ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS IMPERIAL BEDROOM THE COSTELLO SHOW FEATURING THE ATTRACTIONS AND CONFEDERATES KING OF AMERICA F-BEAT/COLUMBIA, 1986

Eager to embrace a variety of styles, Costello enlisted Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick It was very sad to read of the recent passing of that incredibly talented, gentle man, Geoff Emerick. He patiently watched us burn off the “nervous energy” that had fuelled all our previous records until we found our way to this album. He’d seen better bands than us come into the studio with crazed notions and fuzzy fragments of song and put them into sonic order. We had set up at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Regent Street, in AIR Studios. If we thought we were being like The Beatles by hiring a harpsichord, then an actual Beatle was down the hallway making Tug

Of War with George Martin, just past a mixing suite that hosted both The Jam and Alice Cooper, although, sadly, not at the same time. We gave ourselves an extravagant amount of weeks to make our best mistakes. Geoff Emerick’s recording experience and mixing made absolute sense of the band’s unpredictable but brilliant playing – Pete Thomas’s insane drumming on “Beyond Belief”, to Nieve’s demented piano on “Man Out Of Time” and “The Loved Ones” and Bruce Thomas’s mighty bass coda for “Shabby Doll”. Geoff sat through my endless vocal-group overdubs that were the first thing to get lost when we took the songs on the road as not one of the band could do much more than shout “Hey” on the chorus, so it took until last summer’s Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers Tour for Davey Faragher, Kitten Kuroi and Briana Lee to make some sense of my, sometimes, nonsensical notions. The record is occasionally called “baroque” – another of those overused French words, like “genre”, that make “critical thinking” seem like thinking – but this could really only be applied to Steve Nieve’s insanely funny and extravagant orchestration for “…And In Every Home” or that damn harpsichord on “You Little Fool”. I don’t think it has anything to do with “Almost Blue”, a song later heartbreakingly performed by Chet Baker, who had inspired me to write it, two years before he brought his beautiful trumpet playing to our rendition of “Shipbuilding”.