was no doubting that Bruce's arrival gave us the right combination of musicians to rerecord some of the more complex songs. Though the atmosphere was cautious and respectful on the surface, the humour of these sessions was best captured by Bill Flanagan's Thurber-esque cartoon in which I was jokingly menaced by The Attractions wielding axes, swords, and a pair of large garden shears. Bill was the editor of Musician magazine at the time, and the tableaux was later re-created for a photo shoot, although I think the pen and ink version was actually closer to real life.
Putting aside any simmering grudges, The Attractions lineup made an excellent job of cutting "This is Hell", "London's Brilliant Parade", and "You tripped at every step" in a mere handful of takes. Two tracks that were later released as singles, "Sulky Girl" and "13 Steps Lead Down", were reminders that this could also be a pretty great rock and roll band.
When Brutal Youth was finally released, the record company made much of the return of The Attractions, and the album was tagged with that lame old cliché: "back to basics". These simplifications may have made for good ad copy and lazy journalism, but they were pretty inaccurate. Nick Lowe played bass on the majority of the tracks that were required to groove, and the two rawest cuts on the record, "Kinder Murder" and "20% Amnesia", dated from the first Pathway session when there had only been Pete Thomas and myself in the studio.
In time I came to regard the Idiophone/Brutal Youth sessions as a failure, simply because the little that was said about the album tended to focus on superficial appearances and the soap-opera mechanics of the recording, while totally ignoring the content.
So, what of the songs? Although so many of them had arrived in a rush--that is not to say that they were dashed off without any thought. I had filled many notebooks with snatches of lyrics that only took shape as the music revealed itself to me.
I had carried around fragments of the melody that opens "Pony St." for almost a year after it came to me during a stay in Italy. I had not even picked up a guitar or sat at the piano to work out any harmony. I was unsure whether it wouldn't be better suited to more experimental compositions that had made up my contributions to The Juliet Letters, but it ended up in a rock and roll song in which the daughter is the parent to the mother.
The Brutal Youth album contains at least four songs that could not have been written before the experience of working with the Brodsky Quartet. In fact, "Favourite Hour" was written in a deserted rehearsal room at Dartington Summer School where the Quartet and myself gave the second performance of The Juliet Letters just prior to taking the piece into the studio.
"London's Brilliant Parade" was another song that shared the musical ambition of The Juliet Letters. Lyrically, it was a more affectionate look at the city in which I was born than I could ever have managed when I was actually living there. I've never thought to use the term hometown, but there is a very personal route map in the final verse. Handing the song over for Steve Nieve to play meant that it could be realised beyond my extreme limitations at the piano. Adding the rhythm section brought it closer to the darker domestic ballads, "You tripped at every step" and "Still too soon to know".
"This is Hell" was an attempt to continue the fantasy afterlife theme of "God's Comic" from Spike and "Damnation's Cellar" from The Juliet Letters. Of the two versions contained in this edition I think I now favour the more spontaneous take from the Church Studios session. I hope the song justifies its existence with the notion that "in hell" you can hear Richard Rodgers' "My Favourite Things", but it is always performed by Julie Andrews and never by John Coltrane.
"Favourite Hour" was about the terrible anticipation of a dread event. Although Steve played it very grandly, with drum accompaniment, on the version heard on CD 2, I was determined to rerecord it with a live vocal and piano performance of my own in order to concentrate the attention totally on the melody. I believe it is among the very best songs that I have been fortunate enough to write. Whether it should have received a more expansive treatment is something that I will leave to the listener or for another performer to resolve.
The details in the other songs were collected during periods of travel. "13 Steps Lead Down" refers to that number being used to instill dread in those entering the Tomb of the Spanish Kings at El Escorial. Not that the song continues much with that theme--it was more for those who could not subscribe to the new fashion of sobriety.
I found the real "Rocking Horse Road" in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was one of those lovely suburban neighbourhoods that was, at once, utterly benign and filled with reminders of a claustrophobic life from which a career in music and emotional cowardice once offered an escape. "You tripped at every step" was a candid reminiscence of what occurs when that exit is not taken. "My Science Fiction Twin" was about a fantasy life that I was lucky to avoid.
