Monthly Archives: May 2022

40. The Seeds of Love, Tears for Fears, 1989

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In stark contrast to the last entry, I can tell you exactly where and when I bought this album (and make a stab at why, as well), and you may be sure I’m going to do exactly that.  It’s not, however, a nostalgic tale of the record shops of my youth (I was about to turn 27; I don’t think I considered it my youth at that point, but is sure feels like it from this vantage point).

Our period of real struggle, alluded to in the last couple of posts, came to an end when I finally secured a job working for the Italian confectionery giant, Ferrero.  The job initially was not to dissimilar to what I had been doing for Bookwise, but it felt like there might be more options for me in a company which had big plans to expand in the UK, and in any case, they were the only ones to say yes, and I really needed a job by September of 1989.

As I say, I can clearly remember buying this album, and I’m coming to that, but it was only an hour or so ago that I remembered all the logistics of that week.  Ferrero were based just outside Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire; I was still living in Perth, and had no car.  Once the offer had been made and accepted, they paid for a flight ticket for me from Edinburgh to Heathrow, but the whole ‘getting to Edinburgh without a car’ thing was down to me.

Fortunately, my friend Andrew was keen on me going hillwalking (mountain climbing, technically) with him, so I inveigled him into picking me up, climbing a couple of Munros (somewhere in Angus, I think) and then staying over at his fancy new Edinburgh flat before I set off on the bus to the airport at ridiculous o’clock on the Monday morning.

By the end of the week, I was trained in my new responsibilities, and with my new, temporary, car, set out to drive back to Perth.  It was Friday lunchtime, and the plan was just to do the journey in one go, but it only occurred to me about the time I hit the M1 at Watford that I had no music to play in the new car.  The radio would sustain me for a while, but I’d likely be driving for eight hours or more and reception wasn’t guaranteed, especially through the more remote patches where I’d probably be tired and in need of something to sing along to.

So, less than half an hour after setting off, I pulled in to Toddington services in search of music.

And snacks, I imagine.

There was no CD player in the car – it was a stopgap one before my actual car arrived – but it did, of course, have the facility to play tapes, so I headed for the cassette section of the shop.

Now, service stations in the 1980s weren’t dramatically different from the service stations of the 1950s, and the music selection was definitely aimed at an older demographic.  The assumption being, I suppose, that musical trendsetters like me would have planned ahead and bought all their cassettes at the local independent record shop before setting off.

Had I known about Strawberry Fields records in Rickmansworth, and been able to plan ahead, I would likely have done that, and almost certainly not bought this album.

Here I was, however, faced with a spinner full of Mantovani and James Last, with a smattering of recent releases down at the bottom, where they wouldn’t frighten the regulars.  I don’t remember what else was available, but I pulled The Seeds of Love out of the rack and stared at it for some time.  It was brand new – I’m almost certain that it had been released during the week I’d been learning how to fill out my expenses – but I had heard, and enjoyed, the single, and nothing else there grabbed me.

I also was probably budgeting furiously in my head, as I hadn’t been paid yet.  One cassette would have been my limit, and I plumped for this one.

Therefore, I am as certain as I have been about anything else in the first forty of these, that I bought Tears for Fears’ The Seeds of Love album from Toddington services on the M1 about 3pm in the afternoon of Friday, September 29th, 1989.

And, as I had nothing but the radio for company for the rest of the day, I probably listened to it seven or eight times on the way home.

Now, listening to new music in the car is far from ideal, and I was driving a late 1980s Ford Escort, hardly the last word in either road noise suppression or high fidelity sound reproduction.  Despite that, when I woke on the Saturday morning (I’m guessing around lunchtime, given the previous day), I went and fished it out of the car so I could listen to it properly – it made a mark on me that first day which has never quite faded.  To this day, I can’t listen to it just once; whenever I play it, I find myself flipping it back over and playing it again, and keeping it on the turntable for the rest of the week.  There’s something undefinable about it which makes me convinced I’m listening to one of the greatest albums of all time whenever I’m listening to it.

I can’t have it as background music, as I find it demands my attention every time.  It’s an album I have played hundreds of times, perhaps more than all but a handful of the others on this list, and I’ve never quite been able to understand why.  It’s not that Tears For Fears are or ever were my favourite band; I don’t own any other album of theirs (although I’m tempted to seek out the new one), and it’s not that it’s genre-defining for my favourite genre – in fact, I’m hard pushed to fit it in any genre.  In the end, it’s just there.  Maybe you had to be there; it’s a product of a specific time in my life, and resonates because of that, or maybe it’s something else I haven’t ever been able to figure out.

(Or maybe it’s something I kind of suspect, but I’m keeping under my hat until I listen to it again).

For years, all I had was that original tape copy, then I did buy it on CD around the time I was enjoying my long commutes to work (I’m sure we’ll be meeting that period in my life soon enough).  The one I own now, however, is surely the way it was intended to be seen and heard; a sumptuous vinyl copy in a shiny gatefold sleeve, with a properly old-fashioned looking Fontana label, and the lyrics and sleevenotes all big enough to be read comfortably.

I bought that here in Victoria a couple of years ago, and discovered to my delight that it still has the same effect on me – having played it once, I just couldn’t imagine listening to anything else all week.

As soon as the needle drops, I think my suspicions are going to be confirmed – even after more than thirty years, the thing I notice above all else is how well produced and mixed this is.  There were certain sounds and – for want of a better word – tropes we had come to expect form the technological advances of the 1980s, but you can’t hear any of them here – everything is in service of the song. It’s not flat electronics, neither is it ‘everything louder than everything else’; you can clearly hear all the elements and how they play against each other.

A rare nod here from me to Phil Collins, whose drumming is subtly understated for the majority of the song, and only breaks out when it’s appropriate.  No gated reverb, either, which is a bonus.

So, if it’s all in service of the song, and given that the first time I heard it I missed all these subtelties, what about the song?  Famously (in my head anyway) written off by the reviewer in Q as He’s Having Her Period, Woman in Chains is – of course – a delightful melody and a lyric you couldn’t (and still can’t) disagree with, and is saved from being somewhat patronising by the presence of Oleta Adams, whose pure and true voice gives it genuine resonance.

As does her captivating jazz piano at the start of Badman’s Song. A sprawling epic of a song which really shouldn’t work – who knows what it’s about – it swings from late-night jazz to full-throated gospel, propelled by the mesmerising drums of Manu Katche and Adams’ irresistible vocals, but never loses its grip on your attention over more than eight minutes of glorious music-making.

It’s in the instrumental break in the middle that you can really hear how the production works – the tempo drops, and there are random handclaps and noises off to contend with as the musicians draw breath before plunging back in, but it’s all consistent and controlled with everyone sure of their role.  Yet it sounds so loose and almost improvised at the same time.  I know it divided opinion at the time, but put me down firmly on the side of those who think it’s a work of genius.

As is the title track, and the single – the only song I’d heard before buying the album.  I don’t know that I made the connection explicitly at the time, but it’s clearly an affectionate and carefully constructed Beatles tribute – somewhere around I Am The Walrus in feel and ambition.  It’s also an absolutely glorious melody, with enough going on to keep someone like me coming back again and again to hear what else is going on.

