Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

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sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

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https://www.dansendeberen.be/2020/10/30 ... t-bestaan/

Elvis Costello – Hey Clockface (★★★★): Alleen Costello blijft bestaan

Een naam als Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus lijkt recht uit een Ierse sage of legende te komen. Onder zijn alter ego Elvis Costello werd MacManus sinds de jaren zeventig echter een legende in de Londense pubrockscene. Elvis, naar zijn grote voorbeeld, en Costello, naar de artiestennaam van zijn vader. Zijn eerste album nam hij nog alleen op, maar sindsdien vormde hij zijn eigen genre met zijn begeleidingsband The Attractions, bestaande uit bassist Bruce Thomas, drummer Pete Thomas en toetsenist Steve Nieve. Hun debuutplaat uit 1978 This Year’s Model was meteen een voltreffer en staat momenteel nog steeds in de ‘100 Greatest British Albums Ever’. De single “Chelsea” maakte hen prompt wereldberoemd en ook “This Years Girl” werd recent nog gebruikt als titelsong voor HBO’s The Deuce. Zijn begeleidingsband The Attractions kreeg vanaf 1996 een nieuwe bezetting en naam, The Imposters, waarvan Pete Thomas en Steve Nieve ook deel uit maakten. Costello in één genre proppen is vrijwel onmogelijk, want deze duizendpoot is zowat van alle markten thuis, getuige zijn 31ste (!) album Hey Clockface.

In januari 2020 won Costello (en zijn Imposters) met zijn dertigste studioalbum Look Now nog de Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Een jaar eerder werd hij uitgeroepen tot Officer in the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Met al deze honneurs op zak zou menig artiest eventjes een pauze inlassen om alles wat te laten bezinken… of om gewoon even te genieten van de rust. Costello niet dus, want hij reisde naar Helsinki om daar enkele nieuwe nummers op te nemen, waar hij zelf de instrumenten bespeelde. Later die maand, in februari 2020, doken Steve Nieve en hij de studio in Parijs in met een handvol muzikanten en namen daar een aantal nieuwe tracks op, die later (in lockdown) werden uitgewerkt en aangevuld tot dit nieuwe album. Het resultaat is een plaat met twee verschillende stemmingen, waarbij de sessies in Helsinki een intiemer en intenser karakter hebben, terwijl de Parijse nummers meer jazzy en poppy kunnen worden omschreven, als we er dan toch een genre op moeten vastpinnen.

Hey Clockface is als een muzikale kameleon die constant van kleur verandert en zich perfect aanpast aan zijn nieuwe omgeving. De mystieke opener “Revolution #49” zet meteen de toon van dit album, onder de vorm van een mystiek beatnikgedicht van hoop, met als hoofdboodschap ‘Love is the one thing we can save’. We zijn er vrij zeker van dat Costello hiervoor zijn mosterd haalde bij de legendarische Eden Ahbez en zijn “Full Moon”. Dat Costello zich niet in een vakje laat drummen en vooral zijn eigen ding doet, komt tot uiting in “No Flag”, een anti-nummer tegen vooroordelen en principes, waarin hij duidelijk stelt: ‘I look in the mirror and see who I used to be. Made out of plastic in a factory.’ Meteen volgt het akoestisch/intieme “They’re Not Laughing At Me Now” als adempauze op het voorafgaande geweld.

Intussen wordt het stilaan duidelijker dat de hedendaagse media en vormen van (vluchtige) communicatie niet meteen zijn vrienden zijn. “Newspaper Pane” gaat verder op dit elan en je voelt dat Costello (op licht cynische wijze) bepaalde dingen achter zich probeert te laten. “I Do (Zula’s Song)” schept even wat oprechtheid in deze hectische (en moeilijke) tijden. Onder begeleiding van een trompet en klarinet komt de kwetsbare stem van Costello volledig tot zijn recht in deze bloedmooie ballade. In “We Are All Cowards Now” herkennen we Costello op z’n best. Dit nummer, opgenomen in Helsinki, werd in augustus 2020 al uitgebracht als single en is een groovy compositie waarin Costello’s grillige stem begeleid wordt met enkele funky drumritmes.

Halfweg het album volgt het titelnummer “Hey Clockface”, een burlesque en speels nummer dat recht uit een Parijse vaudeville zou kunnen komen. De ondertoon is echter minder vrolijk dan gedacht, hoewel Costello hierin zich wel degelijk verzoent met de vergankelijkheid van ons bestaan. “The Whirlwind” is weer zo’n bloedmooie ballade, waar de fragiele stem van Costello onder pianobegeleiding even meeslepend en ontroerend lijkt als in dat andere meesterwerk van hem, “I Want You”. Wanneer we denken dat zowat alles in dit album aan bod kwam, waagt hij zich aan een funky beatbox/slowrap song, “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”, waar hij de draak steekt met de roddelpers. Misschien is “The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip” wel het meest tormenterende nummer van deze plaat, deze (wederom) prachtige ballade toont nogmaals de capaciteiten van Costello. Bij “What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?” stelt hij enkele levensvragen die we ons allemaal wel eens afvragen. Is dit het nu? Is dit alles? Wat heb ik nu nodig dat ik nog niet heb?

Met “Radio Is Everything” komt de beatnik in Costello weer naar boven. Nogmaals, dit ís gewoon geïnspireerd door Eden Ahbez. Hij neemt ons mee doorheen zijn hersenspinsels, met middeleeuwse zinsconstructies en subliminale boodschappen via het spoken word, als een grootvader die zijn kleinzoon in slaap wil wiegen met een oude spookverhaal uit zijn eigen kindertijd. “I Can’t Say Her Name” gaat weer de vaudeville-toer op, met koperblazers en een speelse piano, dat uiteindelijk een beetje vervalt in overdaad. Met “Byline” zoekt Costello wederom het sentiment op, iets waar hij énorm mee scoort, en breidt hiermee een einde aan deze mysterieuze reis.

Hey Clockface lijkt omwille van zijn variatie tussen verschillende genres en emoties een enorm strijdperk. De keuze van de volgorde van de nummers lijkt initieel nogal wat slordig en vrij onzorgvuldig gekozen. De ene emotie is nog niet verteerd, of er wordt een tegenstrijdige tegenaan gegooid. Uiteindelijk is dit misschien net de bedoeling van de enorme moodswing waar Costello mee afrekent. ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for’, zei ene Ernest Hemingway ooit, maar soms moeten we nu eenmaal doorbijten wanneer het allemaal even té jachtig wordt. Hey Clockface lijkt enerzijds op een vreemde droom uit het brein van Lewis Carroll, maar anderzijds is het in al zijn totale onvoorspelbaarheid vooral een typisch album van Elvis Costello. En wát voor eentje! Sterren komen, sterren gaan, alleen Costello blijft bestaan.

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Google translation:

Elvis Costello - Hey Clockface (★★★★): Only Costello will survive

A name like Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus seems to have come straight from an Irish saga or legend. However, under his alter ego Elvis Costello, MacManus became a legend in the London pub rock scene since the 1970s. Elvis, after his great example, and Costello, after his father's stage name. He recorded his first album alone, but since then he has formed his own genre with his backing band The Attractions, consisting of bassist Bruce Thomas, drummer Pete Thomas and keyboardist Steve Nieve. Their 1978 debut record, This Year's Model, was an immediate hit and is currently still in the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever". The single “Chelsea” promptly made them world famous and “This Years Girl” was recently used as the title song for HBO's The Deuce. His backing band The Attractions was given a new line-up and name from 1996, The Imposters, of which Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve were also part. Cramming Costello into one genre is almost impossible, because this centipede is at home in almost all markets, as witnessed by his 31st (!) Album Hey Clockface.

In January 2020, Costello (and his Imposters) won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album with his thirtieth studio album Look Now. The year before, he was named Officer in the Order of the British Empire (OBE). With all these honors in their pocket, many artists would take a break for a while to let everything sink in… or just to enjoy the peace and quiet. Not Costello, because he traveled to Helsinki to record some new songs there, where he played the instruments himself. Later that month, in February 2020, he and Steve Nieve entered the studio in Paris with a handful of musicians and recorded a number of new tracks, which were later developed (in lockdown) and supplemented into this new album. The result is a record with two different moods, where the sessions in Helsinki have a more intimate and intense character, while the Parisian songs can be described as more jazzy and poppy, if we have to pin down a genre to them.

Hey Clockface is like a musical chameleon that constantly changes color and adapts perfectly to its new environment. The mystical opener “Revolution # 49” immediately sets the tone of this album, in the form of a mystical beatnik poem of hope, with the main message "Love is the one thing we can save". We are pretty sure that Costello got his inspiration for this from the legendary Eden Ahbez and his “Full Moon”. The fact that Costello does not allow himself to be drummed in a box and does his own thing, is reflected in “No Flag”, an anti-number against prejudices and principles, in which he clearly states: 'I look in the mirror and see who I used to be. Made out of plastic in a factory. "Immediately follows the acoustic / intimate" They're Not Laughing At Me Now "as a respite from the preceding violence.

In the meantime, it is gradually becoming clear that contemporary media and forms of (fleeting) communication are not immediately his friends. Newspaper Pane continues this momentum and you feel that Costello (in a slightly cynical way) tries to leave certain things behind. “I Do (Zula’s Song)” brings some sincerity in these hectic (and difficult) times. Accompanied by a trumpet and clarinet, Costello's vulnerable voice comes into its own in this stunning ballad. In “We Are All Cowards Now” we recognize Costello at his best. This song, recorded in Helsinki, was released as a single in August 2020 and is a groovy composition in which Costello's whimsical voice is accompanied by some funky drum rhythms.

