Friday 4 April 2014

Armed Forces- Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979)


I appreciate that this is a monstrous cliche but I really do remember the moment as if it were yesterday. There I was at our church Harvest Supper. In front of me was a singularly unattractive repast, a ham salad which consisted of lettuce that could best charitably be described as limp, an unripe tomato, WAY too much cucumber (Someone had clearly over ordered) and a minute piece of oddly colored ham (HELLO Botulism). Repelled by what I was expected to eat, I looked up and I beheld.............HER! Yes that HER! The first love of my life. I had actually known her since I was eight but she was a girl and I wasn't interested in girls. I was interested in Burnley and books and growing vegetables (I had an "interesting childhood"). But now I was almost 13 and life was a very different ballgame. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time.

Pause for everyone to be violently unwell.

Now you may think that I leapt to my feet, overturned the trestle tables at which we were seating, sending the flaccid salads flying and dashed to her side to declare my undying love and to ask her out. I did no such thing. For one thing I had two formidable matriarchs sitting either side of me and they would have frowned at such nonsense. For another, I actually I wasn't quite sure what I was feeling, I just knew I couldn't stop staring at her.

That probably sounds like a reasonable excuse for doing bugger all (except for staring and possibly some minor drooling). What certainly sounds less reasonable is that I then spent the next 18 months doing bugger all as well. They say that one of the benefits of getting older is that you can make sense of your past. I'm not so sure. In 1985 I bought Sting's first solo album, "The Dream of the Blue Turtles", which is pretentious, jazz influenced noodling and in "Russians" features one of the worst lyrics of all time ("The Russians love their children too"). Even now,  I can't explain why in the name of decency I did that and I certainly can't explain why I spent 18 months in a lovestruck state without asking this girl out. Oh I spoke to her and she spoke back amazingly. She smiled at me and I gave the sort of look back which would have won many a seaside gurning competition. But did I do the deed? Did I take the plunge? No I bloody didn't.

Thinking back it it could well have been that none of my (ahem) contemporaries were taking the plunge either. Loads of people say that kids matured later in those days. Arse knows if that's true. I know for certain that I didn't have any of my mates giving me GBH of the earhole about "going for it" because "she's bound to say yes" (And if she doesn't you'll look a right tit and we'll have a laugh). That would (painfully) come later.

At this point in my life, I was quite happy to sit/stand/crouch and look at her and think happy thoughts. Then in late 1978 (round about the time that "Summer Nights" and "Rasputin" were locked in a tumultuous battle at the top of the charts) I met a lad who we will call "Christian" (largely because that was his name!). We became friends and he started going along to the same youth group, the self same group that the afore mentioned young lady attended (And if you think I'm naming her, you're Dagenham East- several stops past Barking). For some reason that even 35 years later I cannot fathom, I decided to tell him that I fancied HER (Yes, I know, what a knob!).  Christian mentioned that he thought she was "a bit of alright" (Actually I can't remember his exact words, I hope he didn't say that as he wasn't a cockney!!). Now, if I'd have half a braincell, I would have heard ALARM BELLS ringing at this juncture. Sadly though, when it came to matters of the heart I was naive (or, if you are being less charitable, as thick as a whale omelette) and, like the millions who bought "Be Here Now" by Oasis, thinking "I liked the last one, this'll be a bit of a treat", I was in for a very nasty shock.

One sunny Friday evening in March the lad Christian told me that he wouldn't be ambling down to Youth Group with me because he was bringing his new GIRLFRIEND (Hark, let us strain our ears, are those ALARM BELLS that we can hear? No, still nothing!). So I amble down solo and chat with the swathe of Folkestone youths that had gathered at All Souths Church Hall when I hear someone say HER name. I spun round like I was Dead or Alive and received, on a plate, served with relish, the previously mentioned Very Nasty Shock because (and please don't anybody tell me that this is a surprise or you're more stupid than I was) Christian's Girlfriend was none other than HER.

Earlier in the week, I had been playing my football for my Class Second 11 (I was clearly in good form because our class had 30 pupils, enough for 2 teams, the reminder went into the "Spares" which tended to be my natural home). I was in defence which meant I was usually busy as our Class second 11 was, frankly, shite. The opposing team was awarded a free kick, taken by their star striker, Andy Allon. Allon boasted a fearsome free kick and the entire wall dived out of the way as soon as he unleashed his shot. The exception, unfortunately was, yours truly because I played without my glasses. Ostensibly this was for safety reasons as I didn't want them getting broken. Sadly I was as blind as a bat and therefore did not see the Allon Thunderbolt until it crashed into the Marsh Wedding tackle.

The sensation as Ball met Meat and Two Veg was very similar to the feeling I felt as I saw Christian with HER, although fortunately in this instance I didn't crumple to the floor going "ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!" I stumbled through the rest of the evening feeling and probably looking like an extra from Shaun and the Dead. Having then had to walk up Cheriton High Street with Love's Young Dream, I then collapsed into bed and shouted "WHY?" at the ceiling (My mother thought I had sat on the cat)!

Now, at this point, you are perfectly entitled to say "Hang on a Minute! This is a Music Blog. What in the name of Johnny Borrell's ill fated solo career has Tales of Torrid Teenage Romance (or lack thereof) got to do with Music?". Well, bear with me and all will be revealed. But first a slight digression. I first got into Music at the age of 13, more a less exactly at the same time, in fact, that I had fallen for HER. I leave it to the amateur psychologists to debate whether the awakening of my passion for popular music and my passion for HER were linked.

Anyway, I had obviously been aware of pop music before but I first really fell in love with it (and, in all honesty, there is no better way of describing what happened than that ) when I was laid up in bed with flu and, as a present, my Auntie Helen gave me a radio. I was as sick as a dog and so just lay there as a cornucopia of sounds caressed my ears. It was a true "Road to Damascus" moment. The scales had fallen from my eyes, I was a member of the church of pop music. From that point on I couldn't get enough of the stuff!! The radio was on all the time as I desperately hunted for new songs to fall in love with.

Looking back, the interesting thing was that it was songs I fell for rather than artists. If I liked a song I didn't go tearing off to buy the album. This was probably down to the fact that I was 13 and had bugger all money and wasn't going to invest in an album on the strength of one song. Also in those pre internet days, one was reliant on the radio so if you liked say "Denis" by Blondie and you wanted to hear more from them before deciding if they were a band for you. Initially this would only happen if a) the radio played an oldie by Blondie or b) you just had to wait til the next release rolled out. In the case of the former if your bag was mid 70s AOR rock, you were in luck, by the time I was 14 I had heard the entire Wings and Eagles back catalogues courtesy of Tony Blackburn, DLT and the lads at the poptastic radio 1. Otherwise, forget it. I didn't hear "White Riot" until 4 years after it came out when some enterprising wag managed to get it played in School Assembly!

This meant that by March 1979 I still hadn't formed any real attachment to a band/artist. I knew I liked Disco (and still do, what's your problem?) and suspected that ELO were a band to follow (That would be confirmed with the release of "Discovery") but other than that I was still drifting from record to record (The latest things to tickle my ears being "Pop Musik" by M  and "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze.

And then I discovered "Armed Forces" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

And this is where a third way of finding more music by a particular artist came into play. A number of my contemporaries had more money than me (especially those from the salubrious West End of Folkestone, appreciating that this is Folkestone we are talking about here so salubrious is probably a relative term) and they, therefore, had starting buying ALBUMS as opposed to singles. The great thing with this was that frequently said well off contemporaries were keen to spread the news of how great their latest purchase was by lending it out. In the case of the lad who was absolutely insistent that I borrow "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp- thanks but NO thanks- this was a pain in the arse because at one point he was pursuing me across the school playground with the bloody thing.! In the case of my mate Steve, though, who wondered up to me a few days after my heartbreak at the hands of Christian and Her (You see we got back to all that eventually) and thrust a picture of  large elephants in front of me (The cover of "Armed Forces" in case you thought we had taken a trip into the world of David Attenborough), I shall be forever grateful as it introduced to a man who helped me recover from my emotional turmoil!

