July 27, 2016 • 36 mins
How does genius emerge? An exploration of different types of innovation—through the lens of Elvis Costello’s extraordinary song “Deportee,” once utterly forgettable and then, through time and iteration, a work of beauty and genius.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In nineteen eighty four, Alvis Costello released his ninth album,
Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out,
because I bought every Alvis Costello album back then the
week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
music you listen to at ages nineteen and twenty is
the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness.
(00:38):
If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll
see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in nineteen
eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened
to it right away. And this episode is about one
song on that album. It's called The Deportees Club. I
still have it on vinyl. It goes like this, Oh God,
(01:10):
it's awful. My name is Malcolm Blackwell. Welcome to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things Forgotten are Misunderstood. This week, I
(01:30):
want to go back to Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty four.
I should say you don't have to know anything about
Elvis Costello or even like his music to be interested
in this story. I'm not talking about Deportis Club as
a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding
how creativity works. And I've chosen Deportees Club as my
(01:53):
case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed
with it and maybe, hopefully you will be two once
we're finished. Deportees Club is the second to last song
on the B side of Goodbye to a World. The
album cover is a picture of a little mountain top
with two trees on it, with Costello and his band
(02:15):
members in various strange poses. It's all very eighties. The
record was produced by two legends of the British music
scene at the time, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. You've
probably heard some of their work dated records with Madness,
Noyd Cole David Bowie virtually all of the great English
new wave hit songs of the nineteen eighties and early
(02:35):
nineteen nineties. Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley were the guys
behind the curtain. I don't know if you've ever heard
come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. Come On Eileen. Oh,
I swear what he means at this moment you mean everything. Now.
I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you could make that
out that song. Langer and Winstanley Clive Langer knows Elvis Costello.
(03:04):
Of course they would bump into each other in the
way that people in a small always bump into each other,
and New Way music in the nineteen eighties was a
small world. At one point, Langer has his own band
and he was doing a show in a riverboat in
the river Mersey. Costello calls him up and he said, oh,
I'll come up and play a few songs before you
go on. That's Langer. We met at a pub on
(03:27):
Loreston Road in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery,
with close cropped white hair and oversized glasses and the
kind of graciousness that only the English seemed to possess.
An absolutely delightful person. My father is English, an all older,
charming englishman. Remind me of my father. We had some tea.
It was all very civilized. Okay, back to Elvis Costello.
(03:50):
He came up and played all his best songs, I
mean his his you know, Allison and everything son. Alison's
Costello's first big hit. Then I had to go on
(04:14):
and do my first ever show with the same line up,
and we weren't as good, you know, so I don't know.
I didn't know quite how to take that. If you
detect a little bit of friction in that, you're not wrong.
Alvis Costello is a genius, and like a lot of geniuses,
he has a really strong personality. A few years passed
and Costello's record label decides they want to broaden his
(04:36):
commercial appeal. He has a fanatical following among those who
know New Way music, but the label wants a big
commercial hit, so they turned to the hit makers Langer
and Winstanley, and that two of them produce a record
for Costello called Punch the Clock, which has a number
of absolutely exquisite songs, including ship Building, which Lango co
(04:57):
wrote with Elvis Costello, Birth the News, Coaching Shoes Far
You collaborate on Punch the Clock. Yeah, and you like
(05:18):
that album? Yes? He doesn't, and he doesn't know why
is he unhappy with it? I think it was just
too commercial for at that time, and he wanted to
write something simpler, more live more. You know, he's more
of a purist than I am, so I was brought
up with psychedelic pop in the mid sixties, so I
(05:41):
was kind of like, Oh, we can do this, we
can do that. You know, and he's like, oh, I
want it to sound real and black Bob Dylan or something,
you know. But and when you get that right, that's amazing.
I want to hear a little bit more about Punch
the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an
impact on the way the record turned out. Not so much.
(06:01):
On Punch the Clock we didn't have tension. We had
tension later, which I'll talk to you about what we
did have. When we did the playback and Punched the Clock,
we got quite drunk and played it back really loud,
of course they did, and how much would you kill
to have been in the room with them? And he
kind of freaked out, So it's all rubbish. It's terrible.
(06:22):
It's terrible. And I was to, you know, calm him
down a bit and we all carry it on. When
the time comes to make the next album, Costello turns
to Langer and win Stanley again, only this time the
first thing he said is that I want to call
it good Bye Cool World. I think it's going to
be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band,
(06:44):
so he was confiding in me. They do a first
run through recording all the songs, live. Langer is the producer,
the one who's supposed to be running the show, but
immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically takes over because he's
quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and you know, lovely,
but he could sort of barge in and start changing things.
(07:07):
But you know, so, I remember saying to him, thanks
for letting me be here to listen to remote your record,
you know, but I don't think it should go like that.
Shouldn't be like this, you know. So it was a bit.
We're a bit of a standoff. I think he went
out and bought a half bottler gin and I asked
Langer and why Costello said this was going to be
(07:28):
his last album. It's not like he was an old
man ready to retire. He wasn't even thirsty. It was
just that he'd had a lot on his back, you know,
he'd been to a lot. I don't know if he
wanted to carry on playing the game at that point.
The result is disastrous. I hated Good By Cruel World
(07:50):
when I first heard it, and remember I'm a massive
Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did
a television variety show called spectacle. Lad he's a gentleman.
Will you please welcome to the stage. I wants the
nickolo And in the episode where he interviews Nick Low
and Richard Thompson, the camera pans the audience and twice
(08:11):
you see me grinning madly as I said. I'm a
massive Elvis Costello fan, and believe me when I say goodbye.