Halfway through the album follows the title track “Hey Clockface”, a burlesque and playful song that could come straight out of a Parisian vaudeville. However, the undertone is less cheerful than expected, although Costello does reconcile himself with the transience of our existence. “The Whirlwind” is another stunning ballad, where Costello's fragile voice under piano accompaniment seems just as compelling and moving as in that other masterpiece of his, “I Want You”. When we think that just about everything was covered in this album, he ventures into a funky beatbox / slowrap song, "Hetty O'Hara Confidential," where he pokes fun at the tabloid press. Perhaps “The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip” is the most tormenting song on this record, this (again) beautiful ballad once again shows Costello's capacities. On "What Is It That I Need That I Don't Already Have?" he asks some life questions that we all ask ourselves. Is this it now? Is this all? What do I need now that I don't have yet?

With “Radio Is Everything” the beatnik in Costello comes up again. Again, this is simply inspired by Eden Ahbez. He takes us through his fantasies, with medieval sentence constructions and subliminal messages via spoken word, like a grandfather who wants to lull his grandson to sleep with an old ghost story from his own childhood. “I Can’t Say Her Name” returns to the vaudeville tour, with brass instruments and a playful piano, which eventually lapses into excess. With “Byline”, Costello once again seeks sentiment, something he scores enormously with, and thus extends an end to this mysterious journey.

Hey Clockface seems like a huge battlefield because of its variation between different genres and emotions. The choice of the order of the songs initially seems a bit sloppy and rather carelessly chosen. One emotion is not yet digested, or a contradictory one is thrown at it. Ultimately, this may be precisely the purpose of the enormous mood swing that Costello is dealing with. "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for," said one Ernest Hemingway once, but sometimes we just have to keep going when things get too hectic. Hey Clockface on the one hand resembles a strange dream from the brain of Lewis Carroll, but on the other hand, in all its total unpredictability, it is above all a typical Elvis Costello album. And what kind of one! Stars come, stars go, only Costello lasts.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5963
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.tijd.be/cultuur/muziek/elvi ... 62000.html

Elvis Costello puzzelt met eigen catalogus en muziekgeschiedenis

Elvis Costello smeedde het heterogene materiaal dat hij vlak voor de lockdown had ingeblikt tot een verrassend coherent geheel op ‘Hey Clockface’, dat zelfs voor de doorgewinterde fan enkele verrassingen in petto heeft.

Na zijn doorbraak als boze new waver eind jaren 70 was geen enkel genre veilig voor Elvis Costello. De voorbije veertig jaar nam hij albums op vol Beatles-achtige pop, countryballades en bluesstandards. Hij liet zich bijstaan door zijn eigen bands, maar ook door onder meer de R&B-legende Alan Toussaint en de hiphopband The Roots. Meestal was zo’n muzikaal pact het gevolg van een vooraf bedacht plan dat binnen de contouren van één welbepaald album en vaak ook genre vorm kreeg. ‘Hey Clockface’ stapt daarvan af. In handen van een minder begiftigd assembleur zou het vermengen van erg verschillende opnamessessies leiden tot barsten in het muzikale mozaïek, niet zo bij Costello.

De assemblage vond plaats vanuit zijn stulpje op Vancouver Island, waar hij de lockdown samen met zijn vrouw en tweelingzonen doorbracht. Het bindmiddel werd geleverd door de New Yorkse arrangeur en jazztrompettist Michael Leonhart, die hem gevraagd had zijn stem en pen te lenen aan twee composities. 'Ze vervolledigden een puzzel waarvan ik niet wist dat ik hem aan het leggen was', zei de zanger in het muziekblad Billboard over het ingetogen ‘Radio Is Everything’ en het veel rustelozere ‘Newspaper Pane’.

De onlinesamenwerking volgde op twee korte studiosessies, waarvoor hij in februari naar Europa was afgereisd. In Helsinki nam hij drie tracks op, speelde hij alle instrumenten zelf in en hoor je het vertrouwde geluid. Het uitmuntende ‘No Flag’ bewijst met zijn spitse tekst, aanstekelijke melodielijn, fuzzy gitaren en punky venijn dat Costello niets van zijn snedigheid verloren heeft. ‘Hetty O’Hara Confidential’ is nog gejaagder en richt zijn pijlen op de nieuwe media, die ons aanzetten eerst te communiceren en dan pas te denken. Een gebrek aan redelijkheid is ook een thema op ‘We Are All Cowards’, dat de zanger al een hedendaagse versie van ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’ noemde en de tijdsgeest vat.

Spontane ontmoeting

Na de sessie in de Finse hoofdstad ging het meteen richting Parijs, waar vertrouweling Steve Nieve een band met lokale jazzmuzikanten had samengesteld en op twee dagen tijd een tiental nummers werd ingeblikt. Die spontane, half geïmproviseerde ontmoeting maakt het gros van de nieuwe release uit en levert naast pakkende ballades ook enkele verrassingen op. ‘Revolution #49’, de intrigerende opener van de plaat, lijkt te komen aanvliegen uit de verhalen van Duizend-en-een-nacht.

Op het titelnummer brengt een desolate blazer af en toe de sfeer van Costello's klassieker ‘Shipbuilding’ in herinnering, een cello die uit ‘The Juliet Letters’. Die wisselwerking tussen de eigen catalogus en de muziekgeschiedenis maakt van Costello’s 31ste studioalbum een uniek werkstuk dat je een paar keer moet beluisteren om de verbanden duidelijk te zien.

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Google translation:

Elvis Costello puzzles with his own catalog and music history

Elvis Costello forged the heterogeneous material he canned right before lockdown into a surprisingly coherent whole on "Hey Clockface," which has some surprises in store for even the seasoned fan.

After his breakthrough as an angry new waver in the late 1970s, no genre was safe from Elvis Costello. For the past 40 years he has recorded albums full of Beatles-esque pop, country ballads and blues standards. He was assisted by his own bands, but also by the R&B legend Alan Toussaint and the hip-hop band The Roots, among others. Usually such a musical pact was the result of a pre-conceived plan that took shape within the contours of one specific album and often also genre. "Hey Clockface" gets off that. In the hands of a less gifted assembler, mixing very different recording sessions would lead to cracks in the musical mosaic, not so with Costello.

The assembly took place from his cabin on Vancouver Island, where he spent the lockdown with his wife and twin sons. The binding agent was provided by the New York arranger and jazz trumpet player Michael Leonhart, who asked him to lend his voice and pen to two compositions. "They completed a puzzle I didn't know I was building," the singer told Billboard music magazine about the understated "Radio Is Everything" and the much more restless "Newspaper Pane."

The online collaboration followed two short studio sessions, for which he traveled to Europe in February. In Helsinki he recorded three tracks, played all the instruments himself and you can hear the familiar sound. The excellent "No Flag" proves with its pointed lyrics, catchy melody line, fuzzy guitars and punky venom that Costello has lost none of his wit. "Hetty O'Hara Confidential" is even more agitated, targeting the new media, which prompt us to communicate first and then think. A lack of reason is also a theme on "We Are All Cowards," which the singer has already dubbed a contemporary version of "(What's So Funny" Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, and captures the spirit of the times.

Spontaneous meeting

After the session in the Finnish capital, it went straight to Paris, where confidant Steve Nieve had formed a band with local jazz musicians and a dozen songs were recorded in two days. That spontaneous, semi-improvised meeting makes up the bulk of the new release and, in addition to catchy ballads, also provides some surprises. "Revolution # 49", the record's intriguing opener, seems to come from the stories of One Thousand and One Nights.

On the title track, a desolate blazer occasionally recalls the atmosphere of Costello's classic "Shipbuilding", a cello from "The Juliet Letters". This interaction between the own catalog and music history makes Costello’s 31st studio album a unique piece of work that you should listen to a few times to see the connections clearly.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
taramasalata
Posts: 75
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by taramasalata »

cwr wrote:I love it.

I was expecting it to be kind of a hot mess COVID album-- and undoubtedly it is a different LP than we might've gotten if the pandemic hadn't happened and EC had gone into Abbey Road with The Imposters as planned-- but it holds together nicely. It is adventurous and experimental but the advance tracks hadn't prepared me for anything quite like "Byline."
Totally agree!
Also did fear a bit of a mixed bag... but after twice listening: I'm loving it, exceptional, nothing like he has done before, echoing WISE UP GHOST, a wonder that it holds together but it does miraculously, and he always keeps up his immediacy, his urgency, his joy of making music, adventurous, and completely devoted to it. Great music.
sweetest punch
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Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music ... w-18472/[b]

The Spontaneous Genius of Elvis Costello[/b]
Releasing his 31st studio album, Elvis Costello speaks to Rolling Stone about how a spontaneous approach has resulted in one of his finest records to date.
By TYLER JENKE
OCTOBER 30, 2020

There is a strong chance that when a young Elvis Costello first entered London’s Pathway Studios with Nick Lowe to lay down what would become his acclaimed debut, My Aim Is True, the artist in question had no idea what his future held. 43 years later, it’s this lack of clarity that helped to inform the sessions which resulted in his 31st album, Hey Clockface.

It was in the early stages of 2020, before a pandemic shut down the world, that the groundwork was laid for the record. Having laid down a trio of solo tracks at Helsinki’s Suomenlinnan Studio, Costello found himself heading to Paris for a weekend session at Les Studios Saint Germain.

