I tend to claim 1981’s Get Happy!! is my fave Elvis Costello album but that isn’t quite true. I see Get Happy!! and the follow up Imperial Bedroom as one extended vision of a man in perpetual decline. They are emotional disaster areas which, by the end, leave the protagonist with nothing: no life, no love, no marriage that’s for sure.
The two albums begin with “Love For Tender” -finance cripples Get Happy!! it is the subtext -a search for an emotional center in a world where it is lost. The two albums end a year later with “Town Cryer” -Costello is beaten down to the bone. In between the albums move through an eclipse of devastation: the faithless man beats his wife, sleeps with girls in search for something or the other, gets caught, regrets it and bolts to nowhere.
Life on the road, four years of it, are killing him. Drugs are killing him. The US is killing him. And his salvation, music, is a mirror of his real life angst. Dosed in sound, fame, drugs, money and pussy, he can’t climb out of bed.
Get Happy!! is bedevilled Motown fueled by Steve Nieves’s keyboards and produced by Nick Lowe in “leave the tape running” mode. Imperial Bedroom is produced by Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and though I love Lowe, Costello sounds awesome. On the extended double CD there are lots of demos and really, Emerick worked these songs into shape. The music is orchestral pop of enormous magnificence all working to show a man at the end of the game. TWENTY EIGHT YEARS LATER HE HASN’T BEEN THIS GOOD. The best of his best later albums, say King Of America, isn’t this good.
Imperial Bedroom is about relationships heading south for the winter -breaking at the stress point. Whether short stories like “…And In Every Home” and “Man Out Of Time” or crouched biography implicit in “Beyond Belief” (listen to the first take “The Land Of Give And Take” for a closer idea of what’s upsetting him) or explicitly on “Tears Before Bedroom” .
From these three songs, Costello widens his gaze to the devastated wastelands “from your own backyard to the land of exotica.” A promiscuous woman becomes a shabby doll behind green doors, his wide lexicon of love can’t get to the point on another song, a young girl is being taken for a ride in the third.
And then what should be the center of album, “Man Out Of Time” -on a purely subjective level, one of the most important songs in my life. Ever since I’ve heard it I’ve grasped it. And not just the “love is always scarpering or cowering or fawning”: the truth of relationships, even the one I’m in now, is that since we (I) know who we really are, we feel unworthy and unable to be loved. This is so self-evident its truth shocks you, but, more importantly, “To murder my love is a crime but will you still love a man out of time?. The thing is, we want to be loved at our worse because that is the only way we can feel secure in the love.
“The man”, in the middle of a scandal to do with politicians and prostitutes, has run out of time, run out of chances. It is easy to love somebody when they’re on top. How do you love somebody when they are falling through a trap door? How do you love a man in free fall? How do you love an Elvis Costello: drinking himself senseless, fucking anything that moves, drug addled, lost, losing. With everything in the world he turns into an asshole and loses it all.
I am so tough on Costello today, I don’t even like his song titles any more. But I laugh at him because I loved his music so much.
How do you love Costello?
How do you love a man out of time?
And, finally, how do you love me out of time? How do you love me when I don’t deserve your love?
Those are the questions Costello raised on Get Happy!!/Imperial Bedroom.
I turn to the sinister when i get the boot, just a man out of time.