Someone wrote in to RAM about the negativity of then contemporary songs and cited what seemed like a thousand examples from this album where EC told he didn't want to do something. There's even a song called (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea. There are two in that first line, alone. Even as someone who has almost never listened to lyrics beyond getting a general sense, the spat rejection is unignorable. It's a punk attitude.
It's an attitude that was almost completely absent from his debut My Aim is True. When I found out, in deep retrospect, that that first album's backing band, Clover, became the News behind Huey Lewis I didn't bat an eyelid. The plonky plinky yacht rock of My Aim is True alienated me from it until his follow up and to this day I can't listen to it without skipping. But, here's the thing: the good songs on that one are of the same calibre and character as these, it's just the arrangements and band that are making the difference.
The linking song between the albums is the single Watching the Detectives. This skeletal spiky reggae number about distracted lovers and an icy suggestion of darkness smouldering beneath it, was recorded by a band that was only half of The Attractions. The dubby drums and boomy bass were descanted by Elvis' overlapping breathless vocal and Steve Nieve's chilling Farfisa organ (added later when the Attractions formed). It was cinematic atmosphere for meagre means and remains a masterpiece of minimalist world building pop.
That economy was taken to This Year's Model along with the newly formed Attractions, adding Bruce and Pete Thomas (unrelated) on bass and drums respectively. The new approach and the band to match it transformed Elvis Costello from an OK act into a high punching heavyweight. No Action slashes through its pugilistic chord changes and assaulting vocals, organ washes enriching and drums crashing. It's force and fury outdoing the hardest attempt at rocking on the first album in a way that erased it from my image of EC's catalogue. I still think of This Year's Model as the first one and My Aim is True as a dry run.
As the song progress, and you aren't going to get many sequences as rich as the entire first side of this disc from the rock era: This Year's Girl with its stretched 4/4 drums, melodic bass, chunky but subservient guitar, descanting keyboards and vocal force; the spy movie syncopation and big breakouts of The Beat; Pump it Up's double whammy of signature bass and keyboard riffs brought the talking blues of Subterranean Homesick into the London of Pretty Vacant; the surprising soul ballad flavour of Little Triggers; and the garage band joy and vitriol of You Belong to Me. All of it gives you a 1/2 platter of energy, ideas and sheer musicianship that the sleepy town by the sea yawning of the debut never approached (well, it's players had their chops, they were just boring ones).
The Australian release of the album slotted Watching the Detectives in at the end of side one as it had with My Aim is True (New Zealand also got a reiteration on Armed Forces). It's a sore thumb on Aim but fits in without comment on Model. Most of the songs are around the three minute mark and six out of thirteen are shorter. There's no soloing or elongated introductions or instrumental sections; we're here to make statements, most of which include the sense: I don't want to.
Side two tells you that it's already restless and keen to challenge its own formula. Hand in Hand begins with a psychedelic feedback and stretched backward vocal chorus before it cranks into place with a new sub-thee minute stunner. A bright and poppy song about a violent relationship. That blend of sweet sounds and darker meaning really hooked me at the time. It didn't need to be the first of that type of song but it was the first for me and of my time so I thrilled to it. I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea starts with a Latin bass riff that gets extended with a sharp and spiky guitar riff before the vocals come in with a strange tale that mixes the cool Chelsea, NYC, scene of Andy Warhol with the then contemporary one of punk London (and it's own Chelsea), urgent and angry.
Lip Service comes on like an old Beatles number. Someone is socially pricing themselves out of their old market and making mistakes. The narrator says he can now only give tokens but if she changes her mind ... All that and yet this doesn't come across as proto Incel; there's more sad reflection and sympathy and then even the warmth at the end when the band finish cleanly on a She Loves You style major 6th.
Living in Paradise is a kind of '50s ska with raked guitar chords, some tasteful whammy barred Jazzmaster in the pre-chorus and a big multi-sectioned chorus. This is the closest the songs on this album get to sounding like they could have been on My Aim is True. My guess is that it's an older one.
Frantic tom toms and glistening cinematic piano and very busy bass crash Lipstick Vogue to rude life. The rapid fire vocal is a kind of blown-up detail of Lip Service whereby she is distressed and confused by flattery, drugs and attention as he tells her she's much more than the slice that her lifestyle has rendered her to. And then something happens. After a calmer voiced but still breathless verse about slot machines and suggestions of narcotic oblivion ("you say I've got no feelings, this is a good way to kill them") the band fly off with their galloping bass and drum patterns as the cold after-midnight organ and piano tinkle and sear. If the melodic gifts of Bruce Thomas' bass playing hadn't already had you marvelling, the accelerating scale he plays will. It plummets into the last verse of desperate pleas from within the social incarceration that lead toward the killer line: "sometimes I almost feel, just like a human being." We end on the last chorus and a frenetic chant of: "Not just another mouth, the last of the lipstick vogue" until the fade. It's one of the scariest things on the record.