Unsure of what would emerge from this time in the studio, a burst of creativity results in nine more songs. Backed by longtime collaborator Steve Nieve, Mickaél Gasche, Pierre-François ‘Titi’ Dufour, Ajuq, and Renaud-Gabriel Pion, the musicians – dubbed “Le Quintette Saint Germain” – began to craft what would soon become Hey Clockface.

With a desire for the music to be “vivid”, little was spoken within these sessions, with the musicians responding to the air of creativity that was present within the studio. The result is an album that is unlike anything ever created by Costello in the past. It shifts between almost menacing spoken-word passages, to Chuck Berry-inspired lyricism, boisterous, jazzy recordings, and tracks which feel as though Costello has been waiting his whole life to create them.

To celebrate the release of the new album, Elvis Costello spoke to Rolling Stone from Vancouver to discuss how a spontaneous approach to recording has resulted in one of his finest records to date.

I think we should probably kick things off with the standard question lately; how have you been dealing with everything going on this year?

Well, you know, I think I’ve been really – to be very honest – I’ve been very fortunate. I mean, given that I was in Europe, I recorded the songs in Helsinki and the songs in New York and Paris. I suppose immediately before my last tour, which was in England. And you know, three dates from the end of the tour it became obvious that we’re asking something unreasonable of the audience.

The government just wouldn’t make a decision about shutting theatres and I began to see, you know, we had sold out shows and we were seeing rows empty. People were, my friends were ringing me and said, “I know I’m supposed to be coming to the show tonight, but I just don’t feel safe.” And I started to think that I was being irresponsible in asking my band and my crew, and the audience to come.

So you know, we cut the tour short, we cancelled some recording dates that we had booked for London and I went home to Canada. I had to quarantine like everybody did when you travel and I was back with my family and from there, that’s where I’ve stayed. In a cabin, you know on Vancouver Island for the spring and most of the summer. That said, once I was there with my family I felt very fortunate that I wasn’t in a big city.

I was worried about my friends, I worry about my mother in England. She’s somebody in her ’90s, she’s among those people most vulnerable. But the people who take care of her are doing a wonderful job. She lives at home with people coming into help. I tried to then put my mind on the music and try to make use of all this luxurious time. Not just to be with my wife and my children, but also to check in with my friends and then start working with what I could do to… while I waited to see what happened.

It’s obviously been much more prolonged than anybody could dream back then. But as I say, I didn’t waste any of the time. I did a lot of writing and then I started to look at the music and I realised that I liked what we had recorded. I hadn’t examined it that much because I’d been playing shows and I was looking for this way to join it all together when my friend Michael Leonhart wrote to me and said he had a piece of music he wanted me to contribute to. He sent it to me and that became “Radio is Everything”. And I said, he said I have another piece and he sent it to me and that became “Newspaper Pane”.

I said to him, “You know what? I know we were making these for your record, but can we put them on both records and release them twice? Because you know, your audience is different to my audience. You’re a jazz musician.” Maybe different people will hear these songs if we put them out on two different waves and that’s not something people do very often. But these seemed to complete the puzzle, you know. These make the join between the stuff I’d done in Helsinki and the stuff I’d done in Paris. To my ear they did anyway. I was then able to sequence the record. Sebastian Krys our producer mixed the record and you know, there you are, there it is and that’s what you’re hearing.

You’d said how everything for this new album when you entered the studio in Helsinki, but was the intention there actually to record a full album, or did you just plan to make a few songs?

Well I mean when you start, you don’t know what it’s going to sound like, particularly when you sort of don’t take any musicians with you. You’re going to a place where you’re hardly known, because nobody’s got any idea of what you’ve come to do. I’ve never been in that studio before, I’d never met the engineer. You know, I walked down the main street in Helsinki and got onto this little ferry boat, went out to this island where the studio was located and I immediately loved it.

It was a very crisp winter day, it wasn’t like covered in snow like it was the last time I was there in the winter. I had a lung full of this wonderful air. Went inside the studio, found just the thing. It wasn’t neither fancy, nor was it… it worked. Everything worked, but it wasn’t like a fancy studio that you’d be afraid of. And I felt yeah, I can play around in here. And I don’t play the drums, so I had sung the drum part that I wanted and the engineer said, “Well, let’s put that down as the foundation.” That became part of the record.

And then I just said, “Well, I’m going to make everything in the room be part of the drums.” The guitars, the organ, the piano. Everything was going to be serving the rhythm. So you’re making a kind of rock and roll, but it’s not by the playbook. It’s not like the way you normally check off: “Oh you’ve got the bass, you’ve got the drums.” So it just jolts you out of that predictable way to play and knew the kind of mood of the songs.

When you’re recording all of the parts yourself, obviously to do three complete pieces in three days is quite fast. You could spend a week doing one of those songs, but I work quickly and Eetü [Seppälä] the Engineer worked extremely fast. The two engineers, they were really great and I came away from there feeling, “Well, that’s one story. Now what’s going to happen in Paris?”

And I flew to Paris the next day. And it sounds so crazy, it sounds like a jet set life doesn’t it? “And then I flew to Paris”, you know? Because we can’t even imagine going to the corner for a paper now. I say it such a cavalier way, because it seemed very easy to do that then. And it was Steve Nieve’s [pianist] birthday and we had a party at his apartment and all his friends from Paris were there, and we were all singing “La Marseillaise” because he’d just got his French passport. And you know, all things you can’t imagine doing now you know: having your arm around people, singing in their faces and eating cake.

Then we went to the studio the next day and started recording. And we were in this beautiful old studio in Saint Germain and there were, two of the musicians I’d met before. And the other two I’d never met and Steve had never met them either. So you know, it could have been a complete disaster if we had picked the wrong personalities. But everybody seemed to understand what I was trying to do. Steve had written out the chord chart. But we hadn’t written any orchestration.

I wanted to hear what they played just when we started to sing the song. And everything they played is what I wanted to hear and they listened to what I was doing, I listened to what they were doing and next thing we knew we’d recorded nine songs in two days. But in that way of playing you know, like a jazz record is where you’re just performing, you do a couple of performances and everybody just plays and you just hope that nobody plays, splits a note when you’ve got a great take.

Obviously that’s also a testament to the talent of the musicians you’re working with, but is this more spontaneous approach something you find more enjoyable than others?

Well I’ve done [records] every way. I mean, when I first went to the studio I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t have… I mean in some ways, when I turned up in Helsinki, it was exactly like when I first made a record. I didn’t have a band, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how a studio worked so I went in and you know, I was playing with very good musicians on my record who were older than me and more experienced.

And they could understand my ideas and they seemed to like the songs. They understand what you could do at the studio, and then of course we formed The Attractions and then that became a band that was playing every day on the road, so we learnt how to play together. And then we went into the studio and made another record where we knew what we could do. But we didn’t really use the studio to do very much. We just sort of played and you took a picture of that.

So sometimes it’s good to go back to the, not to try and repeat the past, but go back to the simplicity of not really knowing how to do it and discovering it again. Because obviously some other records are much more elaborate. You know, a record like Imperial Bedroom or a record like Spike is a much more intricate recording process.

So was Look Now, the last record we made. It was very determinedly arranged in advance. I treated it like they treated records in the 1960s, made in Los Angeles, where the rhythm section was made down and the orchestration was put in place and I knew exactly where everybody was going to sing, I knew which instruments were going to be played, I knew where the horns were coming in, I knew where the strings [went]. I’d written everything. And then I sang the song; I had to perform to that whole picture. It was all happening in the moment that we were playing it, so it’s a different energy. I won’t say one is better than the other – both records are good, but they are different. And I like it that way, I like it that they’re different because I don’t want them to be the same.

Going off the idea off of the idea of things being different, what struck me is the fact that there is no particular style that permeates throughout the album. There’s a boisterous sound on “No Flag” which leads into a more tender style of “They’re Not Laughing At Me Now”. Knowing things were more spontaneous explains that a lot, but it also lends itself to comments you made about things wanted to be more “vivid” this time around.

I’m not saying more vivid than the last record, but I was aware of the fact that I knew what I had in “No Flag” which was something like… You know, that’s a song about the day you get up where you can’t believe in anything. Now obviously, you know from hearing the sound of my voice, it’s not the way I feel every day of my life but it’s the way I feel some days. And right now we probably feel like that a bit more often than we’d like. There’s nothing to believe in, there’s no flag we should salute. You know, there’s no God, there’s no future, there’s no hope. Pick any one of those. So that’s a song for that day and that’s what that sounds like.

And “We Are All Cowards Now” is the song for when you’re sort of going, “We are cowards if can’t love one another and it’s much easier to hate than love.” So that’s cowardice. That’s what I call cowardice. So that’s what that songs about, in a simple phrase. Then we take a song like “I Do”, which is a love song but it’s a love song like contemplating eternity together. So it’s a right at the edge of life. Now that’s a quiet song and intimate in its dynamic. But you can’t sing that song in a half-hearted way.
So that’s what I mean by vivid. Just because it’s slow tempo, it has to be intense you know, it has to be delivered with commitment. And the musicians play, the minute they come in with that horn line at the top, that’s the only piece of music that I have that everybody write down so they play what I heard in my head. That was the melody at the top, that led into my voice and we just try to keep that mood you know, like through the record.

And in a different sort of way “Hey Clockface” is sort of a simple idea. Everybody has experienced it when the one you love is approaching, time moves too slowly. When it’s time to come to leave, time is too fast. It’s the sort of idea that you know, songs from the past, so I use music, a style of music from the past that’s more carefree and I’m happy to say that those guys knew how to play that in a sense of just discovering it. Not like it was a history lesson – they played it like we were making that kind of music up for the first time. And the Fats Waller song [“How Can You Face Me?”, quoted at the end of “Hey Clockface”] sort of fits with that, because that’s got that same kind of humour.

