After that choked "Oh-oh-oh I -" the band bashes in for the syllable "just" and it's on. Where the previous platter sported a skeletal approach to arrangement, shrill Farfisa chords and spiky guitar lines and spat out lyrics, Accidents Will Happen establishes a developed sound whereby when there isn't a particular figure or effect, the backing returns to a wall of boom. Grand piano nudges the organ off the stage (though it's still around), Bruce Thomas' heavenly melodic bass lines are even further forward, and Pete Thomas' drums are by turns crisp or clever. If anything, Elvis' trademark Fender Jazzmaster is absent through much of it. What this brings to this vindictive song about a collapsed relationship is a strange grandeur. It's rushed but stately but has lines like, "There's so many fish in the sea that rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury ..." The guilty, "I know what I've done," ends the song with a sudden coda swinging between major and minor as voices in harmony repeat, "I know, I know...." Costello wasn't writing about my late adolescent hormonal investigations but, b'crikey, it felt like it.
I don't recall seeing the video for this song until a year or so later and can't remember it being on Countdown. It's a little postmodern marvel, mixing animation loops of the band with more industrial style cartoons of the scenes of accidents in the workplace and the home, often featuring graphs and trajectory illustrations. The final choir of "I know" plays under a wire frame portrait of Costello being drawn repeatedly along with a readout of statistics. The stuff of sci-fi noir in the decade to come. YouTube it.
Senior Service (junior dissatisfaction) retreads the odd drum pattern from Chelsea but soon settles into a vocal heavy piece about seething upward mobility. From the menacing whisper of the chorus to the echo-drenched verses about wanting what the guy one notch up has. I knew at the time from an interview that Senior Service was the brand of cigarette smoked by producer Nick Lowe.
Oliver's Army barges in with a piano figure that sounds like steel drums and plays a '50s inspired pop melody. This was inspired by sight of startlingly young British soldiers in Belfast. The verses are increasingly sinister, going from a bureaucrat's jaded views on military recruitment to an increasingly ugly manipulator, appealing to racism and fear in the young and dispossessed. The chorus is the bit that everybody sang along to, not quite realising that the Cromwellian army it sang of was there to oppress and control local populations. The song was a hit here and accompanied by a cinematic clip of the pale band in a tropical setting. "And I would rather be anywhere else than here today." Everyone at school in my military town tapped their toes and sang along.
Big boys continues the wall of boom but adds dynamics. In a voice that's one defeat away from a whimper Costello sings, "I am starting to function." An organ note plays and stays. "In the usual way. Everything's so provocative. Very , very temporary. I shalle walk." On "walk" the thunder enters with massed chords and big tom toms and a loping bass note that feels like it's being thrown from a height at the start of every bar. After a verse with new melodic material we go back to the big steps of the bass lope and thunder toms. The narrator (also, characteristically in a Costello song from this time, the second person lines) sees himself as inadequate. He lists his absent qualities and failure with women in some pretty pop passages. This album was a training ground for the songwriters of the '80s and allowed them statements that would never chart set in radio friendly sugarpop. On the one hand you'll want to sing along with the melismatic "so" of the chorus. On the other he's spitting out the words of an embittered Lothario. The song turns again, now in sympathy with the woman he rejected because she accepted him. He just needs the strength to cross her off the list and walk on like the big boys. They will reject him as a try hard and he will have to move on, around and around in the cycle of self-loathing. A dark song. It ends on an instrumental fade of the loping bass (which offers some impressive parting flourishes. On and on and on.
Green Shirt offers respite with its harpsichord delicacy and lightly throbbing synthesised bass. The sudden snare interjections punctuate rather than jolt as Costello almost whispers lyrics that blur newsreaders with clerical staff of a totalitarian regime and something like a phone sex line. Rather than a series of concrete predictions, Costello is pushing back against a kind of corporate commodification of society. The news anchor is as alluring as the workers on the phone lines as they coo streamlined lies and glosses. All the colours of situations are turned to black and white and the brass buttons of the military shirt as the calming voice of the administration guides us to the entertainments. One of my favourite couplets in the song does have a predictive tint: "Better send a begging letter to the big investigation. Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?" How's that for a preview of the post-truth culture? Shout to Steve Naïve on the keyboards whose Farfisa delivers more nuance and creepy tentacles that a string section could.