The hairs on my arms stand up at the part where we are counted in to the ‘chorus..’ but instead get a trumpet solo.  That’s happened every single time I’ve heard it since 1989, and that must be in the hundreds by now.  It never gets old, never loses its power to render me speechless, and yet it’s just a pop song.

It’s a lot of other things, too, though.

Advice for the Young at Heart is calmer, and sounds more like 1980s Tears For Fears.  It relies less on the complex tapestry of instrumentation which has supported the first three songs, and instead is carried along on an easy groove which draws attention to the vocals and the words.

I’ve given the words little attention so far, and while there are some striking images and phrases in all of the songs, it’s also true that the words serve the sound and feel of the music rather than making their own point.  This song is no different – the ‘advice’ is mainly platitudes and truisms (‘soon we will be older’, anyone?), but they fit the feel of the song perfectly.  Not every album can be a call to arms or a philosophical treatise; sometimes they’re just perfect slices of pop music.

The second side starts with some treated trumpet sounds, and lopes into Standing on the Corner of the Third World, another title which does as much of the work as the lyrics themselves, which are vaguely anti-colonialist without really making any hard point about anything.  That doesn’t matter, though, as the song swells and fades in intriguing ways, with the impeccable bass of Pino Palladino catching the ear, and pulling the attention in all sorts of directions while the song floats off into the distance.

Swords and Knives begins, unusually for this album, in much the same idiom and feel as its predecessor.  Once the introductions have been made, however, it picks up the pace, and opens out from its simple acoustic opening into a fuller sound with a neat duetted vocal.  As more and more instrumentation joins in, the simple start is forgotten; guitars threaten to break out into a full distorted rock-out but pull back to allow the middle section some space to breathe before the ending folds back to the start, but with some restlessness still evident.  Something is brewing…

And what’s brewing is the faux-live explosion of Year of the Knife, which might just be my favourite song on here.  It’s a full-on rock anthem, but still shot through with all the elements which have caused the album to stand out so clearly from its peers.  You can still hear the Beatles influences, the gospel backing vocals, the full and carefully layered instrumentation while the band go all Springsteen up front.

And, of course, where an actual rock anthem would have a soaring guitar solo, there’s a cello sawing away mournfully, and a breakdown which allows for the inevitable explosion back into the verse, complete with over the top screaming and now here’s the guitar doing all the things that it was supposed to do in the solo.  There’s a rainstorm and a breathless singalong with the whole band at full throttle before it sticks the landing and falls away into the calm after the storm.

Final track Famous Last Words probably wasn’t designed as an epitaph, but works that way – Tears For Fears didn’t release any new music together for another ten years after this, totally failing to capitalise on the momentum this surely had given them.  For the nit-picky among you, there were Tears For Fears albums in that time, but they were essentially Roland Orzabal solo albums.

It’s sparsely arranged at first, but this album was never going to slope off quietly into the sunset, and when it finally opens up and allows everyone to express themselves, it feels like a genuine catharsis, only to rein everything back in and end on a quietly hopeful note.

And, yes, it’s done that thing again where the next thing I want to do is turn it over again and start from the top, so it’s worth examining why that is.

There is, I think, an element of that first time I heard it, when it was all I had in the car, and it would just autoreverse and start again – I didn’t see any reason not to allow it to do that, so the end of Famous Last Words is, in my mind, followed by the beginning of Woman in Chains anyway.  But more than that, I think this album, more than most on this list, and more than most I’ve heard, succeeds in creating an atmosphere; a place you want to linger in and savour, and it does that not only because of terrific songwriting and performances, but also by very careful and thought through production.  Everything, as someone else said, in its right place.  The feel of an album is not something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering, but it’s important here.

I didn’t know how to categorise it back then, and – as you probably noticed – I shied away from doing it now, but if pushed, I’d say it somehow took me back to my Prog roots.  Not in the full-on way of an early Yes album, but I think The Seeds of Love is a concept album of a different kind – the concept is in the sound, the way it’s made, the overall feel of the thing, and – just like the best of the early 1970s albums, it’s that which makes you want to flip it over and start again; to hear those songs again and again, and to feel the hairs on my arm stand up again, just as I knew they would, and have done since I first felt it while thrashing my way up the M1 back to Scotland that Friday afternoon.

I still don’t exactly know why, but I love this album easily as much as I love any of the other 59.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The Hurting and Songs From the Big Chair is the standard answer to this, I’d imagine.  As I say, I’ve never owned any of them, but I do know they contain some tremendous 1980s pop music.  I hear good things about the new one, The Tipping Point, too.

Compilations to consider?

I have no idea.  Let’s look.  I’d say the relatively recent Rule The World should hit the spot.

Live albums?

There’s one which was released in France only, but nothing substantial.  I can imagine a full multimedia extravaganza following this year’s tour, as seems to be the way of things now, so maybe hang on for that.

Anything else?

Well, you have seen Donnie Darko, haven’t you?

39. Kite, Kirsty MacColl, 1989

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This is an album I love so much that you’d expect I’d have some clear story about how it came into my life, and that I’d spend the next few paragraphs tying it to significant events.  Well, so would I.  But I don’t.  I know that I had a cassette of it, and by the early 1990s, it was a fixture in my series of company cars, but where it came from I have no idea.  I don’t even remember if the cassette was an original copy or one I’d taped from someone else’s copy.  The whole thing is a blank, and yet I just looked at the track listing, and every song popped into my head as clearly as if I’d last listened to it yesterday.

I do know when I was first aware of Kirsty MacColl, though.  There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears he’s Elvis was one of those bright, quirky early eighties pop singles which no-one makes any more, and while it may have marked MacColl out as only just this side of a novelty act, I firmly expected to hear much more from her.

Then, a couple of years later there was Tracey Ullman’s cover of They Don’t Know, which suggested there was much more to come, and then – nothing.

The story of Kirsty MacColl’s stop-start music career is remarkable.  No two of her albums were released on the same label, and even at the point at the end of the century, when she appeared to have finally carved out a niche of her own, she was dropped yet again by her record label.

And then, of course, she died, suddenly and shockingly, and a musician who would likely have succeeded in the modern world of home-created and self-distributed music was never able to explore the technology which might, at last, have given her the freedom to do what she wanted on her own terms.

I was going to suggest that she is overlooked somewhat these days, but of course, that reckons without the perennial Christmas favourite, Fairytale of New York.  I can only hope that as each new generation is exposed to her uniquely perfect reading of the song, they’re moved to explore her back catalogue, and discover for themselves what a talented and joyful songwriter she was, and what a magnificent voice she had.

And, eventually, I hope they land on Kite and discover just how brilliant she was in spite of all the things which life and the music business threw at her.  She’s perhaps the perfect example of the underappreciated genius, but she left an almost flawless body of work, every word and every note carefully crafted for maximum impact.  Her songs work as singalong background music, but also – and this is vanishingly rare – reward much closer listening.  There’s so much going on in every song, even (perhaps especially) the ones which appear to be jovial feasts of wordplay.