So we had those things, you know, we had those little moments of exuberance and then concentrate on a song like “The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip” that Steve Nieve and Muriel Teodori wrote the music, and I wrote the short story that complimented that you know. I try to make each one as strong as it could be no matter whether it was a fast tempo or a slow tempo or something with next to no melody and a lot of rhythm or something with a lot of melody and no movement.

Well the end results speak for itself, and it’s quite an intense album overall, even in the quiet moments. It might just be my own thoughts, but I’ve never quite felt your music has been tied to a specific sound per se. People obviously try and label you with a genre, but everything your work has always seemed quite free-flowing. Is this an enjoyable sense of freedom to have?

There’s two things going on, one is the first thing is you do is you have the benefit of surprise, and it’s also a long time ago so people can be sentimental about it. And because I wrote those songs, I am aware of them. I mean, I think it’s something you should be proud of if somebody wants to hear a song that you wrote a long time ago, but you can understand the desire on the part of somebody who wants to make new songs to not be solely defined by that first thing you said or sang.

So you know, you want to keep in proportion and not be too self-satisfied by the fact that people like those old songs. I can understand why that defines you because I mean, for some people I’m the same. I haven’t been as curious about the other music they’ve made, beyond the records that I really love. [Then] there’s other people who I have to hear everything they play. That’s the way I feel about them, I want to hear the latest thing they do every time. But that’s not everybody is it? So you know, I can really understand it.

But the last thing you want to feel is if you’re somehow forbidden to do something different. And I mean, I just can’t accept that. It of course can be unpopular and it has been at different times, different things where I’ve moved away from one sort of form of music to another. But I’ve always wanted to do it because I want to learn something and have that experience, and that doesn’t seem dishonest. And if it did, like I have never made a record going, “How do I look making this record?” I’m just making that record and that’s what I’m doing.

If you don’t want to come with me, there’s lots of other music to listen to. Maybe you’ll like the next one. You know, if you don’t like this one maybe you’ll like the next one. Maybe you liked the one before and you don’t like this one. But that isn’t going to stop me doing it because you’ve got to do the thing that you have a feeling for otherwise you’re making a formula, not a song. You’re trying to make a product, not something you feel anything about. That just doesn’t interest me.

I’m not expecting any round of applause for having that opinion, that’s the way it’s been. And you also have to think that sometimes when you have made records and had a career for a while, the thing you have to remember is that not everybody has been following it all along, just because they’re younger. I mean, I spoke to somebody today that didn’t hear any of my records until I’d made sort of eight or nine records or something. It was the first one that spoke to them, because, just because of the age they were.

So the beginning of a story might be a record that other people could say, “Oh, that’s not his best record. You haven’t heard this one.” Of course I didn’t, I wasn’t born or I was at junior school, you know what I mean? I feel that way about some music. It took me a long while to discover some, the value of certain things. When I was a really little kid my folks had like all these bebop records because my dad played trumpet. And when they would play them when I was a little kid, I didn’t understand what was going on in those records.

And then when I got older I couldn’t get enough of those records, and then that led to something else. And that’s been the great thing about it, all the music’s just led your way, and you gather little bits of skills in other areas. I learned how to orchestrate and things like that, that I didn’t know how to do first of all because I wanted to be able to communicate that way. This record, that didn’t really need those talents, if that’s the right word for it. Those abilities. I just had to tell people this is the mood, this is the tempo, let’s play and we just did it, yeah.

From more of a lyrical point of view, you mentioned how you were writing the short story behind “The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip”, so was the approach to the majority of the lyrics kept quite spontaneous as well?

Some of them were. Like “[The] Whirlwind” and “Byline”, they have been written for a little while, not very long. But “The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip” was really, I received the music as I landed in London before I proceeded on to Helsinki to begin the recording. And Steve and Muriel sent me this tune and I had some sketched idea for the story of Vivian Whip and then the music really kind of made it. That’s the framework, that’s how much space I have to tell the story in – I’ve got to choose the words now.

The opposite thing sort of happened with the “Radio Is Everything” because the music that Michael Leonhart sent me wasn’t structured, like first chorus, middle eight. It was continuous, it was like a piece of music that was proceeding on and the, things were entering and things would pick up a little bit. And I started to listen to the music over and over, and the recording was fairly developed when he sent it to me. And I had opened my notebook and I was looking at these versus that I hadn’t begun editing the way I normally do, and I would normally take the lines and make them regular lengths so that I could set them to music.

And I just started reading them as I was playing the music and recorded it. And it, and the music just told me where to start and stop. And I wasn’t singing, I was just saying them. And in a way I would have ended up losing some of my favourite images in the song because they would have been the victim of trying to turn it into a conventional song.

So it was an unconventional song. Unconventional in two ways. One, the length of the lines were all irregular. And I was responding to the music, but I wasn’t pitching my voice. I was just reciting, which I’d never done before other than on “Revolution #49”, which was done pretty much the same way. That was a spontaneous improvisation upon the opening motif that I gave to the trumpet player, who was playing the serpent which is a medieval instrument that looks like a snake. That’s the first thing you hear on the record and I was sort of guiding the performance and I was sort of – for want of a better word – conducting. I was sort of going make it more intense. I wasn’t saying that, I was waving my arms around like an idiot and I looked down at my notebook at this verse that I had and something made me say it. And I didn’t say it in a dramatic way, I just said it very, very deadpan because the music made me feel that way.

And so those two pieces were sort of improvised composition and I reacted to the music and I had words that I’d written and I recognised the connection between the words and the music and the way it was being performed, in the case of “Revolution #49”. And I’ve never done that before, that’s something entirely new.

It might sound like a magic trick but it was, you know, that’s what I felt and when I played it back I went, “Well, is it an instrumental or should I keep that talking in there? And I like the sentiment it ends on. I like the fact that it says love is the only thing we can save you know, it’s the one thing we can save. I like that idea, so let’s open the record like that.” I’d said to Sebastian, This song either opens or closes the record.” He said it opens the record. I said, “kay, if you think so.” Now I can’t hear it any other way, but I have to give him the credit for saying, “Start there and then give everything else that you’ve got. Don’t lead up to it.” And I’m glad that we did it that way.

It’s such a striking way of starting the record as well. That song, along with “Radio Is Everything” feel like they’re two of the most powerful songs on the record.

What you’re really saying is just stop that singing, because that’s getting in the way. I know. “Just talk from now on,” no, I know. [Laughs] No, I mean it’s something new, so if I’d done it all the time then it would be commonplace. But because I’ve never done it before, it had a feeling of something very new and novel, to me as it was happening. And something where you almost are, “Don’t look at me while I’m doing this because it’s something so unusual.” I’m very used to singing, I’m not used to reciting like that. And then it felt, when I came back the contrast and “Newspaper Pane”, the second piece I did with Michael is somewhere between. Like, more like “Hetty O’Hara ‘Confidential'”. Not quite singing but not quite talking either. Sort of pitch talking, or yelling. [Laughs].

But there’s a lot of music in rock ‘n’ roll that’s like that. Chuck Berry was like that, you know. “On the night he came home from the debutante ball, passed out drunk on the bathroom floor”. It’s the same rhythm as Chuck Berry songs, exactly the same rhythmic delivery. So I mean, it’s not the Chuck Berry music but it’s that kind of machine gun kind of lyric. And that’s something I’ve gone to a few times over the years and that one felt quite different by the time it was done.

As I said before, these results speak for themselves in how this method of approaching the sessions worked for you, so would this be an approach you’d aim to revisit in the future? Or would it be more of a case of trying to recapture the magic a second time?

Well I did do one other piece which was the B- side of the record. It would have been, in an ideal world it would have been a vinyl single of “We Are All Cowards Now”. I recorded a piece called “Phonographic Memory”, which is available now but it’s not on this album. It’s a piece on it’s own, which I recorded here, which is acoustic guitar with a rustication over the top of it. [It] is a very strange story about a presidential inauguration some time in the future, after a civil war, in which the internet has been switched off and all the books have been burnt or locked in a university. And they can’t find anybody sufficiently dignified to give the inauguration speech, so they send an engineer into the national archive to chop up words from soundtracks and spoken word pieces by Orson Wells because he sounds serious. When he’s speaking his voice sounded very like, “Pay attention”.

So somebody writes the speech, but they can’t find anybody dignified enough to say it. So they cut together individual words and this sort of mechanical assembly of words gives the speech, announcing the inauguration of a new president. Who is a young woman who sings this song, called President Swift. So I’ll leave it to you to decide who that is. But a fanciful idea, you can imagine the times we’re living in. It sort of came to me in a moment and I thought I should write it down. That was enjoyable to do you know, because that one is sort of the a shaggy dog story.

Well had you explained that idea to me five years ago, I likely would have though it was crazy. Now, it feels that it could well be a vision of the future.

Well, yeah and I mean bear in mind that I’ve been working on this musical for five years, which should have been opening next month and will probably open next year at this time, the way things are looking. You continue to work on it, we can do all the preparations, we can work with the choreographers and on their plans for designers and everything. Costume designers and we can work on the score and we can work on the script. But we you know, that has 20 songs in it and that’s based on the Budd Schulberg story “A Face in The Crowd”.