Party Girl is a song that I needed to hear more than the others to get into. Like all the material on the album, it's layered and complex. The song starts with an epic feel, guitar arpeggios spread out in a kind of saddening fanfare before Costello comes in. On the surface, he's telling her that she shouldn't condemn herself as being a mere party girl but he's also getting seduced by the power that gives him. And amid the gentle assurances of her individuality he tells her that he could give her anything but time. Ouch! "Starts like fascination. Ends up like trance." he says over a few fretless bass slides that are the musical equivalent of cute raised eyebrows. This gives way to a brief but lovely piano interlude before the next verse where Costello ups the word play with lines about being the guilty party girl. The final admonition, I could give you anything but time is stretched, as though hesitant before, on the word time, the song ends in a passionate coda that could be from Abbey Road. Costello yells: Give you anything but -" and the harmonies answer, "time" over a bursting dam of emotion. This is the most unexpected turn of the record, containing less self-consciously clever lines and served up with music that suits it more than conforms to the rest of the album.
The old side two starts with Goon Squad and a big figure that effectively combines grand piano with guitar. It sounds like spy theme. The lyric is a letter home by what at first seems like a soldier but unravels so it could apply to any kind of organisation based on a hierarchy. In a kind of switched perspective to Oliver's Army, the boy who answered the recruitment call is discovering that none of the promises have come true and that, rather than advancing up the ranks, he's been relegated to the lowest of the thugs. The almighty boom of the track continues until a brief break in the arrangement with Costello's voice EQ-ed paper thin and Bruce Thomas' playing fills the void with impressively busy runs along the scale. A plunge back into the nightmare of the situation roars to the fade under which Steve Naïve plays sinister spindly dissonance on the keyboards.
Busy Bodies starts all at once with the booming wall including a big keyboard wash and jangling guitar arpeggios. Wall o' boom. The vocal melody rises with each line smooth until it stops for lines of commentary, short sung lines with staccato responses on the organ. "Everybody's" Dit dit dit dit. "getting meaner" dit dit dit "busy bodies" dit dit dit dit "Caught in the concertina." Then it launches back into the boom of another verse. This song builds like a tide, wave after wave of verses where sex and corporate competition blur. There are sections but no breaks, no middle eights or solos, just a forward moving mass of populating and competition served up with the sweetness and substance of pudding. The final word is like an admission of inevitability as the last chords sound under a Beach Boys like falsetto figure, a completely unexpected, delicious treat.
Sunday's Best is another constant force but this time a sinister waltz. "Times are tough for English babies. Send the army and the navy..." Costello raids the tabloids for material but not the Schoolgirl Sex Serenade for Septuagenarian headlines. He plunges into the personal ads and editorials the winking, whispering pages of aspiration, lewdness and hatred. The 3/4 grind suggests the fairground, comedy and thinking that's loopy in both senses. Costello builds, phrase by phrase, the mind of the root-system of the culture of his time which included the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the National Front, his voice going from a prurient stage whisper to a barely contained hysterical yelp for the chorus: "Standing in your socks and vest. Better get it off your chest. Every day is just like the rest but Sunday's best." Perversion and piety, church and smut, all blending to the mud grey that all plasticine rods eventually become. Everyone knows but no one recognises anyone. We fade out with a sharply sarcastic waltz figure on the guitar and I realise again that this is one of the few songs on the album that would sound identical live and here in the studio, the band is that good.
Moods for Moderns is the closest the album comes to something more typical of its time, a post punk snarl, the type dismissively termed new wave by DJ's who saw it as a too hard basket and pronounced it with a sneer. A series of images from relationships is shoehorned into a quirky dissonant groove and skittish rhythm with organ stabs and whispers for the verses and harsh snappy harmonies for the choruses. The commodification of sex or romance feels like fast food or a heightened service industry as partners change partners like the season's new clothes. "Soon you'll belong to someone else and I will be your stranger just pretending."
Chemistry Class has the most stately and broad arrangements in which one line has a big sounding piano arpeggio and the next is held up by momentous tom toms. This can be reversed but the procession of them is what keeps our attention. The vocal is mostly plaintive in the verses and quietly arch in the chorus, it sounds world weary, knowing, describing something for the hundredth time. The narrator is witnessing yet another sexual encounter that will end in another emptying breakup. The working title for the album was Emotional Fascism. The phrase appears on the artwork. Armed Forces was chosen as a more media friendly title but the first applies to most of the songs here and nowhere more than this and the following tracks which make it more explicit. The chemistry on show here is attraction but it gets sinister as he asks, "are you ready for the final solution?" This might refer to the genetic mix of sexual activity or the chemistry of the brain, but it alludes to the holocaust. Seldom has a more violent word play been delivered with such creepy awe. The alternating piano and drums accompaniment to the verse lines which had started so yearningly quickly takes on something more humanly percussive. The song fades on an instrumental repetition of the final lines of the chorus with a pulsing effect on the guitar that suggests machinery that perhaps is scanning for the next case; the musical beauty of the song itself ingested by the engine.