As the album was mixed and assembled at Sound Factory Studios in Hollywood, it seemed that there was some sort of thread running through these songs. However, I could not pretend that I had planned this in advance. The preceding story of these sessions would make nonsense of that conceit.
The title, Brutal Youth, was suggested by a friend after he heard "Favourite Hour", musically, the gentlest song on the record. The phrase was extracted from the line: "Now, there's a tragic waste of brutal youth". The cover art, with its childhood snapshots, confirms that this title was intended humorously rather than with any sense of intimidation. The only song contained in this edition that is about youths that are brutal is "Life Shrinks". This was originally recorded for the soundtrack to the movie War of the Buttons but was removed from the final cut after a contractual dispute. It was later issued as a B-side.
The other songs contained on CD 2 are either the studio demos and experiments from the Napoleon Rooms, Pathway, and Church Studios or fuzzy 4-track home demos that were cut just after the songs were completed.
The record IS backward looking, but I do not mean that in a musical sense. I had spent the previous nine years exploring other ways to play songs, and in the 12 months prior to recording this album, I had learned how to write songs of a completely different shape and feeling. Now came the question of whether there was still a loud song worth singing.
So, if this record does look back, it is with affection and amusement to disastrous and bungled affairs of "Just about glad", "Clown Strike", and "My Science Fiction Twin" or with the regret and remorse of "You tripped at every step" and "Rocking Horse Road".
There are also outward looking songs longing for a vanished place and time in "London's Brilliant Parade" and "Favourite Hour" and those looking on with dread and loathing for the way things appear in "Kinder Murder" and "20% Amnesia".
I started out to make something violent and undone in the wake of the most disciplined work of my career. After several false starts, I managed to get from the incoherent insults of "Poisoned Letter" to "All the Rage", full of bravado and a sense of fallibility--
"So don't try to touch my heart
It's darker than you think
And don't try to read my mind
Because it's full of disappearing ink"
If this record ended up just a little closer to the truth than these things sometimes get, it was almost by accident. What do you want? This isn't confession. This is pop music. I found myself playing in a rock and roll band again. If this did not require forgiveness, then it did assume some small understanding of anger and when to let it go.
-Elvis Costello

[mcramahamasham]

ALL THIS USELESS BEAUTY

Record companies were being devoured like cold shrimp on a lukewarm buffet. The good people of Warner Brothers were disenchanted. The nervous people were hiding under their desks and trying not to get fired. With flawless business acumen, I saw this as the ideal time to suggest releasing of a double album.
I first proposed this collection under the title "A Case for Song", thinking this had the ring of an old Noel Coward revue about it. It was not originally conceived as an "Attractions" album. I wanted to make a songwriter’s compendium using any ensemble that the music dictated.
The record would feature songs like, "You Bowed Down" – written for Roger McGuinn and constructed like a bespoke garment – but it might also accommodate, "Punishing Kiss". This was written for Anne Ross to sing in the Robert Altman film "Short Cuts" and was now arranged for a string quartet with a small jazz ensemble added.
My way of thinking was being influenced by preparations for the 1995 Meltdown Festival at London’s South Bank Centre. I had been asked to direct the nine days of musical events in June of that year. The invited artists included Moondog, the Composer’s Ensemble, Marc Ribot, The Wooden Indians, June Tabor, Jeff Buckley and Gunther Schuller, conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
I got to work with many of the other guest musicians for the first time, singing something like sixty different songs in five of the concerts. During the last few years on many records have appeared that had their beginnings at this festival.
The McCartney/MacManus composition, "That Day is Done", was reprised on the Fairfield Four’s "I didn’t hear nobody pray" record. I appeared on "Individually Twisted" with Deborah Harry and the Jazz Passengers followed by a part in Roy Nathanson’s "Fire at Keaton’s Bar and Grill". I continued to perform in concert with the Brodsky Quartet and we recorded Kurt Weill’s "Lost in the Stars" for the "September Songs" film of his music with Hal Wilner. I also sang John Harle’s trio of settings from Shakespeare’s "Twelfth Night" for the record "Terror and Magnificence" and the Night Before Larry was Stretched" for Donal Lunny’s "Common Ground" album.
