Entertainment For Lively Minds
Help with Costello quote
Posted by Andy Lynes on 30 March 2009 - 11:33am.
I seem to recall that someone once said of prolific Oliver's Army hitmaker Elvis Costello something along the lines of "Everytime he goes to the loo he comes out with a new song". I've got a feeling it might have been Nick Lowe in an NME interview but I'm not sure. Does anyone else remember this quote or have I imagined it?
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I remember it...
....as a Bob Geldof quote.
Not exactly
a complement, is it? Ha!
although if there is one thing
Sir Bob is an expert on its producing pish and shite for public consumption
Take Costellos weakest song
and it is better than the whole of Geldofs catalogue. The guy would have been a great ambassador, is an okay writer but is frankly a pretty poor musician.
Whoah there!
I'm not having that, Steve! Partly because I believe Elvis Costello to be one of the most overpraised bods out there; partly, and more pertinently, because I think Geldof has done some good stuff over the years - not a lot, to be sure, but his last album, Sex Age Death, is a strong and occasionally inspired set of songs. The last song, 10.15, is a real beauty, genuinely moving. I can't find it to listen to on the web, but it's available on emusic. You might also be surprised (I was) by what good reviews it got.
The cover...
is awful, though!
I Heard
a couple of tracks from it when it was released and to be fair they weren't bad. Having said that I think most people would agree that if you took his records with the Boomtown Rats from his Halcyon Days and take Costellos work with the Attractions from the same time then Costello dopesnt come out marginally ahead but streets ahead. Then if you take their respective work in the last 10 years for arguments sake there simply isnt any comparison either. The Rats stuff has not aged at all well but you could play for example Alison, Chelsea, Detectives, Pump it up, Accidents will happen and even Olivers Army on the radio today and still get a favourable response. Geldof has not written a song to compare with to name just one Shipbuilding but then again neither have many other British songwriters since Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards or Ray Davies.
I once
won £25 in Q magazine asking Costello about an old quote of his in which he said he no way would he ever be around to witness his own artistic decline.
I asked something like if he'd even momentarily considered the pistol and the drawing room round about the time of Mighty Like A Rose (which I have actually probably now bought 3 more times since for bonus tracks etc).
He replied defensively as you'd expect, but then asked: "Where's that question come from? Oh, Accrington, eh? That's near Manchester isn't it? What a very Mancunian type of question."
Although geographically not totally inaccurate - 27 miles or so the distance - I still occasionally chuckle at the bespectacled musical polymath lumping us vowel-flattening flat-capped, potato pie-munching, whippet-racing folk of the Lancashire mill town into the same basket as the foppish dandies of the metropolis over t'hills.
North of Manchestah
Veering off topic, Preston74, but congrats on being patronized by a star on living in a Godforbidden back of beyond hicksville within an hours train journey of a big city.
I live in Blackburn and got the same slapping down from celebrity dicksplash Cilla Applethruaraquet Black. She thought I lived "ner Leeds, chuck" when I presented her with my mother and a veiled threat.
Perhaps all Liverpudlian deserters think East Lancs shut down with the mills. And on Costello/Geldof, my equation is;
Costello thinks he`s far better than what he is.
Geldof seems to have understood his place in the music world from day one.