So, I don’t remember how Kite came in to my life, but I can’t imagine having ever lived without it.  I know that her promotion for this album consisted of a series of appearances on the French and Saunders comedy show, where she seemed to be having as much fun as everyone else, and also was subtly making a point about how it shouldn’t be remarkable to see a show made by women, featuring a female musical guest, and yet it felt radically different at the time, and I’m not convinced it wouldn’t feel the same today.

Incidentally, the whole point about having a musical guest in a comedy sketch show was that it allowed the show to be classified as ‘light entertainment’ rather than ‘comedy’, and there was more budget to be had for the former.  It’s also why The Young Ones had Motorhead on the show, among others.

Anyway, Kite.  Is it as good as I remember?  (spoiler alert: yes.  Yes, it is.)

The album kicks off with the infectious guitar lick of Innocence, a perfect example of how MacColl’s songs can be at once lyrically dense and musically effortless and joyful.  It’s far from a jolly song; a portrait of a powerful man, oblivious to his misanthropy (hard not to read it as a direct attack on any one of a dozen music business executives).  All delivered with an upbeat country-tinged inflection and a lyric which darts from Stevie Smith to The Beatles’ I am the Walrus without looking over its shoulder to see if we’re keeping up.

It's followed by Free World, two and a half minutes of bitter polemic aimed at the political environment of the late 1980s; sung in an urgent tumble of words, with lines tripping over each other in their need to be heard, all the while backed by a guitar which could have come off the latest U2 album (there’s a reason for that, naturally).  It’s elevating and uplifting, right up until the meaning of the words actually register.

It's pretty much the perfect opening two tracks to any album, and I can’t think of many artists whoul would have been able to sustain the quality over an entire album, but Kirsty made it look easy.

Next up is the much more openly mournful ‘Mother’s Ruin’, a perfect change of pace as Kirsty considers the lives of those women who live in the shadows, the London ‘alleyways’ not so different from the New York ones we met in the last post.  This, however, is a woman’s perspective on life – the despair and lack of prospects may be the same, but the feeling is different, the ever-present edge of fear and powerlessness is shot through the whole song.  Oh, and I can’t let it go without marvelling at the way the title is worked in twice, once as a noun phrase, once as a verb phrase.

See, that Linguistics degree was useful for something.

I’m going to pretty much skip over Days.  It’s not Kirsty’s fault; she clearly loves the song as much as everyone who isn’t me does, but it does nothing for me, I’m afraid – not the original by the Kinks, not the Elvis Costello version, not this one – although this one is less plodding than the others, and her voice elevates what I find a fairly mundane lyric.

Look, I know it’s a classic.  It’s just one of my blind spots, and is the only thing to take a slight shine off an otherwise perfect album.

Fortunately for me, No Victims comes along to remind me that it’s perfectly possible to cram more choruses in to a single song than Lou Reed manages in a whole album, and still make a powerful political point.  I think the joyful singalong quality of this song is not better known because of the subject matter – men, in particular, don’t like to be reminded of the woman’s viewpoint, especially when it crashes directly into Fifteen Minutes, in which Kirsty, accompanied by a pulsating acoustic guitar and some random castanets, returns to the subject of the opening song, with a smile and an ‘Oh, one more thing…’

It eventually can’t help but explode into a fully fleshed-out musical extravaganza, but the point has already been well made by then, and even the victim of this vitriol is surely singing along to his own evisceration.

This is one of the last albums (I haven’t checked; it might be the last one) on the list which behaves exactly as an old vinyl album used to.  Twenty minutes per side, and a definite break in the middle.  Here, the break comes just before Don’t Come the Cowboy with me, Sonny Jim! which runs the risk of retreading the Chip Shop themes, especially given its musical style.  It manages to avoid this by being a straightforward country song – never does this feel like pastiche or parody; Kirsty performs is absolutely straight, and delivers one of the great lost country songs – how this wasn’t a huge hit in the hands of a Dolly Parton or a Tammy Wynette is surely only down to those same, unflinching, woman’s view of the world lyrics, which would make it uncomfortable listening for about half of its intended audience.

Tread Lightly does that same trick of being an upbeat and bouncy song with a lyric which gives even the casual listener pause.  It has a way of running lines on which must have been a nightmare to plan the breathing around; it’s a songwriting trick I’m particularly fond of, this ability to fold lines around each other so that you are forced to re-evaluate what you’re thinking as a seemingly endless sentence develops on its own thoughts.  So few attempt it; even fewer can carry it off with seeming casual ease in a song you can cheerfully whistle along to.

Kirsty MacColl would, I imagine, have hated the celebrity-obsessed times we appear to live in now, but it would have given her plenty of material.  What Do Pretty Girls Do? might have a different answer in 2022 than it did in 1989, but the sentiment would still be similar; perhaps it’s a little cynical, looking at the fading of shallow beauty, but it’s a perfect portrait of someone we still recognise today.

Dancing in Limbo is a woozy dream of a song which uses the music to tell the story just as well as the words do; it’s an early indication of Kirsty’s interest in Latin American music; although it’s about a stalled life, it’s also a musical invocation of a siesta; the doubled voice lulls you to sleep off your slightly excessive lunch while you regret the choices you made, you don’t seem to have the strength to do anything about any of it.

The End of a Perfect Day is a breakup song, but better than that, it’s a Kirsty MacColl breakup song, so while she breaks your heart (and mentions in passing that she’d rather you didn’t get violent about it), you can’t help singing along.  If it sounds a little like a Smiths song, that would be the writing and playing of Johnny Marr.  Kirsty never lacked brilliant musical partners, and little gems like this song make me wish she’d spent more time exploring those possibilities as well as working on her own stuff.

Marr’s delicate guitar illuminates and elevates You & Me Baby as well – it’s much less Smiths-like, but it is part of the sound of the time, and is fascinating to me as an exercise in restricting the normal warm, wide palette of a Kirsty MacColl song.  This is almost minimalist in its approach, with almost no variation from the same few notes (she can’t help herself towards the end, where ‘intercept’ gets a little more interpretation than I suspect was in the original music); the effect of which is to illustrate the death of a love affair and the seemingly dreary prospects ahead.

It sounds like a flat way to end such a joyful album, but I think it serves its purpose well – Kite isn’t about a life or a time which requires an album to roar off into the sunset; Kirsty always knew exactly what she was doing In ordering songs on an album, and this muted ending reflects the slightly less than optimistic tone of the whole piece; the songs are bright and joyful, the words more realistic.

As I said earlier, Kirsty MacColl’s is a small body of work, and it’s impossible not to wish there had been so much more.  It is possible, however, ot take comfort in the knowledge that what we do have includes an uncompromisingly brilliant and clever album like Kite, and a set of songs which stands up today in a way that so few supposedly classic albums do.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

You know what I’m going to say.  There are only five of them in total (six if you count the repackaged version of her first), and you should own and love all of them.  Oh, go on then, Tropical Brainstorm.  It’s not like any of the others, but it’s sly and subversive in entirely new ways, and contains the ridiculously sensual Autumngirlsoup.

Compilations to consider?

Galore came out before Tropical Brainstorm, but is still a terrific summary of her work to that point. 

Live albums?

Kirsty famously suffered from terrible stage fright, so, no.

Anything else? There are a couple of British documentaries, one celebrating her life, and the other investigating her death.  Both are worthwhile, if you can find them.  I’ve read The One and Only by Karen O’Brien, and recommend that, too.

38. New York, Lou Reed, 1989

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I had this opening paragraph all planned out.  I was going to talk about the power of the compilation album, especially in this time in my life where I had relatively little disposable income, and no real idea what kind of music I liked anymore.  I was going to talk about one compilation album in particular, which I picked up on a whim one day so I’d have something new to listen to in the car, and then I was going to need a new paragraph to tell you all about what I found there.

The second paragraph would have talked about the fact that it was a double album – a double cassette, in fact.  I would probably have had a lengthy diversion about the two different types of double cassette box which existed, and how this one was large and thin, whereas others were fatter, like two standard cassette boxes back-to-back.

You have, however, probably figured out that my memory has let me down again.  The compilation album I was thinking of was called New Roots (sold as New Horizons, volumes 1 and 2 in some places), and it was a tremendous thing which introduced me to many new artists and bands, some of which we’ll be hearing from later in this list.  I looked it up, ready to build myself a new playlist so I could experience it all over again, when I was brought up short by the realisation that there was, in fact, no Lou Reed track on it.

(It does have a track by Davy Spillane on it, which makes it three weeks running he’s featured in this list, albeit tangentially)

I know for a fact that I first heard a track from New York on a compilation album; I know which track it was, and I know that there was a Grateful Dead track on the same compilation.  That’s not much to go on, but I think I know what was going on.  Around the same time as I was thrilling to the eclectic sounds on New Roots, there was another compilation going around,  and I must have heard that one – maybe I borrowed it from the library; maybe someone lent me a copy.  I’m not sure, but I now think that I was introduced to one of my favourite albums by Greenpeace.

If you were the kind of student I had been, your slow inculcation into the world of commerce and all that implies did not soften your political outlook.  When the French government sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, there wasn’t much nuance involved – it was an act of state-sponsored murder, and whatever you may have thought at the time, or think now, about Greenpeace, there was no doubt that supporting them was the right thing to do.

Whether borrowing a compilation from the library, taping it, and then going out and buying an album by one of the artists involved actually counts as support, I’ll leave for you to decide.

Had I remembered, I’d have researched the compilation harder; I now think it was called Rainbow Warriors, and did, indeed feature a Grateful Dead track (Throwing Stones, in case you were wondering).  It also was the album which introduced me to World Party (Bang! and Goodbye Jumbo both only just missed the cut for this list), made me take R.E.M. seriously, and has just reminded me that we all loved Hothouse Flowers for a few months there, didn’t we?

Oh, and way down at the end of the track list is the song which presumably caused my memory to be somewhat confused.  The delightful (go check it out) Wholly Humble Heart by Martin Stephenson and the Daintees features on both compilations, so perhaps I’m not quite as senile as I thought.

Anyway, Lou Reed.

I was, as I may have mentioned, a student in the early 1980s.  There was, in some areas, a suspicion that the really revolutionary music had all happened just when we were too young to appreciate it.  Prime evidence for this was the reverential way that everyone in the know talked about The Velvet Underground, and how we had essentially missed the boat.  You could listen to the albums, and to the ones which followed by John Cale and – especially – Lou Reed, but you’d never quite get it; you “weren’t there, man”

And we obediently listened, and agreed that, no, we didn’t get it.  Not properly.  There was also the fact that – particularly  the Lou Reed albums – it was all a bit intimidating; designed to keep out those who didn’t “get it”; those who hadn’t been there. 

It was all nonsense, of course – you get out of music what you bring to it - but it took me years, and the experience of being staggered by the brilliance of this album to really figure that out.  You really don’t have to have experienced the things which drove the artist to write the songs in order to understand or enjoy them; in fact, if the songwriting is as strong as it is on New York, the experience is entirely heightened by presenting a fully fleshed out world of which you, the listener, knows nothing.

Listening to New York was, and still is, like watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary ( a black and white documentary, of course) about life in the grimier parts of the city in the late 1980s.  All human life is there, and Reed shines an unflinching spotlight on all of it.  It’s an album for which the adjective ‘coruscating’ might have been coined; more than a decade after the righteous (or otherwise) bile and anger of punk, this is the album which actually hits all the marks everyone was aiming for.  It’s uncomfortable and uncompromising, yet unexpectedly tender and sweet in places, and – even in its grimmer moments – laugh-out-loud funny.

It's an hour of stripped-back rock music, intended to be listened to in one sitting (as Reed puts it in the liner notes “like a novel”), and while it’s a million miles from the Prog flights of fancy I grew up with, it’s one of the most effective and hard-hitting concept albums ever recorded.  The vocals are typically Lou Reed – he mostly intones rather than sings – the music is unpretentious and direct, and the effect is like no other album on this list.

I’ve owned this album in several formats over the years, and I’m now going to actively seek out the vinyl version, because – unlike many albums recorded in the newly coined digital age, I can only imagine how much the crackle and hiss of vinyl will bring to the feel of this enterprise.

Enough talk – let’s crack open the novel, or put on the documentary, and sing along with Uncle Lou, shall we?

Romeo had Juliette is bursting with allusions; it references both the Shakespearean original and West Side Story, but here’s Christopher Columbus, lost on his way to the New World, and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  And that’s just the first track.  It ends with the sense that these lives we’ve glimpsed are moving on without us, as the camera pans to…

… the world of Walk on the Wild Side, now lacking even the tacky 1970s glamour, as Halloween Parade describes how the AIDS pandemic tore through the communities which Reed used to celebrate.   The final line, “See you next year…” sounds more like a desperate hope than genuine expectation, then the ragged chorus stutters to a halt and the camera moves on.

Round the corner from the parade is the Dirty Blvd. Pedro is deftly sketched out in a few lines, and we can see him clearly – desperate and downtrodden.  If you’ve seen The Wire, you know exactly what Lou’s talking about.  There’s a verse about the “Statue of Bigotry” which – like so many on this album – is as relevant today as when it was written, if not more so.  What happened to the American dream?  Well, here it is: not even the harmonising voices at the end can disguise the rotten core of the Big Apple.

It's not a hopeful album, in case you were wondering.  Endless Cycle rubs our noses in it – it’s not, as it might appear – judgmental; it simply lays out the facts, that these lives have an inevitability to them, which the devastating final line simply underscores.  Again, the song ends with a chorus of voices, perhaps trying to smooth the edges, before just giving up.

There is no Time is a straight-up punk anthem; a call to action.  We’ve seen what life is like, what are we prepared to do about it? There’s nothing quiet about it, except its desperation; the underlying knowledge that however stirring the words, there’s no-one following.  It eventually collapses under the weight of its own despair, but it’s out there – in the right hands, it could still be a powerful driver.  And in the wrong hands, something much worse.  There are no easy answers.

Now the lens opens up, and Lou starts to look at the rest of the world.  Last Great American Whale is the track which drew me in; this was the one I heard on that compilation, and which prompted me to find out what the rest of the album was like.  It is also a call to arms – the allegory of the last whale serving to point up the racism of the American dream.  I assume it was on the Greenpeace album because it is ostensibly about a whale, but it’s actually about so much more; as so often in this collection, the final verse distills the argument down to a vivid image; in this case man’s inhumanity to man is reflected in man’s indifference to the planet.  And – again – the final line is just perfect.