Fretwork would soon record my viol composition "Put Away Forbidden Playthings" with Michael Chance. It was included on the record "Sit Fast", a collection of pieces commissioned earlier in ’95 for the Henry Purcell Tercentenary. After my Meltdown set with Bill Frisell was given a limited edition release on Nonesuch, Michael McGlynn arranged and recorded the title song, "Deep Dead Blue" with his choral group, Anuna.
Even though I had played with Steve Nieve for eighteen years, on and off, by this point, we performed our first full-length concert together – with just piano, guitar and voice – at Meltdown. It was almost like living a double life and it was in these circumstances that we began to record "All this Useless Beauty". ---
This all seemed pretty distant as The Attractions and I hit the last chorus of "Complicated Shadows" on stage at the Beacon Theatre, New York City. We had our production team of Geoff Emerick and John Jacobs in the mobile recording truck, as we were performing our new arrangements in public for the first time and we wanted to catch anything worth keeping. Back in April ’95, I had taken a similar approach to an opening act slot on four Bob Dylan shows. I wasn’t billed and nobody was expecting me, so I only played unreleased tunes, including a very early draft of a song that I had just been asked to write with Burt Bacharach.
It was now August and we were about to enter the studio in Dublin. I had already changed my mind about the contents of the record several times. I know that "God Give me Strength" was among the titles that I recorded with the Attractions but no decent mix of it has come to light.
The heart of the record was certainly in the ballads. We played each of them at the slowest, most expressive tempo possible. For "Little Atoms" and "Distorted Angel", we constructed a rhythm loop to make the songs float a little above the beat. I believe that the elegant and restrained band performance of "Poor Fractured Atlas" is one of the very best Attractions recordings.
Arrangements were stripped down and more a more emphasis placed on the voice and the piano. This didn’t exactly help the feeling of group unity. From time to time there was a great burst of energy and we’d capture something like the berserk arrangement for "Almost Ideal Eyes". But when the studio takes of "Complicated Shadows" failed to completely capture the mood of the song, we edited into the live performance from the Beacon Theatre. As a fine singer once remarked: "…and now the end is near".
Then again, I didn’t want to pretend that I was still twenty-two. These words had a different point of view than those I’d written in the late 70’s. There were songs about vanity and the deluded manners of men – "Poor Fractured Atlas", "Why can’t a man stand alone?" and the song, "All this useless beauty". There were songs about betraying your principles, letting yourself down and being diminished – "Little Atoms", "You Bowed Down" and "Starting to Come to Me". None of these lyrics contained any anger toward the characters, only disappointment that they had settled for so little. I could just as easily have been talking to myself.
The songs, "All this useless beauty" and "I want to vanish", were both originally written for that great voice from English folk music, June Tabor. While the first song was actually delivered with more anger than on my version, June found all the black humour in "I want to vanish". Perhaps I reserved the more private meaning of the song for myself. The bleaker implication of the text was not something I’d expect anyone else to relish. The line, "I’m as certain as a lost dog pondering a signpost", pretty much states my frame of mind at the time of this recording.
There were songs of a lighter humour. "Distorted Angel" was about almost discovering Catholic guilt at a birthday party when you are eight years old. In a strange way, "It’s Time" was the sequel to "Tramp the dirt down". This is indicated by an absurd line in the last verse: "…but if you do have to leave me. Who will I have left to hate?"
As I read what I have described, it seems to have been a time that was incredibly serious and rather wretched. I should perhaps point out that while I was arguing with myself in this quietly demented fashion, I was also drinking very large quantities of alcohol. That’ll work for you every time if you really want to remain miserable.
