ELVIS COSTELLO THIS YEAR’S MODEL

His second album, featuring “Pump It Up” and “Night Rally”, remains one of Costello’s best Before we left Pathway, Nick Lowe had showed me that we could paint pictures with sound on “Watching The Detectives”. Steve Nieve had arrived by then to play the keyboards. I told him I wanted the piano to sound like “Hitchcock”, when I think I meant “Bernard Herrmann”. However, I needed all of the Attractions to work at speed of life for “Lipstick Vogue”. “Pump It Up” was scrawled on a hotel fireescape in Newcastle, in the last days of the Stiff Tour, and cut at Eden Studios in Acton just before I left for our first American misadventure. You could say “we never looked back”, but having crossed the United States for the first time and been thrown off SNL and had a mince pie, when we returned home, we finished the album in the rest of the 11 days that we could afford. And then we went back to America, again and again… Look Now co-producer Sebastian Krys pushed up the faders on “This Year’s Girl” recently, adding the voice of Natalie Berman (from Wilde Belle) for a remix for the opening titles of the second season of The Deuce. These are very big shoes to fill after Curtis Mayfield’s “If There’s A Hell Below” had opened Season One, but Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas and Steve Nieve’s playing sounded as mighty as ever and we even uncovered an unused background vocal idea, lifted from our inspiration – The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath.