I was in my 20’s before I really got Elvis Costello. Sure there were the radio hits like Oliver’s Army and Watching The Detectives when I was in my mid teens, but to me at that time they were just cool sounding, catchy radio songs. It wasn’t until I began to explore his lyrics that the light went on and I realised just how clever a wordsmith he was.
This Year’s Model was the first Elvis Costello album I bought and what a sensational choice at that! Released in 1978 it was Elvis’ second album and his first with The Attractions – Steve Nieve on keys, Bruce Thomas on bass and Pete Thomas on drums. While all of Costello’s early albums contributed to his persona as an angry, articulate, nervous and above all sardonic figure who gave a viperous voice to the New Wave, none of those albums delivered it with quite the same urgency or energy as This Year’s Model.
No Action opens the album with just a few cold words from Elvis: “I don’t wanna see you, I don’t wanna touch…” before he finishes that second line The Attractions come thundering in with a blast that completely takes you by surprise. From that moment they had my attention. Lyrically it’s a classic blues scenario – I love you but you don’t love me – played out in countless pop songs for generations, but when Elvis delivers it you can feel the anguish in the line “when I hold you like I hold that Bakelite in my hands” you know he’s strangling that phone in frustration. Then it’s the genius in the simplicity of the line “every time I phone you I just wanna put you down” working on so many levels – the visual imagery of putting the phone down; putting her down as in insulting her; and, in its most extreme sense, killing her. Costello may have been 24 and married with a young son, but he was more than capable of articulating the heated anger, frustration and jealousy when your ex has found a new love.
This Year’s Girl captures our facile infatuation with the latest sensation and in doing so references the album’s title. Exploring the contradictions behind the image Costello writes: “Still you’re hoping that she’s well spoken cause she’s this year’s girl”, but then you don’t want them too intelligent because she could be a threat or at the very least a difficult conquest: “You want her broken with her mouth wide open, cause she’s this year’s girl”. Like the subject itself the song is all shimmering beauty with Bruce Thomas’s rolling bass lines, Pete Thomas thumping out the beat and Steve Nieve’s organ swirling throughout like a piece of pop confection.
The Beat is a strange song that dives into the neurotic psyche of Costello. It’s a song where despite the mutual attraction between Elvis and this woman of interest he can’t make the relationship happen:
“Well, if you only knew the things you do to me / I’d do anything to confuse the enemy / There’s only one thing wrong with you befriending me / Take it easy, I think you’re bending me”.
Regardless of his reasons (self loathing? fear of inadequacy?), it’s the kind of lyric that seems to resonate with so many, probably because deep down we all have our own fear of failure and nowhere is that written larger than when it comes to approaching the object of our desire.
The rhythm section of the Attractions comes to the fore on Pump It Up. There’s no doubting the Thomases of Pete and Bruce are the drivers of this song, but then Steve Nieve cranks up the organ and the song really takes flight. True to its name it’s just one of those songs that makes you want to move. The only real dispute is the nature of the lyrics – with interpretations ranging from masturbation to doing amphetamines on the club scene. Personally I couldn’t give a damn either way. What I do know is that by the time I first heard this song I was in my late teens and a typically frustrated lad, riddled with insecurity and personal doubt. My hormones were raging, as was my musical taste. At that time there was no better song that addressed my need to blow off some steam than Pump It Up and it still sounds as vital and exciting now as it did then.
This Year’s Model takes a breather with Little Triggers. The slowest song on the album is another song of sexual frustration with the woman pulling little triggers with her tongue and the sniggers on her lips. Like the soul songs of the 60’s from which Little Triggers takes its cues love can be cruel, but lyrically those soul classics could never match the wordplay of Costello:
Thinkin’ all about those censored sequences
Worryin’ about the consequences
Waiting until I come to my senses
Better put it all in present tenses
You Belong To Me rips off the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time”, though this time it’s Steve Nieve’s keys playing the intro, not the Richards guitar riff. Lyrically it’s Elvis dissecting love at its most complicated with himself and all of his neuroses at the centre of this song. He doesn’t want to be a goody-goody, he doesn’t want just anybody, but he doesn’t want anybody saying you belong to him. Then he goes on the attack with:
Your eyes are absent, your mouth is silent;
pumping like a fire hydrant.
Things you see are getting hard to swallow.
You’re easily led, but you’re much too scared to follow.
My copy of the album closes side one with Watching The Detectives, a song released as a single between Costello’s debut set My Aim Is True and this album. Detectives wasn’t included on either of the first 2 albums in the UK, but there were a number of variations in track listings on This Year’s Model, depending on where it was released. The U.S. version for instance foolishly dropped Chelsea (perceived as being too British in its subject matter), but did include Costello’s Radio Radio instead where:
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin’ to anesthetize the way that you feel
Well at least the powers that be saw the errors of their ways after Elvis so politely stated his case. It’s fantastic to see that radio is so much more adventurous these days as a broadcast medium (he says through gritted teeth).