Now E.Costello had been knocking about the pop charts for a couple of years but I have to say I don't remember encountering him until I indulged in my Thursday night Top of the Pops ritual and saw him there with his Attractions, playing "Oliver's Army". For those of us of a certain age and a certain musical disposition, "Oliver's Army" is one of THOSE records i.e. a stone cold Classic Pop Track and people who don't agree are regarded as HIGHLY DUBIOUS. The thing that struck me when I first saw EC on TOTP was his appearance. When I was at Primary School, pop music was largely regarded as territory occupied by girls and girls liked pop music because they fancied the boys that made it. This was, after all, the heyday of the teenie bopper , when swathes of teenage girls poured onto the streets to SCREAM at the likes of David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, Marc Bolan and the Bay City Rollers (Lord help us all).

It was widely considered, therefore, that the prerequisite of the popstar was that they had to be attractive. Yet here in 1979, flying high at Number 2 in the Hit Parade, was the man Costello, who not even his mother would deem attractive. To be blunt with his skinny physique and big plastic glasses he looked like a nerd. Or to be more precise, he looked like me! I was immediately disposed to liking him. So when Steve handed the album over and said "You're going to like this, Marsh (All boys Grammar Schools, everyone calls each other by their surnames....or worse)" I suspected that he could be correct in this regard.

Ah lo! He was indeed!I have mentioned in previous blogposts that, in my opinion, when Costello signed to Warners in 1988 he grew a beard and lost the plot completely. However, that need not concern us here. From 1976 through to 1983, Costello produced a series of albums that formed a critical part of my teenage years : This Years Model, Get Happy, Imperial Bedroom and Punch The Clock. Superb records all. It is probably fair to say that I don't think Armed Forces is Costello's best album (That's Get Happy) but if someone came to me and asked for an introduction to the man, I would hand them a copy of Armed Forces as, whilst I am loathed to use the word "representative" to describe the work of a man who has covered many many genres, it is certainly his most accessible album as well as being the most commercially successful.

I was, of course, yet to be introduced to all those fine records. Looking back, it is fascinating that I approached "Armed Forces" knowing hardly anything about Costello (apart from the fact that he looked like me and had produced one of the best songs I heard in my, admittedly limited, exposure to music. Two other points should be taken into consideration here. Firstly. as implied earlier, my musical education had started in earnest in 1977. The Eagles and their Radio 1 played brethren apart, I wasn't overly familiar with Singer/songwriters of the past (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen etc) and how Costello and his music compared to what went before. Secondly, at this stage I didn't read the Music Press (such as it was) and therefore I had no idea how it had been received critically.

In other words, when the needle hit the stylus of Side 1 (Oh the nostalgia of it all) and "Accidents will Happen" came on (I was going to say "Blared out of the speakers" but I had a very small, battery powered, mono record player!!), I was approaching the album completely cold. I had no idea whether "they" thought it was any good or how it compared both to Costello's past work or other singer-songwriters. All I know is that it sounded superb and, more importantly, IT SPOKE TO ME!!

Which brings us back full circle to my Torrid Tales of Teenage Romance! As I listened to the album I was a man (Well OK 14 year old boy) who had his heart, if not broken, certainly kicked about a bit. The girl I fancied me had DESERTED me (OK she didn't know I fancied her but that's not the point!) for another man (Well, boy) who in turn had been my friend, who knew how I felt about her and yet still stole her from under my nose- the bastard etc. Furthermore I had had one of my central beliefs about life shattered. Somehow I had managed to pick up this ridiculous idea (Arse knows where I had got it from) that you saw this girl, fancied her, asked her out and she said yes (And the birdies sang and the lambs frolicked in the field). No one had told me that it was waaaaay more complicated than that. Indeed as soon as you fancied someone, the chances are you were in for a whole shedload of trouble!

As soon as Costello sang "I just don't know where to begin" I knew he understood, he understood that if Love didn't stink (That was the J Geils Band) it was certainly something something that smelt dubious. It was something to approach with caution and with a massive helping of cynicism (A word we will return to in a moment). Now I would stress that "Armed Forces" does not contain a song about a youth who fancies this girl, does bugger all about and then gets her nicked by his mate- the bastard etc (That would have been amusing, although more likely to come from the pen of Joe Jackson- see later). In fact the record hardly refers to the lot of teenagers at all. Well to clarify I think it doesn't. Costello was lauded throughout the late 70s and 80s as one of England's finest lyricists. Er possibly. There is no doubt that many of his songs do contain some fantastically clever word play ("Man out of time" off Imperial Bedroom is lyrically sensational) but I have to confess (and this may say more about me than Costello) that half of the time I am not entirely sure what he's on about. Oliver's Army leaps to mind at this point.