Now I’ve been performing those songs in concert for a number of years now and people seemed to really respond to them. I didn’t tell anybody I was recording but I know some people thought that I was going to record those songs next. But because the show has been delayed, I may well record my versions of them some day. But not right now because the show hasn’t been heard. I want them to be heard in the context of a rip. And I’ve carried on working through this year, I carried on after we finished this album. I just continued working.

And so we have some records that we’ve been preparing for release next year already, because we have to think of how we’re going to maintain a sign of life. You can’t just give in to these circumstances, you’ve got to just keep moving forward. I mean, what’s the point otherwise? Otherwise you’re going to feel eventually like it’s going to grind you down. It takes a while to go out there and everybody feel comfortable coming to the theatre again. I mean, some shows… have they had any shows at all in Australia?

Not really, they’ve started doing some socially-distanced events but some of those have been cancelled because of virus flare-ups.

had these ones you know, where people go into drive-in’s and instead of applause they would flash their headlights and things like that. They sound a bit bizarre you know, I don’t know whether I would love that. And then Steve Nieve played a film festival a couple of weeks ago where he played a tribute to Ennio Morricone, it was an improvised piano piece. I think they had people every couple of seats. So it was weird, it was like playing to a very poorly sold house, but that was how many they let in. So those things would feel weird from the stage and they’d probably feel weird from the seats as well, wouldn’t they? It’s not like what you’re used to.

If music keeps arriving, particularly if it arrives unexpectedly, then you hear about it and you discover it and that’s great. And that’s one of the good things about streaming – other people have their doubts about it. Is it’s kind of like radio with all the unpleasant talking taken out. You know, it’s something you could turn on anytime and discover something. I also really love physical records still, but when I say records I mean vinyl records. And those, strangely enough have, as you probably know, have had a revival.

You know, and re-releasing six album set based on Armed Forces which [will be] the last word on [that] record, I think that not everybody will want that but somebody will want it and within it are these live records, the original record really well mastered and the comic books that are fully of my original hand written notebooks. So anybody that wants to know about how that record happened. It even has a record made in Australia in it. It has the Riot at The Regent. It has a souvenir of that infamous concert, so yeah. So you know, something fun for all the family as they say.

Well, despite all the dark days there is still some light in the form of music coming from yourself.

Who knows whether anybody is buying records right now, but they’re there if you need them. The way I see it is sort of like a public service to keep making music. You’ve got to just be in contact, we’ve got to show a sign of life you know.

Well, thank you for your time, and again, congratulations on the new record.

Pleasure to talk to you, stay well, and I hope that… It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been [to Australia] now and we had all these plans but they’ve all been delayed. So heaven knows when it will be, but we’ll surely try and get back down there. It’d be great if we could.

“Stay well and throw your television out the window,” is my best advice for everybody. Don’t look at the TV, that won’t help any.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5963
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://variety.com/2020/music/news/elv ... 8OHBM7MIRs

Elvis Costello on His ‘Clockface’ Album, ‘Armed Forces’ Set and Coming Broadway Musical: ‘I’ve Spent My Whole Career Leaning Backwards to Launch Forward’
By Chris Willman

Elvis Costello knows that, this deep into a four-decade-plus career, he will always be asked the inevitable then-and-now questions about how his attitude has changed, beckoning the 66-year-old to pit the late-1970s version of himself against the gentler and more accomplished Costello that constitutes this century’s model. That doesn’t mean he has to like it; asking him to do a self-compare-and-contrast is one of the few things you could bring up that risks evincing the vintage 1978 glare.

“You know, that’s an analyst’s question, that question they always ask,” he says — referring to journalists’ eagerness to put him on the couch to measure his levels of amusement and disgust, then versus now — “and I try not to be impatient with it. But if for some reason you had to have your legs sawn off, you would not ask the surgeon poised with the hacksaw, ‘How did you feel about your vocation in medicine when you were a student?,’ would you?” He continues: “You surely feel something valuable has happened in the time, even if you’ve made mistakes. And, you know, mistakes, I’ve made a few. But then again, too few to mention.”

As it turns out, Costello is perfectly happy to talk about his youthful days, as long as he doesn’t feel like he’s being subjected to Freud’s talking cure. And it’s a good thing he has that comfort level, because he is being asked to chat up two projects that, apparently by coincidence, are coming out nearly simultaneously: his strikingly good 31st studio album, “Hey Clockface,” which dropped Oct. 30, and a deluxe vinyl boxed set commemorating his third album, the 1979 masterpiece “Armed Forces,” which arrives just a week later, on Nov. 6. There is a lot of clock-punching, or smashing, to go around in this sudden flurry of releases.

He quotes a couplet from “Newspaper Pane,” one of the tunes from the brand new album: “’I don’t spend my time perfecting the past / I live for the future because I know it won’t last.’ That’s spoken by a character in the song, but there are days when I really feel that. The effort to critique the past is one thing. To live to solely devote yourself to correcting it is surely energy that should be spent on making a better future. Now, maybe you can’t do one without the other,” he acknowledges. “Lots of people would argue that. And I have spent my whole creative career leaning backwards to launch forward.” In context, he’s talking partly about how he’s always acknowledged borrowing from his musical forebears, but it could just as easily describe how, as the juxtaposition of new and catalog releases suggests, he’s standing on the shoulders not just of the giants who preceded him, but his own, too.

These old and new works are almost ridiculously incomparable in style, but there is a striking commonality. “Hey Clockface” doesn’t sound remotely like his last album, “Look Now,” which didn’t sound like any of the ones before it. And “Armed Forces” found Costello already shedding the lean, frantic signature sound of the prior record, “This Year’s Model,” to embrace the possibilities of the studio in a more ambitious and even grandiose way. Outside of the Beatles and David Bowie, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the small canon of rock ’n’ roll greats so eager to stretch himself, then and now.

Although most of the new album was recorded in a couple sessions immediately prior to quarantine, Costello allows that we probably wouldn’t be getting “Hey Clockface” in this form without the pandemic. He and his 21st-century band, the Imposters, were 10 days into a U.K. tour in March when “we started to see holes in the crowd, [despite] knowing that the halls were sold out — whole rows of people that didn’t want to put themselves at risk. So I had to call a halt. The border was about to close to Canada,” where he lives with wife Diana Krall and their 13-year-old twin sons. “Once I got over the shock of being launched back home, I had time to think and listen to what we had done.”

Specifically, what Costello had done was take time out before and during those tour dates to book quick, experimental sessions — by himself, as a clanging one-man rock band in Helsinki, and with a jazzy combo of Parisians put together by his keyboard player Steve Nieve in France. (He had even booked time with his touring band and his old producer Nick Lowe in London, with a whole different set of songs earmarked to work on, but those plans got scotched and will wait for another day and another album.)

He points to a tune on “Hey Clockface” to illustrate what he considers a narrow escape. “There’s a song called ‘What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?’” Costello says. “And in some ways that might be the explanation of how this album came about. Because I might well have worked my way out of a good record by just recording so much stuff I couldn’t hear where the story was anymore.”

The new album is intriguingly genre-less — aided in this regard by using the Parisian musicians on nine of the 14 tracks. “It’s never great to get a lot of conversation in the way of making music,” Costello adds. “We didn’t have to theorize, because we couldn’t — because I don’t speak French. So nobody asked for my passport in the sense of: Is this jazz? Is this classical music? Is it pop music, of a kind? I didn’t feel I needed to waste any time giving it a name; it was a far better use of time to write and sing it.”

There’s no danger of the new album being mistaken for a “guitar record” — with the exception of the first song Costello released from it, “No Flag,” which he did in his DIY Helsinki sessions. Its rejection of not just nationalism but any creed sounds unusually nihilistic for someone who has domestic tranquillity waiting at home in Vancouver … almost like something out of the punk era, we point out. “Which punks are you talking about?” retorts Costello, smiling. “The punks in 1969, maybe, more than some punks in 1977.”

He explains the mood behind the tune: “There’s some days where there’s no consolation in any allegiance, any philosophy, religion — even the words of a lover. There’s some days where none of it matters, and it doesn’t mean anybody would want to stay there forever, but maybe it’s better to write that out in a song.” Costello says he has no need to “live in the past, trying to summon up some old kind of fury. Because I’ve got all the fury that I need right now. Put on ‘No Flag’ and tell me which track on ‘This Year’s Model’ is more aggressive than that. There isn’t one.”

As a follow-up to the agitation of “This Year’s Model,” 1979’s “Armed Forces” might have had even more rage to it — but it was better disguised, as Costello, his band the Attractions and Lowe committed to putting more of a pop sheen on the songs, trading organ for synths or, on the politicized “Oliver’s Army,” a piano sound they borrowed from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

“By the time we got to ‘Armed Forces,’ we had the idea we wanted to make an actual studio record,” Costello recalls. “And that was our version of what a studio sounded like. We played cassettes in the station wagon driving around America for the first time, of the same four or five records round and around. Little wonder that became our language for that next record, things that we were listening to in that moment — including ABBA. We put aside the rock ’n’ roll, Small Faces/Rolling Stones references of ‘This Year’s Model’ and into it came the synthesizer, which came from those David Bowie and Iggy Pop records — ‘Station to Station,’ ‘Low,’ ‘Heroes,’ ‘The Idiot,’ ‘Lust for Life.’” Then, considering more stripped-down techno influences, he adds, “I don’t think we thought we were making a Giorgio Moroder record, but we liked the mechanistic sound of Kraftwerk, even if we weren’t going to make records that were that austere. I wanted the emotion in them.”

Guitar music figured in — barely. “Certainly ‘Party Girl’ has a reference to the Beatles, obviously in the arpeggio at the end. There are some Cheap Trick songs that sound like that too, though, and we loved Cheap Trick. So were we ripping off the Beatles, or were we just ‘Hey, Cheap Trick — I like them’?” He hears us chuckle at the idea he might’ve been influenced as much in the moment by Rick Nielsen as George Harrison. “You’re laughing,” he says, “but I’m deadly serious!”

Columbia Records added a cover of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” recorded for another project, to the album. “They thought it sounded more rock ’n’ roll than many of the other things, and that’s what they wanted. This record didn’t suit them at all.” Although Costello says of the song that “in my mind, it’s not even on this album” (and it wasn’t, on the original U.K. version), he’s not unhappy that it became so wildly popular that fans have expected to hear his version of Lowe’s tune closing out most of his shows for 40 years now.

“I think there was a little irony in the way Nick recorded it originally,” Costello says, recalling that Lowe first had the idea of gently satirizing hippie sentiments with “Peace, Love and Understanding.” “But if you’ve ever heard him perform it in recent years, he sings it very much like the lament that it deserves to be. I think both approaches to the song are really appropriate. I like all the versions of the song that I’ve heard. Sometimes it takes you a moment to hear it again in a different way, but I’ve had reason to sing it as a ballad, as a rocker and somewhere in between. I’ve heard Bruce Springsteen sing it and Chris Cornell sing it, and Josh Homme sang it with Sharon Van Etten. I mean, there’s some really good versions. Nick’s version with a choir earlier this year was beautiful. You know, it shouldn’t be needed now, but we still have to sing it. How long, how long must we sing this song — as Bono said, you know?”

The “Armed Forces” boxed set is coming out on vinyl as well as digitally with several extra LPs’ or EPs’ worth of live material from ’79. He picked out only the performances he thought were great from that period, he says. “I appreciate the Grateful Dead fans really want all those ‘Dick’s Picks’ releases and want the differences between each show, but I don’t really think there’s a lot of difference between the performances over the course of one year of the Attractions. It’s more about the atmosphere of some of those shows. One is from a show in Sydney where there was a riot. You can hear the show just about to go out of control. I love records that fade out just before it goes somewhere; that one fades just before it goes somewhere, but nowhere good. ‘Live at Hollywood High’ has a great atmosphere because we were in this high school gym, and it slightly ironic that there were no high school students at that gig, just some 35-year-old divorcees dressed like teenagers, and record executives. And Linda Ronstadt apparently was at that show. I’m really thrilled to know that she actually heard ‘Party Girl’ at that show for the first time, and then went ahead and recorded it. Not that I was particularly grateful as my younger, very snotty self.”

Costello’s new album includes one ballad, “The Whirlwind,” borrowed from a planned Broadway musical adaptation of “A Face in the Crowd,” delayed by the pandemic. “I did think about recording the songs for ‘A Face in the Crowd’ last year. I thought about that being my next recording, my renditions of these songs, because I’ve performed many of them over the last four years as we’ve been developing the show. For the very same reasons as I’m not currently on my way to South Dakota or somewhere to play a show, we’re not opening in previews the theater this week as we might have been. Instead, next week we’re entering into another workshop, which obviously is over this kind of medium,” he says, referring to Zoom.

Despite the Trump parallels people have seen in the 1957 film about a grifter who turns sudden media stardom into political ambition, Costello thinks the theme will stay fresh regardless of election results. “Budd Schulberg couldn’t have imagined Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan when he wrote the book, let alone the current catastrophes,” he marvels, referring to the early-’50s short story that the writer adapted into a seemingly prophetic screenplay. “So whatever the coming days bring, it will still be a story worth telling, because Schulberg originally wrote this tale of ‘A Face in the Crowd’ about somebody who was summoned up from the dark impulses of the audience. We still have to tell a story about what the relationship is between the audience’s desires and how they’re reflected in a particular kind of ruthless, raw talent on television.”

Costello does worry a bit for this adopted realm he’s entered into, though: “I hope the theater world survives this particular thing. They have a lot more moving parts. I can always walk up with just one guitar and sing you a new song I just wrote.”

With new music and old in the marketplace, though, Costello is handling the Broadway delay with patience and equanimity. There are other projects on hold, too: a redo of “This Year’s Model” with all the lead vocals replaced by those of some of the top singers from Latin music, in Spanish, which was to have come out in 2020 but can hold till next year. And that new set of songs to record with the Imposters, if Lowe is still as willing to come out of producing retirement for it in 2021 as he seemed to be in March. Even though he had a health scare a few years back, he thinks more about how some of the songs he recorded on his previous record, “Look Now,” took 30 years to get recorded, and he thinks they came out the better for that wait.

“What are we rushing for?” he says, taking the quarantine slowdown in surprising stride. He repeats himself with even more of a gust of ebullience, laughing: “What are we rushing for?” I’m not going anywhere.”

Image

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Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Hawksmoor
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

Played it four or five times straight through tonight, on headphones, and completely revised my opinion. Initially thought: bit of a mishmash, cobbled together in a way that was unintended, by an artist whose voice is shot and whose quality control has dropped, particularly in terms of decent tunes.

What an idiot. This is a stunningly beautiful LP: clever, brave. innovative, tuneful, wonderfully sung and perfectly sequenced. The snap-breaks between the Helsinki tracks and the Paris tracks are perfectly judged, 'No Flag' makes me want to jump up and play air guitar. 'The Whirlwind' and 'Byline' make me want to weep into my hands for every relationship I've ever managed to screw up. 'Hetty O'Hara' makes me want to dance (no mean feat for a 56 year-old lifelong non-dancer). 'Newspaper Pane' makes me think what a clever bugger he is (I probably knew that in 1978, but it's always good to be reminded).

Just magnificent. For me, perhaps his best since 'The Delivery Man', and that's high praise from me. Truly exceptional, and for your 28th LP (depending which ones you're counting, of course) that's saying something.

If nothing else, the 'London derrieres'/'Londonderry Airs' line is laugh-out-loud good. Who else is anywhere that level of punning?
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Harry Worth
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Harry Worth »

After the range of 'the singles' ahead of this I was apprehensive, wondering if it would be a half-cooked, tins at the back of the lockdown store cupboard affair that I'd end up buying only because I'm a fan.
But no, from the moment I ventured into Fopp Records in Manchester to make my purchase where 'Newspaper Pane' was blasting over the speakers, it was clear I was wrong.
It's one of Elvis's most complete albums ever to my mind. It all hangs together in a fabulous eclectic shimmer. When it moves to a different style, it still feels like you've just turned a corner onto a street in the same town - amazing given its cross continental gestation.
I'll check my compass again in a week to see if I haven't been overcome by enthusiasm as another lockdown beckons and that it is still pointing towards the grid square where Fabulous is located. For now it certainly is!
E*C*RIDER
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by E*C*RIDER »

Yep, well said Hawksmoor & Harry Worth,

I’d shied away from the sonically sub-standard digital teasers and the frenzy of multi-coloured limitless editions…

But now, swinging by my record shop and picking up EC's new record on first day of release (as i’ve done ever since TYM), i agree.

What an absolutely sensational album! Amazing stuff. Elvis is King. Still!!
"...i feel almost possessed,
so long as i don't lose this glorious distress..."
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by bronxapostle »

After two spins....A solid 8. Thanks for the help POPE OF POP. I imagine I'll give it a 9 by ALL SOULS DAY. :D :D
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/ ... ew-no-flag

Elvis Costello: Hey Clockface review – worthy of your time
3 out of 5 stars.
The master craftsman mixes styles and moods to often brilliant effect

Whatever the time, it’s usually later than you’d like. The clock face’s implacable march is one of the themes of this periodically brilliant, if scattershot Elvis Costello album, one recorded in Helsinki, Paris and New York as coronavirus hit.

Costello came to prominence mere moments after punk, and although his output since has spanned a kaleidoscope of moods, hard-hitting bile remains one of his greatest default modes. No Flag is this album’s crowning glory, a farewell to love whose overdriven churn mirrors Costello’s eloquent anomie. By contrast, the title track is an old-time jazzy flail that quotes Fats Waller and again blames romantic disappointment on a perfidious timepiece.

The remainder of the restless tracklist zigs and zags, as Costello maxes out approaches, musicians and hobbyhorses; his lifelong disgust at militarism remains one subplot. Of two over-egged spoken word tracks, the dramatic, Arabic-leaning Revolution #49 is a keeper. So are the more emotionally skewering songs, They’re Not Laughing at Me Now and What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have – subtle miniatures that reaffirm Costello as one of the masters of his craft.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
chickendinna
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by chickendinna »

I was one of the fools who purchased a mixed bag of Hey Clockface ephemera, including the boxer shorts. I must have deleted the confirmation email. I emailed Second City Prints on Friday, but have heard nothing. Have they started shipping items yet or does anyone have a secret email customer service address that I might try? I purchased the signed cd too but that's for the estate sale. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
jardine
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

I can tell you this. I cancelled about a week ago, but on Oct. 31, they sent me an email reminding me that the would have shipped then. not much help, though.
Mikeh
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by Mikeh »

I ordered the (expensive) signed cd from the EC website which has yet to arrive. Though I did get the download from and email they sent me on Friday
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by johnanderson »

I’ve cracked and mail ordered mine from Rough Trade, having failed in my quest to buy it locally.

I’ve spotified it several times and I’m loving it, especially the quicker songs, especially especially Hettie.

Radio is Everything reminds me uncannily of “Tour Jacket with Detachable Sleeves” by Half Man Half Biscuit. I’m sure that Elvis will be flattered by the comparison.
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by Pigalle »

chickendinna wrote:I was one of the fools who purchased a mixed bag of Hey Clockface ephemera, including the boxer shorts. I must have deleted the confirmation email. I emailed Second City Prints on Friday, but have heard nothing. Have they started shipping items yet or does anyone have a secret email customer service address that I might try? I purchased the signed cd too but that's for the estate sale. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
I wrote and received a response from them at: orders@secondcityprints.com
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://guitar.com/review/album/the-big ... clockface/

THE BIG LISTEN: ELVIS COSTELLO – HEY CLOCKFACE

The prolific songwriter, Jazzmaster enthusiast and uncompromising innovator returns with a new solo album recorded in three separate sessions across the globe. Does it work as a coherent whole?

Half a century into a career of angry, eloquent and frequently challenging expression, is there any chance that Hey Clockface represents Elvis Costello easing into his creative dotage? Nope. It’s a complex, multifaceted album that spits venomously and ruminates weightily, all the while defying easy categorisation.

Last time out, on 2018’s Look Now, the famous Jazzmaster-toting Rock and Roll Hall of Famer collaborated with Burt Bacharach and Carole King on a wholly engaging batch of classic songwriting, and again there are notable guests on the follow-up. It’s ostensibly three records spliced into one, partly due to the constraints of Covid and partly because, well, why the heck not? By this stage in his career – as if it were ever different – Elvis Costello is doing whatever he damn well pleases.

Nine of the songs on Hey Clockface were recorded in a two-day session in Paris with a full band that included an ensemble of French musicians dubbed Le Quintette Saint Germain, who played largely spontaneously. There are also entries from a solo session in Helsinki and remote recordings in New York, on which Costello is backed by the avant-garde contributions of guitarists Nels Cline and Bill Frisell. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all sounds as if it would make for an eyebrow-raising, disjointed listen, and you’d be partly right.

Spoken word opener Revolution #49, from those Paris sessions, begins with alluring Arabic horns. Costello intones gravely, “The land was white, the wind a dagger, Life beats a poor man to his grave”, before repeating the mantra “Love is the one thing we can save”. It’s a sobering start.

The first track from the solo sessions, No Flag, ignites in entirely contrasting fashion, the most prominent guitar moment on an album where the instrument is used largely as a refined, decorative tool. Over a stuttering distorted riff and processed beats Costello rages in rasping timbre, “I’ve got no religion, I’ve got no philosophy, I’ve got a head full of ideas and words that don’t seem to belong to me”. It’s enlivening to hear him so indignant and direct.

They’re Not Laughing At Me Now is of a different shade again, this time more conventional, an assembly of gently played acoustic guitar, mournful piano chords and Costello’s lilting tones. Lyrically it’s defiant and scornful, yet musically restoratively beautiful.

The two songs recorded in New York, with Cline and Frisell in the room while Costello added vocals from his Vancouver home, are at the experimental end of the record’s spectrum. Newspaper Pane is anchored by a steady hip-hop beat, muted guitar playing nudged to the background behind prominent, parping horns as Costello reflects on the senselessness of lives lost in war. The latter is another poetic spoken word monologue, flecked with shards of reverse guitar and doleful sax, the narrator paraphrasing George Orwell when he depicts the “soul of a jackboot in a broken brace, poised above a human face, forever and ever”.

That pensive, reflective air hangs over the majority of the record, and Costello wears it well, I Do (Zula’s Song) and The Whirlwind are deeply stirring ballads, the latter finding Costello sounding briefly reminiscent of Blackstar-era David Bowie.

He departs once more, on the title track from the Paris sessions, into jaunty jazz ensemble territory. It’s a cautionary tale that time is an adversary you cannot win a fight with. Hetty O’Hara Confidential is no less arresting, a beatbox rhythm and resonating synths the foundation for Costello to unleash a string of rhymes referencing an ominous shadowy character with a “morphine tattoo, an unquestionable thirst”.

Having completed a whistle-stop stylistic expedition that just about manages to feel like a coherent whole, the final two tracks are exquisitely lovely, examples of songcraft sharpened over 50 years. I Can’t Say Her Name, strummed initially soporifically then in more sprightly fashion on an acoustic, accompanied by spiralling reeds, is an understated gem. The closing Byline is even more affecting, a wistful set of recollections adorned with ghostly harmonies and sombre cello. At its death, a former lover concludes “I was never his, he was always mine, but I wrote him off byline, byline”. It’s a desperately sad ending, but this is a record we should celebrate as a vivid snapshot of an artist with one eye on the clock, devoting every second of his time to continued evolution.

————
SUMMARY
Reflective, explorative and at times absolutely inspired, Hey Clockface is as good as anything Costello has done in years.
OVERALL SCORE: 8
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.stereoboard.com/content/view/230017/9

Elvis Costello - Hey Clockface (Album Review)
3 stars out of 5

Elvis Costello’s 31st studio album shows a British icon in fine fettle. It is a punchy, if uneven, trip through his stylistic catalogue, and at 66 he retains a great deal of mischievous chutzpah and artistic confidence. That said, the record will likely be a total head scratcher for Costello newcomers.

‘Hey Clockface’ was recorded during sessions in Helsinki, Paris and New York with a rotating cast of producers and collaborators, including guitarists Bill Frisell and Nels Cline. We open with the spoken word Revolution #49, which drops into the scratchy and processed No Flag, a track that recalls the overproduced 1990s indie-punk of Blur’s Bugman, with the bilious lyricism that defines much of Costello’s work. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

The answer, of course, is that aforementioned magical mystery tour. Unlike similar British rock luminaries David Bowie and Elton John, Costello’s stylistic variations have never really related to physical chameleonism.

As such, the chonky imbalance of ‘Hey Clockface’, from crooned balladry on I Do (Zula’s song) to satirical 808 jungle drums on Hetty O’Hara Confidential, is quite confusing.

But when it connects, it's marvellous. Newspaper Pane tells a story of a doomed love affair over seemingly different historical eras. The boxy hip hop drums and vocal production seem to date the song to the ‘90s, and it also features the familiar crappy organ voices used by longtime collaborator Steve Nieve.

Like Costello’s voice itself, the organ sound forms a bit of an arrangement joke (or scherzo) in his music. Thus, AAA composition and devastating lyric writing are seemingly undermined by cheap and tacky arrangements. That nasal vocal style of Costello’s, itself an instant ‘80s throwback to Morrissey and Tears for Fears, has always protected him from accusations of pomposity. Think of the way it vandalises one of his biggest hits: a cover of Charles Aznavour’s She.

And that’s in play throughout ‘Hey Clockface’. This is pristine music making and storytelling that is messed up and mucked about by its creator. It has been said that a person’s artistic style is defined more by what they can’t do then what they can. If Costello has an achilles heel it is a talent for creative self-sabotage—perhaps because songwriting seems too easy. It’s this tension between what he can do and what he actually does that makes him one of the UK’s most brilliant, yet underrated, exports.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
bronxapostle
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by bronxapostle »

chickendinna wrote:I was one of the fools who purchased a mixed bag of Hey Clockface ephemera, including the boxer shorts. I must have deleted the confirmation email. I emailed Second City Prints on Friday, but have heard nothing. Have they started shipping items yet or does anyone have a secret email customer service address that I might try? I purchased the signed cd too but that's for the estate sale. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

i tell you...they sure were expeditious in taking the money from our accounts two or three months back. an email informing us of any further delay would be the professional approach!!!
jardine
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

i did get some sort of email a couple of weeks back saying that there was a delay until november something or other. that's when i cancelled my order. I didn't order the colour coded lubricated clockface suppositories, though.
bronxapostle
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by bronxapostle »

jardine wrote:i did get some sort of email a couple of weeks back saying that there was a delay until november something or other. that's when i cancelled my order. I didn't order the colour coded lubricated clockface suppositories, though.

maybe i missed my email in a junk mail folder!
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Ymaginatif
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by Ymaginatif »

I received an email that the Clockface LP was delayed for two weeks - to mid November. Maybe, if your superdecrazy package includes an LP, that holds up shipping?
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ente ... 21353.html

Elvis Costello: ‘I didn’t expect to be discussing a televised lynching with my 12-year-old boys over dinner in 2020’

The beloved British raconteur is back with a new album exploring the current era of selfishness, self-righteousness and xenophobia. But where we are is nothing new, he tells Mark Beaumont

With an almost wistful lilt, the bon vivant of British post-punk reminisces fondly about the riots. “The one in Belgium,” Elvis Costello recalls of one night at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels in 1978, when the crowd turned against New York support act Suicide, and he and his band The Attractions took the stage with an unholy vengeance, “we came on with the attitude of ‘f*** you for treating them like that’, played a furious, incoherent 20 minutes and that just tipped everybody right over the edge, then it was a full-on riot. I give Alan [Vega, Suicide’s provocative singer] the credit. He lit the Molotov cocktail, I hurled it over the wall. One night we walked off and turned the whole PA into white noise to drive people out of the gig, no encore. We were just being young idiots.” He ponders this for a moment. “The Young Idiot – that’s gonna be the name of my next book.”