We’re reaching the end of side 1, and it’s time to lighten the mood a little.  Lou Reed was not an easy man, even in his public persona.  He was prickly and uncomfortable, and downright unpleasant by all accounts, but he was capable of whimsy and a light touch, as evidenced on Beginning of a Great Adventure.  It’s something of a love song, a paean to love and family, although – inevitably – laced through with cynicism and is performed with a permanently raised eyebrow.  I love the list of potential baby names, which starts with references – I assume – to people Reed knew, but ends with “Dummy, Star and The Glob”

Which, come to think of it, may have also been people he knew.

As you smile along to the fun of it all, you do also have to see it in the context of the grimy cynicism of the rest of the album – he’s not entirely convinced of the viability of this vision of family life, but as a release valve at the midpoint of the album, it serves its purpose admirably.

Side two is right back on track, however.  In fact, it’s back on the bus, as Busload of Faith starts with “You can’t depend on your family”, then dives right into the hypocrisy of the religious right.  It’s a delicately balanced lyric, which manages to clearly and succinctly make its point without appearing mealy-mouthed about how ‘faith’ means something different to each of us.  It doesn’t dismiss the idea of faith; in fact, it relies on it to make its point.

From social observation, the album now pivots into satire, as Lou takes a cold, hard look and what seemed at the time to be the absurd nature of American politics.  Sick of You manages to name-check Trump and Rudy Giuliani; God only knows what Lou Reed would have made of the last few years, but I’d have loved to hear an update to this song, because the wild satire sounds like cold social commentary at this point.

Hold On moves the satirical lens to point at the New York of the first few songs, and pulls pretty much every theme of the album so far together; the satire falls away to reveal the fact that all the stories so far have been firmly based in reality. Environmental degradation and the grim street life come together in a cry not so much of despair but of realization; there’s nothing to be done; you’d better hold on.

Good Evening Mr. Waldheim feels at first as if the satire is back, but there are no punches pulled here, as Reed calls out the Austrian chancellor, the Pope and Jesse Jackson.  It’s the most bitter and directly political song on here, and while it sweeps you along with its vitriol and catchy rhythm, it perhaps hasn’t aged as well as everything else here – some of these songs have been spookily accurate in their vision of the future, but this one is anchored in the past, and loses some of its edge to a modern listener.

Xmas in February is the bleakest song in a pretty dark collection of songs, but it’s also perhaps the most powerful.  There were a number of Vietnam war reflections released during the 1980s, both in film and song, and this one is probably one of the least well known, but it’s one of the most powerful.  As you might expect by now, it’s completely clear-eyed and brutally honest, and manages to deliver its message in powerful poetry, delivered in an understated, almost unassuming manner which catches you off guard, and stands in complete contrast to the next track.

Strawman is a vitriolic (there’s that word again) railing against the cult of celebrity.  All the points it raises are more valid today than they were when it was recorded.  In fact, Lou, you have no idea.  It’s only been thirty years, but this over-the-top rant now sounds like the mildest of criticism in the current age of celebrity worship.  I would have loved to hear this song updated for 2022…

New York was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the death of Lou Reed’s friend and mentor, Andy Warhol.  He reunited with John Cale to record Songs for Drella as a more fulsome tribute and reaction, but Dime Store Mystery stands as this album’s acknowledgement of what had happened.  It starts as a meditation on the last temptation of Christ (and no, I don’t believe he conflates Warhol with Christ; its quite clear to me that these are two separate reflections).  It ends with a quiet reflection on the last moments of a man taken before his time (Reed was quite bitter about how his friend died, and maintained that the doctors could and should have done more).  The city is woven through this song, like all the others, and it serves as a kind of memorial for a place as well as for a life, fading out in the acceptance of what fate has wrought.

New York is a truly epic album, albeit one achieved with minimal invention and ornamentation.  It never strays beyond the basic recipe of guitar, bass and drums (save a little violin right at the end), and the music stands as a platform for the words, which are as important here as any set of lyrics have ever been on any album.  I may not have been the right age to appreciate Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground when they were revolutionaries, but I was exactly the right age to appreciate this complex, mature, political album when it came along, and I think I got the better deal, as I’m convinced that this is Reed’s best, most personal, and most impactful album.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, sure.  Start where everyone starts, with Transformer and Berlin, but there’s a lot to explore, particularly in the later albums, when he was perhaps less concerned with image and more concerned with just saying what he wanted to say.  He’s not easy to like, but there’s a lot to admire.

And, no, there’s no reason to listen to Metal Machine Music, however much he liked to pretend there was.

Compilations to consider?

I’ve not explored too much, but I can’t help noticing that The Essential Lou Reed contains only one track from New York, and is therefore liable for prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act (assuming that’s still a thing).

Live albums?

There are many, including Velvet Underground ones, but I’m going to recommend the Perfect Night collection, because it’s a great mix of eras.  No Walk on the Wild Side, though.

Anything else?

Well, there’s The Velvet Underground.  And numerous books, none of which I’m qualified to recommend.  Let me know if there’s one I should read, though, because Lou Reed’s is a fascinating story.

37. North and South, Gerry Rafferty, 1988

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Yeah, not on Spotify...

Some albums are on this list because they play a big part in my musical upbringing, but this one is here because it marks a transition.  Actually, thinking about it, it marks more than one transition.

As I suggested in the last post, the last year of the 1980s is not one I look back on with any kind of fondness.  Zoë caught a flu which turned into a persistent illness which lasted more than five years, and – not long after we had moved to Perth and taken on our expensive mortgage – Bookwise ceased to exist, leaving us with essentially no income.

I had been with Bookwise for four years, and there was a reasonable redundancy payment, but it was something of a sobering few months, as we figured out just how we were going to move forward from this.

I spent the summer of 1989 alternately job hunting and watching Australia thrash England in the Ashes.  I remember it being a long, hot summer, but I don’t know for sure if that’s true; it was certainly long, as I slogged through any number of interviews for jobs I had no enthusiasm for, assuming that the right thing would eventually come along.

This was still the era of hand-crafted presentations, and I spent hours painstakingly working with Letraset to make up a set of slides I would show to prospective employers, but the pack of Letraset letters were just about the only non-essential purchases I was making at the time.  There certainly was no room for buying music to play on our newly (and perhaps, with hindsight, rashly) acquired CD player, although the stream of LPs borrowed from the library morphed into a stream of CDs borrowed from the library, with the ability to record those to tape in something approaching high fidelity an added bonus.

I must have borrowed this album just before the income stopped coming in, as I know I recorded it to tape.  I know that, because it was my constant companion on my round of job interviews – I remember listening to it in hotel car parks all over Scotland waiting for my turn to go in and explain why I wanted to come and work for a company I’d never heard of selling watches, alcohol (I had an interview with whoever owned Guinness at the time, just as all the scandals surrounding Ernest Saunders and the share price fixing was going to trial), or fasteners and pins – that last one was in a hotel at Glasgow airport, but I couldn’t tell you anything more about it at all.

