Today’s disc is a 12” single from 1986 by Elvis Costello and the Attractions called I Want You (B side I Hope You’re Happy Now). Bought quite a while after '86 and probably second hand, this is the first single in this series (hear it here) as it has been all albums up to now. Rather confusingly the A side on this credits the writer as MacManus (the artist and songwriter’s real surname) and the B side as Costello (his stage surname) so if anyone knows why, answers on a record sleeve please. Costello’s dad was a professional trumpet player and his mum worked in record shops, his paternal grandfather was a musician too.
I Want You was on the 1986 album Blood and Chocolate and the Wikipedia page for this song is pretty harsh, with one critic having called it “[among] the nastiest songs he has ever recorded, both lyrically and musically”. Looking at the lyrics now I can see their point (don’t look, honestly, best not to) but back then I absolutely loved this track, for the mood of longing rather than the specific lyrics overall. Maybe that’s because I was around 20 years old and at a stage where I regularly loved people in an uncomfortably intense way so it seemed fine to me. From this great distance I think that the loving in question wasn’t even about the object of affection most of the time, I was just uncomfortably intense in general (not that unusual for a young person, is it really?). I’ve calmed down now.
As for music, if my musical tastes and experiences were largely influenced by older siblings though my childhood and adolescence then the influence of friends really kicked in around this time. Some people I met in my first year at university were music fanatics with amazing collections. Some had even read the NME (I’d skimmed a Kerrang! here and there, stuck the odd Smash Hits lyrics on a teenage wall). One of my best uni friends had grown up in the North West of England (so much trendier than the North East where I’d started off) and arrived with a giant collection of albums on home-recorded cassettes, mostly containing music by singers and bands I’d never, or barely, heard of at that point. Like my brother's 7” singles, each of her cassettes had a neatly written cover and I spent a lot of time looking at the names on those cases, wondering how she knew them all (she had trendier clothes too, though that wasn’t hard then and still isn’t really). She had a Dixons (Saisho?) hi-fi (one of those block ones with double cassette player, radio and record player) and in went tape after tape at the start and end of each badly behaved night out. Good times.
Music new to me that I remember listening to from that collection included stuff by the Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg, Everything but the Girl and Stiff Little Fingers (and I also remember the names the Woodentops and The Three Johns but nothing about what was on those cassettes, probably too far into NME territory for me). I think Elvis Costello (and most likely his band the Attractions) was in there too. I had heard of Elvis Costello before (he’d been having hit singles since 1977 and I followed the charts up till about 1984) but it was only around 1986 that I started to be anything like a fan. I can’t say I’ve ever really liked his voice but it has that kind of like-me-you-fucker-there’s-more-to-music-than-prettiness appeal (see also B. Bragg) and he had some great songs. Now 69, Costello is (still) a very prolific artist and writer, putting out what Cilla Black might have called a lorra lorra material (32 studio albums, 6 live albums, 16 compilation albums, 6 tribute albums, 2 extended plays, 62 singles and 4 box sets apparently). He’s got a lot of very jaunty tracks, especially a lot of the early hits, music you might want to call new wave, but it’s definitely the slower ones I’ve listened to the most (including this one, plus Every Day I Write the Book*, Alison, Good Year for the Roses, written by Jerry Chestnut, and (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding, written by Nick Lowe). Rom com fans will know his 1999 version of Charles Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer’s She because it turned up in a movie featuring a couple of big stars (pop quiz opportunity here). Costello also wrote the lyrics for 1982’s Shipbuilding (there is a well-known version by Robert Wyatt and the Unthanks have covered it too, but Costello’s version is below). Shipbuilding is a really special song (music by Clive Langer) and one that has, perhaps, lasted a little better than I Want You.
Looking at online info this week I see that Costello has worked extensively with Burt Bacharach (a writer featured already this series on Day 2). A box set of their work together was released just last year (though to be honest I couldn’t find a song on it I enjoyed on first listen). He’s written and performed with many other artists (say, Paul Mccartney), and has popped up in TV and film too (in, for example, the brilliant New Orleans post-Katrina drama series Treme). Quite the career and it's not over yet.
Back tomorrow with something, perhaps less intense, from the other side of the Atlantic.
For the first intro post to this series go here.
*This song was written in ten minutes as a challenge to himself apparently.
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