As new wave’s angriest young man, Costello rampaged through the late Seventies with a besuited bravado and sardonic sneer, lobbing arch lyrical bombs at Chelsea punk fashionistas, fascists and despotic, imperialist power figures. Four decades later, at 66, this Zelig-like elder statesman of literate, cultured rock, revered man of letters and dabbler in the higher arts – on the phone from his Canadian lockdown to discuss his 31st album Hey Clockface – no longer exudes the biting antagonism of his early days

His live shows, though still often ferocious, barbed and untamed, can take on a more inclusive and intimate tone. Take his carnival-style Spectacular Spinning Songbook tours, at which audience members were invited onstage to spin a wheel marked with 40 Costello songs and timeless classics to decide the setlist. Or his nostalgic Evening With… style residency at the London Palladium in 2016, for which he played inside a giant 1950s TV and regaled audiences with tales of his roots in the plush northern dancehalls.

Today he cuts the figure of debonair raconteur, and his increasingly regular diversions into country, jazz, gallic folk, classical music, opera, easy listening, bluegrass and electronica – alongside such renowned collaborators as Burt Bacharach and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint – have long since granted him a more open-minded audience. No longer does he need to label his records “WARNING: this album contains country and western music & may cause offence to narrow minded listeners”, as he did with 1981’s album of country covers Almost Blue; Costello fans have come to expect unexpected sonic swerves. Ever since he released the Nashville-toned King of America and the savagely art-punk Blood & Chocolate within months of each other in 1986, he has forged ahead as an un-pigeonholable stylistic polymath.

That mischievous imp of old still has the occasional gambol, though. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Costello resurrected his 1989 musing on the eventuality, “Tramp the Dirt Down” (“and when they finally put you in the ground /I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down”), for his subsequent tour. And as Covid tore through the country in March, he took to the Hammersmith Apollo stage in the shadow of encroaching lockdown, told the crowd “we’ll keep playing as long as they let us” and tore into a visceral “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)”.

“I woke up the next morning and thought, ‘the game’s up’,” he says. “I saw the holes in the crowd in an apparently sold-out house in Manchester, and even at Hammersmith at the interval there was about half a house. We thought ‘wow, people have really taken this seriously’… Two weeks later I’m reunited with my family after two weeks of quarantine when I get home, I’m in a little cabin on Vancouver Island going, ‘where did the world go?’”

What did he make of Ian Brown’s song claiming the virus is a plot to get us all implanted with chips? “Mancunians,” Costello chuckles, “you can’t help ’em, can you really? That’s a joke – my family’s from Liverpool, I’m contractually obliged to say that, whatever they say.”

The first mid-pandemic volleys from Hey Clockface also threw back to his adventurous and insurrectionary past. Fully submerged in the electronic manipulations he’d explored on 2002’s When I Was Cruel and 2013’s Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost, and reviving the abrasive rock attack last unleashed on 2008’s Momofuku, “No Flag”, “Hetty O’Hara Confidential” and “We Are All Cowards Now” were the result of a pre-tour diversion to Helsinki. There, Costello had worked alone, without a drummer or bassist, singing beats into his phone or constructing them from other instruments. “I was trying to make a rock’n’roll sound that wasn’t like anything I’d done before – there’s no bass for half the song, or all those instruments are playing different roles in what is just a rhythmic flow”.

They seemed to speak to the times, too. “I sense no future,” goes “No Flag”, painting a portrait of a godless era of selfishness and xenophobia, “no flag waving high above, /No sign for the dark place that I live”. The fractured soul “We Are All Cowards Now” references “rivers rising” and “the pornography of bullets”, seeming to want to hide away from the horrors outside its boudoir curtains. Costello shrugs off accusations of prescience, though.

“People tell me ‘No Flag’ is really about now. Well, I must be clairvoyant then, because I wrote it in January,” he insists. “There’s some days when there is no hope, no philosophy, no theology, no deity gives me solace from the feeling of hopelessness that I have, but you don’t stay there very long. It’s been a summer of turmoil, for a number of reasons, between the pressures of the pandemic and brutal events that then trigger protest and reaction and violence, all of that stuff you can take sides on, things you can’t avoid seeing, [but] I’d already written all of that. All of those things were already happening, they’re just in focus now because of all the conditions.”

During the pandemic, he posted 50 of his – equally pertinent – old songs on his website, a day at a time, to reiterate the point that the tribulations of 2020 are nothing new. “All of these things have been happening all along,” he argues. “I personally didn’t expect to be discussing a televised lynching with my 12-year-old boys over dinner in 2020, but we are. So there’s something wrong, clearly. It’s the sort of stuff that was reported when I was their age on the evening news, a very sombre, not very partial, purely deadpan reporting of some outrage in the civil rights movement in the Sixties, and you’d think, ‘for heaven’s sake, how long does it have to go on before these things stop happening?’”

When talk turns to Donald Trump, he dovetails into a description of his long-in-the-works musical A Face in the Crowd, based on Budd Schulberg’s 1957 screenplay about an ex-con drifter who, thanks to his provocative attitude, rises through the entertainment world to become an egotistical, megalomaniacal power figure. Sounds familiar. “It’s very easy to draw a parallel,” Costello says, “but really what the story is about is what it summons out of the crowd. He’s a creation, he’s a monster created from the dark impulses of the crowd, so who’s really responsible? People go, ‘that terrible moment when Hitler seized power’. No he didn’t. He was voted in… However vulgar Donald Trump is, he’s nowhere near that kind of monster, thank goodness. He’s just a vulgar guy, we knew what he was before. It’s not a big mystery. People go ‘why would you vote for Silvio Berlusconi, a guy with plastic hair and terrible taste?’ Because some people want to be like that…You get what you wish for.”

“Hetty O’Hara Confidential”, meanwhile, takes a sardonic look at social media storms. Here, a merciless Golden Age gossip columnist with “the irresistible urge to assassinate”, sings Costello, finds herself rendered “powerless” in the Twitter age when “everyone has a megaphone” and “they’ve got witch trials now with witches to spare, /And a jukebox jury full of judgement and fury”. A wry comment on cancel culture? “There’s nothing more pathetic than a punctured monster, as maybe we’ll soon find out in a number of places,” he neither confirms nor denies, wary of reducing his songs to one specific reading. “Obviously [Hetty’s] kind of power is not held by any one person, every little spiteful person can think that they can do that now [cancel someone], whether or not they are righteous or merely self-righteous – and let’s make a distinction between those two things by the way.” He’s on a roll now. “The speed of life and the ease and the facile nature of even you saying a phrase, the impulse to dismiss somebody and gang up and all get together, you know how you deal with that? You simply switch the device off and it stops existing. It only exists if you’re looking at it.”

After his Helsinki sessions, Costello continued the album alongside long-term sidekick Steve Nieve and Le Quintette Saint Germain in Paris, “something I’d dreamed of doing”, he says. “You can’t help but have the outsider’s romance of wandering through the streets of Paris on the Left Bank to go to the Studio Saint Germain. It sounds like somewhere where something great happens before you’ve played a note.” These sessions gave the album a more emotive counterpoint to his noisier, politically charged Finnish experiments, with elegant moments like “They’re Not Laughing at Me Now”, “I Do (Zula’s Song)” and “Byline” emulating Costello’s more sophisticated output such as King of America, 1991’s Mighty Like a Rose or 2018’s Look Now. Hey Clockface’s title track, for instance, is a lover’s rag borrowing a Fats Waller riff. Combined with mournful paeans “What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?” and “The Last Confession of Vivian Whip”, the album begins to read like a battle against time.

“Yeah, but in a lighthearted way,” Costello insists. “I wanted [“Hey Clockface”] to be like when you’re waiting for your sweetheart, time moves too slowly. When it’s time to leave, time moves fast. That’s all the song’s about, it’s not about mortality. I don’t feel that time is my enemy, I embrace time in the sense that I can say, as in ‘Newspaper Pane’, ‘I don’t spend my time reflecting on the past, I live for the future because I know it can’t last’. I do really feel that way.”

In 2018, Costello cancelled a handful of European shows while he recovered from surgery for a minor cancer scare. Was that a wake-up call? “No, because it was turned into a melodrama by The Sun and other people who couldn’t care less whether you live or die and have no empathy for anybody. It was not an insignificant problem but it was fortunately one that could be dealt with one-time-only. I won’t subscribe to the description of myself as a survivor of anything, that sounds melodramatic and self-pitying and I never would’ve told anybody had I not had to give a credible reason for why I wasn’t going to be in Manchester on a given night playing with the Buzzcocks. Pardon me if I don’t have a lot of time for discussing my brush with mortality, but I didn’t have one.”

There’s certainly life in the old riot-starter yet. If Hey Clockface is Costello’s sharpest sociopolitical overview since his Thatcher-baiting Eighties, it’s just the latest instalment in a lifetime of documenting the machinations of the heart as much as the head of state.

“One of the reasons we sing in the first place is to get the emotions going,” he says. “At the root of it is something very fundamental. It’s just a life and death thing, happiness, sadness, justice, injustice. Those tussles are within many, many songs.”

He pauses. "Not every song on the radio, obviously. Some of them are just about ‘call me on the cellphone, how d’you like my bum?’”
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Harry Worth
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by Harry Worth »

johnanderson wrote: Radio is Everything reminds me uncannily of “Tour Jacket with Detachable Sleeves” by Half Man Half Biscuit. I’m sure that Elvis will be flattered by the comparison.
Can't see it myself, but I'm sure Helen would be touched :lol:
jardine
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Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

Quick review. It's vivid.
Screen Shot 2020-11-02 at 4.25.02 PM copy.jpg
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Arbogast
Posts: 248
Joined: Tue Nov 19, 2013 1:00 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Post by Arbogast »

I hear that the EC piece in New York Magazine/Vulture this week is very good...but it's behind a paywall. Anyone out there with access to it willing to share?
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