Brutal Youth

Rip It Up, Issue 201, 1 May 1994, Page 20

Brutal Youth

It’s Sunday morning in Britain, a day of rest for Costello and the Attractions after completing weeks of rehearsal for a forthcoming world tour. For Elvis it’s back to the line-up that helped him convey some of the most carefully wrought blood-letting this side of Lennon. “It’s great to be working with them again. All four of us ended up playing on five of the cuts on the record but if you read some magazines it sounds as if they played on the whole recod. The whole line-up plays on less of the record than the line-up that includes Nick Lowe on bass. So to call it an Attractions record would be inaccurate. "We’re trying to put together a show where we can draw off any song that we feel like playing. Everybody’s been throwing in ideas but we probably won’t be able to regain the really wide repertoire we had in the past. Although that mightn’t be a bad thing as some of the shows got unwieldly at three and a quarter hours. For this show nothing is off limits although a case has to be made for the new album.” The album in question is, of course, Brutal Youth, a triumphant return to the pre-Spike four piece instrumentation that was the backbone of Costello’s ire and the format accepted by most critics as the criteria closest to the essentials of rock n’roll. So now he’s back in vogue because he’s conforming to some vague critical notion of minimalism? “I’m not doing anything,” Costello explains. “It’s in their minds, I’m just doing what I wanna do and it happens to coincide with what they think I should be doing some of the time. A lot of the people who've been writing the most comical stuff about how he’s finally coming to his senses prove to my mind that they haven’t been listening from the outset. I’m just trying to take it with a pinch of salt and not punch anybody.” (laughs). You were getting feisty over the reception of The Juliet Letters last year. “A lot of people dragged a lot of old grudges against me into the assessment of that music. They didn’t manage to do us down. We reached a tremendous number of people for such a piece of music. We sold a quarter of a million records and we went around the globe and everywhere it was heartening as people were so curious about the music we were making. And that’s encouraging not just for us but for anyone that wants to do something a little different.”

In contrast to The Juliet Letters with its string quartet attempting to carry Costello’s vocal histrionics for a whole record, Brutal Youth proves that his voice and songs are more effective when propped up and propelled by what some have called a “back to basics” approach. Was this approach preconceived or just the way the songs suggested they should sound? "It’s the way the songs came out. I started bashing them out mainly on guitar. I think you can tell the songs that were written on the piano — ‘Favourite Hour’, ‘London’s Brilliant Parade’, ‘You Tripped At Every Step’ and ‘This Is Hell’. The rest written on guitar so to one degree or another they have a little more rock and roll about them. So what’s the point of complieating matters.' Some of JBr them are just pick up Br the guitar and start f playing type songs j like ‘Kinder Mur- J der’. Others have S a lot of edge to g them but are H quite arranged H like ‘20% Amne- H sia’ which starts IS out like an R n’B I song and then 1 goes somewhere else. Likewise ‘Sulky Girl’ starts out then explodes in the rus. "I think it’s an easy to say it’s very raw and garagey. like gritty sounds, I don’t like slick and although some people like to believe that Mighty Like A Rose is ah enormously slick record it’s only because of the volume of musicians on it. There are gritty songs there like ‘Candy’ and ‘You Couldn’t Call It Unexpected’. I wanted to hear grain in the character of the instruments and have their own individual features. “I think we’ve done it to a great extent on Brutal Youth, I think Tchad Blake’s engineering has really brought that out. Even the simplest musical idea like ‘Rocking Horse Road’ can sound really original if you just record it properly. There’s been a lot of songs like ‘Wild Thing’ based on those changes.” In an album supposedly rife with songs about sexual fetishism and violence, ‘Rocking Horse Road’

sounds like a song about escape from a repressive environment. “The germ of the idea for that song came from an experience in New Zealand and I filed it away. There’s a place called New Brighton just outside Christchurch and when I was a kid the seaside resort near Liverpool that I used to go to was called New Brighton. So in Christchurch I had an afternoon off and I got curious to see New Brighton. I walked down the strand there and on the map I had it suggested that at the end of the isthmus I was on I could cross this little stream and get onto main road. But when I got to the x end the stream was actually a ragtorrent so I had to cut inland and walk back and I found myself in this Rocking Horse Road, it y really is a street there. And I don’t mean any disrespect to the people who live there but it was like a street I used to live in and the 'song is about a sudden feeling of J having escaped from this sort of dace. And it’s also ; feeling that someyou should feel is Je is suddenly opnd claustrophobic. Melt’s down to a personal view of !gEs®«’* Cfl something that should be benign becomes hostile." ‘Rocking Horse Road’ is one of the outstanding songs on an album full of them. ‘Sulky Girl’, the single which preceded ‘Brutal Youth’, is another and surprisingly was a modest hit in Britain. “I never really expected any singles success in England because I feel so estranged from what’s in the charts. It mainly consists of bad dance music and bad power ballads, sort of Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton crap and a lot of gimmicky records that are dance records like Doop. There didn’t seem to be any place for anything I would do and then out of the blue we had our first Top 30 single in eight or nine years. And even though it was short lived it announced the album which went in at number two.

There’s no lyric sheet with Brutal Youth so you're left to decipher the songs from the Costello vocal phrasing. “I just wanted to unify the songs again so the people get it all at once. I also like people making mistakes and mishearing things, sometimes they improve the lyrics. But ‘Sulky Girl' is about a girl who’s burdened with her appearance. She looks a certain way which makes men project their desire onto her and she realises this is something she can turn to her advantage. So on one hand she’s oppressed by looking a certain way and I imagine her to be someone who’s trying to make their way in Western Europe, maybe someone who’s come from Eastern Europe. A lot of girls have come over and they’re just staying out of trouble. They’re like migrant workers and it’s difficult for them to make their way as there’s a lot of guys who prey on them. It’s about how she gets the better of the guy in the end just by being a little smarter.” Brutal Youth isn’t about happy families, that would be too much contentment to expect from Costello. But neither is it completely about sex, sexual violence and rotten relationships. It’s as varied lyrically as his other albums but because he can be so cryptic the tendency is to generalise as to what his songs are about. “It happens with most records not just mine. There are too many records released, there are too many people writing about them in too many magazines and there are too many deadlines. You rarely read an informed personal opinion as if someone’s lived with the record for any length of time and really let it get under their skin. They’re obliged to make sweeping generalisations or a thumbnail sketch and they’ve got to jump one way or another. And because writing has become so competitive, the standard dropped so alarmingly, people are inclined to want to make a spectacular killing with their opinion rather than appear to be vacillating or to not understand.” So Costello is back at the cutting edge of rock n’roll and last year’s boxed set of his first three albums is a reminder as to how long he’s been there. From now on these reminders/retrospectives will come in pairs with Get Happy and Trust on the horizon. Also pending is his Rn’B covers album which he mastered before last Christmas, he’s just waiting for the right moment to release it without a “huge drum roll”. And then there’s tour negotiations for Down Under to complete. This definitely looks like Elvis’ resurrection year.

iM i vl - fFTHTiWf?®®rHt9CT IMtl ill Ml paN &I« SHr

GEORGE KAY