I like to think I persevered with calm determination, but the truth was that I was becoming a tiny bit desperate as summer shaded into autumn, and did wonder if perhaps I should be looking further afield than I had so far, when I happened upon the interview which changed everything.

I honestly hadn’t heard of Ferrero beyond a vague awareness of those chocolates with the strange advertising campaign.  I had to do some research before meeting them, and was surprised to piece together from the pages of The Grocer that they were responsible for several well-known brands, and were looking to establish themselves in the UK, having spent the previous 20 years or so being represented by brokers.

I’m not sure if I put it all together in my slightly frantic state, but given how the next sixteen years turned out, perhaps something had chimed with me – this was a small company looking to grow bigger, and perhaps this would mean opportunities for someone who hadn’t quite figured out what he was going to do by way of a career, but was fairly sure there had to be more to it than what he’d seen so far.

The first interview was in a hotel on the Queensferry Road in Edinburgh – it seems to be a Holiday Inn now, but it was something else back then.  Relatively easy to get to compared to some of the ones I’d been to, and I remember sitting in that car park, having driven down from Perth with a feeling that this one was going to be the one.  On the tape player in Zoë’s car – my lovely company Ford Orion went along with the Bookwise job – I listened to North and South and hummed along to an album I’d got to know well, waiting for my chance to prove I had what it takes to get ahead in the world of chocolate.

Something clicked that day, and the following week I was flown down to Rickmansworth – a place I’d get to know extremely well over the next few years – to pick up my new, temporary, company car and drive back up to Perth, re-employed and with something of a new purpose in life.

There’s another album coming up which reminds me more strongly of those first few weeks working for the company which defined the next part of my life, but this one will forever be my ‘interview album’, the one I turned to for its calming influence before I went in to face anther grilling about how passionately I wanted to sell things for people I knew nothing about.  I know I bought an actual CD copy as soon as I had some income again, but it didn’t get played all that much, perhaps because the associations weren’t all that comforting, and I can’t tell you how long it is since I listened to it all the way through, but I’m looking forward to it.

It's the only Gerry Rafferty album I ever owned, although I think I had a taped copy of City to City at one time.  I have no idea why I picked this one up in the library; I don’t remember hearing a single from it on the radio, and no contemporary review sticks in my mind.  Perhaps there was an article in Q one month which piqued my interest; perhaps there was nothing else on offer in Perth library; perhaps I just felt I should be listening to more music by Scottish artists – who knows?

What I do know is that I liked it a lot more than its reputation suggests is reasonable, and that I don’t remember why.  I do now, looking at the cover, enjoy that subtle Union Jack reference, and the fact that the title, and some of the songs seem to hint at a dichotomy between Scotland and England, a sense that perhaps there were other parts of the country to explore.  Perhaps it subconsciously influenced the next steps in our lives, but equally, I’m probably ascribing something to it in hindsight which wasn’t there at the time.

I think, listening to the title track now, that any review of it surely contained the word ‘sophisticated’.  This is grown-up pop music, well-produced with the many instruments each allocated a place, and there are a great many of them.  Every Gerry Rafferty track after Baker Street seemingly had to feature a saxophone, but there are violins, brass and uilleann pipes in here too.  I have no idea what exactly it’s supposed to be about – why the isolated reference to the Rock Island Line, for example, but it’s a warm bath of nostalgia, and I’m happy to let that slide by.

Moonlight and Gold has a string section in its introduction, or more likely a synthesised equivalent – I don’t have sleeve notes to hand to find out – and is otherwise a perfectly pleasant, laid-back love song.  I can already tell that there won’t be a lot to say about some of these songs.  The feel of them, the melody, and even some of the words, come back to me as I listen, but not much more – I’m not stirred by the music, just drifting along pleasantly here.

Perhaps this is the first time I can make the point that musicians brought up on the 40-minute album in the 1970s didn’t seem to have any clear idea what to do with the extra 20 minutes or so expected of them in the CD age.  Both the first two tracks here are over six minutes long for no particular reason I can fathom – I don’t think they would lose much by being cut in half, and I’d contend that it took several more years before anyone really got to grips with how CDs worked.

The next song, Tired of Talking has a bit more bite to it; it’s more upbeat and seems to be going somewhere.  Unfortunately, the place it’s going probably isn’t worth exploring, and boils down to “oh, do shut up”.  But it’s more fun than the first two, and gives me hope that there will be more variety here than I remember.

Maybe not, though.  Hearts Run Dry is a perfectly serviceable, slow, breakup song during which the instruments try their best to get old Gerry to pick up the pace, but he firmly resists and drifts along, wallowing in his melancholy for another whole six minutes.

I should point out that the playing on the album is uniformly excellent – everyone is giving their best, and there are some stellar names like Pete Zorn and Davy Spillane (and, I note now Ian, later Jennifer, Maidman from the Penguin Café Orchestra) on here, but the songs struggle at times to live up to the quality of the playing.

Actually, that’s not fair – the songs are perfectly fine, just too darn long.

For example, the extended introduction to A Dangerous Age serves to jumpstart it, and it rocks along splendidly (at least for some definition of ‘rocks along’), a chorusless road song, and then it keeps doing it just past the point where it stops being interesting instead of coming to some kind of climax, it just trundles on into the sunset via two pretty similar instrumental breaks where one would have done the job just as well.

Halfway, and I’m still hoping I can find just what it was that I enjoyed so much all those years ago.  Not heard it yet, though.

Shipyard Town does the thing which would serve Deacon Blue so well over the next few years; that misty-eyed lyricism tied to a jaunty melody.  Deacon Blue, however, had the knack of tying songs like this to a memorable chorus, but just as this song girds up its loins for some kind of giant singalong, it drops into a bridge to nowhere, another instrumental middle eight and then back we go to the beginning.

It's actually a lot of fun, this song (although I’m slowly understanding that this whole album is about the breakup of Gerry’s marriage); I just wish it would kick on every time it threatens to.

OK, so if it’s a breakup album, there’s going to be the deeply mournful song where the singer finally comes to terms with what’s happening, isn’t there?  And if the rest of this album is anything to go by, it’s going to be nearly seven minutes long, never quite get going, and feature some delightful atmospheric playing.

It’s called Winter’s Come, because of course it is.

And then… and then Rafferty manages to throw off the blanket of fog, crank up the tempo and while assuring us that Nothing Ever Happens Down Here gives us hope that something is happening somewhere.  It’s a positive riot of a song compared to everything which has come before.  Maybe this was the track I was listening to before that Ferrero interview….

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that it’s the one track which clocks in at under four minutes.

But it doesn’t last.  Next up, On a Night Like This is another six minutes of mid-tempo reflection which does at least have a vaguely Latin beat to lighten the mood.

Dinner party music, that’s what it is.  Inoffensive and perfectly pleasant.  There’s nothing at all here you can object to or will make your guests uncomfortable.  I genuinely have no idea why I loved it so much at the time.  No doubt you had to be there.

There’s one last song, and it’s set to a cod-reggae beat for some reason.  Unselfish Love, like all of the songs on here, is perfectly pleasant, but at least it has something approximating a chorus.  It also seems to suggest a way froward from the mournful wallowing the previous hour has been indulging in, and for that we should be grateful.