Two Little Hitlers surprises by launching into a sunny pop reggae arrangement. On the surface of it it's another relationship song featuring trademark wordplay and this time a kind of happy go lucky resignation to the inevitable conflict emerging from coupling. You could see it as a kind of summary of the whole album where love and sex and conflict and cruelty bash against each other. By this point the conflict has escalated to a struggle of wills and ends with an echo of General McArthur's vow following a defeat: "I will return." This phrase which ends the chorus but also repeats into the fade is accompanied by what sounds like a deliberate lift of the Rebel Rebel lift. I say deliberate as it's only half the riff, just enough for the knowing to acknowledge.
The first three Costello albums had signature artwork. Aim's Buddy Holly like man in a suit and a guitar by way of introduction. Model's more aggressive stare from behind a camera. Finally, the set that promised emotional fascism, a herd of elephants with the leader looking to stampede the viewer. The rear cover of the Australian release had the US front cover, a stylised face surrounded by action painting drips and splatters and a splattery title and band name in yellow over it. This got confusing when seeing it presented as the front cover in music press ads etc. The local edition opened on the right side which confirmed the elephants as the front cover. I liked the collision of art styles and the violence of the writing on the rear cover but I was always more intrigued by what was inside.
The inner sleeve featured the term emotional fascism on both sides and on each part of the phrase, "our place or yours?" The photo on one side was the band in front of an English suburban house and the reverse was of Costello apparently collapsed on the diving board of a swimming pool while another figure is underwater, perhaps dead. Around the photos is a series of rectangles, red on one side and yellow on the other. The red ones have the song titles and band member names and the yellow ones are the names of home decoration colours (like White White). The abstraction of this reminded me of all those Pink Floyd and 10CC Hipgnosis covers where every second one had images so removed by abstraction that the meaning was anyone's guess. This looked like the band was out of place (Elvis was wearing a suit to the pool) or oppressively in place. From my sprawling Queenslander house in Townsville the middle class two storey place looked compact and comfortable. The band in their tight fitting noo wave suits with white sneakers do not look like they live there. It was clearly ironic but also like hearing localised jokes in British tv comedies that meant nothing to you but still sounded funny.
It gave the record a modernity that knew it had to do better than depict opulence by contrast with social commentary. The house, if out of the reach of most Britons of the time, unremarkable in its design, feigning larger manses rather than being them. The pool does suggest wealth but it is a place of accidents and bad endings, the kind of thing the tabloids of Sunday's Best would delight in. Like the images of mundane consumerism in the inner sleeve of Model, this acknowledgement of consumerist aspiration and my appreciation of it felt like I was invited into the club who had the eyes to see. Hey, a seventeen year old doesn't need much to cry rebellion.
However the rebellion here was gratifying. This was probably the first new record I pushed on everyone I could. If it was at a party I went to, I made sure I put it on, twice at least. I made cassettes for classmates and made friends listen to it when it came out, pointing out every bit of irony or arch pun as they came up, not trusting them to hear it themselves. Better still, girls liked it. The kind of girls who could talk about more than the same bullshit boys were meant to spout, in fact, the very kind of real people under the surface of Party Girl. Well, that didn't do me all that much good but I had conversations that shoulds coulda woulda that I still recall with others who needed a little intoxication and less encouragement, whose observations sounded like newspaper columnists and whose jokes drew years of world experience from the ether. All just kids like me, of course, but in those moments ...
Armed Forces served all this up with a sound big and brash. There was no apology for the expansion of the approach, none was needed. Rather than a slick sellout improvement this felt like real development. There is a lot of fine trickery and key manipulation going on in the compositions and the band was clearly peaking with some strong imaginative and emotionally punchy playing. What I didn't know was that this would be the end of the first phase. The second and onward would push me further than further from Elvis Costello. He got more sophisticated as the albums came out, even writing for string quartets and with the great Burt Bacharach. But never again would he release another album songs that, banger after banger, described what I was observing with my own eyes and feeling with my own nerves in my last year of High School. I enjoyed High School, well, I enjoyed the years, but the more you enjoy anything at that age the closer you get to feeling the heat of its hazards. I was lucky to have good older siblings for those public moments that my shyness might have prohibited, and records like this for all the other moments where I and the walls of my room had to work it out between us.