If I didn't know what he was saying, how the hell did it speak to me? First and foremost it was his voice. I had never heard a singing voice like it. He seemed to sneer his way through the whole album. The words oozed out of the little plastic record player laden with bile, anger, sarcasm and (it's that word again) cynicism. This may seem an odd thing to say but it was the way that he sang the songs that spoke to me just as much as the lyrics. I believe that "Goon Squad" is about the army but the way that he spits out the words "Mother, father, I'm doing so well, I'm making such progress now that you can hardly tell" gives it a far more general interpretation. The lyrics imply that there is something inherently rotten with not just England's institutions but the way that "respectable people" live their lives. It's the sneer in the voice though that makes the message clear.

In summary, from where I was standing, here was a man who seemed to be standing looking at life and everything "normal people" took for granted and gaze on it with disdain and cynicism. And to me, it was as if the penny had dropped. Now I'm not going to say that I became a wizened cynic overnight but suddenly I had something in the armoury. Life was not all wine and roses. It was something to be inherently suspicious of. I knew this because Costello said so. It was the first time that an artist had spoken to me like this, where their music had connected with me on an emotional level. My graduation into a cynical teenager had begun, particularly where matters of love and romance were concerned. Whenever a couple got together in my youth group I was the first person to suggest that it wouldn't last (I was an absolute charmer, wasn't I?). Indeed Christian  and HER's relationship lasted all of a month. I proclaimed to anyone who wanted to hear (i.e. no one) that I could see THAT coming and then cleared off home to play" Armed Forces" and feel very smug.

And did I zoom in and ask HER out? Of course I did BUGGER ALL but I could reassure myself that there was no point because it wouldn't last because that's what Elvis would do (That's actually bollocks of course because for a man who was no oil painting Costello had an excellent record with the ladies)

Two interesting codas to all this. Costello's commercial success with Armed Forces seemed to inspire a number of other artistes who could be best described as cynical gits. Firstly there was XTC. Although Andy Partridge would prove himself a far more complex songwriter than just a cynic, "Respectable Street" off "Black Sea" is one of the finest examples of the cynical songwriter at work. Then there was Clive Gregson of the under rated Any Trouble (And their first two albums "Where are all the Nice Girls?" and "Wheels in Motion" are worth a place in your CD collection). Above all, there was Joe Jackson. I know that he says that he intended the song as a joke but when I was 14 and I looked out at the number of goons going out with attractive girls, nothing summed up my disdain for such a state of affairs as "Is She really going out with him?" and the opening line thereof "Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street" is frankly a work of genius. As with Costello, all three artists' work meant a lot to me in my teenage years.

The second coda is that you will be glad (because no one likes to think that there is a mentalist roaming the streets) that I did eventually leave my cynicism behind (well......more or less) and become a more rounded individual. It will come as no surprise that this happened when I started going out with my first proper girlfriend (Altogether now..............aaaaaaaaaaaaah!). Oddly though there are two ironic things about this. Firstly that happened after Costello released what I regard as his last great album "Punch the Clock". From that point on, I fell out of love with Costello. Maybe now that I had found true love (Altogether now.....aaaaaaah!) and realised that life sometimes didn't just kick you in the shins, I didn't need him any longer or maybe he just lost the muse. I suspect a bit of both. Many people say that the 1986 albums "King of America" and "Blood and Chocolate" are strong records and I am sure that they are, they just didn't appeal like the earlier ones had. But then came Warner Bros and the Beard and the rest, sadly, was history (and shite).

The second ironic thing about this situation was that my first proper girlfriend was none other than HER! You see in the end I did get off my backside and do something about it. Just took me 6 years. I could tell you the story of how it eventually happened but "Don't start me talking I could talk all night". And if you don't get that reference, bugger off and listen to "Armed Forces".

No comments:

Post a Comment