Overall, I’m really glad to have been reacquainted with this album, as it’s allowed me to think about that strange, uncertain period in my life, but I’m afraid I won’t be rushing to replace the CD copy I sold a few years back.

Yes, I’ve sold my entire record collection more than once.  We’ll get to that, I think.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, you’d have to say City to City, wouldn’t you?

Compilations to consider?

I’ve taken a look, and I think one called The Best of Gerry Rafferty might be your best bet.  Doesn’t have any of these tracks on it, though.

Live albums?

Nope.

Anything else?

There’s a biography called Stuck in the Middle with Gerry Rafferty, and I imagine it’s worth a read, although I can’t promise that.

36. Spike, Elvis Costello, 1987

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You might be wondering about Coal Train Robberies. It's not on my vinyl version...

If you’ve been following, you might know how this goes – this is neither objectively the best Elvis Costello album, nor is it my favourite (although it’s closer than you might think), but it’s the one I picked unhesitatingly when I was compiling the list, and thought to myself “there has to be an Elvis Costello album on there”.

The reason for picking Spike ahead of so many others goes to the heart of why I’m doing this.  This exercise, as I’ve said all along, is mainly for my own entertainment, and one of the most enjoyable parts of this whole thing has been focusing in on particular parts of my life and illustrating those with the music I was entranced by at the time.

There’s a run of albums coming up which cover a pivotal part of my life; the years where I – we – dealt with adversity and unforeseen changes.  At the end of that process, we’ll be living in a different country to the one we grew up in, and I’ll have something which feels much more like a career than the one I started out with.

To get there, however, we had to go through the early stages of proper adult life – buying a place to live rather than renting; taking decisions about where to live, and which of our jobs should take priority in that decision, and once we’d gone through the process of moving from one side of Inverness to another, then agreeing that my job opportunity looked like something solid and uprooting ourselves again to go and live in Perth, making the biggest change of all.

I’m talking, of course, about joining another library which had records you could borrow.  The library in Inverness was fine, but the selection of albums was a little limited (I do, as we’ll see, owe my enduring love of the Penguin Café Orchestra to Inverness library, but little else).  The library in Perth was housed in an imposing Victorian sandstone building, and had a much bigger selection of books and records than any of the ones I’d been a member of up to now.

Although we were newly-minted homeowners, with a cripplingly expensive mortgage to show for it, and had two incomes, we weren’t exactly rolling in disposable income just yet (I feel sure that day will come any time soon…).  Therefore, the library took the place of bookshops and record shops in my regular Saturday morning trips into town, and my collection of poorly recorded cassette tapes grew and grew.

Having a library with an extensive back catalogue did, however, allow me to explore some of the artists who I previously loved mainly for their singles.  My abiding love of Joe Jackson (qv) dates from this time, and it was only now, in 1989 or so, that I properly started to get to know my generation’s Elvis.

I’d been aware of him, of course, from the first time I saw him on TV (memory insists it was a performance of Alison, research suggests it was much more likely Red Shoes, neither of which charted, but both of which stuck in my head).  The thing about Elvis Costello, of course, was that he looked like someone you’d meet on the street.  The pop stars of the first half of the 1970s were gaudy, polished stars; people you might catch a glimpse of from afar.  Elvis Costello and everyone around him in that strangely undefined ‘new wave’ thing which wasn’t so much a musical movement as an attitude – they looked like you and me, or at least our older brothers.  They probably had day jobs in banks and accountancy firms, and they wrote and sang songs like the ones we would have written, if we had a tenth of their talent.

I have always been – this whole project will pretty much attest to it – a sucker for a song which tells a story, and pretty much every Costello single I heard did exactly that, with wit, invention and wordplay and a singing voice which cut through the static of medium wave directly to the centre of my brain.  You would never mistake an Elvis Costello song for someone else, and you wouldn’t hear lyrics like that from anyone else.

It turned out, as I slowly got to know the albums, that he didn’t just save the songwriting tricks for the singles; every album I heard was packed full of acid wit, catchy hooks and an attitude which jumped off the vinyl and challenged you to see things his way.  Even the broken-hearted love songs were deep, dark, and sinister.

One evening, during rehearsals for Hamlet (also qv, somewhere around the Pink Floyd period), a bunch of us were sitting on the back stairs at the Children’s Theatre, passing around and admiring someone’s copy of Get Happy!!. If you hadn’t been brought up – as I hadn’t – on early Beatles albums, you would have been – as I was – astounded by the look of the thing.  I pull out my own copy now, and see exactly what I saw then – an extraordinary number of tracks crammed on to each side.  The artwork – not recreated on my Canadian copy, sadly – was pre-distressed; it looked as if it had been well-used for decades, despite having been released the week before.

I loved the idea of Get Happy!! and I loved the singles.  Then I heard New Amsterdam and I was a fan for life.  Note that this was after Watching the Detectives, Oliver’s Army, I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down,  and so on – the Costello wordplay wasn’t new to me, but New Amsterdam was on another level somehow.  It contains so many puns – some of them incredibly obscure, likely only intelligible to the author – in such a short track that it left me breathless in admiration and wonder.

So, here I am in Perth library one chilly (it’s Scotland; it probably was chilly) Saturday morning, and here’s a brand new copy of a brand new Elvis Costello album.  I had no idea what to expect – the last album, Blood and Chocolate, had been a dark, tumultuous thing featuring a couple of my favourite Costello songs, but which I hadn’t entirely got on with, but I was determined to listen to this, because of Paul McCartney.

I’d been reading about the Costello McCartney partnership in my new favourite magazine. Q magazine had taken the place of the weekly music press for those of us a little older and wiser (well, I liked to think so).  It was more permanent than the old inkies – my collection grew to the point where it was in danger of killing someone if it fell on them – and it had all kinds of in-depth information, analysis and nonsense about all those artists who were making the transition to CD (again, I’m coming to that).  I read about the collaboration, and the idea of this spiky wordsmith teaming up with half of the greatest songwriting team of all time was – well, it was intriguing.  There would be inevitable comparisons with John Lennon, but I waned to see if this partnership would work on its own.

So, I borrowed the album, then the next weekend went out and bought my own copy.  I’ve owned it in some form or other ever since – I still have (for some meaning of the word ‘have’) my digital copy which was one of the first things I bought on iTunes when it started to be a thing, but I’m going to listen to it now on my vinyl copy, and I’ll be transported back to Perth, and that brief time in our lives when everything seemed to be trucking along nicely.

You’ll have to wait a week for what happened next, but for now, let’s see if I can figure out just why this is the EC album I would save from a fire above all others…

The first thing you notice is that the album is credited to just ‘Elvis Costello’.  No Attractions, or indeed anyone else.  Instead, there’s an all-star cast scattered throughout – the fist track guest list is led off by Roger McGuinn and Paul McCartney, for example – and while you might cavil that this takes some of the focus away from the songs, I’m going to respectfully disagree.

Opening tack …This Town…  is atmospheric and mysterious, a film noir of a lyric sung over a slightly eccentric beat.  Underpinning the orchestra of instruments is – of course – the liquid bassline of that bloke who used to play the bass in the Beatles – it plays with the rhythm and seems to have a space all of its own to bounce around, even if you’re listening hard to the words to figure out who all those people are, you can’t help noticing this bass melody poking its head up every now and then.