So the mysteriously captivating Watching The Detectives wraps up the first side of my copy of the album, making what was already a stellar record even better. It’s a brilliant piece of music noir arranged with a reggae beat (of all things), yet strangely it works brilliantly with the Attractions creating a song so tightly sprung it builds with the tension in the song’s lyric. Watching The Detectives describes a woman watching a detective movie on TV, but the lines get blurred in the last verse about who’s watching the events and who’s actually involved, including the woman in her living room and even Elvis himself as the narrator. Weirdly wonderful.
Side two opens with the breezy synth led pop of Hand In Hand, a song that is quintessentially Costello in sound from this era. With its opening stanza of:
No, don’t ask me to apologize
I won’t ask you to forgive me
If I’m gonna go down, you’re gonna come with me
It’s another embittered battle between the sexes, but as ever it’s Elvis who ends up on the losing side. He’s as brutal on himself as he is with anyone else, in that sense as far as Costello is concerned that means anyone or anything is fair game. Unlike so many posturing rock stars before (and after), that’s what distinguishes Elvis from the pack.
(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea was written when Costello was still known as Declan McManus, working as a data entry operator at the Elizabeth Arden factory in London. He says that by then he’d “developed a keen sense of the promise and the disguise of fashion”. Chelsea was, and is, the up market suburb of London where the tastemakers of fashion determine who or what is in, and subsequently who or what is not – “last year’s model.” It’s an acerbic indictment on the fashion scene and those who exploit the vulnerable for profit and their own desires.
In his superb biography Unfaithful Music And Disappearing Ink Elvis had this to say about the writing of the song:
“My initial guitar riff was borrowed from The Who’s “Can’t Explain”, but I was glad that Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas later came up with a more syncopated way to play it, especially after I found out that The Clash had pinched the same riff for “Clash City Rockers”.
Regardless of the origins of the song’s riff Chelsea is an absolute standout as one The Attractions’ finest moments on record. That drumming intro from Pete Thomas is so tight and fast! Then Bruce Thomas’ bass chimes in deftly before Elvis adds to the energy with some jittering guitar lines. Later Steve Nieve joins the fray with a sombre organ tone which then morphs into something that sounds like the soundtrack to a 50’s sci-fi movie.
Lip Service is about as straight forward a pop song as you’ll get from Elvis Costello. Once again it’s a song where the narrator has no hope in the relationship, the woman considers herself way above him. There’s a really lovely bass line from Bruce Thomas in the song where he’s virtually playing the lead instrument for the melody in the chorus – unusual and distinctive.
Living In Paradise is an odd song with a loose and quirky arrangement augmented by a cheesy Caribbean feel. It doesn’t help that the song is jammed in between Lip Service and Lipstick Vogue where it sounds incongruous on the album. Lyrically it’s Elvis obsessing over a woman who isn’t his – one for all the ten pound weaklings who loathe those “physical jerks”. Hardly a song to draw sympathy for the geek left out in the cold when his voyeurism leads him to the keyhole outside her bedroom door. Bad boy Elvis!
Lipstick Vogue is the one song on the album where Elvis’ words take a back seat to the band. He’s still got plenty to say as he navigates his way through another screwed up relationship and his own paranoia:
“Don’t say you love me when it’s just a rumor
Don’t say a word if there is any doubt
Sometimes I think that love is just a tumor
You’ve got to cut it out”
But it’s The Attractions who are the stars of this show. The song is propelled by a frantic energy that typified the sound of the New Wave with Pete Thomas’s drumming sounding wildly out of control and yet somehow still holding the song together as he locks in with Bruce Thomas’ superb bass playing while the rhythm section shifts gears and then goes into overdrive. There’s some fab work on the keys from Steve Nieve too, but this song really belongs to Pete and Bruce.
The album ends with the disturbing Night Rally, probably written in reaction to the rise of the Neo Nazi movement in the late 70’s. It’s a subject Elvis would return to in more detail with his next album Armed Forces. Night Rally ends abruptly and musically isn’t as engaging or immediate as the rest of the record, but it doesn’t take anything away from this outstanding album. This Year’s Model was recorded in only eleven days, yet you wouldn’t know it from the remarkable production work of Nick Lowe, who’s classic English rock n roll sensibilities were a perfect fit for both the immediacy and the stripped back nature of Elvis’ sound, a sound that The Attractions delivered with a mighty ferocity and urgency that has never diminished, even as this angry young thing now rapidly approaches its middle age.
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