Last year’s model
Elvis Costello back together, 50 years on, with Allan Mayes, his partner in obscure duo Rusty. By Tom Doyle.
Rusty ★★★ The Resurrection Of Rust EMI. CD/DL/LP
IN HIS 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello wrote of Allan Mayes, his co-conspirator in short-lived Merseyside pub and club turn, Rusty: “He was a better guitarist than me and sang with a strong, true, voice, but he must have seen something in me.” Throughout 1972, and into ’73 (when they played their last gig supporting Cockney Rebel), the pairing of Mayes with the thenD.P. MacManus gave the latter teenager an intensive schooling in performance and songcraft before he moved to London, put on the horn-rimmed glasses and changed his name.
Down the decades, Mayes kept performing, on cruise ships in the Pacific and bars in the southern US states, before settling in Austin, Texas. Last year, he got in touch with Costello, reminding him that their halfcentury anniversary was looming in 2022, and wondering if he fancied getting together to play some of the old songs. Costello responded by upping the ante: they should make the Rusty record that never was.
The Resurrection Of Rust isn’t quite that full-blown album imagining a different past.
Instead, at six tracks and 23 minutes, it’s a mini-LP-length delve back into the pair’s old songbook, as backed by The Imposters and produced by Costello and his now-regular mixing desk sidekick, Sebastian Krys.
Rusty’s greatest influence back in ’72 was Brinsley Schwarz, and so two Nick Lowe songs feature here from the pub rock band’s LP of that year, Nervous On The Road. Both tracks are treated faithfully: Don’t Lose Your Grip On Love continues to pay off its debt to The Band; Surrender To The Rhythm swings like Van Morrison.
Neil Young was another hero for the duo, and so here we have an enthusiastic ally welded-together cut-and-shut of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Dance Dance Dance. Better is D.P. MacManus original Warm House (And An Hour Of Joy), a longhidden gem, rescued from a dusty reel-to-reel tape box and polished anew. Over wistful country-rock stylings, its yearning, repeated hook of “running… running…” brilliantly recalls one night in his youth when Costello was hassled by louts in Wallasey.
Mayes’ voice – gritty, lived-in – comes to the fore on country/soul writer (for Bobby Womack) Jim Ford’s I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind. But it’s on the pair’s sole co-write, Maureen & Sam, that there’s a real insight into what Rusty might have become. In this tale of a struggling cabaret act, Mayes takes the ’60s folky verses, before MacManus/ Costello bursts in for the punchy crescendos.
A diverting curio, then, rather than essential. But it’s certainly poignant to hear two men in their late sixties reunite their voices for the first time since they were teenagers. They should do it more often.