Cruel World was unlistenable, especially Deportise Club. It was angry
and loud and upsetting. And I'm not the only one
(08:34):
who feels that way. In nineteen ninety five, the album
is rereleased by Ricodisc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in
the liner notes, congratulations, you've just purchased our worst album.
You have to kind of admire as honesty. Except on
(09:03):
that same re release, Costello includes a new version of
Deportis Club, one of the songs on the original album
he hates so much he gives it a new melody
and plays it by himself. An acoustic version, shortens the
title to deeport fiddles with some of the lyrics, and
it never appears anywhere else, just on this random rerelease
(09:26):
by Raycodisc Records, whatever that is, and I would never
have heard it except that my friend Bruce ran across
it and played it for me. Bruce, by the way,
was also in the audience of that Elvis Casillo TV show,
grinning madly. Anyway, Bruce and I used to make mixtapes
for each other, and he puts this new version Deeporte
on a mixtape for my birthday, and I become obsessed
(09:48):
with it. I'll bet I sing parts of it to
myself almost every day. I don't really know why, but
it might be one of my favorite songs ever. There's
a line in it that jumps into my head whenever
I'm sad. It's so perfect, a little couplet about the
dissolution of romantic love and you don't know where to
start or where to stop. All this pillow talk is
(10:12):
finely talking shop. Can we play it? Yeah? I'm in
the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of the original
awful version Deportise Club. Strangely, he'd never heard the new,
obscure and amazing version of the song he produced so
long ago. I want to hear his new version. Yeah, yeah,
(10:36):
So I found it on my iPhone and Langer leaned
his head over the table so that his ear would
be right next to the tiny phone speaker. This one
nine shady five blastom bunch trump that distress Sire's dad.
(11:32):
You know, it sounds like he's found the song, but
he didn't know at the time either that that's what
I thought. I mean, that's what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah,
either of you in the moment. No, Sometimes you know,
if it's not sounding right, maybe I don't know, maybe
we were not focused enough. You know, maybe we were
(11:52):
making a record, but we were miles away. You know.
In the end, they Elvis Costello and his producers all
thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't
understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a
bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.
(12:22):
That's what I want to talk about, time and iteration.
What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge.
I know that this is just one three minute song.
Maybe you don't even like it, but every time I
hear it, I think the same thing, which is, this
is something that gives a lot of people in the
world pleasure, including me, And it almost didn't happen. If
(12:44):
Alvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deeportise Club, turn
it into Deeporte. We miss all that beauty, and the
thought of that breaks my heart. There's a theory about
creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an
economist named David Gallinson came up with. Gallinson is an
(13:06):
art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art,
that there are two very different trajectories that great artists
seem to take. On the one hand, there are those
who do their best work very early in their life.
They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas
that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those
ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom.
(13:31):
Gallenson calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example.
He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and
electrifies the art world the turn of the last century.
I think that someone like Picasso is who we have
in mind when we think of that word genius. But
(13:52):
Gallenson says, wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity.
He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who
never have a clear easily articulated idea. They don't work
quickly when they start off, they don't really know where
they're going. Work by trial and error. They do endless drafts.
(14:12):
They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to
figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example? Sayson?
Every bit as famous and important a painter's. Picasso may
be the greatest of the Impressionists who reinvent modern art
in Paris in the late eighteen hundreds. With Seson's genius
and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different. Why
(14:36):
don't we start with your favorite? If you have a
favorite in the world, maybe my favorite at the moment
is that one good Bye. Talking to a man named
John Elderfield. He's a Seson expert, and he took me
to that gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
where they have all of their Seeson's, easily a few
billion dollars worth the paintings in one room. And it
(14:57):
took only about five minutes wandering from picture to picture
with Elderfield to see experimental genius in action. So this
is one of the many portraits of his wife's says,
I'm made, and it's one of four pictures done in
a short period of time when they were living together
in Paris. The seeson we're looking at is a picture
(15:20):
of a middle aged woman seated. Her head is tilted
slightly to the side. As with a lot of Sazon's portraits,
we can see only one of her ears he didn't
like doing the second year. She's sitting quietly, almost floating
in the chair. And I think it's arguably, you know,
one of the greatest portraits that he did. It's one
(15:41):
of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield says that
the first two are a little smaller, looser, maybe one
trace from another, and then a third much like the
one we're looking at, but without any background painted in
just the figure. Is this very typical of the way
he worked, So he essentially comes back to her four times,
(16:02):
and yeah, and then he right. Notice my assumption here,
because what I was thinking when I said that bit
about he gets it right the fourth time was that
if Sazon did four versions, he must have been marching
towards some kind of preordained conclusion. He has an idea
and he's perfecting it. But that's not says on standard
(16:22):
practice is you do a sketch, work out the problems.
Do a finished version, says on kind of starts in
the middle. The fourth version of Sazon's portrait of his wife,
the one we're looking at, is less finished than his
second and third versions. Well, for example, here you can
see this unfinished parts. So how putatively unfinished parts. We
light the area of the dress. There where it's light,
(16:45):
you can really see the grounds of the canvass, and
all the way through the lower part. Then you can
see who's been putting these breast strikes down and not
actually filling them all together. Sayson didn't work according to
some clear linear plan. He basically just did versions over
and again, iteration after iteration, trying to stumble on something
(17:06):
that sees his imagination. Many of Sann's paintings are unsigned
because he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's done.
He does portraits of his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and
he makes him come for a hundred sittings, a hundred
a hundred. Normally they would be how many and now
I mean normally for portress it would just be a
relatively shown number, I mean five or something. Why does
(17:29):
he need a hundred exactly. I mean, what's so, what's
he doing all the time? Sesan was never finished? This
is what David Gillinson means by experimental genius, and Gillinson
points out that you can see this creative type in
virtually every field. Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick when he's
(17:52):
thirty two, writes it in a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark
Twain publishes Huck Finn when he's in his late forties,
and it takes him forever because he ends up obsessively
rewriting and rewriting the ending. He says on Orson Welles
does Citizen Kane when he's twenty four. Picasso Alfred Hitchcock
(18:13):
doesn't reach his prime until his mid fifties, after he
spent his entire career making one thriller after another, playing
with a genre over and over again. It's his own.
But there's one field where I think Gallenson's theory plays
out the most powerfully, and that's music. It goes like this,
(18:34):
the fourth, the fifth, the minor five, the major lift,
the baffled game. Compola, Lleluiah, halleluiah, halleluialleluia. That's the song Hallelujah.
(18:56):
It was composed by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen. But
basically everybody is in a cover of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright,
You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovi, John Cale, Bob Dylan,
I could go on. It's featured in countless TV and
movie soundtracks. If you ride the New York City subway
on a regular basis, you'll probably hear a busker singing
(19:17):
it virtually every day. Like a good Canadian, I go
to a Canada Day celebration every year at Joe's Pub
in Manhattan, where local artists sing cover versions of Canadian songs.
Every year someone does a version of Hallelujah. Every year.
It brings down the house. And here's what's interesting about
that song. It is so not Picasso, it is, says On.
(19:41):
Textbook says On. A few years ago, the music writer
Alan Light wrote an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book
on the song Hallelujah. It's called the Holy or the Broken,
And one of the big themes is how peculiar Leonard
Cohen is. He's a poet, a tortured poet. He is
(20:03):
a writer in that way that he labors over what
these lyrics are line by line, word by word, throws
a lot away, spends a great deal of time, and Hallelujah, famously,
out of all of these, is probably the song that
he says bedeviled him the most. That's alan like, he
came by my house one day to talk about Hallelujah.
He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
(20:27):
and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
sixty or seventy verses, which is for this song, which
I mean, you've been writing about music for many, many years.
Have you ever heard of a musician who wrote eighty different?
I don't. I don't think so. I mean then I
don't know what that. I don't know if that means
variations on verses. I don't know if that means entirely
(20:49):
like how much of this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter.
It's a whole other, whole other level. Well, there's the
famous story that you know, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan
have this kind of mutual admiration thing, and apparently they
met up in the eighties at some point they were
both in Paris, and they went to meet at a
cafe and Dylan said, oh, I like that that song Hallelujah,
(21:13):
which is a fascinating piece of this story. That really
the first person who paid attention to Hallelujah as an
important song was Bob Dylan. But he said to Leonard,
you know I liked that song. How long did you
work on that? And Leonard said, I told him that
I'd worked on it for two years, which was a lie.
Cohen later confessed it took him much longer. Then Cohen
asks Dylan how long it took him to write the
(21:34):
song I and I and Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Dylan is picasso with Leonard. It's not the first thought,
best thought school at all. And he talks about, you know,
being in a hotel room in his underwear banging his
head on the floor because he couldn't solve this song, Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records
(21:57):
it in nineteen eighty four. It's for an album called
Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes
them to his record label, which is CBS to the
Head of CBS. Who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikov,
who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce
Springsteen's Born in USA? Not a dumb guy. Yetnikov listens
(22:19):
to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not
releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being
released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes
a ripple. And if you go back and listen to
that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future
versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not
(22:40):
there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about
the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Kohen's original version
so hyper serious that it's almost satire. Kind of turgid,
(23:03):
isn't it. But Cohen's not done. He keeps tinkering with it.
He plays it in concerts, and he slows it down.
It becomes twice as long. He changes the first three verses,
leaving only the final verses the same. The song becomes
even darker this time around. Yeah, your flag on the
(23:24):
marble large, But listen, love, Love is not some kind
of victormage. No, it's cool, it's every broken hole. One night,
(23:47):
Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon Ballroom in
New York, and the musician John Klee happens to be
in the audience. Kale is a legend, used to be
in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure in the
rock and roll avant garde. He hears this song come
out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away, so he
asked Cohen to send him the lyrics. He wants to
(24:08):
do a version of it, so Cohen factses him fifteen pages.
Who knows what the lyrics actually are. At this point,
Kle says that for his version, he took the cheeky parts.
He ends up using the first two verses of the
original combined with three verses from the live performance, and
Kle changes some words. Most importantly, he changes the theme
(24:30):
and brings back the biblical references that Cohen had in
the album version. Baby There's a God above all. I
have a love from loves? How to shoot at someone?
Who are you? And it's not a cryken hear at mine?
(24:52):
It's not somebody you see the line, It's a con
and it's a wrong Hello, Kale is really the one
who cracks the code of Hallelujah. According to Alan Light,
this cover version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album
put together by a French music magazine. It was called
(25:15):
I'm Your Fan. Came out of nineteen ninety one. Almost
nobody bought I'm Your Fan, except weirdly me. I think
I found it in a remainder bin in a little
record store on Columbia Road in Washington, d C. Another
person who bought I'm Your Fan was a woman named
Jeanine who lived in Parkslope in Brooklyn. She was good
(25:35):
friends with a young aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He
used to house sit at her apartment, and one time,
when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD of
I'm Your Fan. He plays it. He hears John Cale's
version of Hallelujah and decides to do his own version
of that version. He performs it at a tiny little
bar in the east village called Chennai, where he happens
(25:58):
to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records. So
Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records his
version of Hallelujah for the album Grace, which ends up
being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came out
in nineteen ninety four. I remembering moved in you and
(26:19):
the Holy Dove was moving to and every breath Withdrewsllujah.
Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're
most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one.
(26:44):
It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's
a cover of John Kle's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
only with Kle's piano swapped out for a guitar, and
of course Buckley swaps out Kle's voice for his own
extraordinary voice Hallelujah Allah. All every subsequent cover, and there
(27:24):
have been hundreds, are really covers a Buckley covering Koe
covering Cohen. So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.
Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
in this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay, but nobody
(27:47):
bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
the hype around him, so that didn't make it a hit.
Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal like Jesus,
with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough
(28:07):
until nineteen ninety seven, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in
Memphis and he goes swimming in one of the channels
of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing
and singing the chorus of a Whole Lot of Love
by led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again. And
that tragedy suddenly propels his work and Hallelujah into the spotlight.
(28:29):
And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
fifteen years since Leonard recorded this song. Fifteen years, and
(28:52):
think about how many incredible twists and turns that song
takes before it gets recognized as a work of genius.
It just happens that the independent label Passport Records, who
leases the first version for the album It's on, is
rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen doesn't give up,
(29:14):
keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah. John Cale,
one of the most influential musicians of his era, happens
to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song some more.
Cale's version goes out on the obscure French CD I'm
a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living room in
Park Slope, and Janine happens to have a house sitter
(29:36):
who happens to play it, happens to like it, and
happens to have an ethereal amazing voice. Buckley's version goes
nowhere until he happens to die under the most dramatic
and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then finally we recognize the
genius of this song. But think about how fragile and
elusive that bit of genius is. If any of those
(29:58):
incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never have
heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy chain of happenstance
matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon once says
(30:18):
of Bridge over Troubled Water, one of the most beautiful
pop songs ever written. It came so fast, and when
it was done, I said, where did that come from?
It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly.
You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require a
fifteen years worth of twists and turns and random events.
The world is really good at capturing conceptual creations, or
(30:42):
at least we don't miss as many conceptual works because
they don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But
if you're Sayson and the first version you produce is
just a starting point, and you never know exactly what
you're doing or why, or whether your work is finished
or not, the stars really do have to be aligned.
(31:04):
Sayson was his own worst enemy in a way. He
threw up barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us
when he painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point.
The art of the experimental innovator is elusive. There are
some of them which now are in museums, which we
know he had tried to destroy. I mean, and you
(31:26):
can see in some of them, the cases of where
he slashed their canvases. Why would he destroy his own canvases?
You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted
to do and felt that he actually never was actually
getting to that point. There are other paintings done much
later where he simply abandons them. And Picassa said that,
(31:48):
you know what actually engages as is says Zune's doubt,
his uncertainty. He's obsessive, you know, he's absolutely just totally obsessive.
Albus Costello Deportee in its original flawed form. It comes
(32:13):
out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the way,
that Hallelujah first came out, and I'm not sure that's
a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a very particular
moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year
was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's
not a single stray note or emotion on that record.
(32:34):
It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along
comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the
midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in
glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up, he's having financial difficulties.
He says later that Languor and Winstanley were ill equipped
(32:55):
for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time.
A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been
more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs,
gritty and spare, to match his mood. Something not nineteen
eighty four. Meanwhile, Langer and win Stanley had been brought
on board to produce Hits, polished exquisite. Every little bit
(33:20):
was pondered over and thought about and put together very carefully.
I mean, you had bands like Scritty Polity at that time,
you know, spending nine months on a song, and Trevor
Horne spending four weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.
Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band
called Frankie Ghost to Hollywood, and they spend a month
(33:40):
just getting a particular drum sound, right. So we weren't
about pendicaty, but we were dealing with the world that was,
you know, perfection. It was we were trying to make perfection.
You can imagine what happened when that World collides with
Albus Costello, and some of it just sounded like I mean,
even the band were kind of not very excited by
(34:02):
some of the material, so it wasn't a great experience.
But we did it very quickly, but just quickly, I
mean in the time it to travel on to get
a snare, so down to two tribes, so it's about
three or four weeks. Yeah, the whole album, it was
a mess, perfectionism in a hurry. That's how you get
to the bitter words. Congratulations, you've just bought my worst album.
(34:26):
Good Bye Cruel World is not good, it's unlistenable, But
it's what happens next that matters. You Know how people
always say, put your failures behind you, get on with
your life, never look back. Alvis Costello does none of
those things, because he says on he's not Picasso. He
carries around a little black book where he writes draft
(34:48):
after draft after draft of the songs he's thinking about.
He changes lines in the middle of songs he's already recorded.
He rearranges songs at different tempos or in different time signatures.
He cannibalizes his own work, creating new songs out of
old songs. And I don't know where to start or
where to stop. He doesn't want to sign his name
(35:09):
to the painting. And thank god there are people like him,
and says on in this world, because without the obsessives
and the perpetually dissatisfied, and the artists who go back
over and over again repainting what others see as finished,
we would never have seen the beauty of deportee. And
you don't know where to start off to stop. All
(35:35):
this pillow talk is not in Marvin Finlet talking the shop.
When you've been listening to Revisionist History, if you like
what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us
(35:56):
on iTunes. You can get more information about this in
other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle,
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
(36:17):
Williams is our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Siroca.
