ELEPHANTS MEMORIES
Armed Forces – returning soon in “last word” box set form – hoiked ELVIS COSTELLO to the next level. It was all thanks to Abba, he tells SYLVIE SIMMONS.
“YOU’RE GOING TO HEAR THE BAND TEARING THROUGH THIS MUSIC. THE PACE IS PROBABLY THE REASON IT ALL CAME CRASHING DOWN.”
“IF YOU LIKE this record and you’ve liked it for 40 years, this is the last word on it.”
Elvis Costello is talking about the pending reissue of his 1979 album Armed Forces. He admits it’s been resurrected a couple of times before – the 1993 Rykodisc CD with bonus tracks; the 2002 Rhino with bonus disc and Costello’s copious linernotes. “But this,” he says, “is the innards of it as well as the outer thing, the wonderful artwork. There is nothing more to be said.”
Costello was in his early twenties with two albums under his belt when he and the Attractions – Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas, Pete Thomas – went into Eden Studios in London with producer Nick Lowe in the summer of ’78. A few months before, he’d released This Year’s Model. It reached the UK Top 40 and went gold in the US. Since then they’d been on a non-stop tour. The songs for a follow-up would have to be written on the road – in his hotel room after a show (Bruce, his hotel room-mate, recalled him sitting up all night scribbling in a notebook) or on the bus heading to the next one.
“The experience and the outlook of travelling around the world, everything I saw seemed like the beginning of a song,” Elvis remembers. “Whatever came past the window got into the song.” So to some degree did the music they were playing on the bus. “We only had about five cassettes: Bowie and Iggy’s Berlin records – and Abba.” The Abba cassettes were picked up at motorway service stations on the Scandinavian tour. Elvis and the band would argue the toss over whether The
Beatles were better than the Stones (“Me and Bruce were more Beatles, Pete was Rolling Stones and Steve claimed not to have heard either of them and listened to T.Rex”) but they all came together on Abba. Literally so at a Swedish festival where they met Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad and serenaded them with a four-guitar acoustic version of Knowing Me Knowing You. The band had never been so solid, he says. On the reissue’s live discs, “You’re going to hear the band tearing through this music. In the linernotes I’ve talked more about the playing and the pace. The pace is probably the reason it all came crashing down, but it’s also what made the band ferocious. It all got up to speed very quickly. There’s a video of us playing in Swindon the night before Elvis Presley died where we seem like a youth club band. Then three months later we were making This Year’s Model and playing things like Lipstick Vogue, and by the next summer Armed Forces. That pace had a lot to do with melding the sound of the band.”
Two long weeks in the studio – “a luxury!” – made for a richer, more textured, sophisticatedsounding record. Costello’s version of Lowe’s song (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding), previously a B-side to Lowe’s American Squirm and credited to Nick Lowe And His Sound – although it was in fact Elvis and the Attractions – wound up on the US album in place of Sunday’s Best.
“They didn’t really understand the
English references,” notes Costello.
“They didn’t understand (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea either and took that off the previous album, so I wasn’t too surprised.” Nor was he when they turned down his original album title: Emotional Fascism.
The upcoming box set reissue, he says, includes “facsimiles of my original notebooks, all handwritten, lines scrawled out, half verses not used and all these subtle changes. It was a way of learning the songs as I wrote them, how to sing them, and also to understand the story the album told.”
There are also comic books, postcards and six discs, including two 10-inch live records, the entirety of their June 4, 1979 Pinkpop festival show and the original album remastered directly from the studio tapes. “It sounds as close to the way it sounded to us in the studio as we could make it,” says Costello. “That’s a beautiful thing.”