Night Rally's military drums and hymn-like organ chords give way to a plaintive song about resisting the coercion of his peers. The corporate logo adorns the sky like a batman signal or a swastika and the jolly company spirit becomes increasingly indistinguishable from jackboot order. "You think they're so dumb. You think they're so funny. Wait until they've got you running to their night rally." With the Rock Against Racism concerts needed to push back at a revived National Front in the U.K. and the failing Labour Government that would lead to the nightmare of Thatcherite corporatism only a year later, things around anyone looking up from their beans on toast would have seen things closing in. The song ends with a distorted repetition of the words night rally as a pattern that sounds like an air raid siren swells until the song cuts off abruptly as though its plug were ripped out.
This Year's Model is the flipside of Never Mind the Bollocks for what I was feeling during the punk years. I identified with the movement to the extent that I rejected the uniform as just another uniform and grew to care little for any gatekeeping as to what real punk was. If the Pistols were all swaggering rock force with taunts and much heavier commentary (it's still difficult to get a head around Bodies for many) Elvis Costello and The Attractions were the more abstract side of it, offering literature and cinema where the Pistols gave us slogans. We needed both.
For me, I remember finally getting the record after wearing my cassetted copy through. It was the following year and I had a problem that had broken through the annoyance it had been to take over my life; cystic acne. My face had become a child's drawing of a planet covered in volcanos. You don't get to do a lot of socialising in that state, and that which I'd already established was itself under threat. So Mum got me a referral to a dermatologist who applied jubes of dry ice to the pocks in order to burn them off while my skin was still under seventeen. This eventually worked well enough but after each appointment I was left with a face burnt to a corned beef pink. I needed to bathe my face in salty water for hours for the skin to heal and would do that with whatever crud was on tv. The appointments were on Friday. Another feature of this routine was that I had enough disposable pocket money to buy one or two LPs, so I'd duck into Palings or Chandler's and pick something up. One day I treated myself to the real record of this album and went home to lose myself in it all over again with bigger, deeper sound.
That was the weekend where I was given a choice of staying in and dabbing homemade seawater on my face or going to a massive party on a cane farm outside of Ingham that was going to go all night. With a face like the scene in the industrial safety training film that no one wants to see I hopped into Nita's car and off we went to the Northern Little Italy. It was glorious with music, booze, friends and girls I hadn't met. Of the latter was Nadia. She was a daughter of one of the Cane-ocracy that most of the party was composed of and she was the only one I could see in the crowd. I pushed myself forward and found out that she wasn't just beautiful but sharp as a tack and, atypical for that description, also humblingly kind. At sixteen, my sense of success in chatting up girls was, of course, laughably exaggerated and every time I tried to take a photo of her in the crowd with Dad's Pentax that I was using for my semester of photography in art class, she noticed and shyly covered her face which was coated with the most perfect skin I had ever seen in life, not a spot nor even a freckle, just an even curve of untouched snow. She wrote poetry.
After again failing to take her photo, I stopped dead. I stepped back into the crowd and gazed down at the floor and remembered as sixteen year olds with galloping hormones forget, that the beauteous match I was drawn to by compulsion did not see me the same way. We had an easy and warm conversation, I with an earthly Venus and she with the kind of boy she must have volunteered to collect money for in the annual school charitable drives (I always got out of them). Crushed, I waded through the rest of the night (we were all staying in or around the house as driving all the way back to Townsville was not happening) finding conversations that would be divertingly irrelevant to what I'd just experienced.
And I thought to find her again and tell her that she wasn't just another mouth of Lipstick Vogue, that if she changed her mind she could send a little letter to me. Even I, then, at that age, with that much of whatever I had already drunk under my belt, knew better as soon as the thought took form. But, as always (even now) it was the words than the general sense and the force of the music that let me find something like a means of coping without falling into the usual teenage mistakes of resentment or self-loathing. There was a voice over music that moved the way I did that made it feel not better but less tearing.
None of those photos came out. They were all too dark. Underexposure. On the way back, the next morning, Nita stopped the car by a cemetery and thought we might get some photos. She took one of me. I still have it somewhere. I'm standing in front of a grave that sports a kind of menhir that towers for a short height above its slab. I, for some reason, am wearing a military tunic that I would have borrowed from my brother Stephen who wore them as motorbike jackets. I'm a little slumped, feet apart, and my face has a kind of funereal frown. Cut to a year or so later and I'm back from Uni in Brisbane, having breakfast and reading the local paper. There on page ten or something is a soft news story of graduating nurses. The picture was of Nadia, lighting a candle as part of the religiously flavoured ceremony. Long without the cystic devastation and possessed of the drivelling magnanimity of the twenty year old, I silently wished her well in her career and had a sip of coffee. If they'd mentioned that she was married or engaged or something I would have fallen to the floor in screams and sobs. Instead, I just heard it all again:
"It's yoooooooooou, not just another mouth of lipstick vogue."
Listening notes: I no longer have that LP but have never lacked a copy of the album. For this, I listened to the magnificent hi-res remaster from a few years back. It's the U.S. track listing which is identical to the U.K. one except for the inclusion of the single Radio Radio after Night Rally.
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