By the time we took an autumnal break, so Geoff Emerick could go off to work on Paul McCartney’s latest record, I was ready to scrap the entire record. There had been no great enthusiasm for the scope and length of disc from W.B. and I felt that some of the songs had been played through gritted teeth by at least one member of the band. I had to think again.
During the time away from the album I recorded "My Dark Life" with Brian Eno for the album "Songs in the Key of X". The session lasted for a straight fourteen hours but the outcome was one of my very favourite tracks. I really admired Brian’s ruthless and creative use of the erase button.
So began an even more drastic editing process. I cut two numbers from the proposed album completely and started to re-work the order, placing the ballads at the front and centre. I had already almost entirely re-written the lyric of "The Other End of the Telescope", lying on the floor of studio while the band sat impatiently in the control room. This song was co-written with Aimee Mann and it seemed to suit her entirely. The tune, which was Aimee’s , was very lovely but I felt that the text needed to be more accusative before I could really make it my own. Now it would open the album.
Steve Nieve and I collaborated on a new arrangement of "I want to vanish", in which his piano was joined by the Brodsky Quartet and two clarinets. The new version would close the record.
Any further credit for the fact that this album was ever finished must go to Geoff Emerick and Jon Jacobs who focused the sound on all the strengths and flattered the weaknesses in the playing. They mixed the record splendidly.
This record exists in the distance between an ideal and the reality. I’ve read that it is simply a collection of songs that I wrote for other singers – usually with the implication that this was a bad or inferior thing. True, I had the voice of certain singers in mind when many of these songs were composed. However, compared to the original blueprint, the final album only contains only four previously recorded songs.
If it was in any way an exercise, then it was one in creeping up on yourself, in order to trick out a song that would have otherwise remained elusive. It was the idealised version of a performer that caused me to compose. The content of the songs – the words and the actual music were of my imagining and I had always intended to sing the songs myself at some stage.
The fan or admirer in many of us may imagine a different creative history for our favourite singers, actors and artists. What if Elvis Presley had lived to record "Brilliant Disguise" by Bruce Springsteen or Picasso had painted the Forth Bridge or Wynona Ryder had taken the part of the daughter in "Godfather III"? Or perhaps all these things are better the way they are.
In the end it doesn’t really matter that Johnny Cash never recorded "Complicated Shadows" or that Sam Moore couldn’t see himself singing "Why can’t a man stand alone?" It was enough to be thinking of them that I managed to write these songs and for that, I will always be grateful.
This is the first of my albums to be named after a song actually included on the disc. The title "All this useless beauty" was used in sarcastic acknowledgement of the likely fate of this record. I was not being entirely serious. Amelia Stein’s cover photo is of a lovely but tarnished mannequin. I recently heard that it had perished in a house fire. I cannot say that I found this news very surprising.

A footnote
A number of additional songs, mentioned in these notes, have been included on this release. "Almost Ideal Eyes" is an out-take that should probably have remained part of the album – if only for the bizarre guitar playing in the fade. This is followed by "My Dark Life" and the version of "That Day is Done" recorded in Nashville with the Fairfield Four.
"What do I do now?" is a solo recording of a song by Louise Wener, made in response to her group Sleeper’s participation in the "Four singles in one month" series (see "The other footnote").
The final song in this sequence is the last track that I recorded for W.B. After the release of this album it seemed time to leave the label. I negotiated my departure, despite being contracted for one more album. The agreement called for a compilation of my W.B. recordings. "Extreme Honey" escaped Burbank accompanied by a global promotional budget of an entire $1000 dollars. This is about as close as a major record company can legally get to putting a horse’s head in your bed. The sole virtue of the release was that it called for the making of a new track, "The Bridge I Burned". This was recorded with a group of musicians and technicians twenty years my junior, including my son Mat, who played bass on the track. The record originally included a four line quote from the Prince song "Pop Life". Permission has once again been refused for the inclusion of this take. Instead, those bars contain someone shouting through a megaphone. As song says, there is "a mocking bird in the twilight of infamy".