Let Him Dangle is Costello at his angry, vitriolic best.  He’s never shied away from letting people know what he thinks about things, and this is a succinct true story full of devastating detail (the hangman shaking the condemned man’s hand to calculate his weight) which leaves you in no doubt about the songwriter’s opinion that miscarriages of justice in a country with the death penalty kills people who don’t deserve to die.  And the guitar solo is perhaps only behind I Want You in the Costello ‘angry instumental’ stakes.

Then we’re flipped into a soulful piano ballad – Deep Dark Truthful Mirror begins with piano and voice alone, and is illuminated by a horn ensemble credited as the ‘Dirty Dozen Brass Band’.  As with the best albums, it sounds like it shouldn’t work, this surrealist poem set to wheezing New Orleans brass, but it fits perfectly into this set of songs.

Next up is the first of the McCartney collaborations, which was a huge hit on this side of the Atlantic, and is another of those songs which pop up in grocery stores every now and then.  Just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it doesn’t have me singing along every time.  If there was ever a hope that this collaboration would turn out a song which would have worked for the Beatles, this is it.  It’s still an Elvis Costello song, but if you squint a little, you can hear something there in its bounce and swagger which reminds you of McCartney’s earlier work.  It’s joyful and fun, which is not something you can often say about a song about someone with dementia.

I imagine that God’s Comic still divides opinion.  If – like me – you are a fan of comic songs in general, and DPA McManus’ wordplay in particular, then this is one of the highlights of the album; a delightful, woozy take on the afterlife and God’s plan seen through the eyes of a whisky priest with a cynical eye.  It’s a story, just as the others on here are, but I’m aware that not everyone finds as much fun and fulfilment in this kind of thing as I do.

If you’ve skipped over the last track, you should stick around for the caustic funk stylings of Chewing Gum – it’s perhaps emblematic of why this album isn’t better loved or better known.  It’s the sixth track, featuring the sixth different musical style, and while some might find that distracting, I love the way the guitar never manages to harmonise with anything else going on but spends the whole song trying to pull it all out of shape while the vocals – without moving out of the standard Costello range – slither between the sounds in the only way anyone could possibly sing this.

The 1980s feel like a distant memory sometimes, it can be hard to remember just how strange and dislocating it felt to be governed by someone – a party, a system – whose contempt for those who didn’t fit the plan was so complete.  It was hard at the time, knowing that what was happening was wrong, was deliberately unfair and cruel, when I wasn’t suffering from it; may even have been benefiting from the economic havoc being wreaked (but ask me about the interest rate on that mortgage, and about being one of those hand-picked to pay the Poll Tax as part of what seemed to be an experiment to see how much pain a government could cause its people before something snapped).  Elvis Costello knew, though.  What was it like to be subjected to the Thatcher Revolution?  Tramp the Dirt Down, sung as an Irish lament, tells you all you need to know.

Stalin Malone, the first track on side 2, is a rare, possibly unique beast – an instrumental with lyrics.  The words were printed on the outer sleeve, but presumably couldn’t be made to fit the music, which is back in the New Orleans brass band idiom.  It swings and sways with an insistent snare drum leading us through the swampy, jazz-inflected sounds.  I’ve come to think of the music as an interpretation of the poem printed on the back sleeve, but it can’t help feeling a little too jaunty for its subject matter.

Satellite, on the other hand, exists to serve its lyric – it’s in the New Amsterdam idiom – quick, clever wordplay almost falling over itself in its rush to tell the story of the anonymity of long-distance telecommunications.  Truer now than it was at the time, when the internet was a faint and distant dream, it lopes through a warning about how disconnected we’re all becoming.

Pads, Paws and Claws is the second Paul McCartney collaboration, and if it doesn’t quite work as well as Veronica, that’s partly because it’s not trying to be a jaunty pop song; it’s a sly rockabilly number which works best as the first half of the story of betrayal which gets the full lament treatment in the next track.

Baby Plays Around is the same scenario as Pads, seen from the perspective of the wronged half of the relationship.  It’s a curious song to write with your wife, I’d suggest, but it works, partly because of the song from Blood and Chocolate I keep referring back to. I Want You is bitter and angry, almost menacing in its desire, while this is resigned and sad.  It’s one of his finest melodies, and sung with exactly the right amount of resignation and despair.

In keeping with the mad leaping around this whole album does, the rawest and saddest song is immediately followed by a drunken fairground ride of a song, about a character which seems to have sprung from the combined imaginations of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman.  Musically, it mashes together all of the disparate elements we’ve heard so far, with the tuba parping along in the bassline while a Wurlitzer organ competes with several traditional Irish instruments to knit a tune out of soup.  Not quite my favourite on the album, but up there.

As is the straight up Irish ballad of Any King’s Shilling.  A little further down this post, I’ll be extolling the virtues of an album which came along a few years later, and told a series of pin-sharp short stories in postcard form, and this follows the same structure, but with a poignancy and relevance lent to it by the accompaniment.  The straightforward rendering of a story which may have come from Costello’s family history as a piece of Irish music gives it a simple power, although it’s perhaps an easier listen in these post-Troubles times than it would have been at the time, when any exploration of Irish nationalism was by definition a political act.

Elvis Costello never shied away from the political, though. Last Boat Leaving ties together all the political threads running through the album and leaves us with another short story full of heartache and hinted-at depths; people have won Booker Prizes for novels which explored this theme over hundreds of pages; this song tells its entire tale in just over three minutes, and like so many of these songs, leaves us satisfied that we’ve heard enough to let our imaginations fill in the blanks.

Overall, Spike, the Beloved Entertainer to give it it’s full title, is a dizzying grab-back of disparate stories and influences.  It works because there’s a single unifying voice tying it all together, and it works because the stories it tells are so clearly drawn – even the one told solely by instruments - that you go along with the sudden changes in direction and mood because you want to hear the next one.  Not so much a concept album as the musical equivalent of a short story collection, this album has lived with me since the day I first heard it, and continues to delight (in spite of its overall pessimistic tone) to this day.  Not where I’d start with EC, but if you want to understand the man’s full range, there are few better albums.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Of course.  A great many, but I’m going to focus on the one I love above all the others, and it’s not what you’d expect.  Costello’s collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, features not one traditional rock instrument, and is simply stunning in its storytelling and the way it subverts expectation at every turn.  It might take a while to get used to the whole ‘string quartet’ thing, but it rewards careful and repeated listening.

And if you liked Spike, you should try its companion album, Mighty Like a Rose.

Compilations to consider?

There are many, but I’m going to recommend the one which Elvis himself compiled, called (for reasons I don’ remember, but which are probably explained all over the copious sleeve notes) Girls Girls Girls. It’s comprehensive and full of the songs he thinks you should hear.

Live albums?

I keep seeing Live at El Mocambo in record shops here, but I’ve never heard it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard an EC live album of any kind.  I’m not the person to come to for recommendations, I’m afraid.

Anything else? The autobiographical Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink has been on my ‘must read pile for years; maybe doing this will make me get round to reading it.  Otherwise, there are TV shows out there, and have you seen him do Penny Lane for Paul McCartney at the White House?