Panomply management team is Laura Mayor, Andy Bowers and Jacob Weissberg.
I'm Malcolm Glauder. PARTI PATI
Pushkin. In nineteen eighty four, Alvis Costello released his ninth album,
Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out,
because I bought every Alvis Costello album back then the
week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
music you listen to at ages nineteen and twenty is
the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness.
(00:38):
If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll
see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in nineteen
eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened
to it right away. And this episode is about one
song on that album. It's called The Deportees Club. I
still have it on vinyl. It goes like this, Oh God,
(01:10):
it's awful. My name is Malcolm Blackwell. Welcome to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things Forgotten are Misunderstood. This week, I
(01:30):
want to go back to Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty four.
I should say you don't have to know anything about
Elvis Costello or even like his music to be interested
in this story. I'm not talking about Deportis Club as
a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding
how creativity works. And I've chosen Deportees Club as my
(01:53):
case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed
with it and maybe, hopefully you will be two once
we're finished. Deportees Club is the second to last song
on the B side of Goodbye to a World. The
album cover is a picture of a little mountain top
with two trees on it, with Costello and his band
(02:15):
members in various strange poses. It's all very eighties. The
record was produced by two legends of the British music
scene at the time, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. You've
probably heard some of their work dated records with Madness,
Noyd Cole David Bowie virtually all of the great English
new wave hit songs of the nineteen eighties and early
(02:35):
nineteen nineties. Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley were the guys
behind the curtain. I don't know if you've ever heard
come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. Come On Eileen. Oh,
I swear what he means at this moment you mean everything. Now.
I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you could make that
out that song. Langer and Winstanley Clive Langer knows Elvis Costello.
(03:04):
Of course they would bump into each other in the
way that people in a small always bump into each other,
and New Way music in the nineteen eighties was a
small world. At one point, Langer has his own band
and he was doing a show in a riverboat in
the river Mersey. Costello calls him up and he said, oh,
I'll come up and play a few songs before you
go on. That's Langer. We met at a pub on
(03:27):
Loreston Road in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery,
with close cropped white hair and oversized glasses and the
kind of graciousness that only the English seemed to possess.
An absolutely delightful person. My father is English, an all older,
charming englishman. Remind me of my father. We had some tea.
It was all very civilized. Okay, back to Elvis Costello.
(03:50):
He came up and played all his best songs, I
mean his his you know, Allison and everything son. Alison's
Costello's first big hit. Then I had to go on
(04:14):
and do my first ever show with the same line up,
and we weren't as good, you know, so I don't know.
I didn't know quite how to take that. If you
detect a little bit of friction in that, you're not wrong.
Alvis Costello is a genius, and like a lot of geniuses,
he has a really strong personality. A few years passed
and Costello's record label decides they want to broaden his
(04:36):
commercial appeal. He has a fanatical following among those who
know New Way music, but the label wants a big
commercial hit, so they turned to the hit makers Langer
and Winstanley, and that two of them produce a record
for Costello called Punch the Clock, which has a number
of absolutely exquisite songs, including ship Building, which Lango co
(04:57):
wrote with Elvis Costello, Birth the News, Coaching Shoes Far
You collaborate on Punch the Clock. Yeah, and you like
(05:18):
that album? Yes? He doesn't, and he doesn't know why
is he unhappy with it? I think it was just
too commercial for at that time, and he wanted to
write something simpler, more live more. You know, he's more
of a purist than I am, so I was brought
up with psychedelic pop in the mid sixties, so I
(05:41):
was kind of like, Oh, we can do this, we
can do that. You know, and he's like, oh, I
want it to sound real and black Bob Dylan or something,
you know. But and when you get that right, that's amazing.
I want to hear a little bit more about Punch
the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an
impact on the way the record turned out. Not so much.
(06:01):
On Punch the Clock we didn't have tension. We had
tension later, which I'll talk to you about what we
did have. When we did the playback and Punched the Clock,
we got quite drunk and played it back really loud,
of course they did, and how much would you kill
to have been in the room with them? And he
kind of freaked out, So it's all rubbish. It's terrible.
(06:22):
It's terrible. And I was to, you know, calm him
down a bit and we all carry it on. When
the time comes to make the next album, Costello turns
to Langer and win Stanley again, only this time the
first thing he said is that I want to call
it good Bye Cool World. I think it's going to
be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band,
(06:44):
so he was confiding in me. They do a first
run through recording all the songs, live. Langer is the producer,
the one who's supposed to be running the show, but
immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically takes over because he's
quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and you know, lovely,
but he could sort of barge in and start changing things.
(07:07):
But you know, so, I remember saying to him, thanks
for letting me be here to listen to remote your record,
you know, but I don't think it should go like that.
Shouldn't be like this, you know. So it was a bit.
We're a bit of a standoff. I think he went
out and bought a half bottler gin and I asked
Langer and why Costello said this was going to be
(07:28):
his last album. It's not like he was an old
man ready to retire. He wasn't even thirsty. It was
just that he'd had a lot on his back, you know,
he'd been to a lot. I don't know if he
wanted to carry on playing the game at that point.
The result is disastrous. I hated Good By Cruel World
(07:50):
when I first heard it, and remember I'm a massive
Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did
a television variety show called spectacle. Lad he's a gentleman.
Will you please welcome to the stage. I wants the
nickolo And in the episode where he interviews Nick Low
and Richard Thompson, the camera pans the audience and twice
(08:11):
you see me grinning madly as I said. I'm a
massive Elvis Costello fan, and believe me when I say goodbye.
Cruel World was unlistenable, especially Deportise Club. It was angry
and loud and upsetting. And I'm not the only one
(08:34):
who feels that way. In nineteen ninety five, the album
is rereleased by Ricodisc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in
the liner notes, congratulations, you've just purchased our worst album.
You have to kind of admire as honesty. Except on
(09:03):
that same re release, Costello includes a new version of
Deportis Club, one of the songs on the original album
he hates so much he gives it a new melody
and plays it by himself. An acoustic version, shortens the
title to deeport fiddles with some of the lyrics, and
it never appears anywhere else, just on this random rerelease
(09:26):
by Raycodisc Records, whatever that is, and I would never
have heard it except that my friend Bruce ran across
it and played it for me. Bruce, by the way,
was also in the audience of that Elvis Casillo TV show,
grinning madly. Anyway, Bruce and I used to make mixtapes
for each other, and he puts this new version Deeporte
on a mixtape for my birthday, and I become obsessed
(09:48):
with it. I'll bet I sing parts of it to
myself almost every day. I don't really know why, but
it might be one of my favorite songs ever. There's
a line in it that jumps into my head whenever
I'm sad. It's so perfect, a little couplet about the
dissolution of romantic love and you don't know where to
start or where to stop. All this pillow talk is
(10:12):
finely talking shop. Can we play it? Yeah? I'm in
the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of the original
awful version Deportise Club. Strangely, he'd never heard the new,
obscure and amazing version of the song he produced so
long ago. I want to hear his new version. Yeah, yeah,
(10:36):
So I found it on my iPhone and Langer leaned
his head over the table so that his ear would
be right next to the tiny phone speaker. This one
nine shady five blastom bunch trump that distress Sire's dad.
(11:32):
You know, it sounds like he's found the song, but
he didn't know at the time either that that's what
I thought. I mean, that's what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah,
either of you in the moment. No, Sometimes you know,
if it's not sounding right, maybe I don't know, maybe
we were not focused enough. You know, maybe we were
(11:52):
making a record, but we were miles away. You know.
In the end, they Elvis Costello and his producers all
thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't
understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a
bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.
(12:22):
That's what I want to talk about, time and iteration.
What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge.
I know that this is just one three minute song.
Maybe you don't even like it, but every time I
hear it, I think the same thing, which is, this
is something that gives a lot of people in the
world pleasure, including me, And it almost didn't happen. If
(12:44):
Alvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deeportise Club, turn
it into Deeporte. We miss all that beauty, and the
thought of that breaks my heart. There's a theory about
creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an
economist named David Gallinson came up with. Gallinson is an
(13:06):
art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art,
that there are two very different trajectories that great artists
seem to take. On the one hand, there are those
who do their best work very early in their life.
They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas
that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those
ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom.
(13:31):
Gallenson calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example.
He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and
electrifies the art world the turn of the last century.
I think that someone like Picasso is who we have
in mind when we think of that word genius. But
(13:52):
Gallenson says, wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity.
He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who
never have a clear easily articulated idea. They don't work
quickly when they start off, they don't really know where
they're going. Work by trial and error. They do endless drafts.
(14:12):
They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to
figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example? Sayson?
Every bit as famous and important a painter's. Picasso may
be the greatest of the Impressionists who reinvent modern art
in Paris in the late eighteen hundreds. With Seson's genius
and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different. Why
(14:36):
don't we start with your favorite? If you have a
favorite in the world, maybe my favorite at the moment
is that one good Bye. Talking to a man named
John Elderfield. He's a Seson expert, and he took me
to that gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
where they have all of their Seeson's, easily a few
billion dollars worth the paintings in one room. And it
(14:57):
took only about five minutes wandering from picture to picture
with Elderfield to see experimental genius in action. So this
is one of the many portraits of his wife's says,
I'm made, and it's one of four pictures done in
a short period of time when they were living together
in Paris. The seeson we're looking at is a picture
(15:20):
of a middle aged woman seated. Her head is tilted
slightly to the side. As with a lot of Sazon's portraits,
we can see only one of her ears he didn't
like doing the second year. She's sitting quietly, almost floating
in the chair. And I think it's arguably, you know,
one of the greatest portraits that he did. It's one
(15:41):
of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield says that
the first two are a little smaller, looser, maybe one
trace from another, and then a third much like the
one we're looking at, but without any background painted in
just the figure. Is this very typical of the way
he worked, So he essentially comes back to her four times,
(16:02):
and yeah, and then he right. Notice my assumption here,
because what I was thinking when I said that bit
about he gets it right the fourth time was that
if Sazon did four versions, he must have been marching
towards some kind of preordained conclusion. He has an idea
and he's perfecting it. But that's not says on standard
(16:22):
practice is you do a sketch, work out the problems.
Do a finished version, says on kind of starts in
the middle. The fourth version of Sazon's portrait of his wife,
the one we're looking at, is less finished than his
second and third versions. Well, for example, here you can
see this unfinished parts. So how putatively unfinished parts. We
light the area of the dress. There where it's light,
(16:45):
you can really see the grounds of the canvass, and
all the way through the lower part. Then you can
see who's been putting these breast strikes down and not
actually filling them all together. Sayson didn't work according to
some clear linear plan. He basically just did versions over
and again, iteration after iteration, trying to stumble on something
(17:06):
that sees his imagination. Many of Sann's paintings are unsigned
because he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's done.