The other footnote
If I had wanted to simply make this an album of songs written for other artists, I might have included a number of the titles that you may now find on the second CD. Among these are a studio demo of "The Comedians", as it was re-written for Roy Orbison and a re-working of "Only Flame in Town", made with view to sending it to Aaron Neville. There is also the demo recording of "Why can’t a man stand alone?" which is in, what I imagined might be, Sam Moore’s key and the version of "You Bowed Down" made for Roger McGuinn. "Hidden Shame" is one of the two songs of mine that Johnny Cash DID record while the demo of "Complicated Shadows" is in the arrangement that he rejected.
"The World’s Great Optimist" is my very first draft of a song co-written with Aimee Mann that has only recently been officially released on her album "Bachelor No2". The previously unreleased, "The Days take care of everything" was also intended for Roy Orbison and yielded some of the lyrics that went into my re-written version of "The Other End of the Telescope".
Among the 4-track cassette home demos are my only recording of the McCartney/MacManus composition, "Mistress and Maid", the original ballad version of "It’s time" and an up-tempo take on "Distorted Angel". If they sound a little distorted – that is because they are.
When the commercial response to the album was less than thrilling, I attempted turn these circumstances into something more entertaining. Four singles from the record were released in one month, creating a weekly bulletin board about the album. The elegant sepia toned cover image was brutally "colourized" and new versions of the material were recorded by a group of invited artists. By far the most interesting of these was Tricky’s re-mix of "Distorted Angel" which closes the second CD.

[mcramahamasham]

Il SOGNO

Early in 2000, I received an invitation to attend a performance in Reggio Emilia of the Aterballeto production, “Paradiso” based on the writings of Dante. The intention was also to discuss my participation in their upcoming adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. In truth, I had little or no understanding of the world of dance. When asked by a very serious French publication, “Who is your favourite dancer?” I had replied honestly, “Cyd Charrise”.
However, I became fascinated by the grace and dynamism of a company as guided by their individual and imaginative choreographer, Mauro Bigonzetti. By the end of the evening, I had agreed to provide the musical score for “Il Sogno”.
I deliberately set aside modern methods involving computers, preferring a pencil and paper. The two hundred page score was completed in approximately ten weeks, the latter one hundred and seventy pages being written against the pressures of a deadline, directly into full score. Apart from the occasional advice of one of my composing or conducting colleagues, I worked without a collaborator. However, I must acknowledge all the patient and careful work of Allen Wilson, who prepared the printed material.
Rehearsals for the first performance were not completely without comic interludes; celesta players who disappeared without warning leaving dancers making unaccompanied entrances and a failure on the part of the composer to appreciate the difference between a jazz drummer and an orchestral percussionist being asked to play “time”.
Due to a breakdown of communication, I arrived to find a harpsichord in the orchestra but not a hammer dulcimer in sight. The orchestral management had assumed the request for a “cimbalom” was a misspelling of “cembalo”. Only days before the opening night, a Romanian traditional folk musician was located working in a restaurant in Rome. He didn’t read music but managed to memorize much of the intended part, although his presence in the orchestra pit almost triggered a rebellion in the viola section. I apologize for this addition to “viola player” folklore but it is the truth.
The premiere of the dance production took place at the Teatro Communale in Bologna on October 31st 2000. It was also staged at a number of other Italian houses. Following an creation of a “production only” recording by the Orchestre de Teatro Communale, Aterballeto toured the work using taped accompaniment in theatre and studio venues throughout Germany, France, Russia and at a solitary performance at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts.
Following the interest from Deutsche Grammophon in making a fully realized recording of the music, I began this adaptation to a concert work. I was very fortunate to be able to discuss the matter with Michael Tilson Thomas, who examined the score with me, bar by bar, asking many invaluable and challenging questions. Subsequently, I made a number of small additions and revisions to the piece.
The experience of hearing the music performed in Bologna lead me to approach the drummer, Peter Erskine to augment the orchestral percussion section for the recording. I also composed additional parts for the saxophonist, John Harle.
“Il Sogno” was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and these guest soloists, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, at Abbey Road Studios, London in April 2002.
-Elvis Costello