He does portraits of his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and
he makes him come for a hundred sittings, a hundred
a hundred. Normally they would be how many and now
I mean normally for portress it would just be a
relatively shown number, I mean five or something. Why does
(17:29):
he need a hundred exactly. I mean, what's so, what's
he doing all the time? Sesan was never finished? This
is what David Gillinson means by experimental genius, and Gillinson
points out that you can see this creative type in
virtually every field. Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick when he's
(17:52):
thirty two, writes it in a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark
Twain publishes Huck Finn when he's in his late forties,
and it takes him forever because he ends up obsessively
rewriting and rewriting the ending. He says on Orson Welles
does Citizen Kane when he's twenty four. Picasso Alfred Hitchcock
(18:13):
doesn't reach his prime until his mid fifties, after he
spent his entire career making one thriller after another, playing
with a genre over and over again. It's his own.
But there's one field where I think Gallenson's theory plays
out the most powerfully, and that's music. It goes like this,
(18:34):
the fourth, the fifth, the minor five, the major lift,
the baffled game. Compola, Lleluiah, halleluiah, halleluialleluia. That's the song Hallelujah.
(18:56):
It was composed by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen. But
basically everybody is in a cover of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright,
You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovi, John Cale, Bob Dylan,
I could go on. It's featured in countless TV and
movie soundtracks. If you ride the New York City subway
on a regular basis, you'll probably hear a busker singing
(19:17):
it virtually every day. Like a good Canadian, I go
to a Canada Day celebration every year at Joe's Pub
in Manhattan, where local artists sing cover versions of Canadian songs.
Every year someone does a version of Hallelujah. Every year.
It brings down the house. And here's what's interesting about
that song. It is so not Picasso, it is, says On.
(19:41):
Textbook says On. A few years ago, the music writer
Alan Light wrote an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book
on the song Hallelujah. It's called the Holy or the Broken,
And one of the big themes is how peculiar Leonard
Cohen is. He's a poet, a tortured poet. He is
(20:03):
a writer in that way that he labors over what
these lyrics are line by line, word by word, throws
a lot away, spends a great deal of time, and Hallelujah, famously,
out of all of these, is probably the song that
he says bedeviled him the most. That's alan like, he
came by my house one day to talk about Hallelujah.
He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
(20:27):
and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
sixty or seventy verses, which is for this song, which
I mean, you've been writing about music for many, many years.
Have you ever heard of a musician who wrote eighty different?
I don't. I don't think so. I mean then I
don't know what that. I don't know if that means
variations on verses. I don't know if that means entirely
(20:49):
like how much of this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter.
It's a whole other, whole other level. Well, there's the
famous story that you know, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan
have this kind of mutual admiration thing, and apparently they
met up in the eighties at some point they were
both in Paris, and they went to meet at a
cafe and Dylan said, oh, I like that that song Hallelujah,
(21:13):
which is a fascinating piece of this story. That really
the first person who paid attention to Hallelujah as an
important song was Bob Dylan. But he said to Leonard,
you know I liked that song. How long did you
work on that? And Leonard said, I told him that
I'd worked on it for two years, which was a lie.
Cohen later confessed it took him much longer. Then Cohen
asks Dylan how long it took him to write the
(21:34):
song I and I and Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Dylan is picasso with Leonard. It's not the first thought,
best thought school at all. And he talks about, you know,
being in a hotel room in his underwear banging his
head on the floor because he couldn't solve this song, Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records
(21:57):
it in nineteen eighty four. It's for an album called
Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes
them to his record label, which is CBS to the
Head of CBS. Who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikov,
who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce
Springsteen's Born in USA? Not a dumb guy. Yetnikov listens
(22:19):
to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not
releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being
released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes
a ripple. And if you go back and listen to
that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future
versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not
(22:40):
there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about
the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Kohen's original version
so hyper serious that it's almost satire. Kind of turgid,
(23:03):
isn't it. But Cohen's not done. He keeps tinkering with it.
He plays it in concerts, and he slows it down.
It becomes twice as long. He changes the first three verses,
leaving only the final verses the same. The song becomes
even darker this time around. Yeah, your flag on the
(23:24):
marble large, But listen, love, Love is not some kind
of victormage. No, it's cool, it's every broken hole. One night,
(23:47):
Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon Ballroom in
New York, and the musician John Klee happens to be
in the audience. Kale is a legend, used to be
in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure in the
rock and roll avant garde. He hears this song come
out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away, so he
asked Cohen to send him the lyrics. He wants to
(24:08):
do a version of it, so Cohen factses him fifteen pages.
Who knows what the lyrics actually are. At this point,
Kle says that for his version, he took the cheeky parts.
He ends up using the first two verses of the
original combined with three verses from the live performance, and
Kle changes some words. Most importantly, he changes the theme
(24:30):
and brings back the biblical references that Cohen had in
the album version. Baby There's a God above all. I
have a love from loves? How to shoot at someone?
Who are you? And it's not a cryken hear at mine?
(24:52):
It's not somebody you see the line, It's a con
and it's a wrong Hello, Kale is really the one
who cracks the code of Hallelujah. According to Alan Light,
this cover version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album
put together by a French music magazine. It was called
(25:15):
I'm Your Fan. Came out of nineteen ninety one. Almost
nobody bought I'm Your Fan, except weirdly me. I think
I found it in a remainder bin in a little
record store on Columbia Road in Washington, d C. Another
person who bought I'm Your Fan was a woman named
Jeanine who lived in Parkslope in Brooklyn. She was good
(25:35):
friends with a young aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He
used to house sit at her apartment, and one time,
when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD of
I'm Your Fan. He plays it. He hears John Cale's
version of Hallelujah and decides to do his own version
of that version. He performs it at a tiny little
bar in the east village called Chennai, where he happens
(25:58):
to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records. So
Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records his
version of Hallelujah for the album Grace, which ends up
being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came out
in nineteen ninety four. I remembering moved in you and
(26:19):
the Holy Dove was moving to and every breath Withdrewsllujah.
Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're
most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one.
(26:44):
It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's
a cover of John Kle's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
only with Kle's piano swapped out for a guitar, and
of course Buckley swaps out Kle's voice for his own
extraordinary voice Hallelujah Allah. All every subsequent cover, and there
(27:24):
have been hundreds, are really covers a Buckley covering Koe
covering Cohen. So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.
Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
in this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay, but nobody
(27:47):
bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
the hype around him, so that didn't make it a hit.
Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal like Jesus,
with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough
(28:07):
until nineteen ninety seven, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in
Memphis and he goes swimming in one of the channels
of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing
and singing the chorus of a Whole Lot of Love
by led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again. And
that tragedy suddenly propels his work and Hallelujah into the spotlight.
(28:29):
And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
fifteen years since Leonard recorded this song. Fifteen years, and
(28:52):
think about how many incredible twists and turns that song
takes before it gets recognized as a work of genius.
It just happens that the independent label Passport Records, who
leases the first version for the album It's on, is
rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen doesn't give up,
(29:14):
keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah. John Cale,
one of the most influential musicians of his era, happens
to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song some more.
Cale's version goes out on the obscure French CD I'm
a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living room in
Park Slope, and Janine happens to have a house sitter
(29:36):
who happens to play it, happens to like it, and
happens to have an ethereal amazing voice. Buckley's version goes
nowhere until he happens to die under the most dramatic
and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then finally we recognize the
genius of this song. But think about how fragile and
elusive that bit of genius is. If any of those
(29:58):
incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never have
heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy chain of happenstance
matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon once says
(30:18):
of Bridge over Troubled Water, one of the most beautiful
pop songs ever written. It came so fast, and when
it was done, I said, where did that come from?
It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly.
You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require a
fifteen years worth of twists and turns and random events.
The world is really good at capturing conceptual creations, or
(30:42):
at least we don't miss as many conceptual works because
they don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But
if you're Sayson and the first version you produce is
just a starting point, and you never know exactly what
you're doing or why, or whether your work is finished
or not, the stars really do have to be aligned.
(31:04):
Sayson was his own worst enemy in a way. He
threw up barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us
when he painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point.
The art of the experimental innovator is elusive. There are
some of them which now are in museums, which we
know he had tried to destroy. I mean, and you
(31:26):
can see in some of them, the cases of where
he slashed their canvases. Why would he destroy his own canvases?
You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted
to do and felt that he actually never was actually
getting to that point. There are other paintings done much
later where he simply abandons them. And Picassa said that,
(31:48):
you know what actually engages as is says Zune's doubt,
his uncertainty. He's obsessive, you know, he's absolutely just totally obsessive.
Albus Costello Deportee in its original flawed form. It comes
(32:13):
out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the way,
that Hallelujah first came out, and I'm not sure that's
a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a very particular
moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year
was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's
not a single stray note or emotion on that record.
(32:34):
It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along
comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the
midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in
glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up, he's having financial difficulties.
He says later that Languor and Winstanley were ill equipped
(32:55):
for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time.
A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been
more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs,
gritty and spare, to match his mood. Something not nineteen
eighty four. Meanwhile, Langer and win Stanley had been brought
on board to produce Hits, polished exquisite. Every little bit
(33:20):
was pondered over and thought about and put together very carefully.
I mean, you had bands like Scritty Polity at that time,
you know, spending nine months on a song, and Trevor
Horne spending four weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.
Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band
called Frankie Ghost to Hollywood, and they spend a month
(33:40):
just getting a particular drum sound, right. So we weren't
about pendicaty, but we were dealing with the world that was,
you know, perfection. It was we were trying to make perfection.
You can imagine what happened when that World collides with
Albus Costello, and some of it just sounded like I mean,
even the band were kind of not very excited by
(34:02):
some of the material, so it wasn't a great experience.
But we did it very quickly, but just quickly, I
mean in the time it to travel on to get
a snare, so down to two tribes, so it's about
three or four weeks. Yeah, the whole album, it was
a mess, perfectionism in a hurry. That's how you get
to the bitter words. Congratulations, you've just bought my worst album.
(34:26):
Good Bye Cruel World is not good, it's unlistenable, But
it's what happens next that matters. You Know how people
always say, put your failures behind you, get on with
your life, never look back. Alvis Costello does none of
those things, because he says on he's not Picasso. He
carries around a little black book where he writes draft
(34:48):
after draft after draft of the songs he's thinking about.
He changes lines in the middle of songs he's already recorded.
He rearranges songs at different tempos or in different time signatures.
He cannibalizes his own work, creating new songs out of
old songs. And I don't know where to start or
where to stop. He doesn't want to sign his name
(35:09):
to the painting. And thank god there are people like him,
and says on in this world, because without the obsessives
and the perpetually dissatisfied, and the artists who go back
over and over again repainting what others see as finished,
we would never have seen the beauty of deportee. And
you don't know where to start off to stop. All
(35:35):
this pillow talk is not in Marvin Finlet talking the shop.
When you've been listening to Revisionist History, if you like
what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us
(35:56):
on iTunes. You can get more information about this in
other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle,
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
(36:17):
Williams is our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Siroca.
Panomply management team is Laura Mayor, Andy Bowers and Jacob Weissberg.
I'm Malcolm Glauder. PARTI PATI
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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